Hey there.  Any luck making your extended version of Jaws 2?  I'm dying to see it.

After a long hiatus (long story), I’m back and last month I finally got the tape from Brazil. It’s a very soft, low quality image of a grainy print (not VHS grain, but actually a grainy film print - maybe 16mm?). There’s a brief preview of Cat People before the movie which looks like a much better film to tape transfer than JAWS 2 received.

The tape itself is very difficult to transfer - I believe the tape is sticky on the inside of the cassette and my Panasonic AG-1980 has nothing but difficulty playing it - I’ve never encountered anything like it. After a few minutes the tape starts squealing and the picture becomes unstable - but I pop in a different tape and everything plays fine. After many short bursts - I finally managed one full capture of the film that I stitched back together.

I did a test of averaging/merging 7 captures on the unique footage since it was so short - however, no capture is perfectly lined with the others due to tape instability, so it may not be the best method. I’ll do more tests but not planning on doing multiple captures of the full film due to the playback problems. The tape is fine otherwise, but I don’t want to push it! A different VCR deck may tolerate the tape better, but that will likely be difficult to coordinate and I have no money to spend on this project.

Question though - does anyone have an actual VHS of a JAWS 2 tv airing? My VHS is incomplete, the DVD-R is highly compressed, and then there’s the issues with this tape. I’m almost satisfied, but not quite.

Wow that’s crazy dedication

(2019-11-22, 09:19 AM)PDB Wrote: Wow that’s crazy dedication

Thank you.  It's an even longer road due to a lack of freetime - but I'm in the testing phase now at least.  Could use some testers

Some news about your project?

(2020-02-12, 05:31 AM)DeafYakuza Wrote: Some news about your project?

Getting there.  I just put some additional finishing touches to the added scenes and the master copy is rendering - need to go through the whole thing again looking for errors.  Then I need to add some kind of "fan edit" advisory intro at the beginning.  Where can I find some of those?

Also - made some art for the release from a rare poster

(2020-02-18, 07:20 AM)RidgeShark Wrote: Then I need to add some kind of "fan edit" advisory intro at the beginning.  Where can I find some of those?

Try looking/asking on fanedit.org.

Thanks Chewtobacca! Finally found them and putting the intro together.

Also - Extra finishing touches afoot! Experimenting with the new Topaz AI Video app and have found ways to improve the footage.  It's nothing revelatory, but does help the low-res footage hold up a little better.  Requires a lot of finessing both before and after - definitely not a silver bullet solution.

Wanted to show you guys a comparison with the AI Enlargement. First I want to temper expectations for what this tech can currently do - medium to closeup shots of people can benefit greatly - especially if the image takes up the full 480i image. Wide shots and 480i Letterboxed sources still benefit, but the neural network enlarger has less to work with. These came out looking unnatural, so I did some post-processing to get it looking about right.

https://screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/853
https://screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/854

That's incredible. Amazing cleanup! Wouldn't have thought that possible. Hope you'll share some of your techniques some day.

By the way, one thing you could try for the upscales is the reduce resolution going into the upscale to the "native" resolution. For example if the VHS capture is in 720*something, it might help to reduce it to the native VHS resolution of I think ... ehm ... best google it but I think it was 300- to 400-ish. And then go with that reduced version into the upscaler. I haven't tried the Video Enhance one yet, but I tried this with Gigapixel and sometimes had great improvements in the upscaling. I think it's because they train it on downscaled images, so it doesn't really know how to deal with footage that is blurry to begin with.