I was thinking of using a combination of Blender and Resolve to make HDR grades for future projects. Here's my first test, in three links:

https://we.tl/zMKgk5ipmN
https://we.tl/c1Z11J7lsg
https://we.tl/62FgUqYAGS

You have one week to check it out. This test is the series premiere promo for Sailor Moon, regrained first to 16mm and then 35mm in Blender and rendered in Resolve.

ETA: I'm pretty sure I didn't do a good job, but then, hardly anybody gets it right on the first go. In any case, how do you think I did? (BTW it's impossible to do HDR in Blender alone, and I'm not entirely sure Resolve alone will produce optimal results, which is why I combined both programs for this ongoing experiment.)

I saw some film strips of Shaun of the Dead and some of them have an opened matte.

So I was wondering whether perhaps an open matte version existed. I looked through the blu-ray.com catalogue and I found this Japanese Blu Ray listed as 1.78:1: https://www.amazon.co.jp/ショーン・オブ・ザ・デッド-B...033&sr=8-1

blu-ray.com lists it as 1.78:1 and amazon does the same. On top, the amazon page makes an extra remark in Japanese language "16:9". I know these infos can be wrong, but it's still worth a try I think.

Does anyone here have this or can find it somewhere?

Google says the price is around a 100 EUR. If anyone here is able to buy it, I might consider reimbursing that person, but that action would have to wait until the next year (money is short lol).

Just a quick project I did in the last few days.

Shinya Tsukamoto's films have been getting HD restorations for the last few years. Unfortunately, there's been no hint of an HD release of Hiruko the Goblin, since Tsukamoto doesn't own the rights to that film. In the meantime, I upscaled the Japanese DVD and made a single pass regrade to the Japanese Laserdisc.

Screenshot comparison

Audio options:

Japanese LPCM mono from Laserdisc
Japanese 448 kbps Dolby Digital dual mono from DVD

Includes English subtitles (source unknown).

I'm getting warnings on Chrome that the https isn't working, is it just me?

There was this trailer I saw in cinema that hyped me up for the movie like nothing else. 

It's been so long and I've searched for it so often that I my memory may be betraying me and I may be hallucinating about this by now, but why not give it one more chance.

Okay, first off, I live in Germany, but I don't remember whether I saw it in an English or a German cinema. So both have to be considered.

First off, here is the US trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VW-F1H-Nonk

This trailer gets the intro music right. This beautiful haunting violin screeching. I found out some time ago this is called "Wolf Suite Pt. 1" from the Wolfman soundtrack. Quite the intense piece.

Okay, but at 0:50, the trailer just gets this completely weird "turn" musically that kinda tears it apart. This is not how I remember it.

Now, it's still a good trailer, but here goes my hallucination. There are a few key shots I remember towards a specific music, and I believe they're all towards the end. 

1. The dead guy bleeding on the ground. 
2. The eyes with the goggles that are being adjusted
3. The doors of some elevator or so opening vertically with a guy being revealed behind another guy
4. This labyrinth like logo/text animation.

Now, these shots are all in the US trailer but the arrangement is off from what I remember. I think I remember them all being towards the end of the trailer, and, with different music. Number 1 was with some kind of drum or beat similar to the US trailer with a lot of impact, but in the US trailer it comes too early. Shot 3 is at the end where it should be, but shot 2 should come after shot 3 and before shot 4. So in other words: Elevator, Goggles, Text animation. And the dead guy I think was also much more towards the end when the music got more drive, giving it more impact and shock effect.

////////////

Here's a few other trailers:

UK Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yXkSxV_Ziow

This one has a more harmonious soundtrack, but it is missing the Wolf Suite Pt. 1. Also missing the nice animated text. But it has a different tune towards the ending which I believe MIGHT be the correct one. It's this kind of "da da da - da da da - da da da" which goes so nicely with fast cuts. The placement of the cuts here is weird though.

German trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fxMeCXrCpho

Okay this one gets the beginning right. And it gets the ending right. Especially that tear in the eye, then the correct order of shots. Very powerful, very nice. The music again is different in the end, but MIGHT be the right one as well, not 100% sure. It's the Wolf Suite Pt. 1 all the way through, with some parts cut out. But, this trailer has placed the corpse in a very boring place and I remember that scene to be very impactful, which it isn't here at all. Also, the text in the end looks kinda boring and not how I remember it.

Another German trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tF1T1A_eVBg

This trailer is like a longer version of the UK trailer, musically. Again, missing the Wolf Suite Pt. 1. It's also branded "Haupttrailer" in some places, which means "Main trailer". This trailer comes the closest with the dead guy on the ground I think, musically it's integrated in a similar fashion, but too early. Also, the shots towards the ending are again in the wrong order. Now, this one has a kind of middle ground text-animation wise. It's not that labyrinth thing but instead has these letters switching through with the tack-tack-tack sound. I remember that one in the titles seen throughout the trailer (unlike the labyrinth stuff in the US trailer), but I believe the end title was the labyrinth. This trailer is the one on the German Blu Ray.

A longer (presumably UK) "official" trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6HBytoAJn0Y

This one's an English carbon copy of the one above ("Another German trailer"). Same length, same style, same cuts, same music, from what I can tell. Called "official trailer" on Youtube in some video. 

/////////////

So, that's about the variety of trailers I can find online. Some seem to come close, but none seem to fit perfectly. Am I hallucinating (possible!) or are they actually making separate cinema cuts of trailers?

I feel like I'm going mad because on one hand I can't imagine the trailer not being among these, but on the other hand none of these really fully gives me that great vibe of the one I saw in cinema. It's of course possible I've simply become desensitized to the charm after watching the various versions so many times over, but oh well, let this be one of my last attempts to find it.

Bear with me, most of this is yet science fiction at this point, as will be clear quickly. Maybe, to a certain extent, it's also just me making an overly elaborate joke.

Okay, here goes: There is a theoretical possibility to regrain Terminator 2, using the 2015 Lionsgate release (original grain!), while retaining the color and most of the better detail of the new release. This thread is supposed to serve as a proof of concept on a single frame.

I took a screenshot of the same frame of the 2015 Lionsgate release and the 2017 Remaster from caps-a-holic.

- Loaded in Photoshop. 
- Removed black borders (to not confuse auto-align, as the cropping is slightly different). 
- Auto-aligned.
- Slightly nudged to improve align on face.
- Shake Reduction filter on 2015 release (essentially deconvolution) to bring out more of the grain structure
- High Pass filter on this shake-reduced version at around 2.8 px. 
- Auto-contrast on the high-passed 2015 screenshot, layer mode set to Overlay.
- Fine-tuned opacity a little.

Okay, a few explanations. 2.8 pixels highpass was chosen because that seemed the value at which a higher value no longer better retained grain. Now, the result of this is the new version with the old grain overlaid. 

Problem: High pass preserves all other details in that frequency range too. This is a problem because that information now exists both in the overlay and in the 2017 transfer, so it exists "doubly", which results in a sharpening and edge-enhancing effect that is quite ugly. I'll propose a possibly better solution later, but for now here's how I solved it for my little experiment:

- Blurred 2017 release at roughly 2.8px (did a little fine tuning with the slider). Now the edges under 2.8px "wavelength" were taken purely from the 2015 release while everything with lower frequency was still from the 2017 (thus retaining coloration for the most part etc.)
- Problem: Now all the fine detail from the 2017 release is lost.
- Solution: Copied sharp 2017 release on top of this whole mess and did a high pass at around 1.2px or so (where the 2015 release no longer resolves any detail). Set to overlay. Fine-tune opacity a little.

Result: Wavelength down to around 2.8 pixels: from 2017. Between 2.8 pixels and 1.2 pixels or so: From 2015 (includes grain and some mild fine structure). Under 1.2 pixels and microdetails: 2017 release (for that gain in clarity!). 3 "layers" in total.

