Ok this thread is half a technical inquiry and half a project thread similar to my Upscale Project and 35 Project.

There is a long standing theory here on the forum that I always wanted to test. It was noticed some time ago that many video masters made from roughly late 90's to mid 2000s have a magenta (or red or pink) look to them when viewed on modern TVs. You can see it often once you know what to look for. White clouds that have a pink hue, faces that are red with high blood pressure, blues that looks more purple then blue, etc.

The thought as to why this happened is that the mastering monitors used to make these videos were CRTs. Those CRT monitors work a lot different then our modern screens and they tend to push very green and yellow. This likely happens because unlike modern panels which have color standards to achieve (Rec709, Rec2020), a lot of CRTs only had color temperature to work with (D65 or D93). In order to compensate the masters were pushed toward red in order to keep the white balance correct. That worked fine when we were in the world of CRTs but once the world migrated to flat panels these old masters took on a very magenta or reddish look.

The industry moved on to LCD in mid 2000s and then OLED panels. With that move the red bias went away. But the work was already done. In the run up and adoption of HD in the 2000s many studios quickly mastered their old movies and those masters still are being trotted out. You see it a lot with 20th Century Fox,  Disney but I see it the most by MGM, who remastered in HD most of their film library in the early 2000s.

So this thread's goal is to try to prove if this theory is correct or not and if it is, to adjust some masters to reflect how they look on a CRT so you have the proper look on modern flat panels. So, step one is to get a CRT. Not just any CRT but one used in the mastering process. A Sony BVM, PVM or some such. That is a difficult proposition because those monitors are expensive since retrogamers like to play on them and I simply don't have the money to afford one. Luckily, I have a friend that had the perfect answer. An HDCRT mastering monitor in the Sony HDVS line that is useless to retrogamers as it will not do 240p or 480i. But it will do the HD resolutions that I need at D65. I borrowed the monitor, hooked it up to my laptop with its calibrated OLED screen and played a movie on both simultaneously. Now the iPhone I used to take the pics is skewing the colors a little (especially towards the red unfortunately) but these rough, rough pictures should let you know what I'm seeing till I break my DSLR out and replace the pics later with better examples.


Top is a calibrated OLED screen/Bottom is HDCRT

Star Trek 2 (1st gen BD), Office Space, Jurassic Park, Temple Of Doom, The Dark Knight (1st gen BD)

And what I'm seeing is it looks like there might be some truth to this theory. It does appear that the white balance is better for some of these masters, the skin tones are better and the pervasive magenta/red tint is lessened or gone. Overall the colors are much better in my opinion. That is not to say not more theatrical accurate. There is no way for me to know that but hopefully more accurate to what the person grading the film was going for.

So the next step is to do more experimentation and start trying to color grade these masters to what I am seeing

Cast Away is one of many Zemeckis best works and must be preserved.
Bluray itself is a decent transfer but it is a typical home video release and not as it looked on cinema in 2000.

Costs for this Russian print plus shipping is around $300.
Additional cost for the scanning will be around $230.
Total estimated cost: $530

Scanning will be 2K in 12-bit linear uncompressed DNGs and will be supervised and graded by @TomArrow.
Since this print has Russian dubbed sound, we will synchronize the DTS-HD MA track and hopefully in the future add the cinema DTS tracks.

If the project is fully collected, it will be started immediately as we ensure that the purchase of reels is shipped directly from the seller to the scan facility.

This preservation project will be shared with donators.


Pledges
$340 - Sebkarlbjork
$50 - TomArrow
$25 - Soupdrinker0 (OT)
$20 - 3Maters (OT)
$15 - Kynch
$15 - Freedomland (OT)
$15 - ZackR (OT)
$15 - Parzival91 (OT)
$10 - Trillary dump(OT)
$10 - Gryfun(OT)
$5  - Jerclayv2 (OT)
$5  - craigbillet (OT)
$5  - FilmD00d (OT)


So far
$365/$530

Update - June 15
As you already know, the film reels are from Russia and contain Russian dubbed sound. I just want to convey that it is also a US movie reels that is on sale that includes Cinema DTS CDs. That being said, the Russian film reels are good enough for our purposes. If we are lucky the seller might help us with a digital copy of the discs, for a coin. Fingers crossed.

