WXM

Hi!

This sounds cool. 😃 What software(s) are you using for these phases if I might ask?

To get back on this thread’s topic…

44rh1n, your Extended Edition Color Restoration here, are you thinking about maybe using bits of the new 4k — ala maybe "average"ing or "median"ing — to help the shots you couldn’t get to your satisfaction, or just use them as inspiration, or are you just going to leave it as is (or some other option)?

I’ll put this last one from my looking around, one that puzzles me most. I don’t know if these are real mountains or purely effects, but regardless it’s strange how the 4k frame is without as much detail…

https://caps-a-holic.com/c.php?d1=5240&d2=15006&s1=48928&s2=156526&x=665&y=172&i=16&a=2&go=1&l=1

I don’t suppose anyone knows if those are real mountains — is real footage that would’ve been scanned at 4k as claimed — or just pure effects/CG?

To be balanced, here’s a bit of detail that shows up nicely/better in the 4k, proving that what I posted above is not a blanket issue for the set

https://caps-a-holic.com/c.php?a=3&x=35&y=208&d1=5240&d2=15006&s1=48925&s2=156523&l=1&i=13&go=1

I was looking in the blu-ray.com forum thread about the 4k release and came across this compare (link), which was a bit 😮 to me. Note that I’m not a possessor of these disks, haven’t watched anything in motion; this is just me pointing out stuff others put up, which may be quite “cherry picked” by one of the more frustrated persons there.

That said, I’ve never quite seen something that struck me as much in regards to cranked-up DNR doing damage (well, excluding the dress in Cinderella!) and in an image that’s ideally supposed to have a lot more resolution(/detail) than the BD…

https://screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/8656

Luckily, people in that thread generally say the good of the 4k set outweighs the bad, sometimes by a huge margin for some, so this compare is surely more just a blip of excess DNR rather than an indication of the whole set being remotely like this.

What’s the name of the font-making software you’re using? I guess I’m rambling on about this as I fear that in the future I might need to do real font customization again and wonder what’s at the top of people’s picks.

\ Edit: Big blab about font work here (and CG software), a bit tangenty perhaps, IGNORE IF NOT INTERESTED 😃 /

I’ve done similar, a long time ago — '90s-early '00s — with FontCreator (I think that’s what it was called).

Since then all my “font customizing work” has been a little off the beaten path: in my CG software…which can’t use a font rather directly like Photoshop, Word, and many many other programs. With my CG software you use a “Create text” tool; you type into its field the text you want and select the font, then the software creates a (flat) CG object/mesh of that text. You use — can fully manipulate — that CG object from then on in (extrude, texture, jitter points, on and on and on, really neat!) but it now has zero connection with the TTF file that created it. I.e., if you decide you want what it says to be different then you need to go back to square one to re-create OR alter the CG object you’ve created using object editing techniques if that happens to be easier (<-ala if you need to change “STACEY” to “STACY” you can just change/edit the CG object by hand in a few seconds…but if you find you now need “STACY” instead of “NORUL” then you have no choice but to go back to square one to re-create/re-type…)

If I decide I’m going to make a custom “font” (for use only in my CG software/scenes) I would get the closest existing font, then type a line with every letter, numeral, punc, and have the tool generate my new alphabet object, then I’d go to town modding (dragging around, adding, deleting points that define the shape), perhaps only a few letters if that’s all the end-result required…and of course if I’ve perfectly cleaned up the “I” I can often copy much of that work over to the vertical stalks of the “H” to save some work/time, then leapfrog that work to the “U” then “V”, etc. if needed.

The usage method of the end result is crude though: When I want to “type” something out with my new lettering I copy the CG-object letters I need and place them by hand (but am very careful to lock their horizontal position, I never allow them to shift up or down). If I’m lucky, my needed text will fall in line with alphabetical arrangement in spots, such as “AB” “DE” “GH” “LM”, to give me strong/definitive suggestions for kerning in at least a few spots. A cool thing about CG software is that all kinds of manipulation is very fast, so if I need two letters on the alphabetical line that are reverse of how I need them — e.g. I need “PO” instead of “OP” — I can still grab “OP” and flip the whole of the pair then flip the “P” (to keep their original kerning); in two seconds my “OP” is now a perfect “PO”.

This all is really only for titles and short bits of text though, no paragraphs. Luckily I have yet to do a project where I needed paragraphs of (custom design) text; I was always able to just straight use a font already out there for that and let the tool do (almost) all the placing/kerning.