May I present: 2015 Release, 2017 Release, Hybrid!

[Image: a88106674747673.jpg] [Image: c40b60674748093.jpg][Image: 1a8751674747893.jpg]

For your convenience, I also created a screenshot comparison for 2017 vs Hybrid: http://screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/125219

Okay, some problems: 
- Frames don't align perfectly, as you can see. 
- Some ringing from the deconvolution (at edges of frame and in lamp and possibly other places).
- It doesn't look absolutely perfect. I didn't really spend more than 10 seconds fine-tuning each value. I think the result could be improved by someone more dedicated than me to find the sweet spot and use the right filters etc. (I used Gaussian Blur for blurring the 2017 low-frequency "base"). There is some mild kind of "ghosting" or vaseline-kind of thing.
- Grain doesn't look ideal (lacking finer detail as it's an old remaster and also some remnants of compression artifacts). Could complement with digitally generated grain.
- Method is kinda not super elegant

Good sides:
- Fine detail from 2017 Retransfer mostly retained.
- Colors from new transfer retained
- Picture no longer looks terribly DNRed and looks kind of enjoyable. Face looks much more "human" now, some of the organic structure has returned from the 2015 release.
- Restored the authentic dust speck on the left side of the duct!

Now here comes the part where it's just science fiction:
- Auto-align might not work ideally on all frames. Plus, it distorts both layers, not just one, and needs slight manual adjustment. Stutter would likely result in video.
- Other scenes may be more distorted, not fixable for auto-align (that is where the recent thread about aligning sources may come in handy).
- Deconvolution in Photoshop is pretty slow. We're talking multiple seconds per image. Would take some dedication. Although the AVISynth plugin FQRestore might work too, which is faster (used it on another project already).
- Frames don't align perfectly. Would need to discard parts of the frame, likely hand-tuned to each scene as the framing is likely to vary from scene to scene in both releases.
- Fine-tuning that looks good may vary from shot to shot.
- Likely not works well for scenes with "fixes" like switched stuntman's face/fixed window.
- Would just overall be a huge pain in the ass without some decent automation and require an unrealistic amount of dedication. (I don't have that!)
- Would only work for Theatrical, as the others haven't been remastered (or released so).


Suggestion for improvement of the method:

Remember when I wrote I would give a better suggestion earlier in this post? This is it.

I simply used a high pass filter. That filter is "dumb" in that it retains all structure too, necessitating that weird workaround with 3 layers I did above, to avoid an edge-enhancing effect. I wanted to originally use a more clever fancy approach:
- Denoise 2015 version in similar manner as 2017 was denoised (Topaz Denoiser seems closest)
- Use difference-mode between original 2015 and denoised 2015 to get "only the noise".
- Apply "only the noise" to 2017 version. 
- Fine-tune.
- Et voila.

I hope you got a good laugh out of this. Cheers.

Just the Die Hard LD PCM track from zoidberg's Blu Ray hardware-decoded with my Dolby SDU4.

The original decoding is to LCRS. 5.1 was derived by splitting S to SL and SR with -3 dB (Matrix multiplication with 0.707) to "create phantom center", thus keeping surround volume equal, and creating an LFE from all the channels' crossover at 200 Hz. Channels were left intact, so the original decoded channels more or less are untouched (aside from the -3dB on the surrounds).

To improve SNR, since it's an analogue process, I raised the original LD PCM track by 6 dB before sending it out into the decoder. 6dB should equal an exact doubling of the raw value, so no rounding errors should be introduced through that. Neither is clipping introduced, as the original peaks were at a felt -9dB.

File is available as 5.1 48kHz 24bit FLAC, around 3 GB. Active members of forum can PM me for mega link. Whoever has it has my permission to share, but might want to talk to zoidberg/PDB as the source was their capture.

Sadly I was unable to mux it back with the stream from zoidberg's Blu Ray. I remember some people mentioning the stream was weird. If anyone has a tip on how to do it, it'd be appreciated. Demuxing with tsMuxerGUI works, muxing with MKVToolnix weirdly glitches out. Remuxing with ffmpeg creates a weird unseekable file.

http://www.in70mm.com/news/2017/cds/index.htm

Thanks to zoidberg for the link!

