You'd think when a studio or producer or director makes a movie they'll want it done right the first time. This is the way we made it, this is how we are releasing it, and this is the way it should be seen. As everyone on this website knows: that's not the case. I'm wondering: why?

Of course, I understand how directors and producers can clash, (Brazil, Blade Runner, the Alien franchise, Apocalypse Now), or just the director wants the extended cut to be released (any James Cameron film), but that's not what I'm talking about here. I'm talking about why are there so many versions of movies with different croppings and colors?

I'm fairly new to this site, I must say, but I got into all this when Endgame wasn't released in its full IMAX open matte glory. The film was shot entirely on IMAX, so why not release it that way? (Answer: pretty sure it has to do with how IMAX distributes their films, and they said No to Disney). But the Harry Potter films and True Lies and Top Gun... Those are Super 35. These films can be viewed in 2.35 or 1.78 (not 1.85, right?).

SO WHY NOT just release them in 1.78? Why not release your film with MORE of the image? Is it because 2.35 looks more "cinematic"? OR is it just because these films are eventually going to be shown on TV and instead of doing a pan and scan (as would be done with an anamorphic print) they release it open matte... Which brings me back to my original question. WHY NOT just release it open matte, utilizing more of the screen?


AND WHAT ABOUT COLOR?
(Sorry, all caps there to just distinguish the subject change)
Look at Minority Report - there's differences in the color between the DVD and Blu-Ray. I didn't get to see the film in theaters (ahem, was a child) but I'm going to guess that the DVD is the same as the theatrical version. So why change it?

Terminator 2's 4K HDR release.... why would you do that to a film? What if we were to go back and make all those old film-noirs HDR (whatever the equivalent in black and white is), getting rid of all the contrast between the lights and shadows? That wouldn't go over well. So why do the same thing to movies today? If it wasn't shot for HDR, then why remaster and release it on HDR? Just for the namesake? Couldn't distributors just add a little checkbox in Special Feature which activates or deactivates all of the LUTs and color done to the new version of the film? Would be nice...

And then there's DISNEY... editing their classics so much to even switching the order of two shots (Little Mermaid, I'm looking at you). And all the while, practically remaking whole films in the computer. Dumbo didn't look like that. Those aren't the colors they chose. Fantasia didn't look that way. I could understand adding more colors and upping the resolution (albeit it looks weird), but why CHANGE the colors?


SOUND is a whole other topic I don't know all too much about. I do know that it seems there's a new remastered soundtrack just about every new release of a movie. I can understand making a variety of mixes based on user's home setup, but I don't know how many changes are made to soundtracks and would love to hear more in this thread.

What are you thoughts on these changes? Why are there so many versions of films (aspect ratios, not just cuts!)? Does releasing a film in 2.35 really make it more "cinematic" and if not, then why not release it as open matte? I look forward to this discussion.

I found this tool really helpful and thought others might as well:

https://forum.audacityteam.org/viewtopic...27#p164527

It's a plugin for Audacity and is an easy way to either fix audio errors or in my case blank out a repeated word that happened when patching different sources together. An issue I have found with Audacity is if I am copying the audio from one part of the file to another it's easy to accidentally change the overall length of the file, but with this tool that never happens. It's not perfect, it only works if the bit you wish to copy is right next to the bit you want to paste over, but on a recent project it made the process a lot quicker.

(I would never, ever think to use the word "howdy" in actual conversation, but boy is it difficult to find a way to distinguish oneself among all these intro thread names...)

Hello, Fanres community! After much lurking, I have finally decided to make the jump with both feet into this delightful pool.

I'm still pretty new to a lot of the fan restoration stuff, but I look forward to learning from the expertise of everyone here!

I do have quite the burgeoning interest in finding better quality (i.e. LD-sourced) original sound mixes for older films, as well as restoring original studio opening logos. From what I've seen so far, this looks like the place to be. 

This could sure come in useful:

https://github.com/Alexkral/AviSynthAiUpscale

Some cuts of films might never make it to (official) UHD, or even HD, so decent upscaling is always useful.

Doom9 thread:

https://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=181665

Just a heads-up!

Guys,

So I have two video files, say,1.mp4 and 2.mp4. I want to cut out the beginning of 1.mp4 and then add it to 2.mp4, so that in the end I have 3.mp4 (which is the beginning of 1.mp4 + 2.mp4). Is it possible without re-encoding? Can ffmpeg take care of that? I know with ffmpeg you can cut out certain parts of the video, but not sure if it's not re-encoded after you apply ffmpeg...

