Oh great! so the project is not cancelled. I’ve been patiently waiting for a few years.
Please keep us posted 😃
Thanks!
So what happened to the scan process and the donations? Is the 35mm film still available for scanning?
Last update was that the film was fully scanned. Has this project been cancelled?
Do you have the Raw capture of the LD?
I want to compare it to mine and see which one has a finer quality.
Please let me know
Thanks so much!
Hey! Good to hear from you.
Thanks for sharing.
Yes, I’m still using it and I’m impressed with the Proteus mode.
You’re right. On my PC with a built-in graphics card, it relies on CPU and the speed is super slow. Having a better GPU makes a huge difference.
On my Mac the speed is very fast however. It has a 3.7 GHz 6-Core Intel Core i5.
I have TMPGEnc Video Mastering Works 7 and it has a Stabilizer filter. I’ve tried it on some footage and seen great results. Please provide me with a clip or a number of sequential frames so I can give it a try.
Do you know for sure that it’s cancelled? I’m still patiently waiting.
Do you know for sure that it’s cancelled? I’m still patiently waiting.
Is this available yet?
I would also donate and contribute. Any update is appreciated.
Yes, I’m also looking for the raw capture of this no matter how large the file is.
It looks fine to me, but I’m not sure if I can shell out $300 on something like this.
Yes, It’s a bit expensive. Would be nice if it was a lifetime license but looks like updates are not included, although you can still use it. Maybe not renew every year, but still.
Or even fund it by multiple people who can share the license but possible that the license only works for one.
It is also likely that other companies like Adobe come up with their solutions, since AI is growing.
For those that are curious -
I found that for my purposes, a frame by frame scale in the regular gigapixel software generated better results than using their beta video upscaling software.
GP has released a new app called Video Enhance AI. It is so much better than GPAI beta.
Check it out. I have posted a few comparison iamges of my Beauty and the Beast LD at the following thread:
Thanks for the tutorial!
Yes, let’s not go off topic from the original post by Avatar_Emil_Borg. Hopefully he’s seen the demonstration images I posted as he was wondering about the Gigapixel app and all.
Thank you for the detailed info.
The speed of a hand-made IVTC in avisynth (using SelectEvery) is lightning fast. But I …
Interesting. Makes sense. I just don’t know scripting and how to learn to do it. But I know it’s great.
This ugly pulldown-thing that you have with NTSC (I am lucky to live in PAL region) is produced in different ways…
PAL Has 2 really good benefits, 1 as you mentioned not having this ridiculous interlacing issue with film, 2 it has more horizontal lines of information for the picture. But the big downside is the frame rate when it comes to 24fps film, that shift of speed and change of pitch in the audio after conversion to 25fps is so noticeable and annoying to me. I know how to convert a PAL source back to progressive 23.976fps and change the audio speed to match the new framerate to reverse this effect but when audio speed becomes slower, audio quality decreases to some extent because it goes from high pitch to low pitch.
it’s fields that are added - as you know of course
Yes, I meant fields combed as one frame.
film --> scanned with pulldown (telecined) --> stored really uncompressed or losslessly compressed --> IVTCed
would give you 100% progressive frames back, that’s right.
Yes, Laserdisc is uncompressed because it’s analog, correct?
These look damned good! One could critisize many things, but…
Exactly, It may not be perfect and there are still issues or limitations but what it’s able to achieve is incredible. 😃
Sounds as if you tried a lot not to lose anything around upscaling. Really good is, that you exported from GPVE to lossless images, to collect these together afterwards. How well does the heart of this, GP Video Enhance, seem to work for you? I found it rather weak. Can you post some screens?
May I admit some things? I feel free to do so, maybe I can help:
So far the results are satisfactory to me as I have been comparing different upscaling methods. GPVE gave me more noticeable details and sharpness. I have comparison images ready if I can post here.
Of course, help is always appreciated as there are different ways of doing this and I’m constantly looking for ways to learn and improve, and here’s the place to share our experience and knowledge. 😃
As for IVTC, I haven’t tried Avisynth yet but I’ve read about it and would try it. I am aware of the change of pattern that can happen but I think that could be the case with any algorithm. As you mentioned, doing those by hand to produce progressive results is the best way to have perfect results but I don’t see how it can be fast. Shouldn’t that take forever? Please elaborate on that.
Second, I’m not sure I understand the part you talk about telecining while scanning.
If the original footage has been 24fps film/animation and telecined (3:2 pulldown) to 29.97fps which is the case with Laserdiscs, IVTC is the process to get rid of those added frames and turn it to 23.976fps. The results should have no jagged edges or as you say staircase-artifacts and no half resolution. My IVTC video has no rough edges if that’s what you mean, so please explain this.
