As those of you who have been following my thread will know I discovered earlier this year that Netflix were streaming a 1080p version of Die Hard which differed in a number of ways from the Blu release:

Stable titles/no telecine wobble
Cleaner, with film damage reduced or removed
Altered colour timing, varying from shot to shot so as to suggest a full regrade as opposed to a blanket tinting
More detail in many circumstances, usually static close-ups due to the way Netflix's compression operates

Obviously the film was restored in 4K a number of years, perhaps the master slipped out? In any case I felt it warranted a preservation, purely as a curiousity, so I capped it:

Captured from cable box at 1080p24 to an external USB capture device which hardware encoded to a high bitrate AVC file, visually identical to stream
Stream capture converted to Lagarith lossless and imported in NLE,
Blu ray indexed via DGAVCindex and downconverted to 480p Lagarith for sync,
Lossless stream synced to blu ray and menu cutaway removed during end titles,
Light 35mm film grain applied via grain plate, matched to what grain survived the encode,
Rendered out to UTvideo codec in YV12 for 2-pass encode via x264 CLI (veryslow preset, tune grain, av. bitrate 19Mbits/s, blu ray compliant)
Raw .264 file muxed to blu ray folder structure with audio and chapter stops from blu ray with tsMuxer.

Audio tracks (with huge thanks to DoomBot and PDB):
1. PCM Dolby Stereo from Initial Widescreen Laserdisc release (1666-80), closest to Theatrical Audio known available short of obtaining the optical track from a realease print
2. PCM Dolby Stereo from THX Widescreen Laserdisc remaster (8905-85), a beefed-up track said to be based on the 70mm 6-track, offered as an alternative listening experience.

As this is Blu ray synced alternative tracks can be ripped/muxed to your taste.

Obviously a streaming video can never match the bitrates of a commercial blu ray, there are compression artifacts mostly in shadow detail and out of focus/solid areas of colour. The grain plate helps to mitigate many of these. What I have aimed for here is to replicate the experience of streaming at the maximum quality available, offline with superior (and authentic) audio.

PM me for more information, feedback is appreciated, especially from anyone fortunate to catch the limited 4K DCP presentations. Depending on feedback and improved source material there may be a v1.1, also I will be keeping the original capture for the foreseeable and may make it available.

Happy trails!

Rogue One: A Star Wars Story

No one's created this thread yet?

Without going into spoilers, I think it's the best Star Wars film since 1980.

Lots of great universe building, surprising additions to the cinematic force mythology, and memorable new characters! Whole thing looks great, and you really get the battle between Rebel Alliance and Imperials come to life in a way never seen before. But, the most bold addition is a degree of radical moral ambiguity on both sides that we really haven't gotten, almost the film I wish that 2015 had given us.

The film admittedly does suffer from some pacing issues early on, but, unlike the other SW films, its nothing that a fanedit couldn't feasibly fix. The film picks up later on and concludes with one of the best endings in the saga, apparently most of which is radically changed reshoots.

Ironically, for a film that takes place during the OT timeline, it will comfort those that didn't like TFA that there aren't as many plot/narrative beats lifted from previous films. There are references to be sure and some more ham-fisted than others , but again, inevitable fanedits will take care of this...

Go see it, hopefully more than once. Have a feeling I'll be revisiting this one time and again.

I have the material to get this kickstarted that i can share but my laptop is not powerful enough nor do I have knowledge to do this but I would absolutley love for someone to restore the US Theatrical cut of Luc Besson's The Big Blue featuring the alternate score by Bill Conti.

I have the following on my laptop

The Big Blue - US theatrical version (HD 720p MKV from rutracker) but with agressive cropping
The Big Blue - original Motion Score by Bill Conti (FLAC)

I also have the US Laserdisc and the VHS as well but have no means of ripping the Dolby Surround track sadly.

I do mention this over at OT.com but there wasn't any uptake on it even though i did hear that someone did restore it but didn't share it for some unknown reason but considering it's never been released since it's original VHS and laserdisc and from what i heard that Luc Besson won;t actually allow this cut to be released in the future due to his dislikign of how it was changed, it's a pretty solid title for preserving i think?

Simple project: "recolor" the Black and Chrome version... why? Well, because it is not just the Color version desaturated:
http://screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/194121

It's just a matter of using the Black and Chrome luma with the Color chroma:
http://screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/194122

Quite easy, don't you think? A perfect project for PDB!

• Original Trilogy forum – where all it started
  
• Fanedit Database – you can find here a lot of fan edits
  
• Laserdisc Database – where you could find (almost) every LD!
  
