the ugnaught

First off, thanks for all of your hard work.

Just wanted to point out that the Holiday Special appears to have been IVTC’ed. Most of the special was shot on video tape at 30i. So it would be more appropriate to bob this to 60fps if you wanted to convert it to progressive.

There are a few scenes that could be IVTC’ed. Such as the animated segment and the reused shots from the film. Otherwise they are all video tape fps.

I went through the original KCCI and WHIO versions to verify this.

Would recommend QTGMC if you had any plans to convert this to 60fps.

Yep, seeing a lot of improvements this go around. Hoping this is my final version.

Here is a quick screenshot for comparison.

The same files were uploaded to youtube a long time ago by a user named Thall Joben (not me).

At the same time, I am neck deep in my ground up re-capture and re-master with the addition of the new sources. I have updated capture equipment as well as an updated process. So you may want to wait on those. Your call.

I started in earnest about a month ago once all of my new equipment was in place. I’ve finished the first episode and moving on the the next. Will probably be another month at the very least.

lorang said:

For those that have access to TV Vault and Spleen I have just finished the edit of these Season 1 episodes and taken the old run episodes from ABC poor quality but used the sound to redub these superior French versions back into English so they match as close as possible to the as broadcast episodes.

First off thanks for doing this!

Curious, where did you get your copies of the ABC release?

So I just went through a couple of those France 4 rips to compare the Old Indy segments to the US airings. These being the most important parts as there are 8 episodes that have never had any official release in any region with the old indy segments. So if one were trying to make “original airing” preservations these are required.

Welp, bad news. In ‘Benares January 1919’ (which is one of the aforementioned episodes with no official release in any region) specifically they’ve edited off seconds here and there making them incomplete. Assume this was to make the dub easier and not have to sync mouths as much. A few sections that previously had someone talking on camera is now swapped to off camera with a different person silently reacting to the words.

I haven’t had a chance to go through the entire episodes to compare but just going off of the old indy segments it doesn’t look good.

There are also advertisement pop ups with modern shows. That is annoying.

Additionally there is the usual frame blending done on 23.97fps sources converted to PAL. Another mess to untangle.

Oh yeah, and cropping. This is typical of 4:3 content modernized for 16:9 tv’s. They ever so slightly crop the image to something more like 14:9 and then letterbox the rest of it.

In these example pics look at her shoes, the cigarette machine, that arrow up top…

In summary, I wouldn’t use them for preservations. Nice to have I suppose. Maybe the episodes themselves are more intact but I have my doubts. Not to mention the cropping and frame rate issues will still be there regardless.

Chandrila said:

The chapters are one hour and a half long. Then, on Wikipedia, I saw a list of chapters with a lot more episodes than what I have. The names and the order of them are different too!
Would somebody be so kind and explain me WTH is going on? Can I watch the episodes I have in the order they are? Do I need to look for more episodes so as to have the complete collection? THX in advance!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Young_Indiana_Jones_Chronicles#Home_media

BandobrasTuk said:

ZigZig said:

It seems that they are available on yggtorrent.

Didn’t get it downloaded but I found another 720p in Portuguese.
To me it seems just to be a (although good) upscale of the DVD-Master.

I just went through the french “720p” set. They are 100% upscales.

Went through them side by side and frame by frame with a qtgmc rip I did of my own dvd’s.

The 720p is clearly just an upscale done with a little bit of sharpening filters and slightly brightened.

I looked into this a long time ago with the thought of doing my own preservation. The Young Indy releases are a jumbled mess. Here is a short breakdown of what you have to work with. As you’ll see official releases of the original airings are slim. Then add to the mix that some of the episode were aired differently in US vs abroad.

EDIT***
REMOVED TABLE AS IT MAKES THE EYES BLEED

long story short is only 11 of the episodes were released on PAL vhs. And 13 on japanese laserdisc to include the same 11 as PAL VHS so really only a net gain of 2 extra episodes.

There are 32 episodes of Young Indy.