Based on what you said, Hutt, I guess I’m kind of lucky with this custom (CG) alphabet approach in a big respect because my kerning is just done by hand, sliding letters horizontally until they’re right, which is fast and always looks great (unlike Arial’s kerning with “rt” always being too close, at least IMO, needing a tiny space inserted).

Outside of my CG software I’ve also been lucky I guess in that I’ve either been able to find a font good enough for my needs, or any mods I needed were so minor they were easily doable (in Photoshop) without editing a TTF file. But I would like to know if there’s something good, perhaps free, out there I could have on hand just in case.

If you made it this far I hope it was of enough interest 😃

With my CG software I can put an image as a backdrop and “trace” over it to create polygons. I assume you can, will do, similar with your font/typeface software? (<- which is what by the way?) Are you going to lay a close font over and drags its points to match are create a “new” font ala tracing your new scans?

The funny thing about it: the names are actually from the original English HD footage. They were not touched at all.

Ah, wow! I think subconsciously I figured something like that was going to be the case, hence all my "chotto"ing/softening. Still, consciously it’s a bit shocking to learn that! That “ST” just looks so off 😃

.

I am quite eager not to cut any corners

…despite you doing all this for free, just out of the love of the project…! Kudos to your attitude, and hopefully you have all positives come your way as results of these versions you’re doing.

I’ll toss out while here, please keep throwing us these images/examples. Even if people aren’t replying much I’m pretty sure a lot of people are interested seeing what you’re doing, are taking peeks. 😃

Well, Mr. Hutt, once again it seems I’m one of the only people posting in your threads (even though I’m not German, don’t know German), but I’ll say good job and cool stuff! 😃 I’ve done some reworking fonts, but not to the extent you have here ala dealing with the two designs of R’s, N’s, K’s (and your spending so much time on just the kerning) so thumbs up for putting so much effort into it! The CO quote looks great!

To mention something more specific about your last posted images, your “TEIL 1” title looks awesome, but on the second one that opening “ST” on Stanley is kind of distracting with the different sizes of the letters. Seeing your meticulous work, what you have is surely a good reproduction of the original reference, but maybe something about an HD version needs tweaking over what your VHS reference seems to convey? Just a casual two-cents observation for kicks; if you’re seeing that what you have is correct then don’t mind me 😃

Wow! Nice!

am a huge fan ever since 1982, when I watched Aliens for the first time

You watched Aliens four years before it was released? 😉 (You surely meant Alien I know, I just couldn’t resist having a wee bit o’ fun 😃)

A couple of people above made “coming soon” mentions of it, but now up on Amazon for pre-order is the (KL) new HD version of the theatrical cut. I’m worried about putting a direct link as it could change or the like, but on US Amazon search for

• “Buck Rogers in the 25th Century - Theatrical Feature”
  or
• “Buck Rogers in the 25th Century - The Complete Collection”

Release date: November 24, 2020.

DJPitaB, yeah, I’ve done similar. When wanting to average/median five or so VHS captures of the same thing I’d have five or however many VirtualDub instances open, would comb through…

I guess I was hoping you had some magic software to share, but wishful thinking. Thanks for the reply.

DJPitaB, your (solid) way of dealing with any dupe frames in video… Real quick so as not to de-rail this thread (I don’t have a way to do your wanted capture 😦) what is your method for that if you don’t mind sharing the info? Thanks.

Chase, regarding the Dobby shots…

I’m not any kind of authority on HP. I’ll just say that your version looks neat and cool except for the lurch when the supposedly seamless cut happens (to your effects work frames).

For the first shot there’s a little bit of a zoom in. For the second, everything in the b.g. shifts to the right a little (the window frame and bed and such, plus Harry eyes go from open to closed instantly, plus the focus for him goes pretty soft). Can you easily enough get those two lurches in difference out with a little more work? If it wouldn’t take you too long…

It seems like you’re really close to having a great shot here and it’s just this side mess, not the main effect itself, that’s hampering things. I understand that for the second shot it might mean masking Harry out as his own element (and having the b.g. linger so that it doesn’t shift) and maybe that’s beyond the amount of effort you want to put into this. (Off the top of my head also, if you could get Harry as his own element you could do a two or three frame dissolve at the cut area to solve the eyes open-closed issue.)

Just my thoughts. Again, your main effect with Dobby looks pretty neat to me! 😃

Oh wow, that’s quite impressive!
Could I use virtual dub for a first correction then use Premiere Pro to do some tweaking?

