Lately me and PDB talked about the "pink tint" problem (provisional name, until someone would bring up a better one!); so, without further ado, let's talk about

THE "PINK TINT" PROBLEM


What is it?
It was noted that some releases, often from 1990s and 2000s, present a pink blanket that was not obviously present in the theatrical version.

Why does it happen?
It is still not clear if it was a problem arised during the telecine tranfer, a byproduct of color regrading process, due maybe to get natural skin tones always, even when it's not the case, or something else... who knows? Do you know it? Please post a comment!
 
Which titles are affected?
At the present, it seems any title could be affected.

How can I find if a title is affected?
Sometimes is so clear you have not to look for, you will be able to say that a given title has the pink tint problem few minutes after you start to watch it... but it's not always the case; as our brain is a great tool, we adapt what we watch to "balance" the wrong colors, and we interpret them as right... that's why, often, you have watched a pink tint prolematic title without knowing it (me included!).

The most easy way to find it out is a direct comparison between different editions; in this case, usually it's quite easy to find it out. But it's always possible to desume it even without a direct comparison; just look for some clues:

• bright lights: flashes, explosions, fire, flames, spaceship engines; if not directly pink, you can spot it in the halos
  
• bright objects: white walls, that's the best choice... but also water, that, instead of blue, cyan, green, it could have a magenta, violet color; sky as well, could be violet instead blue
  
• too natural skin tones: even when they should not have natural color (the one you can get in a bright sunny day), in the pink tint titles often they have it... or, at least, they seems more natural than what it should be... a face under a blue light should have a colder tone, why a face in front of a torch should have a warmer one; instead, in a pink tinted title often they look natural under both circumstances
  

Project Info:

There were two goals with this project. The first goal for me was the complete one project for each of the movies in the the Alien Trilogy. Alien was a regrade to the 95 LD with the Sensurround track, Aliens was the TV Cut (eventually the TC also) regraded to the 95 LD and the final was Alien 3 to be cut the Workprint (WP).  In other words its an attempt to re-cut Alien 3 as close as I can to the tape(s).

For example, in order to recreate the WP's opening credits I had to make 24 cuts to TC and 19 edits to the 5.1 soundtrack. That involved moving shots to recreate the flow of the WP and then covering up the sound edits by rebuilding the 5.1 dialog and music track. And that's one example. In the end I will try to make this as close to the WP as possible. For unique WP shots I will either use close substitutes from the AC/TC, for example the unique EKG shot from the opening of the WP is replaced with the exterior Sulaco shot from the same time or find the original footage if I can. I was able to recover a few WP shots from trailers and EPK video. Things such as Ripley "for the last time" shot and Golic's original death when releasing the Alien. Some shots like the "bigger cage" shot will have to be left out altogether.

I was going to keep the existing color timing until one day I came across some lobby cards for Alien 3 and they looked a lot like the color timing on the WP tape. So I thought I should use the tape as a basis even though it most likely is theatrically inaccurate. Point of fact: there are actually 3 WP tapes. One without a time code (which I don't have) and two with a time codes. The two with the time codes are from the same source but differ slight, with one tape having title cards for the reel changes and the 20th Century Fox logo. The colors are also similar with a heavy bias towards blues , oranges a lot of red but with one tape having a lot of green in its picture also. I balanced the look between the two tapes to come up with an average that I'll refine some more after editing is finished.

This is actually the most difficult project I've undertaken. Not only does it have a massive amount of editing of video but also audio, a new territory for me.

Video:
2010 Blu-Ray (AC and TC) video color regraded to the Workprint tapes and cut into the WP edit

Audio:
1. 2010 Blu-Ray Dolby Digital 5.1 re-built from scratch from the AC/TC BD but adding in dialog from the WP tape if needed.

2. The soundtrack from the original WP tape that is dialog and sound effects only, no music.

Pics:
BD/WP regrade (WIP)

I seem to have come across something from my past that I've had for years but never really gave a second thought.
After joining this board a while back now it has reignited my passion around Laserdisc's and other versions of movies.
Currently re bought a Laserdisc player and currently working my way through buying all my fav discs again.

Anyway, I found a disc I got back in 2005 of the Matrix from eBay. I can't even remember why I got it to be honest, I just did.

From looking at it again it seems to have something close to the original colour timing of the movie when first released and also is cropped in 1:85 which looks fantastic on a HDTV, admittedly its only in 720p but still looks amazing.

Here are some screenshots from it, I'm thinking it would be great to replace the audio with maybe the LD PCM or something as the audio that comes with is okay.

