You must admit almost all, here, would be more than happy to see the laserdisc format alive, again.
New movies on a long-time dead format... and, of course, anybody knows that it will never happen - even if a Digital Laserdisc built upon BD technology will lead to a 1.2TB monster disc that could contain an entire UHD long saga as Star Wars, or few long TV series seasons on HD, or... well, a lot of things!
OK, back on Planet Earth, and on topic: would be possible to get a laserdisc "Renaissance" on Blu-ray? I think so!
Laserdisc is not (only) an analog video format (with analog and/or digital audio); it's much more than this! It brought us a lot of innovations - widescreen, director's cut, digital audio, multichannel audio, multi audio tracks, special editions, box sets etc. and, without it, probably DVD and BD would never have existed.
We love that physical, huge disc... that big cover (better if gatefold, perfect if within box set) with great arts, liner notes... often inserts that were not mere chapter lists, but insights of interesting facts about the movie, or the format itself...
Video wise, even if it was top notch at the times, it can't stand HD (and UHD) formats of nowadays; still, sometimes its color timing (I guess the digital color grading was not applied on them) was similar to the one seen in the theaters (apart the obvious problems due to format and transfers); and sometimes it still has colors and/or contrast better than DVD and/or BD.
Audio wise, it's still a great pleasure to listen to a laserdisc track; very often they used the theatrical mixes, while not all the times those mixes were used for the DVD and BD editions, in particular when we talk about mono and stereo tracks.
Said so, I don't want to say that laserdisc is perfect, and blu-ray is a bad format, at the contrary: blu-ray is a great format itself - very good definition, lossless multichannel audio; still, sometimes, the content is not, well... "right"?
We got blu-ray editions with "wrong" colors and/or contrast, audio mixes, poor covers etc. - a format that good deserves more than this.
Now, you are asking yourself: 'What all this has to do with a so-called laserdisc "Renaissance"'?
Well, let me explain. We would love to get laserdisc back to life. We all know it will not be possible (unless a crazy multi-millionaire guy would do it for us, at loss, but it will not happen, probably...). Still, we can do something to bring laserdisc "spirit and/or flesh" in the blu-ray world. How?
Packaging:
recently, Disney, Warner and others have made a sort of analog revival, offering laserdisc/vinyl sized covers for their blu-ray and DVD - they called "Vinyl Edition" here in Italy.
They are a bit scarce in comparison to many laserdisc gatefold covers, but it's a start! Think also that it is possible (not too easily, I must admit) to make custom jackets for our blu-ray and DVD discs - a guy even made ones for his laserdiscs! http://www.aheroneverdies.com (web archive)
Video:
laserdisc is only standard definition, but in few rare cases it is the only (or the best) version available - as for title availability, or for its cut, or for the aspect ratio - for a given title; of course, this could be captured and placed onto a simple DVD; but blu-ray offers, apart the standard resolution compatibility, also the chance to use AVC instead MPEG-2, to get better quality at the same bitrate, and other improvements; also, it's possible to upscale the video to 720p/1080p, not to increase actual resolution (that is not there), but to get proper 24fps (23.976fps), in case you have PAL movies, or want to avoid possible interlacing problems. Or, if you want to just add scenes/shots (or even single frames) that are not present (or are censored) in the BD version.
But the previous case is not so common; more common (even if still rare in general) is that laserdisc colors *could* be better than the ones found on blu-ray - because quite some laserdisc titles used release or interpositive prints as color reference, while it's widely known that blu-ray use usually negative print (to get better resolution), and then try to color regrade it digitally to get colors as close as possible to release print (that were 20, 30, 40 years older than laserdisc master) - or, simply put, they regrade it to be more "modern" (teal & orange, anyone?).
In this case, laserdisc could be used as color reference to regrade the blu-ray; of course, it will be close to impossible to get the same identical colors (and, as written before, probably the laserdisc colors aren't perfect, and should need some color correction), but with the proper tools and skill it's possible to retain most, if not all, of the "laserdisc spirit".
