This started really simple: I just wanted to take the audio of the 1996 US CLV LaserDisc, which is digital 44.1 kHz PCM, and sync it to either the 2001 UK DVD (which is of course PAL) or the 2019 US/CA Blu-ray or both. But then I found that both had their own problems.

The 2001 UK DVD is the original theatrical cut of the film. Being an old PAL DVD, it's encoded as a 4:3 frame with a resolution of 720 x 576 (pixel aspect ratio 59:54 so it ends up displayed at 768 x 576). It's also the only widescreen home video release of it (i.e. in the original theatrical aspect ratio of 1.85:1 or thereabouts) since the 1996 LD, or at least it was until the Blu-ray came along last year, because the US DVD was pan & scan (presumably heavily cropped at the sides). It is also unfortunately an old MPEG-2 DVD at a low enough bitrate to fit on a single-layer 4.7 GB disc, same as the US double-sided THE EXORCIST DVD I upscaled recently for Halloween. Apart from that, it's very grainy because it's from a film source, and the audio is 192 kbps Dolby AC-3, but it is at least the original film for the most part.

The 2019 US Blu-ray Disc, on the other hand, looks significantly better and actually pretty damn good overall, especially for a Disney Blu-ray (if it's not already clear, I have been hurt before... see Beauty and the Beast, Cinderella, etc.) But there are two main issues with it. First off, the audio is once again lossy Dolby AC-3, although at least this time it has a respectable enough bitrate of 320 kbps and it actually sounds pretty decent from what I can tell. But secondly, and much more annoyingly from my perspective, Disney's been up to its old meddling antics again with this disc and they've redrawn some of the animation specifically for the purposes of censorship, as far as I can ascertain. Most of these moments seem to pertain to them trying to erase some fairly subtle and fairly 90s humour, which must have been determined to be A Bit Too Rude for 2019:







Of the above four now-censored scenes, the only one that even slightly raises an eyebrow for me is that second one, wherein the protagonist Max reacts with intense excitement to having a positive interaction with the girl he likes and then proceeds to dance around the room with a seemingly amused school secretary... but in the theatrical/LD/DVD version, as you can see from the above, he's not particularly self-aware of where he's putting his hands. I can definitely see that being interpreted as problematic, if noticed at all, although honestly it's only ever for maybe 1-3 frames at a time that you'd see the offending hand positioning so it's not exactly something that jumps out at you unless you're navigating frame by frame or specifically looking for it. The others are innocuous and in some cases fairly hilarious imo, particularly that first one (which would only conceivably be an issue if it was more than a few frames of contact and/or wasn't in what is very clearly coded as a clichéd dream sequence in the mind of a pubescent teenage boy). But that's not even really the point: the point is that it's been changed and is now no longer the original cut of the film for that reason. And as you'll know from my constant banging on about it with STAR WARS and THE EXORCIST and all those other films that have been messed with, I'm not OK with that.

To make matters worse, even after I then decided to basically just stick with watching the DVD in general (with my custom LD audio), I then discovered one really huge sync error on the DVD, in the video I intended to keep rather than the audio I intended to discard: the title sequence at the very start has the text "WALT DISNEY PICTURES presents" appear in sync with a flourish in the music before fading out for the next piece of text to take its place, except that on the DVD, it doesn't do either of those things. Instead, it appears 16 frames (2/3 of a second) too late, putting it very noticeably out of sync with the music, and abruptly pops out of existence instead of fading out as it should. So even the already low quality DVD video isn't good to go without further edits.

So now, as with THE EXORCIST, this has turned into a video-and-audio project instead of a straightforward audio resync.

-

Firstly, I've already resynced the LD audio to both the Blu-ray and the DVD (although in the case of the DVD, I deliberately did NOT attempt to resync the audio to fall in sync with the "WALT DISNEY presents" text because this would sound awful and it wasn't "fixed" on the DVD audio anyway), so the initial goal's already met. But I want to get the DVD looking at least basically watchable, even if I can't necessarily make it look great.

