Yep, I'm doing another project, this time a standalone project titled THX-1138, based on the 1978 re-release cut of the film.

This is the trailer I'll be using to promote the project on other projects of mine. The actual trailer, as will appear on my projects, will look better than the trailer you see in the link.

This time, I'll be confining myself to a single aspect ratio--the original aspect ratio of 2.33:1, in fact. The primary source shall be the Grindhouse Edition sourced from an Italian print; where Italian text appears (e.g. the closing credits), I'll sub in the equivalent shot from the Blu-ray whenever possible.

In any case, here's a preliminary spec list for my restoration:

VIDEO
Resolution: 1080p (BD), 480p (NTSC DVD), 576p (PAL DVD)
Aspect ratio: 2.33:1

AUDIO
English (mono)
Brazilian Portuguese (mono)
French (mono)
Italian (mono)
German (mono)
Mexican Spanish (mono)
Castilian Spanish (mono)

SUBTITLES
English SDH
French
German
Spanish
Italian
Dutch
Finnish
Japanese
Portuguese
Swedish

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.

I'm looking for an additional open matte sources of Casino (1995) - 16:9 or 4:3 at least to make high quality hybrid open matte version with BD overlay and no logos.
Now I have 16:9 HDTVRip Universal HD 720p with pop-up logo and 4:3 low quality DVDRip.

If a full open matte version of Blade Runner 2049 is out there, I was hoping to do it as one of my projects, with the 2D IMAX version (complete with the custom intro) on one disc and the 3D version on the other. Obviously, I'm planning to include the Atmos track on both discs. Additionally, I'm going to regrain the 2D IMAX version with 70mm film grain using a special version of the 70mm film grain I managed to procure from a helpful YouTuber in stunning 4K.

So I'm kinda interested in retro gaming besides movies and I've stumbled upon this unit - Framemeister. It does a great job for playing retro consoles on new TVs. I was wondering if anyone ever tried plugging in Laserdisc player into them? The unit itself is very pricy and I don't think I'll get one anytime soon.

Comparison:
https://youtu.be/yGwrrxeR2R4?t=109

Exactly as the title says. I'm determined to finally build a PC to at least get my own materials captured and do some editing. Ideally I'd like it to be able to double as a HTPC so I can watch projects without burning discs and for it to be able to run some games here and there.
Primarily I need to capture my LD collection. I've now got over 500 discs so that's a lot of audio detective work to do.

I've set aside $400 so far. Would that be adequate to build a decent editing machine for our usual line of work or is it going to take a lot more? I've never actually done any PC building before so I really have no idea what I'm doing.

Hello!

I would like to capture PCM audio from a Laserdisc Player (PAL), I had thought about this card, does anyone know it?, do you know if it's bit-perfect?:

http://www.esi-audio.com/products/u24xl/

If you know any better and with guarantees that it's bit-perfect I would also be interested. My computer is a laptop with windows 7.

Regards.

These are just some movies I know were shot Super35 or at least not anamorphic if they are digital, but I have never seen them available in Open Matte. These are some of my favorite movies, as well.

Session 9 - I have seen this open matte/cropped on Cinemax in HD. It is also one of the first movies to be shot digitally, which is interesting. I am not sure if it was open matte or cropped, but it was filmed 2.39:1.

The Descent - I have never seen this open matte, but I know it is not anamorphic, since the lens flares are spherical.

Doomsday - another Neil Marshall classic, also have never seen this in anything but widescreen but I know it wasn't shot anamorphic.

Sinister - I have this seen on Showtime in HD, but they only play movies in OAR. Pretty sure this was shot digitally like most movies these days, but it doesn't look anamorphic. How cool would it be to see the 8mm movies in open matte.

Go - a Pulp Fiction-like plot, but it has a style of it's own. I have seen this in Open Matte on Starz in HD, I think it was. It was shot Super35.

Kalifornia - I have seen this on Starz in HD in Open Matte. Filmed in Super35.

There are so many more that I haven't thought of. Most of these do look or would look so much better in Open Matte.

This site is awesome, and it is cool to see other movie nerds like myself. Am I the only one who prefers Open Matte versions of movies to the widescreen ones? I hope not.   

