Yesterday I recorded this Italian movie (IMDB: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0095940) from an HDTV channel; quality is not anywhere real HD, though...

The good thing is that it seems a direct film-to-video conversion, with grain, scratches etc... and, there is even no retail DVD, just VHS.

Bad thing, it misses the end credits, but they could be taken from the VHS; color grading is different from VHS - that is obviously messed up; still don't know if the HDTV is the *right* one...

Thoughts?

Over at blu-ray.com forum a member said that the 2014 release of the AVP & AVP-R double feature on Blu-ray fixed the seamless branching and missing scenes of AVP-R. Does anyone may have this set and could provide the proper unrated version of AVP-R?

Folks,

Wanna hear what REALLY bad noise reduction on an official blu-ray can sound like?

Here's a sample of the film Rashomon with two audio tracks--one from the Criterion disc and one from the Japanese Kadokawa Pictures disc.

https://mega.co.nz/#!6R9B0IoI!hnaxEnDkYJ...5uaDNonPfA

[Image: SS76T25.jpg] [Image: W88qE1T.jpg]

Kadokawa did the restoration itself, which was certainly done properly (4K scan, audio also treated faithfully, blah.). It appears the master from which Criterion authored their disc (lent to them by Kadokawa) was also used to prepare the Kadokawa blu-ray, as you'd expect. Both have practically identical frame-accurate video.

The audio, though, is a different story. Ambient effects (insects, the rustling of leaves, rain) have been wiped out entirely on the Criterion, and dialogue sounds incredibly muffled and hollow - so much so that at first I thought these were two different mixes. However, traces of the obliterated sounds can still be heard faintly on the Criterion from time to time.

A travesty.

Once upon a time, a project maker decided to make this project... but, until now, it's still not released AFAIK, nor known updates are available...

So, maybe it's time to make this project!

What do you think? OAR? Open matte? Both?!?

I've mentioned this on OT in the past, but I'd love to see Jurassic Park given some love. As many will know, the 2011 2D transfer has (among other problems) an awful cold blue colour grading. The 2013 3D remaster made an attempt to restore the warmer theatrical colours but, as part of the 3D conversion, had all detail and grain scrubbed away and other bizarre artifacts added.

It would be great to have a regrade that retains the detail of the 2D BD with the more theatrically accurate colours of the 3D BD. Here is some evidence that shows that the 3D BD's colours are closer to the original theatrical look than the 2D BD.

2D BD
[Image: jurassic_park_10.png]

3D BD
[Image: jurassic_park_3d_21.png]

Original ILM file
[Image: 5a630cee_immaginetuv.jpeg]



2D BD
[Image: v5do.png]

3D BD
[Image: 0ran.jpg]

Film cell
[Image: l46n.jpg]



2D BD
[Image: gpvw.jpg]

3D BD
[Image: sftd.jpg]

Film cell
[Image: m0wJlfV.jpg]


Anybody interested??

I mean, it works remarkably well almost all the time... until you really NEED it...

Two weeks ago, I was going to record a never-released-before-in-HD movie (AFAIK)... OK, not the best movie in the world, but funny nevertheless, strange, sci-fi and with great actors... The Adventures of Pluto Nash... well, my capture card record it flawlessly for five minutes, then it goes banana, and continually stop, rec, blocked image, stop, rec etc... I cried (literally) because I waited that moment for a week... no, not an antenna problem, I watched the whole movie on the TV, so... after that, I discovered that the decoder used for the HDTV - which is AVC - was faulty... while the MPEG2 was perfect; of course, I haven't discovered it before, because this was my first attempt to record an HDTV program - and the previous tests, made some hours before, were OK, maybe due to lower bitrate, dunno...

Well, after that bad accident, I was lucky enough to record several other programs, all available in HD, but just to rewatch them later, and never had a bad frame after that, so... wow, I'm lucky, after all, I thought... classic, I was wrong... yesterday, or, better, today, at 4a.m., another great movie still not available on HD, The Night Flier... I stopped any program, shut down the PC twenty minutes before, just to run it "fresh", and guess what? Windows decided to NOT load... not properly, not even in safe mode... nothing... the damn Windows loading image, and then reset, and again and again... movie started, and half an hour after I was still trying to resurrect the PC... gone to sleep, crying again... today, luckily, I found a way (after many useless other ways) to make it work again...

Now, this night there is another not-in-HD movie (title will remain a secret, until I have it safe and sound recorded on my HD), so please, touch wood, prey, wish me luck... anything, but this night I MUST find the way to record it - properly - with no problems...

De-logo Patch Technique™

What is the De-logo Patch Technique™?
It's a method to get ridden of a logo (usually TV) using a second source to obtan a "patch" that will cover it.

How does it work?
It's quite simple: you need two sources aligned (spatially and temporally); then, take a portion of the source without logo, to make a "transplant" to cover the source with logo; you could do a simple geometrical shape patch - to be the shape of the logo, make elaborated, multi shaped patch - like several simple geometrical shapes put together, to cover for example a logo composed by letters, numbers, symbols etc. or make a mask that cover perfectly the logo.

