Hello from Sweden!

Excited to be here!
really love your projects, specifically open matte.

So the other day after hearing there was the new three-hour long "Ultimate Cabal Cut" coming out, I decided to actually sit down and check the Director's Cut Shout! Factory had released that preceded the Cabal Cut Blu-Ray Seraphim did. Apart from noticing the obvious discontinuity resultant of still missing footage at the time, something kind of caught my eye throughout. The film was, well, looking an awful lot like Arrow's Hellraiser transfer. There were numerous instances where I felt that the lighting was a bit too revealing and times where I noticed blue patches in a neutral looking scene. Doing a bit of poking around, I found out that this movie was shot by the same cinematographer who did Hellraiser. On top of that, I found something rather interesting.

I would like for someone to attach the Universal Studios Logo to the 2019 Warner Archive Remaster of Judgment Night (the Universal Logo is removed)

 I would like to sync the 2.0 Mix from the 1998 Goodtimes DVD release of Judgment Night, as well as the Spanish and French Language Tracks, as well as the DTS 5.1 Mix from the 2004 Universal DVD release to the gorgeous 2019 remaster.

Most software out there (Photoshop, After Effects, etc.) will by default operate in sRGB colorspace. The same applies for photos or videos taken by digital cameras as well as most video editing applications.

What do you do when you want to color your photo or do a custom grade? You load it into your software and start working on it, for example with Curves or Levels.

In my opinion this is a wrong approach. It's especially problematic if your goal is to remove a blanket tint or correct white balance.

Here's why: sRGB colorspace by default has a gamma of 2.2 (Apple used to have 1.8 I believe, but I believe they switched too). 

This means that the color values, as they are saved in an sRGB image file, are NOT linear. The blacks are essentially stretched and the highlights compressed. This makes sense from a standpoint of maintaining small file sizes (due to the usual low bit depth of 8 bits), but it causes problems when you're trying to do precise work.

More info on Gamma and why it exists: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamma_correction

Here are some images from Wikipedia to demonstrate what I mean:


You can see in the first image that some weird stuff is done to the signal when gamma is applied.

If you look at the second image, in the top row the values are more evenly spread. The top row roughly represents the actually stored brightness values in a gamma-corrected file (for example sRGB) and the lower row represents brightness values in a linearly saved file.

The benefit of the file with the applied gamma is clear: There is more space left for storing darker values, while in the linear file dark values are strongly compressed and quickly crushed in a normal 8 bit file. Without gamma, we wouldn't be able to get the same kind of quality out of 8 bit files.

BUT

Due to the values not being stored linearly, manipulating them without prior conversion to linear space (which most software does *not* do by default) results in unnatural behavior. Some of you may already know how this applies to blur (there are a few videos on Youtube about it), but it applies to everything really.

Let's start with a simple experiment I made:




On the left side is the source image. A neutral gradient with a green blob (created in sRGB with 100 G 50R and 50B).

My goal here was to use Curves to lower the green intensity (by dragging the upper right corner down in the green channel) until the green blob becomes neutral.

The middle image is just that, done in sRGB. The right image is again exactly that, but done in linear space. As you can see, the results are not 100% identical, despite the green blob being neutralized in both of them. Granted, it's not a huge difference in this example, but you can see how with more complex examples with many different organic colors could start looking "unnatural" with the wrong approach, or in extreme cases (like when you're trying to brighten dark images) result in really ugly discolored images.

If your eyes allow you to see it, the two images do indeed look pretty identical around 1/4 from the bottom. That's because that is roughly the value (in terms of brightness) I was "aiming for" when neutralizing the green blob. If you overlay both images with "Difference" mode in Photoshop and amplify the results, you get this:



As you can see, the farther away the values go from the brightness I "aimed at", the bigger the difference between both approaches becomes.

So what does this mean practically?

Imagine you're trying to remove an orange tint that is the result from a white balance that was set wrong.

Now you go ahead and change the curves or Levels so that the highlights are all neutral (a very very common approach that I was even tought at web design school).

But what happens? The middle values don't "fall into place" perfectly and you get subtle discoloration and you can never quite "nail it". When you nail the grey values, the highlights become slightly off, etc.

And white balance is a relatively small problem. Let's take some more challenging problem, for example film fading, where green and blue channels often need to be amplified to extreme degrees. The bigger the change you're trying to make, the bigger these effects become.

Let me give another example:




Above you see the source image.