After I have found that the LD has a different color grading than BD/DVD/HDTV, and that its master used *may* be a silver retention processed print, I thought to give a try also to Alien³ laserdisc...

First, we know that DVD and BD have the same color grading; here I compared the LD just to my PAL DVD only because I can play it on the fly, but of course the following should apply to BD as well, so I'll refer to BD from now.

I have two Alien³ laserdiscs, one NTSC US, that is the only one ever released there (so, no THX or DTS or AC3, even if there is a Japanese THX and AC3, and a French THX one) and the other is the PAL UK. They have similar color grading, but not exactly the same; usually I think that a US (or JP) laserdisc is the way to go for a US film, but this time the US LD is not that good, it is cropped on bottom and right in comparison with the PAL LD, so *probably* the color grading is wrong as well; then, for this movie, I'll take the PAL LD as color reference here.

To me, it seems like the Alien Resurrection "affaire": the LD has more golden skin tones and richer colors, while the BD has natural skin tones but duller colors in some shots; there is not a single variation for the whole film - for example, is not the case where one is colder and the other warmer, or one leans towards magenta while the other towards blue and so on... there are instances where the LD is more magenta, while sometimes the contrary happens; the only things that seems costant is the skin colors, which are more natural and paler on the BD, and often the green/blue is a lot more saturated on LD.

Again, a quick'n'dirt comparison, so this could change after the proper comparison will be ready; I should prepare it to show you the differences, but I'm lazy and it's late, so that's all for now (not representative of the whole difference, but it gives you an idea) - top LD, bottom DVD:




Can't say the LD has the "right" color grading; I have seen many comparisons between LD and DVD or BD and almost all the time there are just slight difference, color wise, due mainly to color spaces, luma levels and saturation settings, once they are adjusted the color grading is, more or less, the same; but sometimes it differ greatly, and could not be matched adjusting the various setting; in these cases, most often the older master have the "right" grading, thanks also to the fact they usually use a release print to make the master, hence retaining the theatrical colors, while nowadays the norm is to scan the negative and, because it has no color grading, they are forced to make it digitally, with the result that it could not be the same of a release print scan; without talking about the teal&orange trend, and the fact that it seems impossible for the studio to release a new version of an older title without "refreshing" its color, to be more "modern"...

Take this as a late night rant of mine, call it my nervous breakdown. See it as me stomping on the ground ala Steve Martin. Rants are so rare coming from me (actually this is my very first) and I'm very sorry but I've been put down by the enormous waste of time of these past weeks, hours and hours spent pointlessly on glitchy authoring programs. F***k them!

As the title suggests, my open question is (and it's not a sarcastic question but a honest one): can anybody here ACTUALLY produce a proper Blu-Ray release? With a menu... no, forget even the damn menues... with frigging CHAPTERS? Becuse I sure couldn't, and I had no idea it was gonna be this difficult when I started my project. Here's me thinking the hardest part was to MANUALLY FIX OVER 150 FRAMES to obtain a better result than the commercially available "fixed release". But nooo...

Sure most of us enjoy our releases on digital files to store on hard disk, sure, I have three myself! But it looks like there is no way to make an actual blu-ray release and add to one's own collection, or am I overlooking something essential here?

Chapter markers have been my biggest burden in the last week. They basically have to be encoded within the video from the editing/exporting stage (in my case Premiere), after that comes the export to an uncompressed intermediate file that I then convert into a BR-compatible h264 file... but it's not like the h264 encoder cares to keep track of chapter markers, right? So I find myself with a 100 minute film and no chapters... and the best part is, they can't be added later! No, because no authoring program I tried so far can, becuse they are not encoded into the h264 file to begin with!
And the programs that COULD add chapter also insist on re-encoding the whole bloody film with their own generic presets, what's the point of passing through the x264 encoder to get the best quality if then I need to encode it again? I might as well use Adobe Premiere's terrible h264-BR output directly and settle for authoring it with a castrated bitrate on Encore, or Vegas, where a glitch prevents from loading chapters or save them and I haven't figured out which subtitle format CAN be used since none seem compatible.

I better chuck it here. If anyone has ever successfully created a blu ray with chapters from scratch and without having to re-encode the h264 file, do let me know.
As far as I know it's impossible, we simply can't add a single blu ray to our collections.

Good night, sorry for the breakdown.

I realize that this topic has been discussed by a lot of us in many different conversations throughout the forum, but it doesn't look like we have a dedicated thread for this yet... So, here it is


I'm aware that the thread title and subject matter is all relative and the answers from different users will vary, because there are a lot of factors involved and the terms are all kind of ambiguous as well. So let me try to clarify the question by breaking down what I have in mind when bringing this up....