Why use it, if you have a source without logo?
Good question! Usually, you want to de-logo an high quality source - like a 1080i/p HDTV broadcast, which is the only one available, while lower quality sources are available - 720p HDTV, WEB download, DVD etc.
Using this technique, you have the best quality for the whole image, except for the patch which covers the logo.

What if there is not another source?
Then this technique couldn't be used; you must use another de-logo method, that usually cover the logo interpolating the surrounded details.

Some examples
Here you are the original frame (left), the mask (center) used for a classic de-logo method, and the overlaid mask (right) before the de-logo - (click for 2x zoom):

[Image: original_mask_overlay.jpg]

Now, the original frame (left), a classic de-logo method (center), and the De-logo Patch™ (right) - (click for 2x zoom):


[Image: original_classic_patch_116266.jpg]

The classic De-logo method seems to work well... right? Yes, but only in some shots, usually the most static... see the next examples - two consequential frames:

[Image: original_classic_patch_43828.jpg]

[Image: original_classic_patch_43829.jpg]

Pretty neat, right? WARNING: I haven't tested enough the classic De-logo filter; with carefully chosen settings, it certainly could work better, but it will always produce some artifacts.


The quality of the final result varies, of course, depending on the quality of both sources; near perfect solution is to find two 1080i/p HDTV versions, both with a logo in a different part, and use one as the patch for the other, and vice versa!

Advanced method (updated 2017-11-30)

In some cases, the sources used for this technique have different color grading and/or contrast; it would not be possible to use the De-logo Patch Technique™ "as is"; you first have to regrade one source using the other as a reference, to get a patch as much similar as the source that should be delogo'ed.

Sometimes, the regrade could not be perfect, and the eyes (well, the brain attached to them) are very good to notice some imperfections, in particular straight lines, so to fool them, you could use a variation of the simple logo mask, covering the straight lines and making them less noticeable - I suggest to do a loop of various masks, so every subsequent frame would get a different mask. Also, very important, add a grain plate to the patch, to disguise even more the eventual logo remains.

From top left: untouched HDTV, untouched WEB-DL, simple overlay using untouched sources and a simple logo mask, advanced overlay using colormatched source for the patch, different variation masks, grainplate for the patch and for the final result (and also a color correction, that is beyond this technique)







Variations of the logo mask:

From Wikipedia:

Quote:Color grading is the process of altering and enhancing the color of a motion picture, video image, or still image either electronically, photo-chemically or digitally. The photo-chemical process is also referred to as color timing and is typically performed at a photographic laboratory.

Lately, my memory lacks more than ever... don't know if it's due to my age, stress, or something else... the fact is, I promise to do a thing, and I mean to mantain the promise, but I forgot to do that thing... or, I make a thing, and I must let a person know what I did, discovering some time later I forgot to tell it to that person, even if I was sure I did it... so, I keep remember I'm forgetting something, but can't remember what!

So, to whom it may concern: my apologies for everything! If you think I'm still forgetting something - a project to finish, a capture to make, a file to find, everything - don't worry, even if you have sent one previously, send another PM to remind me what I have to do...

Why I haven't addressed this message to the persons interested? Well, I can't remember who they are all!

Multi-image or multi-frame super resolution (SR) is a technique used to restore detail, while upscaling low resolution images or video frames. Although SR can be applied to native low resolution images or video frames, here we will focus on the case where a high resolution source has been downscaled to a low resolution, as is the case for commercial DVDs.
We will start with an example of a single image. When you downscale a high resolution image to a lower resolution you lose information. Each pixel in the low resolution image becomes a weighted average of a number of frames in the high resolution image. When we upscale the low resolution image to the resolution of the high resolution image the lost information does not magically reappear. The result is a blurry image that lacks detail, as can be seen in the following example. Here the resolution has first been reduced by a factor of two, and than upscaled to the original size.

http://screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/125890

The information about the stripes on the girl's pants and scarf has obviously been lost as a consequence of the downscale. However, if we have multiple images with subpixel shifts much of this information can be retrieved. This effect can be simulated by shifting the high resolution image in multiple directions by one pixel. Each of these shifted images is then downscaled and upscaled in the same way as before. If we then align, average, and deblur these shifted images, we obtain the following result:

http://screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/125895

As you can see much of the original detail has been retrieved.
We have seen that it is possible to obtain a high resolution image by combining multiple low resolution images. The same principle can be applied to video. Video can be viewed as a set of shifted images. By aligning very similar objects in multiple frames, averaging the pixel information, and deblurring, the resolution of a video can be increased. In practise this is of course quite complicated, but the basic concept is the same as the above example for a single image.
An example using the bluray for Star Wars can be seen in the following screenshot comparisons. As before the video has first been downscaled by a factor of two, and then upscaled using SR.

Simple upscale versus SR:

http://screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/125527

The methods used for image and video super resolution have been extensively described in scientific literature. Just type in (video) super resolution in Google Scholar, if you're interested. Commercial software is also available at a reasonable price. As a Virtualdub and Avisynth user I have found that for video upscaling the best performing option at this point is the Infognition software (standalone, Virtualdub plugin, Avisynth plugin). Why don't you try it out?