Thus far, every open matte release of the Sailor Moon movies I know of, even on DVD, has a rather distinct problem: ghosting. Same problem seen on many high-definition versions of Ghost in the Shell. What I want to see is a top-quality open matte version of each of the three movies, at the original 4:3 aspect ratio and without that damn ghosting, and if that means taking each frame from the HD releases and manually readding the image info at the top and bottom of the screen, so be it. Even if Andrea isn't the biggest fan of Sailor Moon (to put it lightly), I believe even he'd agree that it's a travesty to the Moonies in the videophile community that there's not yet a good open matte version of any of the movies out there, a travesty I, especially, believe can and should be fixed no matter how difficult and time-consuming it may appear.

At long last, restoration efforts are underway for Fistful of Dollars, the first of Sergio Leone's Spaghetti Westerns. At present, audio tracks are being restored as best as possible; Italian, German (1965 and 1979 dubs), Castilian Spanish, and Japanese (1976 dub AFAICT) audio tracks now have a base mono FLAC master at 192 kHz/24-bit which I might refer to should any additional changes (such as anti-censorship) be made. Restoration of the French audio track is currently in progress; I've just finished the anti-censorship process and only have yet to sync the audio to the restored mono track included as part of a repack and restore the music cues at the start and at the end. English, Turkish, Hungarian, Mexican Spanish, and Portuguese track restorations are pending. My aim for the audio track restorations is to have as much consistency across audio elements as possible.

Preview links to the restored FLAC masters, screenshots, and cover art to come at a date to be determined.

In the meantime, here's a preliminary spec list for my restoration:

VIDEO
Resolution: 1080p (BD), 480p (NTSC DVD), 576p (PAL DVD)
Aspect ratios: 2.35:1, 1.33:1, and 1.78:1 (each on separate masters)

AUDIO
Italian (mono)
German (1965 dub) (mono)
German (1979 dub) (mono)
German (1979 dub) (Dolby Stereo 4.0: left, center, right, and surround)
Castilian Spanish (mono)
Japanese (1976 dub) (mono)
French (mono)
English (mono)
English (6-track: left, left-center, center, right-center, right, and surround)
English (Dolby Stereo SR 4.0: left, center, right, and surround)
Turkish (mono)
Hungarian (mono)
Mexican Spanish (mono)
Mexican Spanish (Dolby Stereo SR 4.0: left, center, right, and surround)
Brazilian Portuguese (mono)

SUBTITLES
English
English SDH
French
French SDH
German
German SDH
Spanish
Spanish SDH (Castellano)
Spanish SDH (Latino)
Italian
Cantonese
Danish
Dutch
Finnish
Greek
Hungarian
Japanese
Mandarin
Norwegian
Portuguese
Swedish
Turkish

The above spec list is not final, which is most true for the subtitles; I might have to drop some of the subtitle options, ultimately, and I have no illusions that I'll be able to get everything I want for this project. But I'll do my darnedest with what I do have.

Thought it might be nice to have a list/thread of these, after having stumbled over two. Quick search didn't turn up an existing thread, so here I go.

Here are the ones I stumbled over:
- Burbs (1989), Arrow Films release, 2.0 LPCM, music and SFX
- Angry Birds (2016), German Blu Ray, 2.0 AC-3 192kbps (Dolby Surround according to BDInfo), music

Here it is: https://www.ebay.de/itm/Dolby-Surround-D...2968402357

A little background: I've been trying to find a good way to transform the stereo surround track on the Brazil Criterion Collection back into its original 4 channels, as is intended. Turns out it's a little more tricky than expected. 

For one, the "Dolby Stereo" matrix is always the same. In other words, the encoding is always the same. BUT, there is a vast variety of different decoders. 

The most "faithful" ones seem to be actual Cinema Processors, like the Dolby CN65. Way too expensive for me sadly. There is the CN45, but it has a bad reputation and supposedly doesn't come with the surround decoder by standard.

