UPDATE 12/03/2024 - For now this preservation will no longer be available. 

The US Cut of Highlander 2 is suddenly available to buy and stream on Amazon UK! If I had to guess I'd say it's an old, fairly soft, HD transfer made for a DVD that was never released. It's certainly different from every transfer I've seen before. Sadly it's got PAL speedup. I wonder if the UK distributor is planning to finally update their old pan and scan DVD. It's certainly a step up from the French DVD which served as the basis for this preservation.

I encourage everyone who has this preservation to consider buying a copy of the new streaming version, hopefully it will remind the studios that there is demand for a wider release of this cut.

After completing the latest version of the European Theatrical Cut preservation, I thought I'd put one together for the US Theatrical Cut too. I had hoped this would be a quick process (I actually had an initial version ready to release just before New Year) but a few complications came up and it got delayed a few times. 

The US Theatrical Cut is a mess, but it deserves to be preserved if only as an example of how not to edit a film. As I was putting this one together I noticed lots of tiny editing oddities which clearly point towards the US Cut being edited from the EU Cut (or at least something very similar to it), rather than this version being put together from scratch. There's one instance where an additional scene is added to the US cut, and when the film proceeds to the next scene you can still see a few frames of fade out from the scene before the new scene. It's a real mess. 

The main visual source for this restoration was the French DVD which provides a nicely detailed picture. It's probably the highest detailed SD source I've seen for the film in any cut, however it looks like there's been some DNR applied and there are quite a few compression artefacts. It does however have the US Theatrical colour grading which is nearer to grey than the blue of the EU cut. 

Thanks goes to TomArrow for helping me with a shot extension; a ~3 second clip had to be reconstructed from three very different sources. My attempts to fix the shot were far from convincing but TomArrow came up with something that works really well. 

I originally used the English language audio from the Japanese DVD of the US Theatrical Cut, which is basically a poor quality LD rip, however Soundman offered me a bit perfect PCM rip from the US laserdisc which was much nicer quality so I've used that here instead. 

So thanks to both Tom Arrow Soundman! 



There's a bit of scope for an second version in the future; I have both the French and Japanese audio for this cut of the film so they could be included if there's call for it. The French audio does feature Christopher Lambert dubbing himself so it may be of interest to some. 

I think after this I'll be leaving the world of Highlander 2 for a bit. I've now spent over a year working on various cuts of this film so want to take a break, work on some other projects and learn some new skills. I may revisit this and the EU cut later down the line though as I've still got some ideas for improvements...

PM me for links. I hope you enjoy and please let me know if you have any feedback!

Question for you guys.  In this video, there's a hard cut around :46-:47...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=adBmLtE4wwg

But on the US and Holland Blu-ray's, those two shots dissolve, as seen at around :48 in this video...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7QdLc9Fz4dI

Does anyone know which edit is accurate to the original International Cut?  Anyone have the laserdisc to check this?

After restoring the European Theatrical Cut of Highlander 2 I thought I'd put together a preservation of the US Theatrical Cut. I thought this would be a quick task as the French DVD provides an excellent visual source, and all I'd have to do would be to sync up some high quality audio. I completed a first version that I was fully happy with, but just as I was about to release it I ran into a problem. 

The US Theatrical Cut contains a shot that is extended by around 1 second. Annoyingly this extension isn't present on the French DVD. I have two other sources for the extended shot; the Japanese DVD which is a low quality letterboxed LD rip, and the UK DVD which is high quality but Pan and Scan. 

Even with colour correction the Japanese DVD shot has such a massive drop in quality that it sticks out like a sore thumb. The UK DVD is an excellent match for the French DVD in terms of colour and quality, so I attempted to use the various sources to patch back in the cropped off parts of the image but the result was less than successful. 

Does anyone have any suggestions or tips on what can be done? Part of me is tempted to just ignore the extended shot as it's less than a second and contains absolutely nothing of interest, but the perfectionist in me doesn't want to let this go.

Below are frames from each source. I can provide the actual clips if anyone wants them. 

Japanese DVD


UK DVD


French DVD

Hello there!

It's my first post here and I'm very nervous..
So anyways let me introduce myself!
My name's Buse andd I'm a girl, I'm 18.
I'm from Turkey and I've been reading comics/manga since 2018, I'm also kind of new to anime.
My obsession with Star Wars stated in 2017 which is also the first time I watched the Saga.
I graduated from High School last year and I have a cat!
There's not much that I can think of so yeah
I hope we can get along!! I already loved this place!