VirtualDub doesn’t let you do pieces of a file, only the whole thing (that’s loaded) and you’re talking different scenes needing diff work. Ultimately if Premiere is to be in your workflow for sure then let’s hope it can do everything that VDub could do to keep your life simpler. I don’t have Premiere (!) so I can’t say what it will and won’t do for you with this, but I’d imagine AP could surely kick some pretty serious color correcting, contrast adjusting, etc. butt here in 2020.

But let’s say Premiere fails to go the distance in some spots and you want to give those bits an as-suggested pre-boost in VDub. If you do coloring work in VirtualDub you really should save it out as a lossless (avi) file, using the Lagarith lossless codec, so that you lose no quality (well, more or less; it’s up to you not to overdo the filters and jack up the image). If Premiere insists you turn that avi file into something else before it’ll read it… 😦 You’re talking a lot of hard drive space and computing power. A 45 minute BD rip when turned into a lossless avi will be about 100GBs. 😮 But if you have a powerful as hell computer and empty terabytes on more than once drive in your system then perhaps…? Or if you need only one or two scenes with such a pre-boost?

There’s also scripting (Avisynth) which is the better path apparently for things, but that’s out of my league to a large degree so I won’t suggest or comment. On this note, let’s see of others chime in with better advice and knowledge than my simple little mind is trying to offer. 😃

Who is Dr. Dre?

A feller known in these parts for being a wee tad decent-plus at working with movie colors. Here’s where he’s a bit active recently (currently)…
https://originaltrilogy.com/topic/Harmys-STAR-WARS-Despecialized-Edition-HD-V2-7-MKV-Released/id/12713/page/673#1366137

He created a legendary tool (although I haven’t used it myself) called Dr. Dre’s Color Matching Tool that’s used by people on many sites it’s that good apparently
https://originaltrilogy.com/topic/Color-matching-and-prediction-color-correction-tool-v13-released/id/18128

Me again

I’m not a master color grader by any stretch, but I put your BD image into my VirtualDub and used just three primitive-ish filters, and think the end result is passable, natural enough now, hm? So it would seem with better tools you could do better than this quick job. (I know it’s not a perfect match to the SD side, but that side looks a tad dark and over-saturated to me, but maybe that’s just me.)

My criticism of my own work here might be the flesh tones are a smidge pink-ish, but I personally don’t know how to pull so much yellow out from the (BD) image and keep yellow in the skin. Maybe Dr. Dre knows. 😃

Hi ykarus1974

I would convert the resulting mkv to MT2S files

I’m pretty sure MakeMKV can make verbatim copy of your BD straight to M2TS, a “pure rip” so to speak; it at least gives you m2ts files. (For the longest I assumed that it couldn’t do this, would only give you MKV container’d output but…)

Use “Backup” (second icon from the left). 😃 Then you’ll save a whole step of converting MKVs to MT2Ts (and likely losing quality).

My two cents…

I have a pal who’s a professional movie audio guy, and the studio he works at — which does sound mostly at the documentary/indie films level (not huge Hollywood) — has lots of high-end sound software to (try to) accomplish all kinds of weird clean up of audio that low-to-no-budget indie and docu filmmakers throw their way. For some of my movie restoration work I’ve thrown him small clips — less than a minute long — for cleaning out dialogue or music from something already mixed to stereo or mono, and while this is totally in his wheelhouse and while his results were decent-to-good (but not perfect) some of these bits took him an hour to do; an hour of his time using all the resources at his studio/work to clean out music or dialogue from a .wav file under a minute long.

So my two cents is that it seems things aren’t there yet as far as your initial request and that you look well into the alternative mentioned by ThatPixarGuy as your solution…although it would be cool if someone chimed in here with a cleaning method that works really well and is not nearly as time intensive.

The owner is looking into the price of shipping it to me vs getting it transferred locally.

When it comes to capturing VHS, I hope you’re aware of “averaging,” “merging”…I think the technique has another name too. I personally never capture from VHS without doing this as the benefits are so very worth it (wiping out tape noise plus increasing detail without using de-noising or sharpening filters/tools). You are likely familiar with averaging, but since it seems you’re only going to get one stab at acquiring this footage I figured I’d mention this just in case. Great stuff, good luck! 😃

I haven’t seen this edit yet, but already the thought and effort you’ve put into this is dynamite…even more than what took care of Bond’s poor LE in this movie. 😮 😃 Looking for to this one!

Sincere thanks for your detailed entries/information regarding your efforts here. I love seeing this kind of work being done. :)

One extra you could have is a section with scans of the box tops from every Macross toy and model kit ever produced.  Why, I think you'd have at least ten scans in there in the end! ;)

Ripplin said:

...looking at the nice disc art for ANH:R (red wire-frame Death Star model)...