And 2 of them also split out into 4 alternate euro airings with old indy.

who can we talk to here at originaltrilogy.com about making markdown tables readable? The color choice leaves much to be desired.

END EDIT*******

With that being said I have at least passable episodes of everything listed above. To include the euro versions of old indy episodes that were lacking in original US release. One of these days I’ll get around to it.

Baobab Archiver said:

I have to agree (to a point).
If you could go back and capture again at a higher resolution that would probably provide the best possible result.

Can’t really do that with VHS. Any capture card pulling off composite or svideo will be clipped at 480p (or 576p for PAL). Only other option is to use a DVD/VCR that also has component or HDMI outputs, but then you are just using whatever digital scaler is on the DVD/VCR combo unit instead of software on a PC.

I’m sure there are some sort of ways to “hack” the recording software to save a larger resolution, but not sure if that is actually reading that much more information from the VCR across the composite/svideo cable.

Danfun128 said:

Why resize to 720p? What resolution are you recording to anyways? You should just leave it in SD IMO.

9 times out of 10 I would agree with you. If somebody was just tossing a tape into a DVD/VCR combo and pushing “record” to output to DVD there wouldn’t be much to work with. Those recordings are generally awful and full of macroblocking and usually plain shit.

To start with I’ll be using a VCR off of this list. Then I’ll be doing a YUV 4:2:2 AVI capture saved to huffyuv or lagarith. Trying to get as close to a lossless VHS capture as possible even though it is technically impossible, but you get my drift.

When I capture a single 1.5 hour VHS tape of 4 episodes it is around 40-50gb per tape. That is a lot of color/chroma/luma information for avisynth and virtualdub to chew on to come up with the best possible image before converting to x264/x265 or mpeg2.

Not to mention the reality is avisynth scripts are a waaaaaaay better scaler than a dvd player or a tv. For all the same reasons 2006 GOUT upscale scripts are a thing. A lot of the popular scripts floating around out there will actually resize a smaller image to a larger resolution, do their work, and then resize back down to give the line enhancers/smoothers/darkeners more to work with on a larger canvas.

So I’ll give it a whirl. If the results are worth it I’ll move forward with it. If it is a waste of time I’ll move on from it.

Mway1 said:

I thought I would do a proof of concept anyway on that Stormtrooper frame on the first post.

https://imgur.com/a/NJGnFPb Here it is in its original resolution, and at 1080p with two different settings of Noise Reduction.

I used this website http://waifu2x.udp.jp

I appreciate the effort of this, but I am generally not a fan of these for VHS rips. Too much warpsharp for my taste. Looks too plastic in a weird way. this is what happens when people run amok with it.

But the more I am thinking about it I may take my raw AVI captures and resize to 720p (960x720 with 4:3) and then re-do all post processing, minor noise reduction and cleanup (maybe some minor line darkening) at that resolution. Then release a 720p mkv set.

Anything beyond 720p is probably just circlejerking at pixel count, IMHO.

LexX said:

I try to cap my Finnish Droids for you as well, but at the time being they are now elsewhere… Hopefully you’re not in a hurry. 😃

No hurry on my part. I imagine it is going to take me a good year or so before I finally get my SVHS deck repaired and new captures completed. I recently moved so still kinda living out of boxes at the moment.

benduwan said:

will your next release of your droids collection have german track?
i´m a fan of droids and ewoks cartoons.

Could you re-seed your german versions on MySpleen? I can grab them from there.

Danfun128 said:

Bit of a difference though. AFAIK Avatar and Clone Wars were mostly computer animated 2d, with some 3d CGI models. Droids and Ewoks were more traditionally animated, so I don’t think it’ll turn out as well.

I think the biggest difference is the source material used for the upscales. All the Avatar and Clone Wars upscales were made from digital sources, dvd’s primarily. While my Droids set will be from 30 year old VHS tapes. Remember that VHS’s resolution is something equivalent to 333×480.

Only so much turd polishing can be accomplished on VHS.