As of today, February 2nd of 2017 (I mention the date because I realize that technology advances and what was "acceptable" and referred to as "fast" two years ago, does not apply now, just like today's stats will be outdated in two years time as well) what hardware setup do you need in order to be able to render a heavily-filtered (I'm talking about upscaling,cleaning/enhancing image, color corrections,grain plates, logo-patching via separate source-basically "the works") 1080p lossless encode within a reasonable amount of time. Again, I realize that "reasonable" is too vague...

In my mind, a "simple" project (for example, just de-interlacing, IVTCing, minor color/contrast/brightness corrections OR grain plate added) I believe should be done in about 4-5 hours for a 2 hour film when encoding 1080p LAGS.
For a more extensive project that involves a lot more work and the film split up into numerous different settings throughout, different filters/plugins/etc. I believe that 8-12 hours for a 2 hour film 1080p LAGS is reasonable of an expectation.

In contrast, my current machine takes about 16-25 hours for the "simple" projects and 36-96 hours for the big projects assuming everything runs properly, which is not always the case and I've had to restart the encode on many of this long renders. It sucks! I'm running an older laptop with just a Core 2 Duo T6500 2.13Ghz, 4GB of RAM and little VRAM on the integrated graphics. It's so frustrating that I have seriously lagged on moving forward with some of my projects that need more work and have focused on audio-only projects lately. There is a light "at the end of the tunnel" for me though, as my best friend has a spare machine he's not using that is not a power-house, but much better than what I got now, that he's giving me and I should have it in a couple of weeks. (he's in another state and within the next few days will be mailing the board/cpu/ram/gpu I need to put into the extra tower I have here at home that needs it's "guts" replaced) Will be upgrading to an AMD Athlon II X4 645 3.1Ghz quad-core with 16GB DDR3-1333 RAM and some gpu (he'll let me know tomorrow, doesn't remember what's in there because he has a few machines) Hopefully that will help speed things up, especially since it's already overclocked by about 10% (and he's a pro that knows what he's doing on the tech side, so I trust the overclock being done "right") should yield even better results... But will they "conform" to my expectations? Will this rig meet the "minimum" requirements?



So, are my expectations of rendering times reasonable in today's world? And, if so, then what kind of MINIMUM hardware setup would that involve? (specifically - CPU, type and amount of RAM/VRAM)



Any input is appreciated

Lately I experienced a lot of crashes, and I thought it was due to hard tasks asked to my poor old PC, using too much filters on a single avisynth script... then, crashes occur also not using avisynth... and I'm starting to think about the causes.

I'm pretty sure now that the guilty is an HDD; easy, you can think, but the fact is, it's not a single, whole disk, but just a partition; I was forced to make two logical partitions, due to the fact Windows XP can't "see" disks bigger than 2GB; the strange fact is the other partition seems to work well!

Something that happens:

• disk is usually very slow during writing, exept with some softwares - TSmuxeR is blazing fast! Some example? 28hrs to rip a 30GB BD, 10+hrs to split a 3GB file in 100MB chunks using 7zip... and keep crashing... using another drive, times dropped to around 1.5hrs for BD rip, and few minutes for the file division!
  
• some files are impossible to delete! They seems to be used by some programs, but that's not true...
  
• copying from/to it takes forever
  
• strangely, using this partition doesn't affect the capture quality, maybe because it's relatively slow.
  

Evil Dead II - Open Matte (Upscale Project #2 v1.3)

See project origin here: https://fanrestore.com/thread-1071.html

Video:
The open matte DVD was upscaled with a combination of super-resolution and nnedi with filters to reduce macro-blocking and edge enhancement/halos. The resulting image was further processed and then re-grained with a real grain best matching the BD version. The video was then color corrected with a 35mm LUT and color matched to some 35mm frames and the 35mm trailer scan from book of the dead(www.bookofthedead.ws)

Audio:
1. Mono PCM 2.0 from the wide screen laserdisc

2. Dolby Digital 5.1 from the open matte DVD.

3. Dolby Digital 2.0 commentary from the open matte DVD.

Pics:




Thanks:
Doombot: for testing
MrBrown: For the Japanese PCM soundtrack

Those of us that work on various projects are all very familiar with having to deal with material that is sped-up or slowed-down due to NTSC/PAL conversions. Granted, most of the time we are slowing PAL audio back down to IVTCfilm, but there are those times where is has to be done the other way around.

In most cases, the audio has to be speed corrected and sometimes pitch has to be addressed too. This is where a rather large amount of degradation occurs that most people are not aware of. If possible, it's always best to use the "original-speed" audio, even if it has to be re-synced to match the project that your working on.

