Would it be beneficial to recapture the video from a laserdisc? In other words, would that eliminate the aliasing? I would think so unless the laserdiscs themselves are poorly authored. Theoretically in a perfect world, the interlacing could be removed using 3:2 pulldown if it was authored and captured properly.
Now I think I like DrDre's better ever so slightly at least in the first shot and probably in the others too. R2's red light is more clear in the SR V8 shot and his blue stripes in the front are better defined.
I am not sure because it is hard to compare but I think I like the grainier ones better.
I think both look good and if I had to pick one, it would be tough but would go with Laserdisc Master's based on those screenshots. It seems like there is a bit more clarity/vibrance to the image despite the additional noise. However, if one was better at hiding the aliasing than the other, I would easily pick that one. DrDre, can you dial back the denoising a bit? It might give yours the edge in that case (no pun intended).
Looking at R2 in the first screenshot, it looks like there is more detail in the rectangular lights section of his chrome head for example.
Looks great!
Looking forward to the new videos!
Thanks ChibiMak. It will be cool to see what DrDre can do with it! Hopefully the majority of the detail can remain in tact while the aliasing will be mostly reduced.
I'm back - things seem to be friendly again (except for an obvious exception that I don't quite understand but whatever).
The latest version looks pretty great given the source material. I was wondering about the scroll at the beginning. It seems to have a lot of ringing in the lettering. Is that in the source, or is that from sharpening?
Regarding the aliasing (no I won't let it rest until it is solved), I remember ATI coming out with something called "motion adaptive de-interlacing" in their video card drivers back when video card technology was really taking off. That technology might work well here. Here is how you do it (lol): http://www.google.com/patents/US6459455
Thanks,
Michael
team_negative1 said:
I think all of you know that these are just temporary comparisons intended to show the results of the cleanup. We don't put up all the disclaimers anymore, because people tend not to read them.
The final versions will have some color correction done to them.
Contrast and brightness will be adjusted also. See the latest example of the Star Wars clips.
Great! I figured speak now or forever hold my peace. While I am at it, some of the corners are round so I would suggest cropping a bit tighter so they are square. ;-) I really love the work you are doing, and I am just giving my feedback to help maximize the quality of the final product.
In my opinion this thread isn't fun anymore because people are too touchy and protective, etc. whatever... I will come back after the hostility is done.
These pictures illustrate exactly the issue I wanted to point out. There are details in the darker areas that are being crushed into black (the first picture has more details than the second in each pair)...
Picture 1: whole left side is dark and you can't see the trees
Picture 2: bottom right corner can't see anything
Picture 3: bottom right corner, can't see the engine
Picture 4: Looks ok
Picture 5: Bottom area between the guys is to dark and can't see the details
Picture 6: Top area is too dark. Is that a guy in the upper left corner or what?
Picture 7: same as picture 6 (duplicate)?
Picture 8: Can't see details in Dark Vader ;-)
Hope this helps! Otherwise it looks great! Just boost the lower end to not crush the dark areas into black. In Adobe Levels, move the left arrow over to the right when stuff starts showing up on the curve to make the black stuff black, then move the middle arrow to the left a bit to boost the dark areas up so they aren't so dark.
Darth Mallwalker said:
thorr said:
[...] check it vs. the Blu-ray which most likely is correct.LOL
LOL - agreed. :-) I only mentioned it because it is the easiest (cough, somewhat high quality, cough) source to check. A properly scanned film frame properly anamorphically stretched is your best bet but harder to come by.
DrDre, I understand what you are saying, believe me. You may have achieved the nearly correct aspect ratio in terms of the pixels, but it is possible that you may not have achieved the correct stretching of the image either vertically or horizontally. The only way to really know is to check it vs. the Blu-ray which most likely is correct. If people are fatter or skinnier or shorter or taller than the blu-ray, then it is not correct, regardless of the aspect ratio of the pixels. I was working on restoring the Star Wars Special Edition trailer from 35mm film and got a lot of it done. It was up to ME how tightly I cropped it and what aspect ratio of pixels I chose. In terms of the AR of the pixels I chose 2.35:1, but that doesn't mean I had to. There was some of the picture getting cropped on the edges so the corners would not be rounded and have part of the film edges showing.
Regarding AR, I agree with Laserdisc Master. I have past experience in that area and 720x480 is normal. The pixels are non-square but it doesn't make them wrong. To put the issue to rest, do a three way screenshot comparison between the blu-ray and your two methods and see which one overlays on top of the blu-ray better.
