Evening all,
I'm ProgMetalMan of OT. I'm 17 and find archives and reconstruction quite fascinating, but probably won't be of much help on the matter. Anyway it's nice to see you all again!

I don't think I've posted anything here yet, so hi

Yesterday a new user made his first post, and guess what? A spam post... it occurs few other times; while I ban the guilty users temporarily, they spammed again when the ban period finished, so...


WARNING: from now on, users that will post spam will be banned forever!

Recently I started a thread on OT - http://originaltrilogy.com/forum/topic.c...opic/17854 - and, because I never did it before, I thought to restore a trailer... easy task, I said myself... well, not hard like restoring and entire movie, but a bit difficult; in particular, the audio, because I'm not that expert in that field...

OK, I'm working on EP7 trailer #2; took the DCI rip as main source - that is really superior even to 4K youtube versions, and iTunes download (resized to correct aspect ratio) to replace non-English audio and video; next will be EP7 trailer #1, then some 1997 SE trailers.

Stay tuned!

Update 2015-05-31 00:43 CET: both EP7 DCP and SE 97 trailers released

Well, we (the FanRes members) are ready to release some interesting projects, and I wonder if you would like to adopt a catalog number system for the releases...

It will be great if we have a given number for each release, so we could refer to that call it, for example, 10001-BD instead of "movie title [release name] version 1.1 with audio fixed and color improved"...

I thought to use #####-XX, where ##### is the catalog number, and XX is the project format, like

• BD = Blu-ray
  
• DV = DVD
  
• UB = UltraHD Blu-ray
  
• MK = MKV file
  
• etc.
  

• 1 = movie
  
• 2 = animation
  
• 3 = music
  
• 4 = bonus
  
• etc.
  

Soft+Open Matte™

What is Soft+Open Matte™?
It's a method to display an open matte video with or without soft matte; applicable also to the open matte scenes found on variable aspect ratio sources.

Why?
Because someone would prefer an open matte version, with more images on top and bottom, while someone else would like to watch the OAR version.

How does it work?
Using a matte mask that will be overlaid on the open matte version, masking top and bottom parts of that, recreating the OAR version.

It's too good to be true...
You know what? IT IS TRUE! Of course, there are pros and cons...

PROs:

• avoid to have two different versions - open matte and OAR
  
• less BD-R discs/files
  
• works with BD-R and single file
  
• filesize increase negligible in comparison with having two versions - actually, it would be a bit more than just half that size
  
• retains part of the images that would actually lost in an OAR version, giving at the same time the chance to see it in both formats
  

• one frame gap every one minute unavoidable in most players, except MPV and SMPlayer (up to date); hardware behavious to be tested yet
  
• no subs with the OAR version*
  

Those of us that have worked on various projects have, at some point, had to deal with de-interlacing interlaced footage. Now there are numerous different ways of doing this, with some rather decent results to complete nightmares. All of this is usually dependent on the resolution of the video, the bitrate (the lower it is the more macro-blocking/noise/artefacts get introduced) and the Codec used (mostly MPEG2). I don't want to discuss the various methods as everyones "mileage will vary" depending on numerous factors.

However, while working on the "Something Evil" project, that finally has a new source (more in this thread) I noticed something in the de-interlaced footage. (I was using TDeint in Avidemux 2.5 exporting using Huffyuv)

I really like the real-time preview in Sony Vegas of multiple different video source on a frame-by-frame basis that is extremely easy to navigate. This is how I noticed that the footage that I de-interlaced (top-field-first) on many scene/shot change would have a chroma-bleed of frame A into frame B or chroma-bleed of frame B into frame A, at various spots, interchangeable, with no particular pattern. I thought to myself, "what if I reverse the field order when de-interlacing the footage?" The result is now that the chroma-bleeds happen at EXACT opposite frames, therefore, each frame can be salvaged.