My open matte collection currently includes 8mm, 300, Gladiator, Minority Report, Oblivion, Pandorum, Reservoir Dogs, Silent Hill, Terminator 2, The Fifth Element, and Watchmen, among others. 

I also enjoy alternate versions of movies, or original versions of them. Like the Star Wars Original Unaltered Trilogy, for example.

I hope to meet other like-minded movie nerds like myself.   8)

Book of Eli Re-Colorized


Description

The desaturated look of Book of Eli is absolutely not my thing, so I decided to push the colour out a little more.

Played around for a while to get a good compromise with a blanket 3D LUT until I was satisfied.

Here's a screenshot comparison (also included in subfolder): http://screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/128273

Since the saturation is so low in the original, there's lots of obvious chroma blocking when raising the saturation, which is why I applied a grainplate for each RGB channel separately. This results in some extreme grain/noise in some areas where there is strong chroma contrast, which I kinda like. Looks better than the blocking, anyway.

Audio is the lossless 5.1 DTS-HD MA audio from the Blu Ray transcoded to FLAC 5.1. On top, you get a FLAC 2.0 Dolby Headphone track rendered from the lossless 5.1 soundtrack, with amplification set so that there is no clipping. This track basically simulates a 5.1 surround setup on your headphones.


Encoding & Files for your own re-encode

Final encode is done by applying the 3D LUT through ffmpeg in 16-bit, then piping into and encoding with 10-bit x264. If someone wants a blu-ray compatible encode, I have included the .avs-file, grainplate, 3D LUT and a .bat script using ffmpeg for the LUT application and piping into x264 (that took some tinkering to get it to work), so you can just make your own version with your own encoding settings. I personally don't have a Blu Ray player, so I don't care about compatibility much.

I know that not all the choices I made with the 3D LUT may be to the liking of everybody, so feel free to adjust the 3D LUT any way you like for your own encode to make it more to your liking. An example of this may be the intense red tones, which I chose because I liked the look and also because there are some red elements in less saturated scenes which otherwise don't pop nicely. Another may be the dark yellow patches on the skies, which were originally green and brighter. I like it this way, but maybe you don't. Partly the choices were also dictated by scenes that would have looked bad if I had done it differently, but you can figure that out for yourself.


Trailer

Also included is a trailer which I created to give a sneak peak at the colors and picture quality. For this I recreated one of the movie's trailers (I think it's called Trailer #2) with scenes from the Blu Ray, then applied the same processing and LUT as for the movie. Shots that were trailer-exclusive were first regraded to match the Blu Ray as best as possible, for example by creating a conversion LUT for other shots of the same scene that do exist on the Blu Ray, using DrDre's ColorMatch software, then also had the same final LUT applied.

Since the best quality trailer source I could find had an Apple logo, that one was patched out with a Youtube trailer. That one had slightly different color, but I was able to fix that with two passes of the ColourLike plugin (Planar & RGB).

The best audio I could find was a 318kbps 2.0 English DTS track from the German Blu Ray (despite the video only being in letterboxed SD there). I retimed it from 25 fps to 23.976 fps by interpreting sample rate as 48000*23.976/25, then resampling the result to 48000 with a good SRC. Normalizing was applied before resampling. Result was saved as 24-bit 2-channel FLAC. That one I ran through the Dolby SDU4 Hardware decoder using a good audio interface, from which I created a 5.1 FLAC track (BC minus 3dB, split to SL and SR, LFE created from low frequencies of all resulting channels, without removing them from those). From that 5.1 I also created a Dolby Headphone track, which is a FLAC stereo.

So the trailer comes with 3 audio tracks:
- Original DTS 2.0 retimed and resampled and saved as FLAC
- SDU4-decoded 5.1 FLAC
- Dolby Headphone 2.0 FLAC

Video encoding process is the same as for the main video.

This was a funny undertaking in general. Many of the scenes in the trailer were unfinished, missing matte paintings and VFX. For example the original trailer was missing an error arrow piercing someone's throat and a head being chopped off. The remade one has all these ... beautiful things.

I did not recreate the title cards (is that what they're called?), so their quality is as good as the original trailer allows.


Release

Project has been released on Blutopia. Feel free to share anywhere, as far as I am concerned.


Screenshots

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