So, my first flat TV was a 42' plasma, in the far 2006, and it was not even HD-ready, but a mere SD at 852x480 pixels.
Still, I remember it could display 720p in decent quality. I sold it, then went to FALD LEDs - even if I got a full-HD plasma as second TV, a Panasonic 42'.

Curious to see if an HD-ready plasma could display a nice full-HD picture, I decided to get not one, but two used ones!
A Pioneer LX-5080XA and a Panasonic TH-65PV500B. Both without stands and speakers, and Pioneer also without the remote control, so I put it in storage until I could find the remote, and put the Panasonic on use in an empty (for the moment) room.

I just connected it briefly to a laptop, to get a first insight; through HDMI, it passes the video at 1280x720, while plasma is 1366x768, and it has some overscan (3% IIRC). ASAP I'll connect it to my main PC, pretty sure it could drive it at 1366x768.

Tested with brief excerpts randomly taken from 1080p and 720p, and few SD. Captures from LD were poor, but it was expected; Halloween DVD was also poor, even if better than LD - I guess it's due to the laptop PC, codecs, setting etc. more investigation needed.

720p and 1080p are pretty good; setting temperature to warm (sadly only basic settings here), colors are pretty good, and image is very natural, analog-like. Details are resolved very well, probably thanks to the subpixel drive, that, I suspect, it helps to get quasi-HD resolution. Never saw sawtooth edges, and in some instances were fine details are displayed - like newspapers - I forgot it was not HD.

Black level is quite high - at least for a plasma, but lately I had few occasions to watch HD and UHD displays in various home, and some have good blacks but horrible clouding, and others had no clouding but greyish blacks, so even if it's far from perfect, it's more than acceptable. (note: viewed during the afternoon, with some light from windows; possibly in a pitch black room it could be better)

All in all, a nice display for 130€ - huge, bulky, heavy (84kg!!!) - that can't compare with OLEDs or better FALD LEDs, still better than many EDGE LEDs and surely than CCFL LCDs; image is very natural and film-like - at least, it gives me that impression of "something is not perfect, still it's soooo good!", a bit like old card or motorbikes, dunno if I give the idea.

Now, really curious to test the Pioneer - got it for 55€...

What's about your experience with plasmas, lately?

So I've got the Mad Max 5.1 DTS track from the Australian DVD - it is 1510 kbps. In order to sync it up to the 4k version it needs a delay at the start, PAL speedup reversal and a bit cutting off the end. I've done this through eac3to but noticed when going from old.dts to new.dts, eac3to converts it to .wavs first then converts the .wavs to .dts. 

I know .dts is lossy - so the question is am I better going to .wavs first with eac3to, then to DTS HD? Is the process of taking a .dts file and converting it to .wavs then back to .dts encoding a lossy file to a lossy format a second time - and will that make a huge difference to quality?

Obviously from a space point of view .dts is better than .dtshd - but as this track is unique i'd like to preserve it as best as I can. 

Hope that makes sense!

Thanks all

Hello everyone - just introducing myself properly to this fine forum with a project I finished a short while ago, an HD re-creation of the 'Special Longer Version' of Star Trek: The Motion Picture.



Video is from the 2013 Blu-ray (colour corrected shot by shot, with added 35mm film grain to fix the digital scrubbing), with select few shots which were too problematic replaced by the HDTV broadcast. Extended scenes are from the 2001 Director's Edition DVD, upscaled to HD. Audio is from the 1989 Japanese laserdisc.

I believe there has been an SD version of this cut released elsewhere years ago, and that others may have been working on HD versions of it since - so hopefully this doesn't step on any toes. Others however seem to have been trying to "fix" the notorious Kirk spacesuit sequence where we famously see a large part of the studio set around the facade of the Enterprise. This project keeps all such goofs intact.


