With the 20th anniversary of Superman Returns on the horizon, it's fitting that I showcase and present another recolor project that I had been personally working on for quite some time. Superman Returns had a very unusual history when it came to its releases. The theatrical trailers and the film itself came out with color grades that are considered either too dim or concerning.

The 2006 home video releases (even the 2008 reissued Blu-Ray with a DTS-MA track) had recolored the picture, and made it look muddy and bland. While there were attempts to recolor the film over the years, I didn't see one where it looked like the original 35mm prints. There WAS a 35mm print for sale on eBay but it was sold and the one which is up now is concerning given the lack of photos.

And so I thought I'd take the matters in my own hands and do a 35mm regrade of the film. My intention for this project is to give this movie a more presentable and accessible outlook (with a better color grade) while giving back its 35mm look and feel. Hoping the film would fair better with fans and audiences than it is now.

Sources:
2006/2008 Blu-Ray Release
The open-matte version of the film
A scan of the trailer's 35mm print (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wbQEc89Z6dA)
DrDre's color matching tool

Hi everyone

I'm working on colour grading one of my favourite movies ever - ALIENS.

It's really an exercise in learning DaVinci Resolve, which is an incredible bit of kit by the way, as I'm a video producer here in the UK.

I'm after a little advice on posting screengrabs of the work so far. Can anyone advise me on a good place to post images? When I use the "Insert an Image" button I just get a broken image icon. I'm attempting here with a Dropbox link:



I'll post more if I'm successful!!

Thanks in advance

1991 LD [11398] PCM 2.0 decoded into 5.0 using a Shure HTS-5300.  Synced to the UHD and saved as FLAC.

The UHD stereo has been loudified and boosted, with clipping in several spots, and some noise reduction in the low end. In spite of all that, the UHD and LD are about the same in dynamic range. So, it is the same mix but they couldn't help but mess with it a little bit.

PM me for link 

Hi! I'm quite interested in learning more about restoring video's, especially old animation. So I might dive into this someday and if I do I'd share it here.

I just found out about this forum and I'm looking forward to what I can learn from the people here for improving some meager releases.

Hi everyone,
I’ve been lurking around the forum for a bit, and I finally decided to sign up and say hello. I just wanted to congratulate all of you—the level of dedication, technical knowledge, and passion for film preservation here is mind-blowing.
I’ve been a massive movie lover for as long as I can remember, but over the years, my passion evolved into something a bit more... "obsessive." I didn’t just want to watch movies; I wanted to experience them in the best possible way. This led me straight into the rabbit hole of Home Cinema, multi-channel audio setups, and video calibration.

For me, a great movie is a delicate balance of perfect visuals and an immersive, dynamic soundstage. There’s nothing quite like the feeling of unlocking the full potential of a film’s original mix on a properly tuned sound system.
Sadly, as many of you know too well, official home video releases (especially local European/Italian tracks) often let us down with butchered audio, compressed tracks, or revisionist video grading that ruins the theatrical experience. That’s exactly why I find this community so fascinating: you guys don’t just complain about bad releases; you actually roll up your sleeves and fix them.

I'm here to learn, discover some hidden gems, and hopefully, down the road, contribute to some awesome restoration projects.
Looking forward to chatting with you all!
Cheers,


Pablitho

Hi everyone,
I’ve recently started getting into the world of audio preservation and restoration, and after doing some research, I stumbled upon this forum. I have to say, the level of technical expertise here is absolutely amazing.
I was thinking about a specific approach to hybrid audio restoration, and I wanted to ask if this is something you have already experimented with, or if it's considered a standard practice here.
When restoring a local release (in my case, Italian), we often face the issue of great older mixes being trapped in lossy formats (like AC3 or standard DTS from old DVDs), while the modern Blu-ray/4K releases have an incredible, dynamic Lossless English track (DTS-HD MA or Dolby TrueHD/Atmos).
Has anyone ever tried to build a "hybrid" lossless track by keeping the untouched English Lossless channels for everything related to M&E (Music & Effects) — meaning Left, Right, Surrounds, and LFE — and then extracting and sync-matching only the local dialogue from the lossy center channel onto the lossless English center?
Conceptually, this seems like the ultimate way to get the best of both worlds: the full dynamic range of the original lossless effects/score, combined with our local dubbing.
However, being new to this, I can foresee a few technical roadblocks, and I'd love to hear your thoughts on them:
1. Bleeding: How do you deal with dialogue bleeding into the Left and Right channels on older local mixes?
2. Center Channel M&E: Since the English center channel also contains specific localized sound effects and foley, replacing it entirely with the lossy local center might degrade the ambient quality. Do you use spectral isolation (like iZotope RX) to extract only the dry vocal track from the lossy source before mixing it into the English track?
3. Phase & Mix Differences: How painful is it to level-match and EQ the hybrid track when the original theatrical audio stems for the two languages come from completely different masters?
I would love to hear your experiences, tips, or if there are any specific threads/guides covering this kind of "vocal transplant" workflow.
Thanks a lot for your time and for this incredible community!

Hey guys.

