Project Info
Despite receiving a 4K restoration from its original camera negative, On Her Majesty's Secret Service looks fairly problematic on Blu-Ray - pushed to magenta with far too cool a color temperature, desaturated, and with highlights radically blown out. Still, with some color correction, the 4K restoration was more than salvageable.

This preservation removes the magenta cast and aims for a warmer, more saturated look. More importantly, the blown out areas have been mostly recovered. Overall, the color-corrected image is a lot more balanced, allowing one to really appreciate the detail of the 4K restoration. The old pre-restoration US DVD and LD were used as rough references, but, as we've seen from 007 Dossier's 35mm trailer transfers, those transfers also were not exactly representative of how the film looked in theaters. The opening beach sequence, singled out in particular for color correction, no longer has a blanket blue tint and looks more like dawn, as it had before.

Aurally, this uses the LD audio track, which is much better than both the revisionist, badly balanced 5.1 DTS-HD remix and the highly compressed and noise reduced mono available on the Blu-Ray.

Specific attention has also been given to both the opening credits and closing credits. The opening is no longer squeezed to be windowboxed and can be seen in the same aspect ratio as the rest of the film. The closing credits, tinted a complete blanket blue tint, on the Blu-Ray, has had its colors restored using the chroma of an earlier master.

*Note that a new 4K restoration may have screened in select theaters and even aired a few times on MGM HD. This preservation still uses the old 4K restoration available on BD as its basis.*

Video

• US BD - color-corrected to remove magenta/blue bias, highlights recovered
   
  

• 2.0 LPCM English Mono Audio (from US Laserdisc)
  
• 2.0 AC3 Commentary
   
  

DaLucc™ - DVD and LD upscaled combined chroma

Similar to PaNup™ (https://fanrestore.com/thread-25.html), this technique would get improved chroma using DVD and LD sources; it is intended to be used as chroma replacement for an HD source, or as color reference in conjunction with an automated color correction tool.

The theory is simple: any actual video format uses a chroma subsampling; DVD uses 4:2:0, where there is one chroma "pixel" for each two luma pixels, on both vertical and horizontal dimensions, while LD used 4:2:2, where there is one chroma "pixel" for each two luma pixels on the horizontal dimension.

While the resolution of the DVD is 720x480 (NTSC) and 720x576 (PAL), its actual chroma resolution is just 1/4th of that, at 360x240 (NTSC) and 360x288 (PAL) - this are the best cases using progressive material; with interlaced, it is lower.

For LD, we have an effective resolution of about 540TVLx480 (NTSC) and 540TVLx480 (PAL) while chroma resolution is less than 1/3rd of that at 160TVLx480 for NTSC - using a well mastered disc, better with SuperNTSC encoder, the best players, and a 3D comb filter in the player, capture card, or video passthrough like a DVD recoderd; it should be 160TVLx576 for PAL in theory, but PAL laserdisc players are notoriously inferior to NTSC counterparts, and none has a 3D comb filter - and I'm not aware of any PAL capture card or DVD recorder with a 3D comb filter, plus there is no "SuperPAL" encoder, and usually PAL discs have a lower overall video quality; hence, actual chroma resolution for PAL laserdisc would be around 120TVLx288.

If you have read the PaNup™ article, you can imagine that color pixels of DVD and LD would cover different colors, as they are less than the luma pixels. At the end, DVD would actually get only 25% of the original source colors - 50% horizontal and 50% vertical , while LD would get 50% in theory, but around 37% in practice, of the original source colors - 50% (37% actually) horizontal and 100% vertical; when captured, this would translate at around 720x480 (NTSC) luma resolution, and 212x480 chroma resolution - in the best cases; for very well mastered discs not SuperNTSC encoded, high quality but not MUSE laserdisc players, and average 3D comb filter, chroma resolution would be expected to be around 180x480, or 25% horizontal and 100% vertical.

So now we have two sources - temporally and spatially aligned - with effective chroma resolution that is just one fourth of the luma resolution, but placed in different ways; upscaling them at the same resolution, then combining them would result in improved chroma quality; this could be used "as is" to replace an HD chroma - if it's perfectly spatially aligned as well - or as a color reference for color matching tools.

