Hello everyone. Been a fan edit collector for years and love talking about film in general. Happened upon this place and look forward to getting to know fellow enthusiasts.

My first "big" reconstruction project, I've made a version of this movie where every actor speaks their original language.
This movie is available in three versions:
All voices dubbed in English, all voices in French and all voices in German.
Naturally, this will not do, so I synchronized the three versions, and then switched back and forth between them depending on speakers' original language. I switched it "live" on my first viewing, then I made a more proper edit in Audacity later. Most of the movie is in French, most of what's left in American, the rest German. There's one actress who speaks English in some scenes and French in others, which confused me for a bit. Oh, and there's Swedish for two lines, but only in the American dub.

When I did this, I had three versions available:
1080p streaming: American image, American dub
DVD rip: American image, French dub
TV Rip: German image, German dub, some scenes deleted, bad quality.
I used FFMatch to match the versions and copy the soundtracks (as MP3, because that's what FFMatch does) and then used a whole lot of "constant power crossfade" in Audacity to jump between them. (Which isn't great, if I want to redo it.)
I started with the American streaming copy as a base, but would use French audio for the most part, in case of crowd noises and such. I would only use the German dub when necessary, since it was much lower quality. There was also one scene that should have been spoken in German, but wasn't present in the German TV rip.
I also edited the subtitles slightly, since they were not translations, but transcriptions of the American dub, so the subtitle lines would be somewhat out of sync and also didn't match the original languages in translation.
Best example: "Ich habe vier Panzer-" became "I have three panzers-", even though "vier" means 4, not 3. Because the mouth movements of "three" and "vier" (sounds like "fear") match better, that's what they dubbed it to...
Unfortunately, I don't understand French, only German, so I couldn't verify if the French translation was bad.
Since finishing/abandoning this project I've found a French/German HDTV rip, which is very good quality and should really be used to replace the German audio. It also included the deleted German TV rip scene, but seems to be dubbed by a different German actor than the one on-screen. This HDTV version is French image, with synchronized French and German soundtracks, so hypothetically there could be some fun reconstruction work one could do to make creditless openings and suchlike.

Hello everyone, I'm Goggen240, my day job is digital projectionist and in my spare time I sometimes mess around with videos.
One of my corona hobbies has been to watch every WWII ever made, and that's led me to make undubbed extended Soviet war movie edits, which people usually don't find interesting at all, for some reason.
And then I came across this place!

Mostly, I've been using VirtualDub for video editing, Audacity for (amateur) audio editing, and I've fallen in love with FFMatch for synchronizing soundtracks.
I've been trying to get into AutoOverlay for AVISynth, and that's how I came across this here forum.
I'll be making a couple posts in the other subforums, I'm new, so feel free to move them around or edit them or whatever if I post them in the wrong spots.

I'll be posting sporadically (and from work, shhh) about my projects, so stay tuned!

FreeSurround is a surround decoding component for foobar2000 that sounds fantastic and even better than most Dolby decoders out there like the one with ffdshow, as ranked by this binaural experiments chart. foobar2000 can do up to 16.1 decoding, which is even more channels than the most common Dolby Atmos setup of 11.1, but I only upmixed to 7.1 as there is probably no way to encode homebrew Dolby Atmos mixes yet unless some brave soul decides to buy the Dolby Media Producer Suite.

I have put them up as FLAC 7.1 tracks as I do not have any knowledge on encoding with DTS-HD MA but feel free to make your own DTS-HD MA or Dolby TrueHD versions. I will not upmix the audio to 16.1 unless some people really want them for whatever reason because I am working with limited disk space, a 16.1 mix would take up over twice the size as a 7.1 mix, and I am working with limited disk space.