These are my two attempts at simply reducing the brightness. Left one in sRGB and right one in linear colorspace. Done with Curves by dragging the top right corner downwards. Now, the differences are pretty subtle and get lost in the thumbnails, so I suggest you open them up in full size.

Here's a screenshot comparison for a better comparison: http://screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/132031

Again, it's very subtle in this example, but you can see how the one edited in sRGB gets a kind of "grayness" to it and the one edited in linear space keeps a more natural contrast and more organic colors, as if the photo had simply been taken with lower exposure.

Fazit

I'm making a topic about this because I believe this to be the culprit of a lot of mediocre color correction work I've done throughout my life. Photoshop and other software by default simply operate on the saved values as-they-are, and does not convert to linear colorspace unless you explicitly tell it to.

Granted, my examples are not perfect, but hopefully good enough to bring across my point, which is that basic color manipulation in sRGB colorspace (like increasing Exposure - or gain - or changing color balance) will not behave organically and naturally and sometimes leave you wondering why your results look "weird" without being quite able to put the finger on why.

Happy to hear your opinions and criticisms.

The Fellowship of the Ring Variable Aspect Ratio (Original TC Colors v1.0A)
The Fellowship of the Ring Variable Aspect Ratio (Color Corrected v1.0B)

Project Info:

Sadly, there is no true or completely open matte version of FOTR. The HDTV broadcasts contain various shots that are open matte with much of the last 25 mins being open matte but the majority of film is cropped down from the 2.39 frame. There is maybe 18% or less of the HDTV broadcast that could qualify as open matte.

So given those circumstance, it was the consensus of this board that the best course of action was to change the aspect ratio and show the most image as possible. This would create a variable aspect ratio (VAR) presentation similar to the Nolan or MI films. The majority of this project will be 2.39 and then switch to the 1.77 HDTV shots

Example (ignore color differences)


when they are open matte. See post 12:

https://fanrestore.com/thread-2563-post-...l#pid51446

for the complete list of OM shots. The HDTV broadcasts both have station/log bugs that need to be removed by combing picture information.

Video:
The theatrical cut BD was used for the 2.39 shots and then combined with the 1.77 OM shots from 3 HDTV copies. The HDTV broadcasts were run through several filters including de-blocking, IVTC, compression cleaning, graining etc. Further the HDTV videos were aligned to remove existing logos. The original BD footage was also grained to offset the original DNR.

The combined video was separated into two projects. One that has the original TC color timing and another that color corrected to remove the magenta/pink tone in the highlights; typical of an early 2000s HD master. And then a slight amount of yellow is added to the mids and green/blue to the highs to match closer the more accurate EE and 35mm version but still be closer to the side of the TC colors.

Audio:
1. DTS-HD MA 5.1 (from the Cinema DTS discs)
2. DTS-HD MA 6.1 (from the BD)

Sync
Synced to the US TC BD

Pics:
Original TC Color Version


Color Corrected Version


Collaborators and Thanks (In order of help):
babouin
Colek
Vouka
Doombot

Hello Fanres family, I am glad that I found his site as I was looking for Open Matte videos and a community that could assist me in making some edits of my own.  Thanks.

Hi guys, anyone have more knowledge about this? I'm interested in this alternate mix.

R O C K Y
R E S T O R A T I O N

Film buffs love watching classic films on DVD. Not only do these films look better than ever on DVD, but they sound better than ever, as well. New editions of movies "remastered in 5.1" appear all the time, but the average viewer may not be aware of the work necessary to make a film originally mixed years ago and make it sound fresh in the home theater environment.

In the 1980's, Chace Productions pioneered the conversion of older mono films into stereo with Chace Surround Stereo. The latest incarnation of this process is Chace Digital Stereo, designed to create 5.1 channel mixes. This technology has brought Chace plenty of remastering work in recent years. Titles as diverse as The Bridge On The River Kwai, Easy Rider, Hellraiser, The Muppet Movie and This Is Spinal Tap have recently passed through the doors of Chace's Burbank, California facilities on the way to DVD release.