For test purposes, DVD and LD chroma resolutions are simulated, downscaling HD source from 1920x1080 16bit 4:4:4 to 360x240 for DVD and 180x480 for LD; in the examples, they are upscaled to 1920x1080, and coupled with HD luma at 4:2:0, cropped to see better the differences. Note: of course in real life things would be a bit different... colors of both source should be closer, or the result colors would be just an average of both source; temporal alignement should be perfect, and spatial alignement should be as perfect as possible - within one pixel; subpixel alignement could be necessary.
















Of course, there are times where difference between DVD (or LD) and merged chroma are very noticeable, other times subtle, and few times merged chroma is worst - for example, where there are a lot of diagonal lines; but almost always result is better than single source. Is it possible to use other source combinations - like PAL DVD and NTSC DVD (in this case only vertical chroma resolution would be improved), or DVD and 720P, or even 1080p and 720p to apply chroma to UHD; try to avoid to use NTSC and PAL laserdiscs, unless they are the only SD sources available; and leave VHS alone - it would give you around 40x480 chroma resolution on NTSC, in the best case scenario...


Complete comparison here: https://diff.pics/6kC0Nbp3Os87/1

I would like to start a series of releases that are all very simple- Using the untouched best HD video source, along with highest quality audio source (occasionally this will be substituted with an older track if extremely unpleasant changes have been made.) They will be sourced from Blu-ray and/or HD-DVD. If there is an HDTV stream that is very high quality, it may be considered (Raiders of the Lost Ark comes to mind).

They will all be BD-25s.

They will have matching Menus made in DVD Architect.

They will have a single video track and a single audio track (English, or original release language if no Dub is available), English subtitles in the case of Foreign Language films or foreign language portions.

I would like suggestions of films that you would like to see in this collection. Please include the preferred video and audio sources if able. You're also welcome to suggest films that simply have a very poor release, or haven't reached Bluray (but have an HD-DVD, D-VHS, or HDTV version).

In the occasion that the film/audio will not fit on a BD-25, a 3-pass placebo film x264 pass will be run on the video, which will be subsequently compared to the original and alternate sources to guarantee no quality loss.

Films I plan to include are:
The Thing (HD-DVD Sourced)
SW:The Phantom Menace (Schorman HDTV Sourced)
Multiple Pokémon Films (they're all a mess of different releases with different quality, audio options, etc.)
Raiders of the Lost Ark (Wowow Sourced, probably bluray audio)
Any HD-DVD without a Bluray release.

The BD has been released few weeks ago; according to this forum (http://forum.blu-ray.com/showthread.php?t=287188), it misses at least two frames, while HDTV misses 5 seconds.

Color grading is slightly different: http://screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/212472

Are these reasons enough to start a project? (apart obviously adding further audio/subs tracks)

As the title thread says really

We're there any Dolby Digital plus tracks out there on the HD-DVD format that contain any elements ripe for preservation?

Worth a thought?

Project Info
The Curse of Frankenstein's UK Blu-Ray release looks horrendous. Taken from the same IP created from separation masters as the old DVD, it looks very magenta-shifted and way too bright, particular for a gruesome horror film. Worst of all, the overall BD image is only slightly sharper than its SD counterpart.

This preservation removes the magenta cast and brings back the blues of the original photography, largely missing in the home video transfers. A trailer provided a reference to show the original's more saturated look, in keeping with other subsequent Hammer Horror films. With a very judicious amount of sharpening to top it off, the final result resembles my corrected Dracula '58 disc in terms of color and contrast.

The commercial UK BD is encoded at 24fps, an unusual format which causes issues with some Blu-Ray players; this custom BD has been normalized to 23.976fps, with the audio tracks having been slightly resynced (without any pitch shift) to fit.

Video

• UK BD - color-corrected to remove magenta cast, darkened, and very lightly sharpened.
   
  

• 2.0 LPCM English Audio
  
• 2.0 LPCM Commentary
   
  

List of project collections (in alphabetical order):

[Fundamental Collection] - spoRv

Itzalive Shadoe Masters™ - jerryshadoe

TAF Restored Masters - The Aluminum Falcon

unnamed collection - alleycat

Updated: 2020-04-07

looking for a color correction,contrast correction,and black crush removal for ghostbusters 1 and 2.

A HD version would be nice. Can this be preserved, it was released on DVD and not on BD.

Many of you guys and gals have probably seen this already on your travels but I thought I'd share this entertaining thread from Film-Tech:

http://www.film-tech.com/ubb/f16/t001428.html

A guy mentions his work on Home Theater Mixes and gets roasted for it  

At the end of it all, no one is any the wiser about anything.