Anyone know the best avisynth tools for cleaning up a ld capture? Specifically, raindowing, dot-crawl and other the other joys of a composite signal.

In this thread, we will announce the promotion to Junior Project Maker of Registered users who have released at least one project, and to Project Maker of Power Users who have released several projects (and are longtime members).

Today, the new promoted members are:

The Aluminum Falcon - Project Maker

zoidberg - Junior Project Maker

Congratulations, guys!

I'm pretty sure there are some members who have released projects lately, and had not promoted yet; feel free to post your suggestions here.

Project Info

While Citizen Kane and, to a lesser extent, Orson Welles's follow-up The Magnificent Ambersons are well regarded today, the 1943 film Journey into Fear is often forgotten and extraordinarily underrated.

Despite not receiving official directorial credit, Welles created in Journey into Fear a unique thriller with extraordinary long takes and Wellesian aural flourishes. His third and final feature film at RKO stars most of the familiar Mercury Theater ensemble- Joseph Cotten, Ruth Warrick, Agnes Moorehead, Everett Sloane, and, of course, Orson Welles himself.

A more pulpy adventure than the previous two endeavors, it follows an American engineer in Turkey, who desperately tries to avoid assassination by Nazi spies on a ship full of colorful characters.

In 1943, Welles was no longer in good graces with RKO (perhaps a factor in his lack of official directorial credit). Like The Magnificent Ambersons, Journey into Fear was the subject of radical studio cuts in order to truncate the length. However, unlike Welles's second film, Journey into Fear today survives in two extant versions - a European cut and an American cut, modified by Welles himself, which contains narration and an additional ending coda.

This restored version collects all footage still surviving and compiling it into one unified cut, not unlike Universal's official Touch of Evil Restored Cut or The Munich Film Archive's Mr. Arkadin Comprehensive Edition. The Restored Version here is similar to the occasionally screened Munich Film Archive SD cut, but is superior in terms of audio and video quality.

As the film is not commercially available on home video in the U.S., this custom upscaled BD was sourced from an assortment of DVD and laserdisc releases, which were then post-processed for the best quality possible. To my knowledge, this is the first time that the film has been presented in its entirety at the proper 23.976fps film speed.

Don't expect miracles with the quality, but if you've never seen Welles's third and final effort at RKO, this edition is the ideal introduction and better represents what Orson Welles intended before the RKO interfered.

Video

• R2 Spanish DVD - European Cut [PRIMARY VIDEO SOURCE - best quality]
  
• Laserdisc - American Cut
  

• R2 Spanish DVD - European Cut
  
• Laserdisc - American Cut
  

Project Info

Back when the Attack of the Clones was released in 2002, IMAX screenings were strictly limited to 2 hour films. Therefore, AOTC (2 hours and 22 minutes) theatrically had to be cut about 22 minutes. At the time, it was also cropped to 1.81 to fill more of the IMAX screen than the original 2.35 ratio would permit.

Fortunately, George Lucas did not supervise this edit. Whoever did clearly caught a lot of flaws in the bloated original film and was particularly brutal in axing the worst of Anakin's excesses, as well as unnecessary subplot sequences in general. Actually, this IMAX version winds up being decently similar to fan edits that succeeded it.

No CAM or TS of this IMAX version exists but many extensive cutlists were created at the time. I reconstructed this based off of information from several sources, and it should prove a reasonable approximation of the IMAX cut until a proper reference source is found (highly unlikely, if ever).

In full disclosure, this is actually an older project that's been sitting on my Hard Drive for awhile. Project files were lost in that crash I mentioned, but I was able to encode a nice BD25 compatible MKV beforehand. Despite its color timing, the BD was used as the source because, at the time, I didn't want to put an HDTV stream through multiple processes of re-encoding, especially because I was considering matching the 1.81 aspect ratio originally. All in all, it's not perfect, but a BD50 V2, color-corrected to match the theatrical timing, is far off for me. (Have a lot of other projects to do in the meantime).  

Partial Cutlist (taken from one web source)
- Original meeting with Palpatine right after the assassination attempt
- Meeting Jar-Jar at the elevator
- Small cuts right before Coruscant chase
- Anakin levitating the orb and some dialogue in Amidala's chamber
- Obi-Wan, Mace and Yoda discussing Anakin
- Padmé saying goodbye to her handmaiden
- Library Scene
- Padmé and Anakin meeting with Queen on Naboo
- The Meadow scene (entire thing)
- Part of fireplace scene (quick and painless)
- Boba turning Slave 1 to fire at Obi-Wan
- Meeting Owen, Beru and Cliegg
- Part of meeting with Dooku and Obi-Wan
- Any discussion after Obi-Wan's transmission and attack (scenes with Bail Organa)
- Small cuts in the droid factory scene

Video

• US 20th Century Fox BD
  

• US 20th Century Fox BD
  

I had some titles listed as such; after a quick research on dvdcompare, I reduced the list:

I'm just curious to see if anyone here is also going to Celebration in Orlando this year (April 13-16). We are taking our ten year old. This will be my first time and I swear it's only for my son....

Hi everyone,

as stated in some Terminator 2 Sound discussion Thread, I am going to send my Terminator 2 Squeezed Japan LaserDisc to spoRv for bit-correctly transferring the Audio streams from the Disc to Computer for use in further Projects by forum members.