Update - June 17
An update. The film rolls are now purchased and are now being sent for scanning. I have pledged $170 to the project. This means that we are soon more than halfway to fully funded. Now only $210 remains. I will wait to contact anyone who has donated until everything is fully funded.

Update - June 21
Good news. We have now obtained the cinema Dts files from @Soundman.

Update - September 29
Good news. Cast Away print is now 100% scanned and is currently being rendered. Sample inbound.

hi everyone. I could really use some help! I need Spicedivers Legion fan edit that  he did  to exorcist iii. I have a  poor quality version, and  wanted to know if someone could send me a very high quality mp4 version please if possible. thanks,humie99

Hi everyone, I have been over at OT and TSWT for a while and can't believe i never registered here. Well I am here now and want to say hello!

Out of the blue, I've decided that maybe Sleepy Hollow could deserve a project... UAR, then regraded taking the 35mm as reference:

(2018-04-23, 07:51 PM)maksnew Wrote:

Movie: Deliverance (1971)
Format: LD 0110385 (analog mono)
Lineage: Pioneer 660 > e-mu 0404 (set to 24-bit, 96 khz) > Audacity (edit out silence at beginning, side breaks, and end and Laserdisc logo and sounds at beginning of both side A and B)

No other processing done. Feel free to increase the volume (-6.5) or process however you see fit.

Output Soundtrack Options: 24-bit, 96khz, Mono (2.04 GB FLAC) or 24-bit, 48khz, Mono (1.11 GB FLAC)

Originally released in mono. This initial Warner Brothers release is the only way to get this in mono.

Not synced although I would love a synced copy.

PM me if you are interested

 hi ya guys, i m darkanakin.thank you for add me. greetings from Italy 

None of these are anywhere near as sophisticated as most of the incredible work that goes on around these parts, but I'm mostly making this thread to keep track of everything myself. I'm trying to do too many things at once, and a lot of them are tasks I don't yet have the skills to do properly, so it's starting to get really complicated. I'll keep this top post updated as things progress.



COMPLETED (pending any future revisions):

STAR WARS: Millions of Voices
A very large and reasonably comprehensive audio archive of the what I believe to be the best available audio for the Star Wars trilogy (1977–1983), including dozens of film audio options in multiple (lossless) formats and a large number of official and unofficial commentary tracks; version 3.0 is due out as soon as some new mixes appear from those actually making them, since I'm only really compiling files for archival and doing lossless decoding/encoding rather than actually editing mixes myself

HALLOWEEN: Evil Waits
A very conservative fan edit of Halloween (1978) to add a re-edited 1981 TV version scene as a prologue and restore the original mono audio

HALLOWEEN: A Symphony of Screams
A (comparitively much smaller) audio archive of the different audio tracks for Halloween (1978), including film audio, every official commentary track, and the music & effects only track from LaserDisc

NEAR DARK: a pipefan413 preservation
A presentation of the best available video and audio elements for Near Dark (1987), precisely re-synchronised, without any lossy re-encoding

SNOWPIERCER: preservation and translation
A presentation of the best available video and audio elements for Snowpiercer (2013), precisely re-synchronised, without any lossy re-encoding; also features custom subtitles translating all of the Korean dialogue in the film to English, except for sections that are already translated in the audio, and a large collection of re-synchronised international subtitles from official releases

ANATOMY OF A DEWBACK: upscale and framing correction
This is "done" except that I'm honestly not sure what the more "correct" framing is for this, because sources are few and all of them are terrible... once I decide, I'll declare it finished with and move on with my life (please help me)



IN PROGRESS, ONGOING:

ハチ公物語 (The Story of Hachikō): translation and audio repair
A presentation of the best available video and audio elements for ハチ公物語 (1987), with a new English subtitle translation which is taking me a long time to work through both due to the difficulty of doing this with my level of Japanese and the number of other things that I keep getting distracted with; the original Japanese audio is only available on one Blu-ray release, and even that is flawed (not least because of a big horrid audio glitch a few mins in that I'll need to fix)

TERMINATOR 2: theatrical audio mix re-sync to 2015 US Blu-ray Disc
This has already been done to most likely a higher standard than I'd manage (the AC-3 by @jonno and the DTS decoded to FLAC by @Chewtobacca) but I'm still interested in syncing the audio off the OOP 2008 2-disc French BD (DTS-HD MA 5.1) and the OOP 2003 Japanese DVD (1509 kbps DTS, but without decoding if possible) to the 2015 US BD and maybe the 2017 one but I can't see me wanting to watch that again. I'm up to my neck in missing frames at the moment, with all sorts of ridiculous screw-ups on every release (except the 2015 US BD which is actually pretty OK for the most part, but lacks the theatrical audio).