Here are two great war movies, on opposite sides of the spectrum. The first one is a great "movie" movie. You know, a great time at the movies! The second one is a war movie will sink you into freakin' hell, possibly make you feel ill at times it's so disturbing (and it achieves this with very little gore effects!).

As already mentioned by FanFiltration, "Kelly's Heroes". All star (big!) cast, great writing, great location shooting and costumes and sets, great action... It's funny, exciting, tense, at times it will practically make you cheer...! Even the music is awesome! This flick has it all! Really, if you've never seen it, you must! This is what having fun at the movies is all about! :)

And on the other end of the "war movie" spectrum is "Come and see" (a USSR movie, original title "Idi i smotri".) I'm one of those people who really didn't like Saving Private Ryan. I give Dale Dye a huge amount of credit but all the contrivances, the bad writing, the overwrought John Williams score in that flick... >:P
A few years later "Come and See" was at a local theater, and seeing it I couldn't believe that this film was made in '85! (I really suspect that Spielberg saw this before making SPR; there's one thing in SPR that had "never been seen" in war movies before, but it's here in CAS 13 years earlier!) Truly ahead of its time. I don't want to pump it up too much as some people say it's overrated. (but I'll still take a jab at such people and say they're out of their mind.) It's not a fast-moving film, not full of great characters who you'd like to be your pals if you were plopped into a crisis. It's just a slice of one of the most terrible (surrealishly so) times in human existence (and this is not a prison camp movie). Alright, shutting up now on it. :)


To throw one more out there, one not seen too often: "Stalingrad" (1993) Not quite a great masterpiece of a film due largely to its veering off from what the subject matter should supposedly offer (the battle of Stalingrad!), but pretty darned good, very worth a look for the harrowing atmosphere, epic scale/scope of the production, and the brutal/realistic graphicness on display in the battles and such. Probably goes without saying, but don't watch the dubbed version.

When you have time to watch something beyond movie length, the HBO mini "Band of Brothers" mini is excellent, highly recommended! (this coming from someone who basically hated SPR!) It's the highest rated thing (that has over a few thousand votes) I've ever seen on IMDb: rated 9.6 out of 10! :O I've watched all ten hours twice now.

That's my two cents. ;)

Mr. Ghostface,

I see your points and, I myself, am enjoying hearing them. :) But I guess I'll say in response to seeing things getting possibly (more?) heated that the point of this edit was to "correct" all of the little things that people deemed inconsistent, a mistake, etc. (plus to add a couple of flourishes that the editor himself really wanted to add). To rag on Ady's fixing little things is like ragging on the "grindhouse feel" Jaws edit at fanedit.org for looking too unclean. It's the point of that edit to look unclean, as it was the point of "Revisited" to gather and listen any little thing that anyone has noticed and take a stab at correcting them. (And this whole idea was general seeded in the minds of fans by George Lucas himself, was it not? So you can't even "blame" Ady for the general idea of such "fixing.")

Note that I'm not jumping down your throat; just tossing this out there that it's east to forget that fanedits are something where you need to consider the intent behind them (and the human resources behind them). Ady has done exactly what he set out to do, and put a huge amount of time doing it. And if an element didn't work out, it's not because of lack of really trying, and generally people who come here know and really respect that. As roundaboutly stated in the last couple of pages (and you probably know this), if you have a DVD of a movie, a computer with a DVD drive, and Womble installed, you can do a professionally clean looking fan edit. That's all the resources you need in this day and age to get a clean/nice edit! Ady (and me to a tiny degree to fill in one gap in Ady's huge arrays of talent) utilized much, much more, put in huge amounts of effort, and the community here really likes that, hence they want to stick up for him. As far as I know, Ady is not a pro. I hear bits and pieces that say that he absolutely has the skills to be a pro, but pros usually also have a support team behind them. As far as I know Ady has pretty much done everything (except the smidgens of custom CG) on these edits by himself. And people know that, respect that, and cut his edit slack if 100% perfection hasn't been achieved.

Again, personally, I like hearing much of what you have to say. :) I see it as different point of view, but in the interest of wanting to see things kept "nice" on all sides, I felt like saying all that. Hope that's okay to you and everyone else. :) What do you work on by the way? Can you tell us? That would be cool to hear a little about! :)


Ady, hey! I think I might be too busy to do more. :( I did build a new computer though, a (cheap!) Core i7, that I'm going to OC (if I don't get cold feet!). It should render in one-freaking-sixth the time of my dual core! :D I'll chat with ya soon for kicks via PM. :)