James Young works in restoration and remastering at Chace Productions. Young began at Chace in 1990 as a "stereo programmer," creating directional effects for the sound tracks of a number of Turner library titles. In 1992, he started Chace"s restoration department, cleaning up and refurbishing audio tracks with digital tools such as Sonic Solutions" NoNoise. Young"s sonic skills have been utilized in reissues such as Gone With the Wind and The Wizard of Oz. Recently, Young took on the king of cult movies, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, creating a new 5.1 mix for DVD release. We asked Young to guide us through the process of remastering a film sound track, and to give some examples from his experience on The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

The first " and hardest " step, Young explains, "is the cataloging, and the tracking down of elements." The age of the film plays a big part in the availability and quality of sound elements. "The old tracks were mastered to optical," Young explains, "but since the mid-50's, a lot of tracks were mastered to mag." Mag is shorthand for 35 millimeter magnetic film, which is preferred as a source because it provides higher fidelity sound reproduction. With a mag available, "the only problems you have are bad transfers over time, or physical wear and tear on the element itself," Young says.

Finding all these pieces of the sound puzzle can be daunting not only because of deterioration, but also because the need for such materials was not originally anticipated. Restoring the soundtracks to classics such as North By Northwest and Gone With The Wind has required a bit of detective work, and sometimes a little luck. North By Northwest had to be reconstructed from several sources, including music tracks that had become stuck together and an airline version that had 30 minutes removed. "One of the key elements that we found for Gone With The Wind was because [of] a music editor who had been with MGM for years," Young remembers. "At one point, when there was a vault being moved, like in the '60s, they found this element for Gone With The Wind that they were instructed to throw away. And he thought to himself, "Oh my God, this is way too valuable to throw away!" So he kind of hid it in the vault and 30 years later, it was the best soundtrack available."

Remastering in stereo is made easier when sound track elements can be taken from discrete, non-composite sources. Many films are archived with three sound track "stems," one each for the dialog, the music and the sound effects " "DME" for short " and each stem may have multiple tracks. Sometimes, Young points out, "we are actually faced with evaluating three, or four, or five, or six different versions, or six different copies or formats of a film. [On] some films, there'll be mono, and two-channel stereo, and four-channel stereo elements, or four-channel and six-channel stereo. And that's the first step, getting together everything we can, evaluating it, finding the best stuff."

"Specifically, with Rocky Horror Picture Show," Young says, "we were working from the original mono mag master. It was a 35 millimeter three-track " Dialog, Music, and Effects." The film was originally released in 1975, mixed in mono by Bill Rowe. As a musical, however, an effective 5.1 mix of The Rocky Horror Picture Show called for more than just a mono music track. "We also had access to the original 2-inch, 24-track music multi-tracks," Young explains. "It's the best scenario for integrating a stereo music source, when you have a DME, because then you can just swap [stereo] music for [mono] music and still have your dialog and your effects from your original master."

With the best elements for a project chosen, the next step is to perform any necessary restoration. "In restoration, we take our source and we try and return it to its original state," Young explains. "We try and remove the ravages of time, and wear and tear, and bad transfers and projection, or whatever " deterioration that's come into the element over time " eliminate that and leave behind something that is as close to the element's original state as possible."

Restoration work at Chace is accomplished in Sonic Solutions" NoNoise, a software-based digital system. Young is quick to point out, however, that digital processes which can rescue an aging audio track can also ruin it. "One of my biggest kicks " one of my crusades, if you will " is to fight the overuse of digital restoration tools. Any audio process can destroy a track. And the more powerful digital tools can destroy them quicker and with more devastation if they're overused," Young says. "There's a great temptation, when you have this massive digital power at your fingertips, to take something beyond where it should [be]."

On The Rocky Horror Picture Show, the mono stems were first put through a sonic restoration in NoNoise. "We cleaned it up, took out subtle little problems here and there," Young explains. "For instance, when Riff-Raff has just killed Frank-N-Furter, and they go, "You killed them! I thought you liked them!" And he screams, "They never liked me!" Well, that scream, at its source, was distorted. He yelled it and it got distorted on the mic. In 1975, when they mixed it, they had limitations as to how they could deal with distortion. Well, now in the year 2000, we've got better ways of dealing with that kind of distortion. So that line is" not completely undistorted, but it's a little bit less distorted than it was before."

With the original mono stems in the best condition, attention turned to the music multi-tracks. "There was no real clean-up needed on the 2-inch 24-tracks. They just needed to be edited to match the picture," Young says. "Greg Faust was the gentleman who did the editorial in Pro Tools of the multi-track masters. It took a lot of hard work cutting that stuff." Young points specifically to introductions on some of the songs, "like the vamp that happens before Frank-N-Furter's coming down the elevator for "Sweet Transvestite." That was not recorded that way " they edited that. So we had to recreate those edits."