I've been trying to figure out the best way to demonstrate this to people visually, so that the importance of this becomes apparent. After ripping my CD collection recently, I've been having to go through the audio and label some of the unique stuff I have (personal recordings, etc) While doing this, I discovered almost 80 CDs that were copies made on professional equipment of my old audio cassettes. While going through all of it, I was curious about what the spectral analysis of the audio will show me. Even though in the higher frequencies, technically, it's all "noise" - there is a frequency response all the way up to 44.1Khz.

This made me realize that I can easily show how the audio is affected by slowing down or speeding up the audio WITH a pitch correction (In cases where ONLY the SPEED is being manipulated, this does NOT apply)
So, I opened up one of the tracks and slowed it down by 4% applying a pitch correction, saved it. Re-opened the original track, sped it up by 4% applying a pitch correction and saved that. Opened all three in Spek and took some screenshots...



Here is the original, unaltered audio track:



Here is the same audio track, sped up: (notice the frequency cut-off that occurs)



Here is the same audio track, slowed down: (notice the even larger difference in cut-off - THIS happens every time PAL audio is slowed down AND pitch correction has to be applied)






In most cases, the difference will not be this glaringly obvious, which is why I intentionally used this as an example since the audio fills 44.1Khz all the way through - unlike anything we'd see in any project for a film/tv show/etc. Regardless, even though the difference might not be this obvious, it STILL occurs which is why it's important to always try to use the "original-speed" audio.

Hope this helps

Color matching: recolor a video source (usually an higher quality version), to match a second video source used as reference.

Regrade (aka recolor) a video source without using a reference, but only following personal tastes, indications, "feelings" is not color matching, thus projects like these can't be called preservations or restorations, but just fan edits (fanfix, in particular).

As far as I know, at the present, there is NO way to regrade a video source to color match 100% a reference source! (retaining all the image quality and parts of the higher quality one)

There are several techniques to achieve this task, and I'm trying here to explore some of them; if you are aware of any other ones, please let me know!

Merge chroma

This is the best way to achieve (almost) perfect results; just align spatially and temporally the two sources, use the luma of the first source and chroma of the second (reference) source.

Pros: colors are not simply matched, but they are the original ones!
Cons: often the two sources don't match; spatially, they could have different sizes, different framing, rotated and/or distorted image; temporally, if there are some frames missing from the reference, it will be obviously impossible to match those frames. Also, the luma of the two sources could differ greatly in contrast, brightness, gamma, and could lead to wildly different final color appareance.

Color matching tools (video)

There are many softwares around that try to match, mimic the colors of a reference source and apply that to another source; again, you need to align spatially and temporally the two sources.

Pros: usually easy to use and automated, they could match the colors quite exactly
Cons: different softwares/plugins use different methods to accomplish the task, so they have different behaviours, but none could match 100% every frame, every shot, every source; where one is perfect for a given shot, fails on another, and vice versa. Also, some of them require the two sources to have the exact framing and size.

Color matching tools (image)

There are other softwares that do the same, but only to images and not video; you could find an image from a film cell, or a screenshot, then find the corresponding frame of your source, and then match the two.

Pros: this could be the only way to match two sources, if the reference video is not available.
Cons: without best consistent reference images, it's impossible to reach a good result; even with such images, hardly the matching setting obtained from a single image could be used to regrade perfectly a whole movie, but could be useful for a given shot or scene; of course, the more the images to match, the more close the matching will be.


Compare & regrade by eye

This is by far the least precise way to color matching two sources, but sometimes the only one if the previous ones are not possible, or they give not good results.

Pros: you don't need fancy softwares and a steep learning curve, just a simple editor which can allow color settings.
Cons: even if used by editors with perfect color vision and perfectly calibrated displays, it's quite difficult to make a good color match of two sources only by eye.


I noted that sometimes a mix of the previous techniques leads to the best results. Usually, I use only video matching tools, and combine the results to obtain the best final matching. For example, working on my last project, I discovered that doing a second pass (regrade a regraded source), using a different plugin, could help to improve the color matching. Also, the latest technique is to use the merged chroma source as one of the reference, and average it with other color matching regraded versions to further refine the results.

Conclusion: even if it's (still) not possible to color match two sources perfectly, with good will, experience, knowledge, a lot of time and patience, it's possible to catch the "spirit" of the color grading of an inferior quality source, and apply that to a superior quality source, without noticeable problems; almost no one will be able to spot the colors differences only watching the regraded version, unless it is put in direct comparison with the reference source..,