Hello everyone, just joined this site yesterday, didn't know there's a site that specializes in movies restoration, glad to be here
1st message here to get rid of the lurking warning on head

Hello there, fellas!

How are you today?

Hello everyone! I finally got around to joining the forum, I remember lurking on the other site forum.fanres back before this site existed. Now I mostly specialize in upscales and have shared a fair amount on another private forum. I am making an account here not only to check out some of the projects I am highly interested in, but to potentially contribute myself.

I have been working on a upscale/color regrade of the Aviator.
I am looking for peoples opinion on it.
Included is a 1 minute clip from the source and my clip.
Converted to HEVC Rec.2020 HDR, Dolby Vision and HDR10+
Thanks!
Ben

https://we.tl/t-Qyssju5833

Hi, I am new here.  I don't usually introduce myself but I wanted to get rid of the warning message. lol
I hope to meet some good people that are into restoring movies.

I'm new here

btw what do all of you mean by "usual places"

Hi! I'm searching for some LaserDiscRips, if some have, please anwer me back.

When Ransom was released on Laserdisc it contained an additional 18 minutes of footage. That version has never been released on any other format. Whilst the DVD release contained some deleted scenes, they only ran for 4 minutes and were cropped 4:3.

For this project a friend captured the US Laserdisc on a Domesday setup and sent me the video. I then went several stages of processing in Avisynth including deinterlacing, decimating, cropping, cleaning, dehaloing, chroma noise removal and upscaling. That footage was then processed in Phoenix to remove instances of dust/dirt. There was then some light processing in Topaz and finally regraining in After Effects.

@zoidberg also captured the US Laserdisc for me and in some instances I used that footage instead. There was one short in particular that looked really bad on the Domesday version, so having two different captures allowed me to mix and match. Also, both versions had different colors so I was able to merge these for certain scenes.

This additional footage was then inserted into the Blu Ray footage to recreate the Extended release. Expectations need to be set here; LD footage is never going to seamless integrate with Blu Ray footage. I have tried my very best to make the footage look as good as possible, but I feel that overprocessing low quality footage is often worse.

The Blu Ray footage was adjusted slightly so that it better matched the LD footage. Fortunately most of the additional footage is completely independent, so it is less jarring on the eyes when it occurs. Overall I was very pleased with how it came out, I’ve been working on this for the last few months and I’m specifically looking for errors when I watch it, so hopefully others will be able to enjoy it for what it is.

In terms of audio, @zoidberg was able to capture both the PCM and the AC3 tracks from the Laserdisc. And my friend with the Domesday setup managed to capture the DTS track from the Japanese Laserdisc – so we have a complete audio offering.

The English subtitles were also a challenge as the additional footage has obviously never been subtitled before. So the blu ray subtitles were cut up and the extra footage transcribed line by line – that part was pretty time consuming.

Finally in terms of extras there is everything from the DVD, including one deleted scene that isn’t actually in the Extended Version, and some interviews from YouTube.

Once again, massive thanks to @zoidberg and my Domesday friend, without them this project would have never happened.

• BD25 with animated menus, background video, pop up menus and resume function
  
• 1080P AVC Video
  
• English 2.0 PCM, English 5.1 AC3 and English 5.1 DTS from the Laserdiscs
  
• English SDH Subtitles
  
• What Would You Do Featurette
  
• Between Takes featurette
  
• Deleted Scene
  
• Bobbie Wygant Interviews with Mel Gibson, Rene Russo, Gary Sinise and Ron Howard
  
• Theatrical Trailer
  

For a while I was toying with the idea to extend merge BR2049 shorts with the main feature, and make it all run at 60fps. It's not everybody's liking, but after watching Gemini Man and Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk, I always wondered how many other of my favorite movies would look. Of course any TV nowadays can do interpolation in realtime, and for the most part that is enough, if one likes that sort of thing, but this was just for fun, to see what AI can add to the idea.

Due to the heavy nature of the project, and working in TIFF 16bit sequence, and limited HDD space I currently have, I ended up doing sections of the project in batches and then merging all into the final result. It's a work in progress, and I would deal with the audio after the whole of video is done, as some adjustments would have to be made to accommodate constant 60fps.

For this the following was done:

- all 3 shorts upscaled to 4K with the AI, and stereo audio remastered to 7.1
- open matte version of the main feature upscaled to 4K with the AI, native 7.1 audio used
- edits were made (a simple addition of the short before the start of the movie, really, nothing too fancy, just to have all in one place)
- everything converted to BT2020 colourspace (graded, until it looked good to me, I do not have extensive knowledge here, or equipment here, rather just enough to please me, not trying to impress anyone in particular)

So yeah, 'will see how it's going to end up to be, working on it extremely slow, due to other commitments, but trying to stick with and complete this one, this time. Much of projects I end up abandoning, as I get bored... The main challenge, I think I would have (maybe due to doing video in sections), was that audio will perfectly match from 23.976 to 60fps, as all the historical attempts I made proved that it's matching 59.94 but, appears not quite for 60fps. Not a huge deal, just some additional timing will have to be done.