Andrea suggested screenshot comparisons and this is a great idea

frame 84694 and comparison between de-interlaced top-field-first and bottom-field-first:
http://screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/128834

frame 84695, same comparison as last frame, but you can see the chroma-bleed reversal in relation to choosing different first field:
http://screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/128836

frame 3851 was chosen here for a few reasons... it is NOT at a scene change and shows how more detail is brought out by overlaying the bottom-field-first at 50% over the top-field-first helps produce a slightly sharper image as all horizontal info from both fields in present in the single progressive frame instead of just half (granted, at this lower resolution the difference is not as big, but I suspect this could help a lot with HD sources)... especially noticeable in the "for sale" sign and phone number underneath
http://screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/128837

So... yeah, just some weird stuff I noticed. With this particular source, I noticed this problem with almost every de-interlacing method I tried and the same difference when altering first-field order...

Hi,

I just wanted to draw attention to an issue I have with all the releases of "Psycho" so far. The latest Blu-ray is certainly not lacking in quality in my book, but Universal still insists that this version is the "original, complete, unedited theatrical version of the film as it was released in 1960".
Their words to me in an e-mail back from 2010, before the actual release. I told them that the German print of "Psycho" contains uncensored footage of a few scenes. But since that rarely gets shown anymore and has been replaced with the "official" US-version on most TV-broadcasts I could not provide footage to prove it.

But now I got lucky! A local broadcaster here in Germany aired the old print again and I recorded it. The quality is not great but good enough to show the differences. And now I finally got around to put together a YouTube video that compares both versions. Since I am not allowed to post links, I suggest you search for "Psycho UNCUT" on YouTube if you are interested.

And a quick e-mail to Universal would be nice so that they just might restore these scenes properly. Alas the quality of this TV-recording is not good enough for a restoration. One would at least have to get to the master elements of the German prints (if these still exist). And I would bet that these shots are also present in French and Italian prints of the time, as they had less strict censorship standards.

Thank you all in advance for your support in bringing this classic back to it's real Director's cut!

For those that don't know, this was a television horror film directed by Steven Spielberg that premiered on CBS on January 21, 1972. For some reason Spielberg has tried to "bury" this film in the "sands of time" and, therefore, this film has NEVER had an official release in any format. There is a low-quality VHSrip floating around from a TV airing on Starz!Family that is in a WMV format. A few months ago, the UK tv station "Horror," broadcast this film a couple of times and Mass5160 (on OT) was kind enough to capture both airings and has provided me with the files. They have a small "Horror" logo in the upper-left part of the screen and towards the end there is an "up next:..." banner on the bottom-left part of screen, very briefly, for about ten seconds. The files are at a resolution of 544x576, using the MPEG2 codec with a bitrate of ~1600kbps and ~1800kbps (very weird that the two broadcasts have different bitrates) and have very decent sounding clean audio (especially in comparison to the vhsrip copy that has a LOT of hiss and was encoded at a crappy 64kbps using WMA) that was encoded using the AC3 codec.

Of course, I'm doing all editing, clean-up, etc in lossless format using Huffyuv. I just got done de-interlacing both "Horror" sources. Now, I am encoding a video where I am overlaying one on top of the other to get a slightly better "final" picture. This helps nullify some of the noise and artifacts a little bit. Once this is done, I have to work on patching the logo, which will have to be done using the VHSrip source as there is no other source available. I already IVTC'ed the VHSrip source to use for patch on the "Horror" source once I slow it down from 25fps to 23.976fps. Of course, I will have to correct speed/pitch on the audio as well. Once all of this is done, I plan on re-sizing this to 720x480 using the SuperResolution technique and then I will author it as a DVD5 (anything more than that will be overkill considering the sources I am using) I will add English subtitles (which I already have put together) and probably the Russian subtitles since I have those as well.

This will be posted on MS

Regardless of response here, I am finishing this project and releasing it and I hope some will enjoy it. Will be posting comparison screenshots between the VHSrip/tvrip and the "Horror" sources soon, as well as comparison screenshots between sources and "final" result. This project is 80% finished already, as I started working on it last month (one of the reasons, besides HDD space, that my WATWD project has been temporarily on hold)

Is there any interest in this or am I doing this one mostly for my own benefit?