WARNING: you should attempt this only if you can't/don't want to afford a professional rescue service, and/or you do not care too much to lose any data. DO IT AT YOUR OWN RISK!!!

Well, two days ago, suddenly, one of my internal HDD started to click like a crazy! Of course, as it is one of internal drive, no dropping, shocks etc. occured.
So, out of the blue, I was at risk of losing years of projects!

Checked the drive with CrystalDiskInfo, it was at risk - really? - so I tried to recover as much as I can.
I started with few MBs of personal data and, despite I was able to backup them, speed rate was sooo low, going from few MBs to zero, up and down, and clicking sounds continue. I tried with bigger files, few GBs, and after some up and down, it stuck at zero bytes transferring speed...

What should I do now? Freezing trick? No way, it would not work.
Professional data recovery? At €€€ (up to 800, more or less) I can't afford it, and, frankly, even if important to me, there were "only" free time projects, albeit fruit of hundred, thousand hours of work...

Then, I had a crazy idea in mind... as the clicking sounds are obvious symptoms of mechanical problems, I thought that maybe the arms moved out of their positions - how, and why, I have no idea. So, the right thing to do would be to take them back to their right posizion. But how, without opening the drive, and destroy all data?

Thought I'd throw this one out to you guys to see if anyone is interested enough to 'fix' the CGI in the 2011 The Thing by darkening it as seen in Rob Agers 'Visual effects psychology: THE THING (1982 vs 2011)' which does make it look a lot better.

Ha ha, I'm sure many of you knew I'd be looking at another Highlander project now that I'm taking a break from Highlander 2. 

Compared to the other films in the franchise Highlander 3 is a lot more simple; only three versions with minor differences, so I'm going to use this as an experiment to learn about implementing seamless branching in MKVs to allow all three versions to be viewed. 

I own various different releases of this film, but I only own the Director's Cut version on laserdisc. Obviously the visual quality is less than ideal, but on top of that I currently have no way to actually capture video from LD. 

So I'm wondering if anyone has any of the Director's Cut DVDs and could provide me with the following CGI enhanced shots:

Kane teleporting himself to New York
   

Kane using magic to steal a pair of sunglesses
       

The final quickening sequence
   

Sadly I think all releases of the Director's Cut version were 4:3 letterboxed, so the quality won't be much better than the laserdisc, but at least it's something.

Also I was wondering if anyone could clear something up for me regarding Highlander 3's US Theatrical Release. I always understood it that the film was released to theatres without the above CGI effects, and that these were added later for home video. I can't say for sure myself as I'm in the UK, but a US friend swears blind that the version he saw on release day in the US featured the CGI effects, and claims that all the US home releases other than the Director's Cut DVDs have been cut. 

So what actually happened with this film in the US? Most resources I can find online point towards the Director's Cut only being on home video, but I'd love to have it confirmed. 

Thanks in advance for any help.

Hello!

I'm looking for the English digital audio of this Laserdisc edition, could someone help me?

https://www.lddb.com/laserdisc/02010/403...ey-Pit-The

Thanks in advance.

This project was completed here:

https://fanrestore.com/thread-5178-post-...l#pid85789



2010 The Year We Make Contact Older HDTV Master (Quick Project v1.0)


Project Info:
I've always loved 2010. I know most believe it pales compared to the Kubrick masterpiece and that is a sentiment I agree with but none of that has tempered my love for this movie. I always loved the more "real world" look and feel of this movie compared to the almost mysticism of the original. That and I think people will agree this movie has a superior cast giving pretty damn good performances.

The origins of this project are simple. While I was patching up the older HDTV master of Alien, I went through my collection of old HDTV caps and recordings and found a few unique ones that I wanted to polish up and release. 2010 is the first of those.

The older HDTV master of 2010 has the same the color timing of the dvd. I wouldn’t say one is better than the other, some colors are better, some worse. I would just call it different and not more theatrically accurate per say. And since there is a HDTV master with different color timing, I would like to preserve it. Hence this project.

Video:
A HDTV broadcast which has the dvd color timing cleaned up with various filters.

Audio:
1. PCM 2.0 Dolby Surround (from the Widescreen LD)
2. Dolby Digital 5.1 (from the HDTV)

Pics:.



Collaborators and Thanks:
jonno: For the synced LD soundtrack

Well, almost everyone agrees that this movie is too dark, and often part of the action is lost due to this.
I made my own project and increased brightness, along with fixing three short shots that needed to be fixed (at the time): https://originaltrilogy.com/topic/Aliens...D/id/16422

Now, after some time - and experience - I'm ready to "refresh" this project a bit... this time it would be the theatrical cut (and not the unrated version I used for the previous project).

Using the open matte WEB version and BD, I'll use the same brightness increase I used before, but this time I'll tweak also the colors, as I think they are quite dull...
At the end, plus points are:

• bigger frame size
  
• increased brightness
  
• "better" colors
  

Hi everyone,

I'm really excited to be a part of this forum. I just discovered this place doing some online research into the varying aspect ratios of films. Very much looking forward to be part of the discussion with like-minded individuals who are interested in the preservation of films

Does anyone have the Cantonese DD 2.0 mono track from the Japanese Paramount Blu-ray?

The HK Kam & Ronson BD only contains a 7.1 remix.

I have the Criterion DVD which includes a mono track and had a quick go at syncing, but its quite a bit different and will require some patch work.

Unfortunately, it's only available on certain Sony 4k TV'S. It was released on Fandango in IMAX Enhanced format.

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!