Just to remind everyone of how terrible VHS is check out some of the screenshots here showing the difference between VHS, DVD and Blu Ray. http://www.hifi-writer.com/he/vhstobd/index.htm

I finally have a copy of the Mexican Droids 3 tape with the Coby episode. I now have NTSC retail copies of every Droids episode made.

It only took me like 10 fucking years to get this tape. 😃

Running it through the VCR now. Only downside is my best vcr (the JVC with TBC) is in need of repairs at the moment. So will likely need to wait some time until I get that sorted. In the meantime making a backup of the tape with my secondary SVHS deck.

ger-el said:

Just an idea. Has anyone contacted those who have posted Colby on YouTube to see if they have any leads to acquiring the episode needed. Just a thought.

Yeah, that person is SWCCMTY and I already brought him over here. He tried to help but we haven’t heard from him in a while. He is the only person to actually confirm ownership of the tape.

schorman13 said:

Maybe this seller could help you.

Spoke with them a long time ago. Trust me. I’ve been looking 😃

Baobab Archiver said:

Was Coby commercially released anywhere? Is that the reason you are huntimg down the Mexican tape3?

Only in Mexico.

LexX said:

What kind of set can we expect? Do you use multiple audio options? I have Finnish dubs that were made for TV, would be cool to have them used. Although they only exist in my tapes which are a little incomplete, too…

I would be totally cool with all that. But when it comes time to actually make the DVD set (again, could be years) I would likely need to ask for community help in accumulating the audio tracks as well as syncing them to the Japanese video.

Each region appears to have slightly different editing around the commercial breaks, slight speed increases/decreases, and other little random things that will require somebody to actually edit the audio for each language. As in pull up Premiere, Vegas, Final Cut Pro, etc and go through the video scene by scene and cut the audio as needed.

Not sure if I could do them all myself. I would likely just come up with a baseline video with English audio for everyone else to sync their audio to and send it out to people working on each language. Then each person edits together an audio track in whatever language they want that perfectly syncs up with the baseline video. Then everyone send me (or whoever is authoring the DVD) their audio files only.

Then whoever is authoring the DVD could simply combine all of the separate elements together for the final DVD.

Would likely be easiest way.

The languages that I am aware of for Droids are:

• English
• Spanish (Apparently there are Castilian and Latin American variations of these, aka Spain vs Mexico)
• Japanese
• French
• German
• Finnish

Baobab Archiver said:

What are your plans for The Great Heep? Will you be doing an updated share? And do your other acquisitions mean improvements for other episodes?

I’m going to wait until I have all the episodes together before releasing another set. Don’t want there to be a ton of versions floating around.

Just have the one episode left (Coby).

So it has been years since the last update. This was because I haven’t been able to obtain any new sources. But after years and years I finally got a NTSC retail copy of the Great Heep.

Took forever for this thing to surface.

I now have all of the Japanese tapes.

Only thing left is tracking down that stupid Mexican Droids 3 tape. Once I get that we can do a proper DVD/BluRay/whatever set.

Kitreena said:
So in the retail VHS version, they had to save on tape space, and so they just faded out the audio track. I miss that original touch!!!

Yeah, they did this too with the UK VHS release of Droids. Around the commercial breaks they would trim a second or two off the fade-aways to tighten it up. I had to use the Japanese audio for those parts in my Droids set.

There is a Star Wars video on a popular Mexican auction/trading site that I would like to obtain but the language barrier and odd payment methods are getting in the way. Cost is low, should stay down around the $20 US range.

This video is pretty important in regards to a preservation that we are doing so any help would be amazing.

Hope somebody can help!

My experience was also using VLC.  May be something there that is having trouble with the MPEG2 stream.

I get the same thing.  Almost like a hiccup that will freeze a frame for a split second and then go forward 2-3 frames.

Kind of like when your PC is pegged on CPU and is constantly trying to play catch up.

Keep in mind I have probably watched each episode 30+ times while putting this set together.  So my opinion will probably be a little skewed.  Things that got on my nerves probably wouldn't even come up on most people's radar.