Once cleaned up and properly edited, the music and vocal performances needed to be mixed down to create a finished stem. Young remixed the music himself, trying to remain faithful to the original mono stems, but taking into account the capabilities of the multi-channel audio format. "The multi-track music source had a lot wider frequency response and dynamic range than ended up on the mono mix. And that's because the mono mix was limited by the technology of its playback. So I used the mono mix as a template. They'd have sax recorded on the basic tracks through a whole song, but it only came up on the bridge. So I was going to follow those kinds of leads " basically re-create the music in the same vein. But of course, I was mixing for a format that had a lot more fidelity to offer, so I wasn't going to limit that."

The multi-track tapes, Young adds, "were great recordings and I did very little equalization. I did no dynamic processing whatsoever. I didn't compress it, or limit it, or anything like that. I stepped very lightly on the music. All I did was give it a stereo image, a little bit of ambience, and level adjust in the mix." Working on Rocky Horror, Young points out, "was a treat, because usually we don't get to remix." Most films, he notes, come in with music tracks already mixed for multi-channel, as was the case on recent Chace projects like Planet of the Apes and North by Northwest.

Because Young was essentially re-creating the musical portions of the film from original sources, some creative editing became necessary to maintain authenticity. "What I discovered as I started to scrutinize the multi-track tape was that there were vocal performances in the final mix that didn't exist on the multi-track," Young explains. "Additionally, there were some vocal performances that matched" but because the final mix had the vocals blended with other dialog sounds that I couldn't lose, essentially what I did was I built a dialog stem." This finished stem of vocal performances was pulled from both the 24-track studio tapes and the original mono dialog stem. Young cites the song "Dammit, Janet" as an example: "All the vocal performances matched perfectly. Except when Brad is on his knees showing her the ring, even though I had his vocal performance, I had nowhere where her "ooh"s and "ahh"s and reactions to the ring were the same. So for that one measure, I took the vocals from the mono master."

One surprise that turned up in mixing involved all the vocal parts for the film"s titular character. "Anytime that Rocky sings, he had versions on the multi-track, but none of Rocky's performances on the multi-track matched the movie," Young noted. The film"s music producer, Richard Hartley, had decided to change Rocky"s voice after the film had been shot, and the vocals were re-recorded. "And those recordings are probably sitting unmarked in a box in London somewhere," Young laughs. "But I did not have access to them." For the new 5.1 mix, Young had to pull all of Rocky"s vocals from the mono dialog stem.

There were other challenges Young encountered maintaining consistency between the original mono mix and the 5.1 version. "In one song, there was a guitar track that had been punched-in on " recorded over " for the very end," Young explains. "So in the mono master, the guitar performance matches the multi-track all the way through, and then at the very end of the song there's this subtle little three-note phrase of guitar that was missing from the multi-track. At that point I made a choice that I didn't want to throw away the whole song " the whole high fidelity multi-track version of the song " for a couple of pretty subtle little guitar licks at the very end... So in that particular song on the 5.1, it ends with other instruments, but there's two or three little guitar notes that are missing."

"There was one song on the multi-track that was not usable," Young added. "[During] "Don't Dream It, Be It," from the point where [Frank-N-Furter] jumps in the pool until "Wild And Untamed Thing," that chunk of music came from the mono. There were problems with the multi-track right there. Again, some tracks had been mysteriously punched in on, and there were instruments that were missing."

The final challenge that Young faced in remastering the music for the 5.1 version of The Rocky Horror Picture Show involved the film"s signature tune. A shortened version of "The Time Warp" featuring a saxophone overdub was used over the closing credits of the film " but was nowhere to be found on the multi-track music tapes. "Even if I could emulate the same edit that they did " shorten it " I didn't have the sax solo anywhere on any of my sources. The only way that we could maintain the same version of "Time Warp" at the very end would be to put the mono through the stereo conversion process," Young explained. "But not only would it change the stereo imaging, but there [would be] a noticeable and significant difference in the fidelity" So the alternative that I came up with is what you hear" I said, "I can't recreate that precisely, but I can do an instrumental, edited-down version of 'Time Warp.' It's a poor substitute as far as content, but as far as fidelity, at least we'd be ending on a high fidelity, consistent imaging, really kick-ass, punchy version of it."