Tech Details:

FILE NAME:  Star Trek The Motion Picture - Special Longer Version.m2ts
FILE SIZE:  33.3GB
DURATION:  02:24:18
VIDEO:  1920x1080p - 23.976FPS - MPEG-4 AVC - 2.35:1 AR
AUDIO:  2.0 Stereo LPCM - English - 48KHz - 16 Bit


Sources:

Video
Star Trek: The Motion Picture (Blu-ray - USA - 2013 - Cat: 7913136A)
Star Trek: The Motion Picture - Director’s Edition (DVD - USA - 2001 - Cat: 08858)
Star Trek: The Motion Picture (HDTV broadcast - USA)

Audio
Star Trek: The Motion Picture - Special Longer Version (Laserdisc - Japan - 1989 - Cat: SF057-1618)
Star Trek: The Motion Picture (Laserdisc - USA - 1991 - Cat: LV8858-2WS)



Please do ask for any more info you'd like to know. And for a link, PM

The Past Masters Collection.

A selection of films from my collection that needed a little bit of love and preservation.
The Best Picture - Color Corrected, cleaned up to my personal taste.
The Best Audio - A selection of the best Audio option's I and the wider web have to offer.

The Story so far...
Ive been using avisynth scripts to play files for the past few years now, mainly for DVDs.
I speed change, clean, up-ress and tweak depending on the source and it all plays real-time on my rig.
i7 3770k, 32gb ram, AMDRX480

Ive also found this process helpful for correcting old HD masters on Blu-ray.
Slightly tweaking the YUV channels to remove the 'Red' byass that plagued dated masters and often doing a upscale to 4k and back down to pull out as much detail as possible.
As many of you know here this kind of tweaking can be addictive, and I'd often hit the limits of my real-time playback.

Overtime I started to push things more and would try an mimic what a said film could of looked like when printed on particular film stock.
Dropping the upscale (unless necessary)
often this would contain two levels of color tweaking, one to balance the picture, then one to add the 35mm release print character.
This included a film-like gamma curve.
After much research and discussion in this very forum, it does indeed look like a lot of the more teal releases are in fact more theatrically accurate.
Removing the red byass and getting more pleasurable skintones certainly introduced more green and blues.

I recently found my entire DVD collection had become victim to recent flooding during a very wet period in my country.
So Ive been salvaging what I can and thought it an excellent time to combine all the various versions of films I have collected over the years.
Id always wanted to do it, and have in the past done a few from my 'Hong Kong collection'
They are a lot more varied release to release and can get quite grueling when combining all the best sources.
This is where the Past Masters project was born.
The Best Video, Audio options I have tweaked to my liking.
I understand it's probably not for everyone and not as 'pure' as most would like.
Those options will always be available for more simple remux projects but I wanted to do a little more.

I originally I intended to do these corrections and 'Quick' projects completely in AVIsynth, just rendering the 'real-time' scripts using the methods above.
But as is with anything like this, I found myself trying various different methods and introduced Adobe Premiere CC back into the mix for Color Correction.
And im very glad I did.
Mainly because of my lack of skill with Avisynth, I just could not balance the white points properly when correcting.
Lumetri in Premiere CC changed all that and Ive been very happy with the results.

Hi guys,

Looks like either the motherboard or CPU in my old Win7 machine I built in 2012 has died: got a BSOD last night, seemed fine after rebooting but woke up to find the PC frozen with no video output, rebooted and it froze during POST after checking the hard drives, and now I get an endless boot cycle (2 seconds on with fans spinning and all 4 lights on the motherboard turn on, shutoff, repeat) before reaching POST.  Pretty sure it's not the PSU as that's only a few months old.  Even if its something fixable I think it's time to move on from this PC, as I've been having some other hardware problems lately.

So looks like time to build a new PC.  Guess I'll be going with Win10, was initially against upgrading from 7 due to software/hardware incompatibilty fears (and spyware, but I'm sure MS put the same crap from 10 into updates for 7), but I don't think there's anything I normally use that isn't compatible. Even the Win7 64-bit driver for the M-audio 2496 I got in 2005 for capturing PCM seems to be compatible with Win10 according to https://homerecording.com/bbs/general-di...-a-389994/

I know this isn't a PC forum, but curious as to what people here are using.  Probably not going to be doing any modern gaming my new PC, but quality 4K video playback might be nice.  My 5-year old Radeon video card as well as my laptop (also Radeon) from last year do 4K output, but the video either freezes or chokes on trying to play 4K77 or UHD .mpls files in fullscreen.  Also always got tearing when playing 1080p video on my desktop, but maybe that's because it was an old Intel motherboard paired with a Radeon video card?  Seem to remember hearing something a long time ago about tearing due to c

Probably won't be doing any major video editing, but would like have a motherboard/CPU that can last for at least 10 years if needed, but maybe I just need to dust the inside of the PC more often...