Example - Waterworld (top WEB, middle LD, bottom HD regraded as laserdisc) (crop frame):
Now, take in account that WEB version basically shares the same color grading as HD-DVD, blu-ray and DVD, even if it's not perfectly the same, but we are there; and the regrading is not 100% faithful to the laserdisc color (also because I tried to remove the slight magenta blanket) - I'd say 95% up to 99%, depending on the scene, but it perfectly retains it spirit, color and contrast wise.
Also, I didn't watch the movie in theaters at the time, but I have it in both NTSC, DS and DTS, and PAL Italian, and I distinctly remember the reviews about how good the transfer was - one said "colors are theatrical accurate"; can't vouch for this, of course, but *maybe* the reviewer watched the movie in theater few months earliers, and his memory was relatively fresh - surely more, in comparison, than the one of the author of a recent blu-ray review, that probably did watch the movie (if it's the case) in theater 15, 20 years early...
Indeed, I was quite disappointed when I bought the DVD, to discover that its colors was not as good as the laserdisc - as well as the HD-DVD - but a lot more muted, dull, with a lot of magenta in the sky and/or water - and, in a movie like this, there is A LOT of shots with water and/or sky!
Despite the fact we can't say for sure if the laserdisc colors are more theatrically accurate than blu-ray, I can't think the latter has better colors than the former... do you agree?
Audio:
it seems that almost all laserdisc mixes are the original, untouched theatrical ones - for convenience, lazyness, or else; Cinema DTS audio tracks, which were compared directly, are almost always identical to the LD DTS, apart the fact that obviously the former lack the LFE channel; some DVD editions may have imported them from LD, untouched - keep an eye at earlier 384kbps AC-3; but DTS track was almost always half bitrate on DVD (while full bitrate on LD) and often AC-3 tracks were "lighter" than the ones found on LD, in particular when the original tracks were matrixed surround, and the AC-3 were mere 192kbps...
Also, in many cases blu-ray uses remixed versions, or reconstructed ones - like upmixing original mono to 5.1 - and often does not offer the original track - sometime you can see a 1.0 in the audio track list, but it's not a guarantee it's the original one, and not simply a folddown of the remixed one...
Add to this the fact there are many commentaries and isolated score and/or effect tracks exclusive to laserdisc!
So, you can get the laserdisc audio and mux it with the blu-ray video ("vanilla", or regraded as laserdisc, to get the complete experience). Do note that it's possible to capture digital audio bit-perfect, even if PCM and DTS should be converted from 44.1KHz to 48KHz to be DVD/BD compliant, while AC-3 will remain untouched! Usually it is preferred, when both PCM and analog tracks have the same content, to capture only the PCM; but if the Japanese chose to use the analog tracks for their own language, instead PCM, there will be a reason... (more info about this in my post "Why laserdisc soundtracks are better…" here: https://fanrestore.com/thread-1107.html)
At the end, you could get the best of both world: blu-ray superior definition, excellent compression codecs that avoid (almost always) all that nasty artefacts seen on DVD, along with laserdisc content (in rare cases) or color grading/contrast (more common) and untouched (with AC-3 tracks) or almost untouched (DTS/PCM tracks) or very good (analog tracks) audio, packaged in a laserdisc sized cover that reminds the original ones.
Of course, this could be applied only to movies up to year 2000, and only some would be eligible to get a "laserdisc Reinessance treatment", but this will be rewarding, I think!
Posted by: deleted user - 2018-04-10, 01:13 PM - Forum: Released
- No Replies
I don't feel like this is big enough of a thing to justify calling a "Complete project", but neither is it really a Bonus feature, so not sure where else to post it. Feel free to move it elsewhere.
Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back 1980 1080p 35mm Renegade Grindhouse v1 GOUT-synced Includes all the audio tracks from the Despecialized Edition v2!
This is based on the following release: Star Wars: Episode V - The Empire Strikes Back 1980 1080p 35mm PCM Renegade Grindhouse v1 x264
The video was (almost) losslessly synced to the GOUT, based on Chewtobacca's GOUT syncs, and all audio tracks and subtitles from the Despecialized edition were muxed in.
