Greetings all,

After a long hiatus I have jumped head first back into cinema DTS rips with a couple projects.  Since I could not remember all the knowledge on the process, specifically the channel levels, I decided to go seek out official DTS sources as well as SMPTE documentation (SMPTE RP200) on cinema sound levels.  

From what I gather, systems are calibrated to achieve the following:

LCR: 85dB
Surround: 82dB
Subwoofer: +10dB in-band gain compared to the mains.

DTS' documentation seems to indicate that levels are recorded taking this into account (as was Dolby Digital and SDDS).  Thus the levels should be:

LCR: 85dB
Surround: 82dB
Subwoofer: 91dB for films after Jan 1, 1999.  Prior to 1999, they should be 88dB.

After parsing through threads here and OT.com, I don't see a mention of adjustment on the sub channel at all to account for this difference in levels.  The question is, what have you all done on your DTS Cinema projects?

Thanks ahead of time!

BandD

For some strange reason the Blu Ray only includes the original mono audio track and not the Dolby 4.0 Surround remix that was done for the DVD release. If there was ever a movie that benefits from a surround sound mix, this is it. I've hunted high and low for a DVDrip that includes the dolby mix so I could strip the audio track and remux it with a good BDrip, but I've never been able to find one. Any help would be appreciated.

Top Gun Open Matte (Quick Project v3.0)

Project Info:
With the news of the new Top Gun 2 shooting, I wanted to revisit the original as I haven't seen it in a decade or so. I was content to wait for jerryshadoe's project but he seems to have not been active on the site in some time (hope he is ok). What I took away from his postings was the 2.39 version has too tight of head room. With that in mind I (second open matte was x5’s) tracked down the Bluebird Amazon open matte Web-DL. Although I love scope format, I had to agree with him that the old S35 transfer was tight and the open matte looked better, especially for the aerial shots.

From there I was ready to mux in the LD's PCM and watch until, on close inspection, I found out the open matte has a few problems.

First it has a ton of blocking and compression artifacts on the video.

Compression artifacts example
100x/200x



Finished (Deblock, Noise removal, etc)
100x/200x


The open matte also uses the new (3D) color timing which I have no problem with outside of the pervasive red blanket over the picture. For that, I removed the red bias and balanced the highlights slightly away from yellow. Now the picture is still warm/yellow but now lack the blistering skin tones as they now tend to orange instead of red and the picture overall has more blue in it.

Orig/CC'd (some of the more extreme examples I could find)


One thing I couldn't fix are the blown highlights, they come with the original Web-DL. Overall this project is not perfect (it is a quick project) but much, much better then the original open matte. As a last step, I took out the Paramount 100 Years studio logo at the beginning and replaced it with a vintage era logo.



For sound, I kept the OM's DTS 5.1 but added jerryshadoe's LD PCM sync (which sounds fantastic) and used Chewtobacca's re-sync timing. The existing EAC-3 and the BD soundtrack were mixed in.

Addendum: also added in the Widescreen LD’s AC-3. Rumored to culled from the 70mm tracks (thanks Zoidberg).

Finally, spoRv gave my a copy of his YAO subs which when turned on will mask the 1.77 picture down to the theatrical 2.39. FYI, the new logo at the beginning will be over cropped incorrectly but the rest of the movie works ok.


Video:
Bluebird Amazon open matte Web-DL (thanks X5) with de-blocking, noise removal and slight color correction. Plus studio logo and English title replacements (via another open matte source)

Audio:
1. PCM 2.0 Dolby Surround (from the widescreen LD, synced by jerry)
2. Dolby Digital 5.1 (from the widescreen LD, synced by zoidberg)
3. Dolby Digital+/EAC-3 5.1 (Original Web-DL Track)
4. DTS-HD MA 6.1 (from the BD)

Subs:
1. English
2. spoRv's YAO subs to watch the 1.77 open matte video in 2.39 mode (note the Paramount logo will be cropped with these subs on but the rest should play out just fine)

Pics:

Final MKV Pics


YAO Subs
Open Matte/2.39 YAO subs



Collaborators and Thanks (In order of help):
jerryshadoe: for the PCM rip and sync
Chewtobacca: for the re-sync calculation
spoRv: for the YAO subs
Doombot: for previewing the MKV and advice
X5gb: for a second better open matte source.
Zoidberg: for the AC-3 cap and sync from the widescreen LD

Hey guys,

So here's a reconstruction of The Terminator extended version. I will call it The Terminator XTD.

I'm new here and am deaf. I live in Germany and my English is not so perfect but is acceptable.

I want to introduce myself who I am. So, I love only movies and I love most of them which are 80/90s. I'm a big movie fan and am also a collector. I have uncounters movies on BDs and mkv's on my storage which can be streamed on my SmartTV Samsung UE55ES8090 with using Multimediaplayer Dune HD Pro 4K.