But postage is not the cheapest for such a sized package, so it would be wise at least to check if there is some other LD in my collection that should be preserved as well. Okay, there are some LDs that not need to be preserved, either because they already are (english languaged Star Wars LDs i.e.) ore are in other kind of projects kind of restored.

Also in some cases the DVD and/or BD releases are well done enougth, or the LDs are not so well done, so that a preservation would be futile.

Because I am in no cases an expert, I just have listed my LD collection, and now I am asking you for input, what LD(s) I should send to spoRv, that they would be transferred for someone to use.
Maybe someone has already some project, and now there is some LD just fitting into his project for a bit more.

My List:
https://www.adrive.com/public/9ekxtP/Las...ection.ods

password: fanres

Also: I may try to answer questions regarding the LDs, but it may take time, I am just every two weeks near my LD collection.

Thanks.

Hey everyone!  New to the site...kind of.  But NOT new to FanEdits!

I guess you could say that the first "FanEdit" I ever saw was possibly the best "bootleg" of Halloween 6: The Producer's Cut that one could find in 2006. I don't know who put it together; the back of the cover references a no longer functional website, onegoodscare.net, but no individual responsible. I was so excited to have it I made a LightScribe DVD for it (remember LightScribe??), and printed out the DVD cover and slid it into a case, and put it all together to fit in with my DVD collection. The edit was bewildering to me.  They used the theatrical DVD for all of the common footage and seamlessly blended in the footage from the best source of the Producer's Cut they could find. It was amazing! I felt like I was in on a secret that only a few people knew about. I felt like I was a part of something underground that was built by people like me, people who had a love and passion for movies...only they had technical savvy and could make these projects. Still, I felt like I was in.

It wasn't until a year or two later, I believe, that I came across what is probably the gold standard of FanEdits, though at the time I still didn't really know that there was such a large community. It was Star Wars, Episode IV - A New Hope: Revisited by Adywan. Halloween 6: The Producer's Cut was one thing; that was a bootleg of a cut of a film that just hadn't been professionally released, something that would circulate around conventions that I could never attend. ANH:R was something else entirely. Color correction, audio fixes, rotoscoping laser beams that had sound but no visual, removing lame Special Edition changes (and further subsequent studio edits) that didn't add any real value or even made things worse. The list of edits was so long my jaw hit the floor when I read them all. This wasn't just a new cut of Star Wars...this has become the DEFINITIVE cut of Star Wars, Episode IV. It was also my gateway drug to the FanEdit world.

FanEdit. Fan Restoration. FanFix. Preservation. FanMix. So many styles of editing a movie to tweak it one way or another, and I enjoy many different styles. I like aDigitalMan's extended version of The Terminator, and others like it, like Captain Khajiit's The Last Of The Mohicans: Hybrid Cut and Adabisi's extended cut of Se7en. I'm also enamored by the choices made by editors like JMB with Batman Begins: Dark Cut; using footage from another movie to change the way events unfolded in one small scene to make more sense of the story was brilliant! And I love how Dr. Sapirstein was able to use footage from the trailer that didn't end up in the final cut of the movie to make Evil Dead that little bit creepier.

I've always been a movie fanboy, and I love that there are talented people out there who can make these cuts and restorations so that OTHER fans can enjoy those movies in other, and sometimes better, ways. Arrow, Criterion and Scream Factory don't always get their hands on some of the movies that need to be restored or reassembled from other cuts of the movie that got lost to time. The super active members of this community (like admin spoRv) are the people who might be able to make it happen first, or even at all! And sometimes a fresh perspective on a movie makes it better for me to enjoy when I didn't fully enjoy it the first time, like Avid4D's Man Of Steel: Recut (which I can't find anymore!). I might not be able to contribute much, but I want to be a part of this community in some way. It would mean to me what these movies mean to all of us.

Can demodulation of the RF AC3 track be done via software (ie applied to a capture of the analogue track of adequate resolution) or can it only be done via hardware? I doubt it but I thought I'd ask anyway.

This project will primarily focus on two things. First of all, upscaling the transfer found on the Scanbox and Worldwide Cinema DVDs, which is arguably the best transfer available for this film. There is an official Blu-ray release, but the transfer on that is itself an upscale from an SD transfer. Here's a comparison between the official blu-ray and my upscale: http://screenshotcomparison.com/comparis.../picture:0

If nothing else, at least the colours are much better.

Secondly, reconstructing the extended version. As you may know, there was a version of this film, about five minutes longer, that played in film festivals before the general release. It includes the infamous "piss drinking scene". To the best of my knowledge, this version has never had an official home video release. I have a VHS rip which is reportedly from a bootleg tape. I will be reconstructing this version, using the available material.

I'm also hoping to be able to present the alternate ending via seamless branching.

Video
Scanbox DVD and Worldwide Cinema DVD as primary source. Hong Kong Blu-ray for the Chinese opening titles and credits.

Audio
The main source for the Cantonese and Mandarin tracks will be the Hong Kong Laserdisc. Although, the movie is actually edited on that release to fit on a singe LD, so missing segments will be sourced from DVD. The English dub will sourced from the Scanbox DVD, which has it in good quality. I'll also include the Bey Logan audio commentary from the HKL DVD.

Subtitles
Most likely the English subtitles from the HKL release.

Extras
TBD