This unit here apparently is/was used for monitoring Dolby Stereo matrix mixes in actual studios. So, chances are, this unit is something like audio engineers use to monitor their Dolby Stereo/Surround mix. It has symmetrical (XLR) inputs and outputs, perfect for a studio environment where you want to minimize electrical noise and stuff like that. This is perfect for me because I have a nice RME Fireface audio interface that I connect this to and create a high quality decoded 4-track from any stereo mix.

It actually outputs 4 channels. L, C, R and S (Surround). Many decoders I found somehow split the surround channel up further, which is of course not really faithful to the original. The Pro Logic II decoder is an example of this. Also, original Dolby Stereo mixes only had a 7kHz limited surround channel, so it's kind of pointless to get any kind of high frequency content in the surround channel, as its guaranteed to be just bleeding from the L,R channels. This one should get me as close as possible to how it was originally "meant". 

Now, it's apparently still built on a Pro Logic integrated circuit, so it's still basically the consumer variant and basically a later "fancy" thing that introduced steering (detecting which channels are dominant and pronouncing them, vaguely said). That's not totally faithful I think, because steering wasn't used at the time when Brazil was produced afaik. So ... meh. It won't be perfectly faithful.

On the positive side, from what I read on Wikipedia, the standard consumer Dolby Pro Logic decoders lack the surround delay that is typical for cinema processors. Basically, this is used to improve the localization. Since bleeding of the Front channels into Surround cannot be completely avoided, a delay is introduced to make sure that the sound always appears first in the front, improving the localization of the sound source in the front. This decoder here does have that delay adjustment (which apparently can be changed between 10ms and 150ms, depending on the size of the room, not quite sure how this all works together yet).

So, to summarize:

- Has 4-channel Pro Logic decoding plus surround delay, like cinema processors. So, no unfaithful splitting of the rear channel through weird frequency modulating stuff. Also likely has the 7kHz cap on the surround channel, making it more faithful again.

- Sadly, it's Pro Logic based, so a certain form of artificial channel separation is introduced.

- Should be on par with very good early home theater surround decoders. So while it won't allow me to hear what you would have heard in cinema (that would require a much more expensive cinema processor), I will hear what good early surround consumer hardware would have produced. Plus the delay. Plus the symmetrical outputs for perfectly recording the output and creating surround tracks out of it.

- No fancy Dolby Pro Logic II type stuff with all the advanced steering etc. that was never really intended back then.

- Afaik it's analogue.

I just hope this thing works. If so, I'll be trying it with other movies too. Should work with any movie that was done in "Dolby Stereo". In theory it should work very fine on the optical Dolby Stereo tracks, for example in the captured Ghostbusters 35mm. It's not technically meant for decoding the optical tracks, but I think it's as close as possible without an actual Cinema Processor unit. Might work on some Laserdisc PCM tracks maybe? Don't really know anything about them, but I imagine they will have put the matrix-encoded audio in there too?

Either way, if it works, you're all welcome to send me some audio to run through it. I'll capture it at 48kHz, 24bit. I could theoretically capture up to 192 kHz 24 bit, but most tracks out there are only 48kHz anyway, so there seems to be little use for that.

Also, for my own releases, I might use the converted output further to create a 5.1 set; The L C R I can keep. The rear surround I can split up into two identical Ls and Rs channels, attenuated by -3 dB to create the "phantom center" in the back. LFE I can simply use a lowpass around 125 Hz on all the channels. Should be fair enough I think.

This is a a strange one for me. I was running an avisynth script (scaling, etc) through Vdub 32-bit into a Lag-AVI. Done this many, many times without error. Now all the suddenly I'm getting this:



basically the video goes a few frames and returns with FFMpeg.dll error reading frame=ERROR UNKNOWN, which as you can see is terriblely insightful. I thought maybe it was something I did in the script so I striped everything except open the video file and then convert to LAG-AVI in Vdub: same results. I also checked the full script in AVSPMod and it was fine.

I upgraded Vdub to the latest: same results.
Downgraded it to the latest version (1.3): same results.
Loaded a new version of FFdshow: same results.
Load AVIsynth again: same results.