PLANNED / RESEARCH STARTED:

THE EXORCIST: The Version You've Almost Seen
An extended theatrical-and-then-some version of The Exorcist, with an audio mix more closely resembling the original presentation but with some of the additional scenes incorporated from the extended "Version You've Never Seen" cut with colour corrections to make the transitions somewhat less apparent

RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK: audio re-sync / repair
This may end up being done by someone else because I'm trying to do too much at once but would at its simplest involve just patching over a gap in the CLV LaserDisc audio, or at most, potentially a full new cleanup, restoration and re-sync of 35 mm optical audio

BASKET CASE: re-stabilisation reinstating Analysis Film Releasing Corporation logo to the MOMA restoration
As described in the linked thread, the UK version of this film from Second Sight suffers from very very bad stabilisation on hard cuts such that the image is knocked out of position for about 3 or 4 frames on almost every single cut, but the US Arrow release doesn't have that issue. However, it does have a different issue (minor, but annoying): it's missing the Analysis Film Releasing Corporation logo from the very start. The logo does appear on the earlier scan for the Image Entertainment / Second Sight releases, so I'm looking to reframe that to fill the same aspect ratio as the Arrow version of the video (no stretching or cropping, just adding pixels around the edges) and stick it on the start of the later restoration, after chopping off the extra text from the start of the later release.

DOG SOLDIERS: audio repair and possibly full restoration from multiple sources
At least, this will hopefully fix the messed up audio on the German UHD release; at best, it will also restore the video to the correct levels (since they appear to be wrong and the blacks are washed out to hell), fix the colours, re-grain the image so that cuts between negative elements and lower-quality sources are less distracting, and stabilisation of hard cuts if needed (same problem as Basket Case above apparently, though I've yet to see any myself)

This is less of a full-on audiovisual restoration and more of a subtitle translation, but nonetheless, I want to ensure I'm utilising the best elements available. As always.

The only Blu-ray Disc releases I know of are a Japanese one from 2015 and a German one from 2019. I have no reason to believe that the video encodes are different, especially since German releases (in my experience) seem to lift existing video and plonk it on a disc, maybe with different audio and/or subtitles, but without actually doing any new encoding. There is at least one problem with the Japanese audio (a glitch a few minutes into the film that sounds like a sound card going nuts or something) that I would like to patch over, but the original Japanese audio (which on the Japanese disc is 2.0 LPCM) is completely absent from the German disc, which makes it pretty useless to me. So I'm looking for alternative sources.

There are sellers on eBay trying to punt extremely dodgy looking DVDs which I assume to be pirate copies, specifically from Greece (which has an extremely poorly doctored JPEG image instead of any photos) and Thailand (which appears to show a sealed DVD in a box but it's supposedly PAL and "region 0" with "very good quality" English subtitles). Otherwise, there is a French DVD that supposedly also has the original Japanese audio as Dolby AC-3. But, again, it's PAL. The only NTSC source I know of is a Russian DVD which I frankly don't trust as far as I can throw it either, and obviously Japanese DVD(s) that I can't easily (read: affordably) get into Europe.

To be fair, I doubt it really matters much considering the only bit I've found thus far that needs patched is about 13,522 samples = ~225.4 milliseconds = ~0.2 seconds, so it probably would still be significantly better if I just used a PAL AC-3 source, slowed it down without shifting the pitch, then inserted the missing samples from it. But it would of course be better to just use a source that's already NTSC in the first place. I expect this is extremely unlikely, but if anybody has a LaserDisc with PCM on it, I'd bite your arm off for a capture of that (the only one I can see any evidence of existing is VHP49510 which the LDDB has very little data on).

There probably won't be much going on in this thread, but I figure it might make sense to track as I go nonetheless. I might post the odd update as I pass certain hurdles or notice new issues that need fixing.

Hello! I'm a lover of classic films and I've been a lurker for a few years (could've sworn I've at least registered before). Mostly interested in preservation of movies, alternate cuts/presentations, etc.