Regarding AA, like I said, you could do a mask of the area where the AA is obvious and just lose the detail in those specific spots in the frame. The detail is gone anyway if it is all jaggies. Of course that is a ton more work than just a script and is probably not worth the effort given the other projects going on in parallel.
Looks great!!
Looks really great except when Darth is fighting Obiwan, the darker areas look greener than they should.
You guys should work together and scene by scene each of you post your best effort (and of course get the aspect ratio in agreement with each other) and then choose which version is best for each scene. If you don't agree, then let us choose :-). In my opinion the jaggies are totally distracting, so whenever there are jaggies, do what it takes to get rid of them (maybe do a mask of the problem areas and mix two versions in the same frames). Also, waxy smooth and glossy is not good either. Over-sharpened with halos is bad too.
Looks great! My only critique/suggestion is to try to recover more of the blacks. It is hard to see details like Darth Vader and anything dark.
From my second link: "Frames that are detected as combed are smart deinterlaced. The deinterlacing is adaptive, i.e., only the portions of a frame that are combed will be deinterlaced. This means that full detail is retained in static picture areas."
It seems like that would help because the frames are still combed (in the source as you mentioned).
I have been meaning to ask this, but I just wanted to be sure that you guys are doing 3:2 pulldown which converts it from 29.97 FPS to 23.976 FPS. That should get rid of the interlacing in theory.
Edit: I just looked and you are both providing 23.976 FPS versions so that answers that question.
In my opinion the SR7 stuff looks like it recovers more details but the combing is bad. If you could do SR7 plus decombing, it might do the trick.
http://avisynth.nl/index.php/Decomb
Not sure if there are other plugins that do decombing by looking at the picture and finding problem areas but leaving the rest untouched.
Hope that helps.
Edit 2: this might do the trick: http://neuron2.net/decomb/decombnew.html
I didn't see any signs of it in Laserdisc Master's version, so I am a little hopeful it takes care of that problem.
Holy crap, that looks amazing! It's hard to judge for sure because it is so quick. Can you show the close up scene with R2 and 3PO that had lots of interlacing in the 10 minute clip? See R2...
I watched the 10 minute video and it looks mostly good, except there are interlacing artifacts which are distracting. The screenshot comparison that Laserdisc Master put shortly afterward look better I think, but they are missing some stars. Any chance of making a 10 minute clip of that one so we can see it in motion? And what is that awful "HDTV" stuff with the blue mess and dislocated engines?
Thanks for sharing all the great work guys!
Mike
Tyrphanax said:
Stood in line for the panel for this for more hours than I want to remember and then our little group got shut out about two feet from the door, so we didn't get in and didn't get the sweet shirt.
Same thing happened to me. Now I am really bummed knowing I could have had a shirt too. There was probably about 20 to 30 people in front of me when they stopped letting people in completely. I probably saw you there when I was looking through the people ahead of me trying to see if there was any hope to get in.
I really liked Battlefront 1 and I didn't like 2 as much. I played 1 maybe a year or two ago and it still worked. There was one server with about 15 people on it. :-)
Speaking of lost stuff from Empire, I just came across this while searching for the lost music. I hadn't seen this before and it is pretty cool (read about and watch all of the videos): http://www.cultofmac.com/289915/rediscovered-empire-strikes-back-trailer-features-lost-footage-luke-leia-making/
Ronster said:
GlastoEls said:
My highlights thus far:
3) Empire Strikes Back lost music with David W Collins
GlastoEls is there any chance you can tell me about number 3 please. Empire Strikes Back Lost music?
I was at that panel also. John Williams originally created music for many of the scenes that now have no music. For example, several scenes on Hoth in the rebel hideout. There is a lot of ambience but no music. They played clips showing how it is now, and again with the music put back in. The way it is now, the music fades out and back in at certain points usually at new scenes. With all of the original music put back in, it keeps going and is timed pretty much perfectly with where the music fades back in. They made it sound like the lost music has been available for some time and he simply mixed it back into the movie to illustrate how the scene would have been with the music in place. It totally changed the vibe of the scene and they were right to remove the music. It was more powerful not having it at certain places.
So, it seems that anyone who has the lost music could recreate this if they wanted.
Edit: Found this and I didn't listen to it but it seems like the same thing we witnessed except this version doesn't have the video:http://www.shotglassdigital.com/2014/06/05/lost-music-returned-to-empire-strikes-back-on-sw-oxygen/