Lastly, Having a lossless video at all times is good. I only do the last conversion after I’ve done all the edits and improvements and when there are no further edits needed, I encode it to my final video because Keeping the lossless files takes a lot of space.
Below are the images. It’s best to download and see at 100% but you can still see the difference here.
I agree to your last sentence. 😉
How exactly did you upscale you BatB-LD?
I use a Panasonic LX-101 Laserdisc player and a Blackmagic Intensity Shuttle USB 3 device to capture from the composite source into either an uncompressed or a high bitrate compressed SD format. I don’t use the device’s upscaling feature as it appears to just output a bicubic resized image. There are a couple of settings for Chroma and brightness at capture level that I have slightly adjusted due to a very subtle Brightness/chroma burn I notice. The captured video is an interlaced 29.97 fps video. In this case it’s telecined.
Then I use TMPGEnc Video Mastering Works to deinterlace (IVTC) and crop the letterboxed picture. I convert it to another lossless or high bitrate SD format using the highest processing options available to use for upscaling later, as Gigapixel currently can’t handle interlaced footage well. The converted video is a progressive 23.976fps video. The TMPGenc app has impressive advanced settings for video encoding, deinterlacing, and good filters which I don’t use at this stage.
I then load the progressive SD video in Gigapixel Video Enhance AI (using a 30 day trial for now). There are 3 upsampling methods to choose from. In this case I used Upsampling(HQ-CG) which I think looked better for BatB, plus HD size and the output format.
Currently there is mpeg4, 8bit tif, 16bit tiff, and png outputs in Video Enhance AI but I see no setting for mpeg4 to change the bitrate or CBR/VBR (could be the limitation of the free trial, not sure). Final result is high quality but the file size is not in your control.
You can consider this your final video but since I want more control and I also have enough storage, I choose png as my output to keep it lossless for further processing. This method outputs each progressive frame as separate png files in sequential filenames saved in a folder (300+ GB).
Then I load the first image/frame in TMPGEnc Video Mastering Works and it automatically loads the other frames to form a video. If any filters needed such as denoise, sharpness, etc, I find it’s better used at this stage on the already upscaled picture. I choose MP4 with H.264 codec.
In the output settings I make sure to choose 23.976 fps progressive otherwise it will change the speed of the video when dealing with still images as frames.
I choose VBR for 2pass encoding so I have control over the file size.
When the video is ready, I use MKVToolNix to add the audio to the video from the progressive SD video I created earlier. This avoids further processing/encoding of the video and only adds the audio to it in a couple of minutes.
That is my final version of the video. 😃
I’m still testing different things but so far this has given me great results.
Sorry for the long reply 😉
I know, nobody wants to hear, but…
You are right. Those details don’t exist but I don’t think anyone expects it to be as good as a human restorer.
I tested the new app and I am amazed by the results. It’s even better than the Beta app.
I’m also not 100% sure if Gigapixel checks for similar patterns or objects already registered, but by what’s available on the picture itself and sort of digital painting new pixels. but I don’t know. I’m just observing the process and comparing.
I will post a side by side picture of the upscaling results for my Beauty and the Beast LD for comparison. I was so skeptical, but what I see is more than I hoped for. To me it’s still better than some of the terrible restoration done by the humans at Disney mostly because of certain decisions they made to alter the original. 😃
Topaz Gigapixel has just released a new app, Video Enhance AI.
I am already using the Windows Beta Gigapixel AI for Video.
I will be trying the new app soon.
Please check it out and let us know your thoughts.
Thanks
Can I have the file please?
You can use filemail . com
There’s no limit to the file size you can upload. It’s so great and simple.
Please let me know.
Thanks
How can I have this verion?
Thanks
This is available again. PM me if you are interested.
Can I have it please?
Thanks so mcuh
Any update if there’s progress been made on any of these movie restoration projects?
Thanks
Would be great to see those 😃 Please let us know if they can be available.
Thanks for this!
They got rid of the shallow depth of field effect so that the tree isn’t blurry as it’s popping out of the screen right into your face.
Retroactively converting movies to 3D is one of the dumbest things.
Yes, and they haven’t done a good job either. I watched the 3D in cinema, not every scene was done properly. I’m a fan of 3D but if done properly. No point in doing it for a traditional animation really.
Yes, there should be other changes in the 3D. The opening scene was an example that only exists in the 3D that I noticed. See the images I created for comparison https://fil.email/7x4LPwUf