George Abitbol, "the Classiest Man on Earth", dies sputtering his famous last words: "Shitty world!" What the heck did he mean? Reporters Steven, Peter and Dave investigate. La Classe américaine is a comedy montage of scenes taken from the Warner Bros. catalog and dubbed to fit the narration.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0321715/?ref_=ttpl_pl_tt

For more information on the project, see the original thread here: https://fanrestore.com/thread-2768.html?...%A9ricaine

* So why Special Edition? Why "fool" HD ? Why, why, why indeed? Since I like you guys, I'll tell you all:
- One, 'cause it's a restoration made in the digital era using digital tools unavailable at the time, based on the maximum amount of HD sources available at the moment, to which SD upscales were added to complete the montage.
- Two, 'cause the flashback scene of the writing of the letter is cut shorter on the source DVD, so the edit had to be modified using the onward/backward repetition technique used many times in the movie anyway, to circumvent this issue.
- Three, 'cause the lightening bolt shots in the beginning were never identified as to which movie they came from, so these were replaced by lovely restored ones from a MGM/Warner Home Video movie prior to 1993 to still be in the spirit of the original restrictions. Plus it gives the scene enhanced visual effects à la "Star Wars 'Special Edition'".
- Four, 'cause the whole thing was color timed and degrained to better sell the illusion that the shots are part of the same scenes.
- And finally five.... There is no five.

Video: 1080p @ 25 fps.
Aspect ratio: 2.20:1 just like the 70mm print that never was.
Audio: French PCM stereo and AAC stereo with a fixed line that was clearly out of sync, even more obvious in HD.
Subtitles: French for the hearing impaired, English (pardon my grammar, I asked for an English-speaking proofreader but no one answered), and English informative as to what movie is being used in the montage.
Trailer: specially made for this 26th anniversary Special Edition, also included in the package.



Special thanks to:
CorVans Prod YouTube channel tutorials for DaVinci Resolve 15.
ilovewaterslides for his help on a handful of shots that required visual effects.
Colek, Plissken1138 for helping me locating movie sources.

Direct MEGA link on demand via PM (for active members only), also available on my YouTube channel created just for this project: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBgdii0...uRfw6QKE3A

I don’t know what the differences are, but I’m told that the Blu-ray from Holland has a superior audio track to the US Blu-ray. I’m currently in the process of creating a restored International Cut using the German 4K remastered release and would like to test the Dutch audio track to see if it would be a better option for the project. I do not need the video, audio only.

I am looking at doing Laserdisc captures from Composite video.

I hoped someone may have some advice on what to use. I think DVD recorders and DVD format in feneral produce way too much artifacting. I would also prefer a format better for editing where necessary

Has anyone tested extensively With a DV Firewire capture device?

Thanks

Mark

I want to want to work out the delay value to use on an AC3 file when muxing to mkv.

Is there a way to sync tracks without converting AC3 on import (like it does in Audacity).

I just want to open multiple audio files, sync it and find the delay value. Don't need to export them.

With the 4K release available in stores, which is arguably the best the movie has ever looked, I do wonder if I can safely delete the D-Theater of the Director's Cut. I haven't compared the versions on the 4K and DTH, but maybe someone here did it. If you did, what's your verdict: Keep or Ditch?

May this be a general thread for discussing HDR from a technical & workfllow perspective for those interested in encoding and creating HDR content.

I'll start out with something I wanna share, a little bit of information regarding nits and the HDR curve and such, based on my own experiments. Also wanna preface this by saying I don't have a HDR display, so this is mostly considerations from a technical perspective.

The usefulness of these thoughts I will explain on the bottom of the post.

Here's my experiment:

   

Here's what I did:
1. Created a 32bit floating point image in Photoshop, with a custom linear sRGB colorspace (gamma set to 1).

2. Created 3 white rectangles. The darkest one had intensity set to 1. That means that on a normal display it reaches peak brightness. Then I created another one with an intensity of 4, equivalent to a 2 stop overexposure. I could do this thanks to the 32bit floating point space in Photoshop. And then a third one with an intensity of 16, equivalent to a 4 stop overexposure. On my display they all simply looked equally white.

3. Saved this image as an OpenEXR file (supports overbright values >1).

4. Opened this OpenEXR file in After Effects and told AE to interpret it as linear sRGB, like it was saved. Set After Effects project setting to 32 bit floating point with, again, linear sRGB color space. The linear color space is important to arrive at the correct values, gamma only complicates things. In linear color space, 2 simply means twice as much light as 1, 4 twice as much as 2, and so on.