The only GOUT synced scan - to my knowledge - so far has been the Dreamastered version, but I personally prefer the untouched colors. I didn't want to reencode and further degrade the quality, so I used TMPGEnc Smart Renderer 5 to almost losslessly sync the original video stream to the GOUT. The only reencoding took place at the splits/cuts, of which there are around 20 spread across the movie. This means that virtually all of this movie is, in terms of quality, 1:1 identical to the original release.
At the cutpoints there is a very slight discoloration due to some color space issues I had, but it only affects looped static frames and should be virtually unnoticeable.
The original 35mm optical audio was automatically synced as well. Areas where the film scan contained no frames and thus no audio (those were looped) were automatically filled with silence.
Thanks to the synced output I was able to mux in all the audio tracks from the Despecialized Edition v2. This includes the 5.1 by Hairy_Hen, the original Dolby Stereo from Laserdisc PCM tracks and the 16mm mono mix and several other tracks, including other languages. (I hope I got it right. Check the Despecialized Edition v2 for more details)
The DTS-HD MA tracks were losslessly transcoded to FLAC, as was the PCM track, to keep file size low. Quality is identical.
The subtitles that were included in the Despecialized Edition were all muxed into the mkv for your convenience.
I also created a Dolby Headphone track from Hairy_Hen's 5.1 mix using foobar2000 and included this as lossless FLAC as well. Made sure there was no clipping, of course. Enjoy, headphone enthusiasts!
Credit goes to the people who made the Grindhouse scan available and who put in the meticulous effort to prepare all the audio and subtitle tracks! Thanks!
Has anyone tried or had experience creating an MKV with two video tracks?
I assume both tracks have to be the same length and in general sync up to the same audio tracks but I was more curious about it compatibility-wise with video players. I see the option to switch video track in the MPC family and VLC for example, so those should be fine. It's other players I'm uncertain of.
Posted by: deleted user - 2018-04-09, 06:32 AM - Forum: In progress
- Replies (2)
I know the Dreamastered version is already GOUT-synced but I'm not really a fan of the colors, while I like the original Grindhouse look more.
Sadly it's not GOUT synced, so I decided to do it myself - but with a twist. In order to not lose any quality, I decided to buy TMPGEnc Smart Renderer 5 to do the syncing almost losslessly.
I used Chewtobacca's AVISynth script from the GOUT Sync thread as a basis and recreated the script's timings inside TMPGEnc Smart Renderer 5. Sadly the software has (currently) no import function and while it allows you to export bitmap screenshots and reimport them as video clips, you cannot set the framerate of an imported image, making a precise timing of frame repeats with this method impossible. Ended up converting them to Lagarith videos with the correct fps, but the software wouldn't import that. It would import, in fact, not even uncompressed lossless AVI. Pretty baffling tbh.
Either way, I managed to do it in the end by converting those clips to x264 and importing that ... this introduced a slight color shift for the looped frames, probably because of some color space conversions along the way. I personally can live with it, as it's only a handful of frames.
Good news: Eventually I got a final "encode" out of it that was perfectly GOUT-synced and I was able to successfully mux it with the Despecialized audio tracks!
The entire final processing (not counting my first tests and the work to arrange the clips) took around 20 minutes, with most of the data indeed being copied losslessly and the split-points/repeated frames encoded on-the-fly and spliced into the stream.
All in all, very happy with this software and I'm sure it can be a great asset for VAR projects (splicing in Open Matte shots into a Blu Ray or vice versa). I already tried this with two different Blu Rays of another movie, one Open Matte and one 2,35:1. Since resolution on BDs is fixed, the tool was able to join them together without issues - something I never managed to do before with any other software. Every other attempt I made always resulted in horrible artifacts and unplayable video after the cut.
Only wish the handling/GUI was better. It can be really cumbersome working with it when you need to make lots of cuts. There is no "timeline" showing all clips together, but rather each clip is a big item in a list that you can scroll through. Imagine duplicating a single frame 6 times - you end up with 6 clips, each of which you have to scroll past (it's still just as big in the overview). Unfortunate. An import function would be great.
