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.

Had an idea to help collectors and restorers out

a sticky list of BD titles that contain original audio mixes that could be used for future projects. This would save time in capturing LD audio if a label like Arrow for example have already provided an original mix in LPCM or to find out if the DTS-MA 2.0 mix is actually the original mix and not a fold down of the 5.1 mix on the same disc

opinions?

After having done some HDTV caps for the SW community I would like to contribute some work here in this forum, sharing caps for preservation or restoration purposes. Especially spoRv's thread about the importance of HDTV recordings made me want to do this.
I’m able to do bit-perfect TS caps from a variety of 24h movie channels like sky and TNT.
The caps are 1080/25p or 720/50p H.264/MPEG-4 AVC with german and english (where available) audio tracks in DD 5.1 and/or 2.0.
My caps are done completely random, whatever on the EPG gets my attention or has something like „Extended Cut“ in the description will be recorded.

UPDATE: The majority of all releases being produced since the beginning of the BluRay era use the same master for HDTV releases. Especially broadcasters like sky air BR masters in OAR. Capping those movies in most of the cases is a waste of time and resources, since the cap is identical to the BR release.
Accordingly I will concentrate on capping movies produced before 2008, the beginning of the BR era.
Special recording requests are still welcome.


If you are interested in one or several caps, PM me.

Here is my actual list (updates will come in very soon):

Black Hawk Down [2001] - 139min - AXN
1080/25p - GER 5.1 - ENG 5.1
german localization - logo right top

Made by Jonno, published here with his permission - say thanks to him!

(2017-11-28, 09:01 PM)jonno Wrote: The CDS sync on the TeamBlu release was actually my work, though I was never properly credited for it (not that I'm bitter or anything )

I read Disclord's research, found that DVD release and recut the AC-3 with Womble (which does segment editing of AC-3, so no re-encoding was involved). It syncs to the Skynet version, but I'm happy to hear that it can be delayed to fit other releases. I may well do it over again should a considerably better release ever appear, assuming this track doesn't get another commercial release (and I think that's a pretty fair assumption).

(2017-11-28, 09:56 PM)Beber Wrote: To match the Team Blu's CDS track to the 2015 US Blu-ray, just add a +22 frame delay.

This movie has never been released in HD afaik, but I've seen some references to a Laserdisc. Can't find one on lddb.com though. 

Any ideas?

How about an HDTV? Something? (I looked, but don't see anything).

I was just wondering. LaserDisc is a rather old technology. I remember some old CDs from the 70s/80s don't exactly have stellar sound. They're okay of course, but the ADCs back then were not what they are today. Correct me if my thinking is wrong, but doesn't that imply that capturing the PCM track may sometimes not actually be as good as capturing the analog audio with a good audio interface? Am I missing something?