The films included with purist 7.1 upmixes are:
- Laputa: Castle in the Sky (1986)
- My Neighbor Totoro (1988)
- Grave of the Fireflies (1988)
- Kiki's Delivery Service (1989)
- Only Yesterday (1991)
- Porco Rosso (1992)
- Pom Poko (1994)

As you can see, these films were originally in Dolby Stereo and the Blu-ray has these original mixes. I did not do 7.1 upmixes of Lupin III: The Castle of Cagliostro, Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, and Ocean Waves because they are not Dolby Stereo (the first two are mono and the latter is stereo, and Cagliostro already has a 7.1 mix on the 4K UHD).

I did not do 7.1 upmixes of the later films either because the current surround mixes are already good enough, and their 2.0 mixes on Blu-ray are not the original Dolby Stereo SR mixes they were shown with but rather stereo downmixes made from the 5.0/5.1/6.1 discrete surround mixes.

Here is my Google Drive link with all of the Dolby Stereo upmixes:
https://drive.google.com/drive/u/1/folde...3o8j9Axt4D

I have a workprint version of this but the quality is terrible ! can anyone help with a better quality version thanks

https://www.lddb.com/laserdisc/10996/061...lose-Shave
This US LaserDisc has the original audio for the original trilogy in the highest quality.

The most noticeable alterations are that A Grand Day Out was originally mono but was remixed to 5.1 for the Blu-ray and some of the music cues in The Wrong Trousers were altered.
The Blu-ray (except for the Australian release) is in 24fps rather than 23.976fps so the audio would have to be slightly sped up from 23.976fps to 24fps.
The Wrong Trousers and A Close Shave were Dolby Stereo and the LDs are Dolby Stereo too, apparently, despite no mention of them.

These LaserDiscs are apparently common and cheap but I haven't found a rip of it yet.
I am requesting this for a friend of mine.

Thanks in advance.

P.S: Admins, please transfer this thread to the Audio Projects > Released subforum. I made a mistake.

https://www.lddb.com/laserdisc/10996/061...lose-Shave
This US LaserDisc has the original audio for the original trilogy in the highest quality.

The most noticeable alterations are that A Grand Day Out was originally mono but was remixed to 5.1 for the Blu-ray and some of the music cues in The Wrong Trousers were altered.
The Blu-ray (except for the Australian release) is in 24fps rather than 23.976fps so the audio would have to be slightly sped up from 23.976fps to 24fps.
What I am not sure about is if The Wrong Trousers and A Close Shave are plain stereo or are Dolby Surround encoded, IMDb says they are Dolby Surround but the LaserDiscs do not mention anything about Dolby Surround.

These LaserDiscs are apparently common and cheap but I haven't found a rip of it yet.
I am requesting this for a friend of mine.

Thanks in advance.

Just wondering if anyone has Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure on Laserdisc that they could capture and share please? Had a look in lddb and it's pretty pricey.

I've been trying to collect as many of my old favoutites in Fullscreen format. Easy when they're on DVD but this one isn't sadly.

Also, heads up, I've got a few on LD as well as some VHS's ready to capture so will be sharing those once they're done.

Project info:

Finally it's up, Dirty Harry 5 - The Dead Pool - in scope format V. 2.1 final.



Video:
Original Blu-ray VC1 converted to H265.

Audio:
1. EN Dolby Digital 2.0 Dolby Surround (from the laserdisc)
2. FR Dolby Digital 2.0 (from Blu-ray)
3. FR Dolby Digital 2.0 mono (from Warner LD [1181013])
4. German Dolby Digital 2.0 (from Blu-ray)
5. Italian Dolby Digital 2.0 (from Blu-ray)
6. Spanish Dolby Digital 2.0 (from Blu-ray)
7. Spanish II Dolby Digital 2.0 (from Blu-ray)
8. Portugal Dolby Digital 2.0 (from Blu-ray)
9. Audio commentary Dolby Digital 2.0 (from Blu-ray)

Also includes all the Blu-ray PGS subtitles tracks.

The first track is Kchrules Flac capture of the Stereo LD found on the internal organ with the initial sync delay corrected.
The French mono rip is by Shatpack.