Either way, planning on sharing this to Blutopia soon as I have enough space on my box. Result is around a 30 GB mkv, out of which roughly 21 GB are for the video. All Despecialized audio tracks included, lossless ones transcoded losslessly to FLAC to save further space. Subtitles all muxed in.
I always dreamt of doing something like this; I even tried to make a similar custom jacket, maybe ten years ago... but now, I would like to find a way to do custom covers for my projects!
No idea where to start, frankly; make some searches on the web, found few interesting links:
this is way better! Author made the cover out of photographic paper, with an insert sheet with transparent mounting hubs, and CD labels that perfectly recall the sheet graphic. A very nice project indeed!
just jump to the gatefold cover making ideas; it could help to get something like the big sleeve/vinyl editions.
So, there are basically two design:
normal jacket - discs are stored inside it, on hubs attached to a inner sheet
gatefold jacket - it opens like a wallet; discs are stored on "pockets", while additional material like miniposters could be inserted inside an open side
For the first design, I think the second link is perfect; for the second one, I thought about a similar approach, with of course a different blueprint - twice the size, if you want double layer jacket, or an L shape if you like to get single layer on the front, and double layer on the back, to get space for the disc "pockets".
I guess it will always be possible to have a single layer gatefold cover, where the discs are mounted on hubs attached onto the right part of the inner side, but, using photographic paper of this size - that is usually 225gsm or 255gsm at best - I guess it would not be sturdy enough.
Another approach could be to print on smaller sheets (A3+) and glue them over a generic gatefold sleeve; don't know how nice could be the final result, though!
I can say that the cheapest option I found online to print a 64x64cm sheet (which is for gatefold sleeve, dual layer) is around 32€ for one piece, the same for two pieces (with the same content, of course); from 5 pieces on, individual price would be around 13€ - simple 1440dpi 4color print, no plastification. Don't know how much would cost printing them at home - using a cheap printer, which is around 200€, compatible ink, a3+ photographic paper, *maybe* would cost less, if enough prints are made, who knows?
EDIT: Disney covers have mainly white, and few black, borders on all sides... so, I guess, it would be possible to get white or black vinyl jackets, and print on A3 photographic paper (adhesive or not); this would be 29.7 x 42 cm (29.7 x 29.7 cm when cut square), that will leave less than 1cm for each side, more or less as the Disney covers; of course, following this method, the central part of all sides woud be a bit more thick, so I don't know how good could look.
P.S. on amazon.es, some titles, including three or four blu-rays, are around 8/9€!
Taken directly from here - I left the links untouched, so if anyone would like to get some, the original website would get some bucks - believe me, there are incredible low prices for some titles!
[url=https://bluray-disc.de/out.php?link=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.fnac.es%2Fa1297462%2FPack-Rocky-Creed-Blu-Ray-Ed-Limitada-Vinilo-Exclusiva-Fnac-Sylvester-Stallone&cs=forum]FNAC ES
It came to my attention a list of fan edits and other projects; I present them here in a single thread, as they are not generally easily found on other fan edit websites. I have not watched them, but they seem interesting enough to be presented here; few info present here are gathered on the web; if you have more info on any of these, please leave a comment. Also, if you are aware of some other obscure fan edits, preservation or restoration projects, just post them here.
A Nightmare on Elm Street, Freddy Vs. Jason [Extended]
I used the original Bluray source, and reinserted the Deleted footage from the Bluray special features also taking Alternate shot (Jason Goes To Hell) making it the longest Running Time.
All 21 deleted scenes (besides #3) have been re-inserted
Child's Play 3 [Extended Recut] HD
Alternate Intro+Deleted Scenes Reinserted
Back to The Future, Timeline Edition
Blu-ray, 5Hrs 30Min
The Cable Guy [Extended Script Edition]
Reinserted 23 mins of Deleted scenes from a recalled import Bluray Edition.