After the 5.1 music stem was finished, it was time to add the dialog and sound effects, which existed only in mono on the DME. Chace Productions" solution for converting mono to 5.1 is the Chace Digital Stereo process. With this system, "stereo programmers" design cues which add directionality and ambience to mono sources. "Eric Johnson is the stereo programmer who programmed the Chace Digital Stereo for the track," Young says, adding that Chace"s Chief Stereo Product Specialist, John Blum contributed as well. "There's not a whole lot of directional movement in this film," he notes, but there are a few distinct examples. "Like when Eddie comes out on his motorcycle, you hear the motorcycle pan. And during the thunderstorm outside the castle, you hear there's placement of the thunder in surrounds... All the effects that are stereo, or that have stereo ambience to them, were created with the Chace Digital Stereo process."

The final step in remastering is to combine the restored and edited elements into a final mix master in a dubbing, or re-recording, stage. Chace Productions has their own facility for re-recording, and this is where The Rocky Horror Picture Show was completed. "We went to the Rick Chace Theatre, which is a THX [certified] dubbing stage. And we used the mono dialog and the mono effects " through the Chace Digital Stereo® processor " and the mixed stereo music " 5.1 music " and created a new 5.1 English master."

"Hopefully people listening to it will hear the same movie," Young says. "I spent a lot of time and effort trying to maintain editorial consistency. And again, at any time where we felt like maybe we were going too far, or whatever, we had the safety net of the original mono, which had been cleaned up as best we could. And it was going to be right there on the DVD."

This kind of attention to detail and respect for the original work is important on all projects at Chace Productions. "Even if we take an old mono track and we create a new 5.1, when you sit down and listen to the 5.1 track, it should sound like the same movie it always has sounded like, in many respects," Young says. "As a company and as a remastering department, that's our primary guide in the way we approach something."

As far as The Rocky Horror Picture Show is concerned, fans have responded quite favorably to the remastered version. James Young, however, is happy just to have been a part of the project. "I'm glad that people are pleased with it, but more important to me is that I had a good time doing it. And I'm going to have a good time listening to it," he says. "That's what makes this job enjoyable, is these projects that come through. It was a lot of fun."

-written by Derek Miner

Special thanks to Ruth Fink-Winter of www.crazedimaginations.com.

Derek Miner can be reached at minerwerks.tripod.com

Hi folks,

So I'm kinda surprised as I find some bonuses on Pal DVD, that are encoded Pal 25fps 50hz, but have the exact same lenght of the same bonuses on the NTSC DVD that are 23.976fps 60hz.

Let say I want to overlay both bonuses to obtain a better looking encode with more detail.

How do I do because when I import the Pal content, and put it in a NTSC timeline, it suddenly stretches to 23.976 and plays slow.

Thank you.

Guessing how fast an HDD should be to sustain realtime 4K and 8K play, let's say some figures - extrapolated from http://toolstud.io

UHD 4K - 3840 x 2160 4:2:2 24fps 8bit YCbCr uncompressed: 199MB/s
https://toolstud.io/video/bitrate.php?im...amerate=24

UHD 4K - 3840 x 2160 4:2:2 24fps 10bit YCbCr uncompressed: 249MB/s
https://toolstud.io/video/bitrate.php?im...amerate=24

UHD 8K - 7680 x 4320 4:2:2 24fps 10bit YCbCr uncompressed: 995MB/s
https://toolstud.io/video/bitrate.php?im...amerate=24

So, to sustain realtime uncompressed UHD 4K 8bit and 10bit, fastest HDDs could be up to the task - or slower ones in RAID. Of course, any SSD could do.
For UHD 8K, you need an NVME or at least two SATA SSDs in RAID 0; with HDDs, minimum should be four in RAID 0, even if probably more are required.

Of course, compressed video - even using lossless codecs - would be quite lower than this figures, so *maybe* for a lossless encoded UHD 8K video, around 500MB/s could be needed, leaving the task to a simple SATA SSD or two (or three) fast HDDs in RAID 0.

Yes, I know that is the "Everything else..." subforum - I built this forum, after all - yet, I don't see any other places to put it, so...

Today I noted a comment on one of my ancient thread on OT, that starts with "I know this is a 7 year old post"... wow! So much time since I was involved in this fan restoration world, still it seems yesterday I released my first project (actually, more than 6 years ago...). But, at the same time, it seems forever.

I must admit movie restoration is not only a simple hobby, is a way of life - kinda - I'm sure someone here think the same.

It is good to see old friends still here, sad to see some are offline since a long time; also it's rewarding to see new members starting to interact in this forum with great passion - they are not many, and it was expected; but they are more than I thought, so I'm happy!

End of thoughts for today... feel free to post your own!