The easy bit was arguably fixing the sync issue with that mis-timed text, so I did that quickly by excising some frames from before it (which clearly weren't meant to be there), looping some frames of blue background afterwards, and creating a dissolve to fade the text into the looped background frames in an approximation of the original fade out from the theatrical/LD/BD cut. Easy peasy:


pw =

Not sure if this has come up before but I've a question about playing PAL 4:3 DVD's on a widescreen TV.

Been watching a few old UK TV series recently and noticed my TV displays the image in 720x576 (1:25) rather than (1:33). This is clearly because I have the TV set to 'Full Pixel' mode but none of the other screen options are able to force 4:3

My question is, should PAL DVD's look this way or are the effectively being vertically stretched by the widescreen TV?

I'm as impressed as I am confused. What the hell could the source for this possibly have been if not film? (He says in the description it's a "video transfer"!)

It got a LaserDisc release, but as far as I can tell only one with French subtitles; I suppose it's perfectly conceivable that those could've been removed, given the quality of the upscale, noise removal, and colour correction job. But holy crap, how?!

This is pretty much a load of nonsense whereby Michael has some fun getting Stan Winston to go nuts with makeup effects and the like, but it's exactly the curiosity that I think is important to preserve. I wish I knew what the hell this guy did to achieve results like this.

Hello! Thanks for having me here, I love your forum! I preserve cartoons mostly from raws or old tvrips but I also love movies.

Hi There!   

With the recent release of the surprisingly great and faithful UHD-BD, specially for Disney standards, with original 1.66 aspect ration and studio intro, I'd like to put together a Definitive Edition audio pack with the BD and DVD audio. 

If anyone can provide the DVD 5.1 AC-3 track, preferably from the original THX 1999 DVD.
 
If anyone has the rare Japanese LD PCM track it would be fantastic, but I guess that's too much wishful thinking. I tryied to get ti myself but couldn't even find a single copy for sale.

I'd be glad to try to sync any of the provided tracks and share them in this community.


Thanks a lot!

Breathless (1960) DVD R2 audio synced to UHD

More noise, more details.

More info:
https://blah-ray.blogspot.com/search/lab...%281960%29

Hi, I’ve been on the hunt for the extended television cut of Beyond the Poseidon Adventure for a few years and haven’t been able to find it. One person did tell me it was on MySpleen but I don’t have an account. Is there anyone who can help me out with obtaining the file (Google Drive etc)? Any help would he greatly appreciated.

Hi All,

I'm putting the finishing touches on a French movie that has been subtitled into English. A user on another site has done the subtitling for me and they've got 99.99% of it but there were a few words, mainly slang, that they couldn't catch. Is there anyone who speaks French that would be willing to have a look at it? There is only 5 or 6 words missing. 

Many thanks

I noticed a pattern while decoding Dolby Stereo tracks. Many of them seem to "lean left". Aka their left channel seems to often be a few decibel louder than the right one. The result is that in the decoding process, the left channel ends up slightly louder than the right one as well. But more worryingly, this also might affect the correct decoding since the balance between left and right affects what comes through the center channel.

So something that is supposed to come purely through the center channel might end up coming from the center AND left channel, depending on how strong the "lean" is.

What do you guys think the reason for this might be?

I just did a quick google and stumbled over this: https://soundforums.net/community/thread...uder.4646/

Could this be another story like the 16kHz noise coming from monitors during mixing that sound engineers just couldn't hear because they are old farts? Did they maybe do too much DJing with headphones on one ear, resulting in, erm, non-symmetric degradation of their hearing apparatus, thus leading them to wrongly balance Dolby Stereo tracks?

By the way, this applies to both 35mm optical audio and LD tracks at times. With the optical, I tended towards believing that the capture device wasn't properly calibrated but that doesn't explain the LD cases since they are bit-perfect PCM (or should be). Very strange.

I've got some original DTS Cinema Discs available to sync. I'm not sure how they compare to the DTS tracks on LDs, DVDs, or Blu-rays. Just cool to have!


I've ripped the discs in Foobar converting from the original AUD file to FLAC 5.1. If you'd like the AUD files by themselves for whatever reason, let me know.

Apollo 13
Babe
Batman Begins
Billy Madison
Casper
LOTR: Return of the King
Schindler's List
Shoot 'Em Up
Spider-Man (2002)
Star Trek: First Contact
Stranger Than Fiction
Varsity Blues