• reDVDit.com FAQs – easy audio/video FAQs
  
• Movie Censorship – find out differences between versions
  
• rewind – the home of DVD & BD features comparisons
  
• DVDDoubleDip - another great DVD & BD features comparisons
  

• Postimage – perfect place to host your images forever
  
• Sendspace – general file host, perfect for temporary files
  
• Advanced Kush Gauge calculator – find out the optimal video bitrate
  
• Wikia logos – tons of logos
  
• Toolstud.io – useful little tools
  
• blah-ray– bad audio on Blu-ray
  
• Shot On What - film stock database
  

• Doom9
  
• VideoHelp
  
• DigitalFAQ
  
• Hydrogen Audio – audio forum
  

• screenshotcomparison.com – the name says it all… hint: as it routinely delete its database, it's not advisable to use it for long term comparisons
  
• Diff.Pics – allows comparison of more than two images
  
• FrameCompare - another screenshot comparison website, made by one of our users!
  
• imgsli - Free before/after slider albums
  

• Caps-a-Holic – one of the oldest and best
  
• DVDBeaver - a lot of movie reviews, often with comparisons between different editions!
  
• DVDlog
  
• HD-compare.de
  
• dvdexotica - movie reviews, often with screenshot comparisons
  
• Bullets&Babes - a forum thread with a lot of comparisons
  

I found this interesting article about switching aspect ratios; put it here because maybe could serve as inspiration for a project...

https://tadleckman.wordpress.com/2012/10...ting-films

I'm having some issues with athoring in Encore. I have 2 DTS-HD, 1 PCM and several dolby AC3 tracks I want to include.

Encore has the option of PCM or Dolby audio. If I use Dolby setting, encore transcodes my PCM track to a much lower bitrate dolby track, all of the audio tracks work in powerDVD. If I replace the track in tsmuxer with the PCM original, there is no sound played for the PCM track in powerDVD.

If I use PCM setting, all of the dolby tracks are converted to PCM, making the m2ts file 5gb larger than it should be. If I replace the PCM tracks with the original dolby tracks in tsmuxer, none of them have sound in powerDVD.

Is there something I can do in encore or tsmuxer to sort this out. Failing that, could something like bdedit be used to change the PCM/ dolby flag on each indvidual track so that powerDVD plays them correctly?

As a special project for myself, I wanted take the Cinema DTS sound mix and sync it to the Blu Ray release. Through the good graces of Jetrell Fo, I’ve obtained the film’s Cinema DTS CD-ROMs from his collection.  I was able to extract the discs and gain access to each of the reel’s audio files---each reel contains 6 mono wave files representing the film’s surround soundtrack (Front Left Channel, Front Right Channel, Center Channel, Lower Frequency Effects Channel, Surround Left Channel, and Surround Right Channel).  

I’ve selected a reel to work-on—one that has a well-rounded mix of normal speaking dialogue and aggressive sound effects, but not involving the film’s climatic sequences.  It's the one where the ship hits the iceberg.  The software I’ve used were the free Audacity and a high-end one, not free, I’ve been using for over a decade, Steinberg’s WaveLab 4.0.

After making my syncs of the 6 mono waves to the clip from the Blu Ray and lowering the sound level of the surround channel by 3 decibels, the real work was in the center channel.  In it, there were passages where the sound level was very soft, like the dialogue; and others where the sound level was very high, like the sound effects.  As is, the viewer would have to turn the volume up and down every 5 seconds, especially when the film’s climatic part comes in.  By applying a limiter and raising the gain, I was able to get the center channel to an acceptable level…

…however, that is my perception.  This is where you all come in.  I need another pair of hears to check-out my work before I work on the remaining 9 reels.

So, here it: a sample of one reel—an MKV video that contains a rip from the Blu Ray with 2 audio options that feature the following mixes:

1. A 16bit/48k, 5.1 channel LPCM of the Cinema DTS sound mix
   
2. A 24bit/48k, 5.1 channel DTS-HDMA of the Blu Ray release, for comparison
   

We decided to merge a couple of subforums together to streamline Fanres a bit.

"Movies" and "Cartoon, TV series" were merged into "Movies, TV and other"

"Restorations, preservations, edits etc." and "Available releases" into "Official and unofficial releases"

"Bug reports" with "suggestions"

Also "Encoding, editing and authoring" was changed to "Audio and video editing" and "Conversion and mux/demux" to "Converting, encoding, authoring".

All threads were moved appropriately.

I'm working on a Star Wars project, where there is few deleted scenes in black & white; I'd like to colorize them, and I'm aware that the only way to do it properly is to do it by hand, frame per frame - but I can't think to do it for thousand frames...

The alternative is to find an automatic way to do that for the whole clip - using, for example, ChromaJig avisynth filter, that is way less than perfect, even if it do something - or feed each frame as separate image to one of the online free colorization app - and even if this method is generally better than the previous, results are not very good in many cases...

Someone colorized a b&w video before? If so, how?