This is a reconstruction of the special edition using a web-rip of the unreleased 2013 mastering. There are already a handful reconstructions out there, but as far as I know, they use a HDTV of the old 90's master for the SE footage, not the recent BD release.
The best source I could find is a 26.69GB open matte mkv. Encoding is pretty decent for what it is. Of course, it had to be reframed to the correct widescreen aspect ratio. No big deal (just tedious). I ended replacing about 50 shots between way-to-much zoomed-in shots, and some grading glitched ones (an alternative oar web-rip came in handy). There's noticeable banding in some underwater shots. 8-bit web-rip source, not much I can do about it (it's also noticeable in the BD as well sometimes). The special edition scenes are processed just very slightly for consistency (a bit of softening, and a layer of grain), then, in resolve, regraded for consistency. The rest of the film is not regraded. I think the colors already looks fine.

Sound (english only, to save space) and multisubs from the BD.

Quote:48.20 GB

Video: MPEG4 Video (H264) 1920x1080 23.976fps [V: UTC 2026-01-15 03:10:49 (h264 high L4.1, yuv420p, 1920x1080) [default,forced]]
Audio: DTS 48000Hz 6ch 6912kbps [A: Original 5.1 [eng] (dts-hd ma, 48000 Hz, 5.1(side), s24)]
Audio: Dolby AC3 48000Hz stereo 320kbps [A: Original 2.0 [eng] (ac3, 48000 Hz, stereo, 320 kb/s)]
-> multisubs!

I created a Python script with AI which stitches the decoded parts of a Cinema DTS CD to one large multi channel audio file.

Features:

• Detecting the signal tone and removing unneeded silence
  
• Detecting overlap by correlation (with detection of inverted parts)
  
• Short cross fade for reducing audible errors
  
• Merging of the files
  
• Extraction of LFE including clipping protection and custom LFE gain (optional)
  
• Slowdown to 23.976 FPS and resample to 48 kHz (optional)
  

...Standing On 2 Feet.

Hey guys.
So, this is a fancut of the film. I removed a couple of unfunny/embarrasing moments that have been bugging me for some time. One scene has been added!

Editing changes:

# bar scene.
The t-800 throws the long-haired guy through the air and he lands on the kitchen. He burns himself and drops to the ground. That's supposed to be funny, but it's not (I'm growing old).  It also breaks the flow of the scene.
It's gone now.
- 4.2 sec.

# "stand on one foot"
No, John, no. Terminators stand on two feet.
This scene is the reason for the fancut. You know, there's humor and then there's a parody or a spoof movie. This scene belongs in a Scary Movie kind of film, or even in one of the sequels, not here. 
This one required reframing a couple of shots and a bit of editing. Is the end result perfect? Probably not, but anything is better than the original.
- 12 sec.

# chip scene
I felt like by just removing things, even if the film improved, I was making it "less" in a way (like, why is a decaffeinato cheaper than a regular coffee dispite all the process to remove the caffeine?), so I wondered if I could include something from the extended version, without hurting the already perfect pacing of the theatrical. The chip scene is the obvious answer. 
Here it is in all its glory... or almost. I did a bit of editing when Sarah and John are arguing after removing the chip. The shot when John replies "but he is my friend, all right?" is gone, and I also fixed the shot where we see Sarah moving her mouth ("Maybe"), but there's no audio (looks like an editing mistake, because the "Maybe" is in the next close up).
+ 196 sec

Dewaxed, regraded
· First of all: we need a proper release, with no dnr, and no shitty AI processing (I mean, Cameron can't let T2 be the only of his movies without the AI treatment, right?).
All the processing I did is just makeup. It can make the film look more pretty, more watchable, which is the goal, of course, but that's it.
So.
I did some pre-processing in Hybrid. Dynamic dehaloing and removing jagged edges.
Then, in Resolve I played with soften and sharpen and texture detail, after that, added a bit of 50% opacity blur, and finally a layer of grain.
Like I said, makeup.
Did I go too far softening some shots? It's possible that this looks softer than what a proper mastering would look, but still not as soft as the old pinkish telecine, so I think we're good.
· I used the good 35mm print scan floating around as reference. It's one of the best scans I've seen, but we should not turn our brains off just because we read "35mm print scan". The thing it's not perfect. It tends too look too dark (Sarah and Silverman scenes, for example), it has that orangey red tones that many scans have for some reason, and blues tend too look a bit too purpleish sometimes. There's actually an overall bluish tint during a good part of the film, with, somewhat, washed out colors (specially noticeable in the desert scenes. The other scan out there looks worse overall, but it shows more vibrant warmer colors there). Those are minor things, not a big deal, but they are there, and it's necessary to look beyond the flaws when matching colors.
The sound comes from the 2007 French bluray. That's right, the one sourced from the original mix! First of all I sync'ed it to the 4K, which surpisingly, wasn't as difficult as I expected, then all the editing. I couldn't do all the things I wanted, like removing a couple of lines of dialogue (only audio editing, without cutting anything). Anyway, it's done.

Quote:54.66 GB
Video: HVC1 3840x2160 23.976fps [V: hevc main 10 L5.1, yuv420p10le, 3840x2160 [default]]
Audio: FLAC (framed) 48000Hz 6ch 4608kbps [A: flac, 48000 Hz, 5.1(side), s16 [default]]
Subtitle: UTF-8 [S: Español [spa] (subrip) [default]]
Subtitle: UTF-8 [S: English [eng] (subrip) [default]]
Subtitle: UTF-8 [S: No subtitles]