Since one year I have Laserdisc-Player and some LDs because they have closed captions which they have not done on DVDs, maybe also on BDs. I need subtitles to get understand than without. I can't imagine today how could I watched so many movies without subtitles in the 90s. I did not know that in the US there were subtitles on the VHS and LDs that the decoder can support.

I am also a Fanedit, for example I dubbed the extended cut of Superman part 1 for German language and subtitles or I edited the unrated version of Dead Presidents and I could digitalize that from LD to HD with inserts with HD upscaling and now I'm working at the excellent movie Ransom - Extended Cut starring Mel Gibson for HD with HD upscaling like Dead Presidents. Then I will work for Pearl Harbor Director's Cut because there is still no released on BD, ...etc. And last good I also can get rip closed captions from LD or VHS to watch on the better quality screen of movies with subtitles.

Now you know who I am 

Friends,

Has anyone done a bit perfect capture of this stupendous LaserDisc track?  I was going to try experimenting with capturing it myself but I've lost the optical cable that is compatible with my old sound card.  In the time it will take to order a new one, I figured I'd ask if the work has already been done.

I queued up the LaserDisc and the new 4K UHD TrueHD track.  Once adjusted for volume, the AC-3 track is vastly superior in every way.

Thanks ahead of time!

BandD

I was thinking of trying to combine the 4k83 optical audio with the optical audio from the Rotj Grindhouse 35mm released a long time ago, in order to improve the audio quality/reduce noise with some method I thought of.

To my disappointment, I noticed that the optical audio isn't included at all.

Does anyone have it, by any chance? Or any way to get it?

Of course any additional source would be welcome too, a higher number would even allow a Median, possibly. It has to be PCM or some lossless format though. Doesn't have to be polished or anything, ideally it's just the raw capture.

Hi,
I would like to know more about HDR, is it an extension in a video file, which can be easily removed or added?
And if my devices are incompatible, they simply ignore this extension?

(...apart the obvious actual cost-per-gigabyte)

Write amplification. 

Hard drives can directly over-write a sector, but NAND-Flash SSDs cannot overwrite a page. The entire block must be erased, and then the page can be re-used. If there is other data in the block's other pages, it must be moved to a different block, before the erase.

A common block size is 512KiB, and a common page size is 4KiB. So if you write 4KiB of data, and that write needs to be done to a used block, that means at least 508 KiB of extra writes have to occur first; that's an inflation rate of 127x. You might be able to write 2x or 3x as fast as you can to your 10,000 rpm hard drive, but you may also end up writing 127x more data. If you are using your drive for small files, write amplification will hurt you in the long run.

Due to the nature of flash memory's operation, data cannot be directly overwritten as it can in a hard disk drive.
(Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Write_amplification)

Typical block sizes include:

32 pages of 512+16 bytes each for a block size of 16 KiB
64 pages of 2,048+64 bytes each for a block size of 128 KiB
64 pages of 4,096+128 bytes each for a block size of 256 KiB
128 pages of 4,096+128 bytes each for a block size of 512 KiB
(Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_memory)

Long-Term Storage. 

Magnetic storage mediums often retain data longer when un-powered, so hard drives are better for long term archiving than NAND-Flash SSDs.

When stored offline (un-powered in shelf) in long term, the magnetic medium of HDD retains data significantly longer than flash memory used in SSDs.
(Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid-state_drive)

Limited lifespan.

A hard drive can be re-written to until the drive breaks from wear and tear, but a NAND-Flash SSD can only reuse its pages a certain number of times. The number varies, but let's say it's 5000 times: if you reuse that page one time per day it will take over 13 years to wear out the page. This is on par with a hard drive's lifespan but that's true only without factoring in write amplification. When the number is being halved or quartered it suddenly doesn't seem so big.

MLC NAND flash is typically rated at about 5–10 k cycles for medium-capacity applications (Samsung K9G8G08U0M) and 1–3 k cycles for high-capacity applications
(Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_memory)

Power Failure. 

NAND-Flash drives don't do well with power-failures.

Bit corruption hit three devices; three had shorn writes; eight had serializability errors; one device lost one third of its data; and one SSD bricked.
(Source: http://www.zdnet.com/how-ssd-power-fault...000011979/)

Read Limits. 

You can only read data from a cell a certain number of times between erases before other cells in that block have their data damaged. To avoid this, the drive will automatically move data if the read threshold is reached. However, this contributes to write amplification. This likely won't be a problem for most home users because the read limit is very high, but for hosting websites that get high traffic it could have an impact.

If reading continually from one cell, that cell will not fail but rather one of the surrounding cells on a subsequent read. To avoid the read disturb problem the flash controller will typically count the total number of reads to a block since the last erase
(Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_memory)

(taken from here: https://superuser.com/questions/834521/i...ver-an-ssd)