I had no major updates that I'm aware of outside of the latest copy of Premiere. A google search shows nothing useful. So I'm at a loss. Any ideas?

I can't really find much on this. It appeared on the internet, but I can't find a review of this Blu Ray and the screenshots don't look terribly impressive so far; one seems to have terrible "color correction" where a whole darker area on the ground blurs into a grey ... something: https://cdn.imagecurl.com/images/7854833...015239.png (although this screen is from an encode, not from the source).

The box doesn't really go into much detail either: http://www.blu-ray.com/movies/Murder-on-...ay/187302/

Also, framerate seems to be 24.000 fps instead of the usual 23.976.

"Classics Remastered" seems to be kind of a brand from Australia. The layout looks decent enough.

Some forum discussion on blu-ray.com: http://forum.blu-ray.com/showthread.php?p=14287472 (somebody says they are new transfers, but have some color issues? But not much to back it up)

Is this an actual remaster or is it just a scam?

Edit: I think I found a screenshot comparison with some Italian version (might be the old transfer?): http://caps-a-holic.com/c.php?a=1&x=618&...0&i=5&go=1

The new one seems to look sharper, but definitely has some weird color issues, and especially the dark areas look weird and seem to lack detail. Possibly won't even allow color matching, else this might have been an interesting project.

So here’s the story. I recently snagged a Pioneer HLD-X0 for 200,000 yen. That’s $1,761.24 USD as of this writing.

Here’s the link to the exact auction for info: http://buyee.jp/item/yahoo/auction/k278262761

Problem is, like you’d be able to guess, I don’t have 200,000 yen! I just want it so bad to capture the Laserdiscs I’ve collected thus far.

For those of you who don’t know, the HLD-X0 is the pinnacle of Laserdisc playback, video-wise, and more importantly audio-wise. Everything comes in clear as a bell on this baby.

Now for the time being, I will try to fund the purchase as best I can, but to make a successful transaction more likely, I will probably need the assistance of my fellow video/audiophiles.

Anywhere around the $1,000-mark is extremely cheap for an HLD-X0. Heck, it’s good for any high-end Laserdisc player.

If you’d like financially assist me, PM me and I’ll give you my PayPal information.

Now this venture will not just be for Laserdiscs I’d like to preserve. If you have any Laserdiscs you’d like to have digitized in the best quality, over and under, send it/them to me if you
have them or tell me where to buy them and I’ll try my best to finance them when I can.

Thank you for your time and I hope we’re able to make this happen together. ^_^

-Arian

Hello.
I wanted to ask, does anyone have any unused film reels that he would throw anyway, that he would be able to send them to me to use as decor?
Of course I'd pay for the shipping expenses.

I have in mind something like this (hanging them on the wall)
[Image: 2013-symphony-show-house-003.jpg]

The QUOTE box is a quirky piece of programming. Generally speaking, from things I've tried to make it do, it ultimately breaks it's internal programming -- after which I must go to source to sort out the mess.

But one obvious and quick fix would be to change the appended word "Wrote:' to start with a lower-case letter, to be "wrote:".

If you're up to it, how about working-in titles that have links in it. Quoting without a built-in reference method makes for sloppy-looking external-to-the-quote links. Thanks!

I just wanted to rewatch Armageddon and sadly found it absolutely unenjoyable due to the sound. The audio is dynamically compressed a lot, which means that an asteroid crushing into the street isn't really much louder than room-loudness dialogue before.

The audio curve pretty much confirms this, especially the center channel goes in the direction of being brickwalled (I am exaggerating, but considering it's not a music CD, it's a fair comparison I think).

Anybody know of a better audio? I'd like to sync something better to the Blu Ray, because this sounds just flat, boring and sad and doesn't live up to the movie imo.

I've read about the Laserdisc audio of Armageddon supposedly being very good, one mention was on this forum in reference to a Japanese laserdisc (link).

Does anyone have a capture of that? I'd kill for it if it's any better.

Although I guess DVD would be fine too if it doesn't have these issues. 

Still, if the LD is the reference sound, I think it should be synced to the Blu Ray just for preservation purposes.