Hi,

I own the Paramount VHS of Toho's anime movie The Wizard of Oz (1982). I'm aware that the only DVD release of this movie available is a region-free release by IDG in Poland, and is available from a Polish online store called DVDmax. However, that DVD is of the 1986 Japanese version and only has Japanese and Polish 5.1 audio tracks and Polish subtitles.

I was wondering if someone could rip the Paramount laserdisc, deinterlace, pulldown, clean up, and AI upscale the LD rip to 2160p, rip the IDG DVD, deinterlace, pulldown, and AI upscale the DVD rip to 2160p, reconstruct the English version with the credits and audio (both in 16-bit PCM stereo and a 5.1 upmix using FreeSurround in foobar2000) from the upscaled LD rip and the restored footage from the upscaled DVD rip, and then downscale the reconstruction to 1080p.

I'm also aware that a reconstruction of the English version exists on YouTube. However, it only uses the Polish DVD video and English audio and is in 480p.

Thanks,
James

It really amazes me the kind of work you guys put into projects!

Never tried any of it myself, only few dvd upscales which failed lol.

But thanks for letting me sign up, hopefully I can get to experience some of the cool projects here myself one day, and watch a full movie that has been "fan-restored"

As usual, I have a new idea in my mind... but before disclosing it, I need your help!

MANDATORY:

• an UltraHD Blu-ray hardware player that can read files written onto BD discs
  
• a BD disc to "sacrifice"
  
• some time to make test - I guess an hour at most
  

• a real 2K/4K display or projector - https://fanrestore.com/thread-4372.html
  
• an hardware media player - or the ability of the player to read files from an external USB memory/hard drive
  

• resolution: 4096x2160, 2048x1080, other 2K/4K
  
• video bitrate
  
• audio frequency: 44kHz, 48kHz
  
• audio channels
  
• container: mkv, mp4
  
• video codec: h.264, h.265
  
• audio codec: FLAC, PCM
  

• access to real 2K/4K - mainly trailers, but also some documentaries
  
• my endless gratitude!
  

Edit: I should have done my research. What I had in mind wouldn't work as intended.

• MKV
  

• 29 GB
  

• 1080p (1920x1080)
  
• 23.976 fps
  
• 1.78:1
  

1. Thai 5.1 Dolby True HD [Splendid blu-ray]–Original score [more robust but slight distortion]
   
2. Thai 5.1 DTS [Hong Kong DVD]–Original score [less robust but very clean and no distortion]
   
3. Thai 5.1 DTS [Cine-Asia DVD]–British score (*DEFAULT TRACK, BEST WAY TO WATCH THE MOVIE*)
   
4. Thai 5.1 Dolby TrueHD–[US blu-ray]-Luc Besson/RZA score (*Thai HD track fills in for places that were cut out of the international version*)
   
5. English 5.1 Dolby Digital [Cine-Asia DVD]–British score
   
6. English 5.1 Dolby TrueHD [US blu-ray]–Luc Besson/RZA score (*Cine-Asia English dub fills in for places that were cut out of the international version)
   
7. 5.1 German DTS-HD MA [Splendid blu-ray]–Luc Besson/RZA score (*No alterations, this is straight from the Splendid blu-ray itself. Switches to Thai in places cut from the international version*)
   
8. Bey Logan commentary [Cine-Asia DVD]
   

• All English subtitles come with bi-lingual Thai/English lyrics for the theme song in the end credits. But just in case your media player is a real pain with foreign characters, there is also a "no bi-lingual" option).
  
• The Thai Cine-Asia track fades out Muay's voice as she wails in despair over George/Hum Lae's death (oops, spoiler alert   ), but you'll continue to see subtitles for her words even if you don't hear her voice
  
• The subtitles are based heavily on the Cine-Asia version
  

1. English for Thai tracks, FPO (Foreign parts only)
   
2. English SDH for Thai tracks
   
3. English for Cine-Asia English dub–The reason why I made this is because Ting says the names of his Muay Thai moves in English in the Cine-Asia dub
   
4. English for Luc Besson English dub–The reason why I made this is because Ting says the names of his Muay Thai moves in Thai
   
5. German for Thai tracks–straight from the blu-ray, no translation of the end credits theme song.
   
6. German for German dub–straight from the blu-ray, only translates the Thai parts cut out from the Luc Besson version
   

• I believe the German blu-ray from Splendid is the highest quality version of this film released and perhaps the only version to ever receive a true HD remaster.
  
• However, as you'll see in my pictures, it was far too white/bright during outdoor daytime scenes.
  
• Night time and indoor scenes were mostly fine.
  

• As you'll see in the Movie-censorship article, Luc Besson used alternative takes in two places: in the scene where George/Hum Lae argues with his landlord, and during the Tuk-Tuk chase.
  
• I believe both instances of those alternative takes were stupid, so I used the Cine-Asia DVD to restore the original takes.
  

This was brought up on another forum, and I thought it would be an interesting discussion for here.

There's essentially three versions: the Polish version, the French version, and the US version.

The Polish version seems to be sharper, and has a more natural color pallet, but seems to suffer from edge enhancement in places.
The French version has a more orange-r color scheme than the Polish, that the US version goes much heavier on.
Highlights are more blown out on the US.

The Miramax DVD seems to be closest to the French disc. Not sure how the Laserdiscs compare. I'm assuming the Criterion release would be the most accurate looking (and sounding for that matter)?

Since the IMAX versions were just released on Disney+ it seems fitting to make a UAR version of Infinity War and Endgame to the quality of a BLUEBIRD release.

In Endgame at least, I've observed quite a few shots in the final battle with a decent amount of image added on the right, with a bit more on top and bottom for the open matte compared to IMAX.

I could not do this justice but here's a quick mock-up I made showing how much extra image there is.


IMAX VERSION


UAR VERSION

Pay extra attention to War Machine's shoulder on the right and the extra image on top and bottom.

I was trying to make a hybrid release for the movie "Source Code" (2011):
- Video: US 4K Blu-ray
- Audio: DTS-HD MA 5.1 from US Blu-ray release (the initial one from 2011)
in order to get away with the revisionist Dolby Atmos upmix from the 4K Blu-ray.*

The Blu-ray is "protected" with playlist obfuscation so that it employs seamless branching of several scenes, so I used DGDemux for stitching together the DTS-HD MA track as it is always under ~6ms of desync (better than e.g. MakeMKV).

In theory, the audio swap should be simple, because spot-checking the video tracks in VirtualDub shows that they are in-sync (frame-exact) up to the closing credits. Also, they both run with 23.976fps (per MediaInfo, and also VirtualDub displays exact same timecodes for a given frame-number).

As a (theoretically) redundant check, I wanted to make sure that the audio tracks are in sync, too. So I loaded both tracks into Audacity and compared the waveforms of both Center and LFE tracks. To do that, I needed to convert the THD track from the 4K to w64 (PCM) with eac3to, as Audacity does not import .thd files.

Here I noticed something strange: Not only are they out-of-sync against each other by about 40ms, but the desync even increases until the end of the movie until it reaches about 150ms of desync.

Has anybody an idea why this is happening? Are the tracks really that out of sync? I can't imagine this to be the case, as 150ms desync should be very noticeable. Or is there anything in my toolchain (mainly Audacity or eac3to) that would introduce any sync/timecode variances? Or is it possible that both versions do not actually run exactly at 23.976....fps but there are rounding errors that introduce timing variability? This really baffles me...

* I know that I can downmix the Atmos track, and in fact I have found that that is probably also the better option here because the Atmos track has better dynamic, but that is not the point here.