Sync:
Any Warner BD (plus subs and chapters).

Total size is about 16 gb.

The story:
Like all Dirty Harry fans, I didn't get why Dirty Harry 5 - The Dead Pool - looked ugly on video for years. First it was released in open matte 4/3 with some cropping on the sides on VHS & LD, then in 1.78:1 on DVD, then on wider 1.78:1 on Blu (more opened on all four sides), and none of those presentations looked like a decently shot film.

It was easy for decades to dismiss this as "the director was a hack", but I disagree with all those ready-made cookie cutter opinions. First because the director Buddy Van Horn was a respected second unit director with credits I wouldn't mind having on my resume, and second because it's obvious half the film at least was shot by Clint himself, as you can see the exact same tricks Clint uses in all his films in all the quieter dialogue scenes (for example, long lens with blurry background, character enter frame, or exit frame, it's signature director Clint).

I think as the film was shot very fast in the spring of 1988 and released in July, that they had two units working jointly, one lead by Clint. The other involving the action and secondary characters led by Buddy Van Horn, and he got the credit given by Clint because he shot more stuff than the usual second unit thing. One way to tell is that the film has no second unit directors credits.

The director of photography is Jack Green the DoP of Bird and Unforgiven. Don't tell me the guy don't know how to shoot films, he is a bloody Oscar nominee.

So it's obvious something is wrong on all the home-video versions of this film. The weird thing is that the film is 1.77:1 on Home-Video, whereas all the other Harry films are scope 2.39:1.

I remember seeing the film on initial release, and not noting the format had changed. So maybe something is off with the presentation of The Dead Pool on all home-video formats. The framing looks totally bad and loose in all of the home-video versions, with tons of dead air.

Here's a possible explanation: a few years ago an industry insider told me that back in the mid-eighties, a trend developed in Hollywood where they would ask directors to shot spherical, for all formats. Meaning the producers decided at the end what format the movie would be released in. It could be cropped on the sides for TV, and either be released as 1.85:1 or 2.39:1 prints, depending on the film budget and the marketing research. He said films like Batman and The Punisher could be framed both ways (assuming you use the complete negative).

This could explain for example why Top Gun cannot decide over all the video releases what format it is on.

A Dirty Harry film in 1.85:1 looks wrong. What this project does is fixing this by converting the film to 2.39:1 scope format.

Here's a Blu-ray shot with the Super 35 framing layout layered on top.
Red is the scope framing, green is the 4/3 framing indications.


Now look how the Laserdisc 4/3 closely matches the framing of the Super 35 4/3 layout.


There's nothing surprising about it, because from the 1990's on, other Clint films shown in widescreen 2.39:1 on home-video weren't anamorphic either, but spherical shot films.

I made about 100 adjustment to scenes and individual shots to achieve this, as I think the 1.77:1 version is adjusted with tilt and scan depending on the scenes and shots (some shots are short of headroom, while having tons of bottom space, and others the reverse). I also added the black and red Warner logo from The Exorcist 2 at the beginning, as the blu one on the Blu-ray master is freeze framed and ugly. It makes the whole thing feel more like a true Dirty Harry sequel presentation. I say it's pretty neat looking now, so enjoy this V.1.0. You now will be able to watch The Dead Pool with a presentation in line with all the other films in the series. Ain't fanres forum a gas?



Here's a quick screenshot gallery. (old version, will be updated with final V2.1 images).

As usual, PM me for the links, contributing members only please.

Good afternoon ( I think?) everyone. I'm senpaisley, and I've been lurking here for a couple of weeks and finally decided to join! I'm a huge believer in the necessity and power of fan restorations, and its also cool as hell. I'll be popping up here and there while I learn more so say hey! 

I don't have much to offer at this point, but if there is anyone out there who wants a semi-HD copy of Frans Zwartjes' Medea (1982), PM me