Are there any alternatives to Gigapixel by Topazlabs?

So I am attempting to do an edit of Titanic with a restoration of the Paramount logo and some light regrading of the color. I have attempted several times to import a Blu-ray rip into Premiere and keep coming up with errors.

If I import the MKV directly, I get these odd anomalies on random frames (almost like pixelation) that are not apparent when played back on the same shots in VLC or other players.

I tried converting the video to an intermediate like ProRes (422 HQ in this case) and instead of pixelation I get frame jumps.  Of course, these appear baked into the source so any encodes I do have the problem.  I even re-ripped the Blu-ray from scratch and had the same result, but on different frames.  Blu-ray plays back fine without issue and the mkv plays fine in VLC and other players again.

I'm beginning to think that Premiere is borked.  Anyone else ever have this issue?  This issue did not happen when working with 4K HEVC rips (Terminator 2 and the Matrix) that I worked on recently.

I'm curious, what do some of y'all think would be a decent candidate for a modern Cameron-esque 2D to 3D conversion. I don't know why, I just thought it'd be a little fun to talk about and make a resultant thread.

A movie I've thought would be really cool to see in 3D would be Dario Argento's Phenomena. Not only do I think it's one of Argento's most gorgeous movies with its Swiss landscapes, but there are many shots and scenes that would make prime material for conversion, many of which due simply to how the movie was shot (such as the extensive use of macro-shots of insects). Plus, let's be real, that slow-motion window death scene would be cool to see in 3D.

Hopefully, that title doesn't sound too dumb; Anyways, welcome to this little experiment of mine. If you may recall from a little while back, I brought up the movie Hellraiser in a post as an example of a movie that's had its color grade extremely skewed for home releases.

(2019-01-14, 05:57 AM)LucasGodzilla Wrote: Anyways, I suppose the best way to start a thread like would be to show a drastic comparison or something like that. A while back on the Blu-Ray forums in a thread for Blue Underground's 4K transfer of Lucio Fulci's Zombie, there were a few posts that took a brief tangent away from Zombie and went to talk about Clive Barker's Hellraiser. There was a post by a user under the name of JohnCarpenterFan that was kind of an eye-opener for many: It basically compared high-quality stills from a preserved archival print of the movie with the Arrow transfer, ranting about their differences.

JohnCarpenterFan;15869547 Wrote:It is very interesting that you brought up Hellraiser. 

I recently managed to get my hands on a well-preserved archival print, watched it, took some scans, made sure they were representative of how it looked correctly projected and compared it with the Arrow Blu-ray.

Be aware that I really liked the Arrow Blu-ray despite the peculiar grain, and didn't have any problems with the color timing... When I watched this print, I couldn't believe my eyes. This film when viewed on film looks absolutely incredible, very stylish, quite a lot of blue lighting. I had no idea this film looked that good, home video has just done it a complete disservice.

One thing I will say is that this print was not grainy at all, even in low-light conditions there was nothing out of the ordinary, I wasn't even aware of it most of the time. 

When I flicked through the Arrow disc not long after, it looked flat and orange compared to what I had seen, it looked ugly and noisy. In the scene where the cenobites appear at the hospital, the room in the print appeared more blue with Pinhead's skin also being bathed in blue which helped draw attention away from the make-up, on the Arrow the room is more neutral and the make-up job on Pinhead really stands out. Also in a scene near the end (see last picture below), in the print, there's clearly blue lighting in the background and the characters directly in front of the camera are covered in a warm glow from a fireplace (IIRC), yet on the Arrow, everything is again flat and orange.







It was like watching the film for the first time. I'd love it if every studio/label took the Warner approach and used answer prints (or at the very least view multiple theatrical prints) to assist with color timing. This "Hold back on the colors/contrast, keep the shadows intact, make everything look natural" way of thinking has got to go. It's not purist in the slightest, in fact it goes directly against what film naturally looks like.

Reading this, I decided to do a bit of a comparison and ripped my Arrow copy of Hellraiser for comparison and well, the differences are pretty big. I weren't able to find the exact frames for all of them but I was able to at least pinpoint frames that were nearly the same.

Screenshot Comparison Here

I highly suspect that what we have in the Arrow transfer is a 2K scan of the negatives with a brand new color grade subsequent since the colors are quite different. I can't prove whether or not that's true since it's just officially detailed merely as a "Brand new 2K restoration approved by director of photography Robin Vidgeon", however it's quite obvious that there's some sort of going inconsistency here.

Certainly makes me wish there's some release of this movie now that addresses this issue. Maybe some of y'all could give a crack at making a restoration of this color grade if you want a challenge or something.

(After)

Hi everyone.

I've just accidentally found this boards, during my search for information about some 35mm scans of Star wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark.
I've been interested in various forms of "tweaking" with movies for ten years. It started with my fanedit of Transformers Revenge of The Fallen:
https://ifdb.fanedit.org/transformers-re...erg-s-cut/
with 80s style audio track.

and hybrid cut of fourth Rambo:
https://ifdb.fanedit.org/john-rambo-the-hybrid-cut/

Then I've made some extended cuts of movies like Prometheus and X-Men The Last Stand using materials form Blu-rays, recreation of Lethal Weapon's Director'c Cut in HD, and some others. Also, I've been trying to improve the look of some movies which didn't look that good on blu-ray like:
- The Dark Knight
- The Amazing Spider-Man
- Terminator 2 (latest waxy remaster).

This place looks quite interesting

Hi there. A few words about my project.

So, Avengers always looked to me like an open matte version which should be framed correctly for theatrical release and somebody have forgotten to do it. In fact, Whedon really has no distinct visual style and because of that, this movie always looked like TV production. Also, until release of Ant-Man it was the only MCU movie with TV aspect ratio of 1.78:1. So I've decided to do something about it and try to reframe it shot-by-shot for more theatrical look so to speak.

It was done in Sony Vegas, based on standard Blu-ray release of the film. Contains original audio track, and two polish voice-over audio tracks & subtitles. 

Of course this version loses significant part of the picture, but after I've watched in this new form, there's a little chance i'd get back to its original 1.78:1 framing.

Some screenshots will be added later today.

Someone in US can cap it in HD?

https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/1267...ic#1267173

Is there a way to separate 4K metadata from a file and add it to a 1080p file to place it in the 10 bit color space?

I had some problems with my PC lately and, even if probably I could solve them just buying a new PSU, this lead me to think about others things (oh yeah, I like to make my life even more complicated, technology-wise! )

Features I noted that I miss with my actual PC (when working) are:

1. GPU HEVC HDR UHD decoder - it stutters, as the CPU is not powerful enough to decode it
   
2. GPU HEVC encoder - not mandatory, but could be useful sometimes
   
3. 10bit output - still not 100% sure about this on better GPU non-pro versions, though
   
4. UHD-BD playback - CPU not powerful enough; not mandatory, too, but nice to get it
   

Ok this is rather specific but let me explain. I found one shot in an old project that needed to be fixed. The original intermediate files are long gone and I’m not going to redo the whole thing for one shot since that would take months.

I would like to avoid converting the project to avi again, fixing the shot and converting again to h264 as that would just add another level of compression.

Ideally I would like to redo the shot (just video) and insert it into the existing MKV without re-encoding. I know mkvmerge will allow you some latitude but not sure it will work in this case?

Any ideas guys? And thanks.