Edit: out of curiosity, these are the titles released with a CDS track, according to wikipedia:

•     Days of Thunder
  
•     Dick Tracy
  
•     Edward Scissorhands
  
•     Final Approach
  
•     Flatliners
  
•     Hudson Hawk
  
•     Terminator 2: Judgment Day
  
•     The Doors
  
•     Universal Soldier
  

For projects that have limited sources available, this method could be invaluable.

Say you've a few different transfers of a film (this is all assuming they are frame to frame identical/have exactly the same editing):

-Source 1 has a lot of detail but also has crushed shadows and clipped highlights
-Source 2 has somewhat less detail but has the shadow and highlight information intact
-Source 3 has the proper color timing

If we could take elements from all three sources, we'd have an ideal restoration! The only problem is that since these are film scans, the images won't exactly line up, and the geometric differences will likely be non linear and variable due to gate weave, different scanners used, different reels of film, etc...

So the hard part is aligning, or registering, the footage. I'm trying to develop a method to accomplish this, but it's proving difficult. Hopefully in this thread we can work on establishing a work-flow, as I feel this could be an essential restoration tool.

So the methods I'm aware of are:

-Manual alignment via grid deformation
For example in Nuke; take two clips, merge them, blend in difference mode, and try your best to align them via the grid. Unfortunately not only is this long and tedium, but it doesn't account for temporally variable frame geometry (your alignment might only hold for a couple seconds).

-Derive motion vectors from two frames and warp
https://www.reddit.com/r/vfx/comments/3f...t_in_nuke/
Another Nuke example; "set-up of VectorGenerator where you make it think your two different plates are a pair of consecutive frames. You can then pull the motion vectors to get a uv warp between the plates, and the IDistort node to reapply the warp if needed." I tried to attempt this method but it seemed to fail.

-F_Align in Nuke
This will take two clips and align them frame by frame. Unfortunately, the results can be very unpredictable at times, and the alignment is limited to essentially corner pin transforms; it can't deform the interior of the frame.

-Motion Compensation via AVISYNTH
https://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=154739
It seems, per the thread above, it could be done a couple ways via interleaving your clips and applying MVTools plugin. People in that thread have reported success but I've not been able to replicate (unfortunately I don't know my way around avisynth very well, and am receiving a "not a clip" error). Once I'm able to post on Doom9 I'll inquire further.

-Image Registration
This technique seems to be most used in the medical field for aligning scans. The most popular software seems to be elastix, but I've also seen stuff written in Matlab that does similar things. It's been said this technique can generate high quality results. Unfortunately, processing time is a concern; the transforms themselves are quick but the generation of them takes a bit of time. This means that you'd have to either use the same transform for an entire transfer, or you'd have to change between several at different points in the footage. It also requires a bit of technical know-how as the parameter file needs to be setup correctly for the thing to work.

To show the possibilities with this work, here are the results of a Nuke composition that was done using grid warp.

https://image.ibb.co/m2Zv9b/1_TMP_BLU_REVEAL.png
https://image.ibb.co/na30aG/2_TMP_HDTV_REVEAL.png
https://image.ibb.co/eyLDvG/3_TMP_COMP_REVEAL.png

The highlights and shadows of the HDTV capture were denoised and then added to the midtones of the Blu-Ray release. The result was then put through a MatchGrade node which brought it in line with the HDTV cap's color grade, and then a layer of film grain was added over the top. It's important to keep in mind that the alignment was far from perfect (especially near the edges); if the alignment were automated and done to a high enough quality, the result would look even clearer, crisper than what I've posted above.

Does anyone here have the ability to capture those and is willing to do so if he gets the tape free of charge?

I don't currently have any, but there are a few movies I would consider this for in the future. For example the Mummy movies from 1999 and 2001, although they're pretty hard to get apparently.