1. Robin turn's Steven down.
2. Chip & Robin's lunch.
3. Sam Sweet [Hardcopy Footage]
4. Dinner Extended.
5. Steven & Robin after dinner.
6. The Terminator.
7. My three sons.
8. Nightmare Extended.
9. Violent Extended Ending.
Running Time - 01:54:45
Original Time - 01:35:45
[Fan Edit] The Game of Death [Extended Cut]
Full Intro Fight W/ Chuck Norris was added
Two Fights were added to extended the Tower Fights (The True Game of Death)
Complete 40 Min Ending Footage was reinserted
Running Time 02:22:00 (No Intro/Credits)
The Monster Squad [Extended Cut]
I have reinserted all the Deleted Scenes (20th Anniversary Edition) 13 cut scenes and 2 were not used, this is the longest and best version available. I made it into Fullscreen Letterbox [sic] and all Cut Scenes were matched best as possible.
I used the original DVD source, and reinserted the Deleted fdootage from the Bluray special features also taking Alternate & Deleted Shots (History Channel) making it the longest Running Time.
Home Alone - Extended Edition
[Fan edit] Grizzly 2 The Predator WORKPRINT [Recut]
Grizzly II: The Predator, aka Predator: The Concert, or a variety of other work-in-process names; it is the sequel to the 1976 Jaws ripoff Grizzly.
Filmed in 1983, the movie never saw a proper release. There is a multitude of stories as to why, the most common involving the producer running off with the budget, or the bills for the equipment not being paid, resulting in the Hungarian government seizing most of the productions materials. In 1987, Cannon Films picked up the movie with the intent of releasing it, but started having financial issues in 1988 and forgot the movie. Its existence was often doubted until 2007, when it finally surfaced, albeit in an unfinished state.
The Plot
Grizzly II is a fairly basic killer animal movie, like its predecessor. The basic story involves a huge concert being held at a national park, at the same time that a massive, prehistoric grizzly bear awakens and starts attacking people in the park. A Native American tracker is called in, who often refers to the bear as an evil spirit, but is unable to prevent the bear from attacking the concert, which is eventually killed.
What Was Finished
The unedited version of the movie is very rough. Most of it is rough filler, using tons of concert footage (performed by Nazareth), most of the bear footage wasn't filmed due to the special effect not being quite finished, and the quality of the film is very poor. The soundtrack is a mess, although a few songs made for the movie are still intact. There are continuity errors near the end, the shadow of the cameraman can be seen in a few shots and nearly all of the scenes that involved the bear are blank films with roaring noises played over it.
Although the animatronic bear was never footage, there was a puppet used in a few scenes. In an old upload of the movie, there was a comment made by someone who worked on the movie which stated that it had been altered and didn't use the puppet they had made. It is possible there was more special effects footage made and unused, but as the movie is relatively obscure, it isn't known for sure. As the old 10 part, the low-quality edit was removed from YouTube; the statement was lost.
This fan edit *supposedly* adds footage from movies like Grizzly, Claws, and Day of the Animals over the blank film.
This will probably be one the most loved UAR version; but I'm stuck with it... sadly, the only good digital full screen version of it (an old Russian DVD) has a strange color grading, different from all the others:
It is similar to many other versions (HD-DVD/Skynet BD, for examples) but not enough; when regraded, it doesn't match the letterbox version (I'm using HD-DVD for the moment) in many many shots...
So, I need your help!
There are three options to solve this problem:
Find an HD letterbox version which used the same master
quite difficult, but not impossible, as there where so many versions... an HDTV recording will do, as long as the logo is in the black bars and it has not pop-ups and too many lost frames near commercial breaks; there is a *very small chance* that D-Theater and/or WMV 720p versions used this master, but, as I haven't seen them, I can't say anything about them.
Find a SD letterbox version which used the same master
this could be a bit more easy, given how many SD versions were available... here, even a VHS high quality capture will do; still, I'd prefer an higher quality version, like a laserdisc capture, or SDTV recording. This will be used to regrade the HD letterbox.
Find any full screen version which used the same master of a letterbox version
as far as I know, only versions available - apart this DVD - are laserdisc and VHS, and TV recordings. This will be used to regrade the Russian DVD.
EDIT: for comparison, this is the full screen laserdisc:
there could be a fourth option, that consists in getting both full screen and letterbox laserdisc captures - IF they used the same master - to regrade respectively the Russian DVD and the HD letterbox version.