5. Exported as 16 bit TIFF, but made sure to set a Rec2020 PQ HDR ICC Profile for the export. This makes AE automatically convert the superbright (>1) values into the HDR PQ color space. PQ is the same color space that most (if not all) UHD HDR Blu Rays use.

6. The resulting TIFF I opened in Photoshop and interpreted (not converted!) the colors as normal sRGB. This was just done for convenience, so that the image you see above has visible shades, otherwise Photoshop automatically *converts* into sRGB and thus all the shades are pure white again, which for this demonstration isn't very useful, as I wanna see that it actually worked and I ended up with different shades, or in other words, that the superbright detail was actually preserved.

7. Now I hovered the mouse over the different shades while having the mode in the Info-window set to 32 bit floating point. Thus I got the values you can see written on top as "PQ: ". Those are values between 0 and 1, representing the actual RGB brightness in the PQ-HDR-encoded image (or video). Of course that 0-1 would be scaled up to, for example, 0-1023 for 10 bit HDR video, it's merely a different way of displaying the data. I chose the 0-1 representation mainly because of the next step:

8.    

Link: https://github.com/colour-science/colour...st_2084.py

This script is part of the colour-science package in Python. It basically converts the raw PQ signal value to nits. This is possible because with PQ HDR (the de facto standard these days) every value in the encoded video corresponds precisely with an intensity in nits. You can see in the screenshot how to call the script, if you want to test it out yourself. I did this with Anaconda in the Anaconda prompt. Details on how to get it working on the bottom of the post.

9. I noted the resulting nit brightness on the bottom in my little graphic on the top of this post.

10. As you can see, there's a clear pattern we can see: A fully bright pixel (intensity of 1) in a 32 bit floating point composition in After Effects corresponds with pretty much exactly 100 nits (probably some rounding errors somewhere). A pixel with the intensity of 4 corresponds with pretty much exactly 400 nits, and the pixel with an intensity of 16 has a brightness of 1600 nits.


Why is this useful?

Simple. Let's say you have some linear footage like, for instance ... a film scan. Typically this scan will be rather dark due to headroom necessary to avoid clipped highlights. In a normal SDR grade you would use some form of curves to compress the highlights without blowing them out, for instance via Gamma, or by hand, in order to get more detail in the shadows.

In an HDR grade, you can do this instead: Make sure you're in a linear color space and 32 bit floating point in After Effects. Apply the "Exposure" filter. Set Exposure to a value that gives you enough detail in the shadows. You will now have blown out highlights, but don't worry, it's all part of the plan. Next, export the video while setting a Rec2020 PQ color profile for the export. After Effects will automatically convert the blown out highlights (which aren't really blown out) into the correct HDR values. You don't even need an HDR display to do this. Great!

And here's where all this information comes in super handy too: In order to make a proper HDR encode that is compatible and works, you need to supply metadata. Most importantly, the peak brightness. This value doesn't affect the image per se, rather it gives TVs a hint on how to remap superbright values if they cannot reach the brightness of the content. Normally you would just have to guess some random value. If you guess too low, you may end up with clipped highlights, because the TV doesn't take them into account when tonemapping. If you guess too high, your image will end up too dark after tonemapping because the TV tries to take into account a very high peak brightness that is never actually reached.

With the information we have though, we can give it the correct value. Let's say you have your linear footage in your composition without any adjustments. Now you know that the brightest possible pixel in the footage will be an intensity of 1. We also know that 1 means 100 nits. Now, if you raise Exposure by, say, 2 stops, via the Exposure effect, you get an intensity of 4 (one stop means the amount of light doubles). And we also know that an intensity of 4 equals 400 nits.

Whatever Exposure adjustment you set under the described circumstances, you can simply multiply it by 100 and get the theoretical peak brightness in nits.

So for instance:
Exposure +1 stop = 200 nits peak
Exposure +2 stops = 400 nits peak
Exposure +3 stops = 800 nits peak
Exposure +4 stops = 1600 nits peak

With the film scans I tested so far, typically a value between 2 and 3 stops seems good to me, so you get a peak brightness somewhere between 400 and 800 nits.

Which coincidentally is in the range that the new Star Wars HDR remasters reach. Many people said it wasn't "true HDR", but I disagree based on the film scans I played around with, it's a pretty believable range for 35mm content. Granted, a scan from the negative might reveal more range in theory, but you wouldn't get that kind of range in the cinema on 35mm, so it's pretty "faithful" in that aspect imo.


How can I do that fancy Python script stuff myself?

I say fancy because I'm a complete Python noob myself, but anyway, here's how I did it:

1. Install Anaconda (it's a kind of Python package/distribution or sth)
2. Run Anaconda Prompt
3. Do this: