This started really simple: I just wanted to take the audio of the 1996 US CLV LaserDisc, which is digital 44.1 kHz PCM, and sync it to either the 2001 UK DVD (which is of course PAL) or the 2019 US/CA Blu-ray or both. But then I found that both had their own problems.

The 2001 UK DVD is the original theatrical cut of the film. Being an old PAL DVD, it's encoded as a 4:3 frame with a resolution of 720 x 576 (pixel aspect ratio 59:54 so it ends up displayed at 768 x 576). It's also the only widescreen home video release of it (i.e. in the original theatrical aspect ratio of 1.85:1 or thereabouts) since the 1996 LD, or at least it was until the Blu-ray came along last year, because the US DVD was pan & scan (presumably heavily cropped at the sides). It is also unfortunately an old MPEG-2 DVD at a low enough bitrate to fit on a single-layer 4.7 GB disc, same as the US double-sided THE EXORCIST DVD I upscaled recently for Halloween. Apart from that, it's very grainy because it's from a film source, and the audio is 192 kbps Dolby AC-3, but it is at least the original film for the most part.

The 2019 US Blu-ray Disc, on the other hand, looks significantly better and actually pretty damn good overall, especially for a Disney Blu-ray (if it's not already clear, I have been hurt before... see Beauty and the Beast, Cinderella, etc.) But there are two main issues with it. First off, the audio is once again lossy Dolby AC-3, although at least this time it has a respectable enough bitrate of 320 kbps and it actually sounds pretty decent from what I can tell. But secondly, and much more annoyingly from my perspective, Disney's been up to its old meddling antics again with this disc and they've redrawn some of the animation specifically for the purposes of censorship, as far as I can ascertain. Most of these moments seem to pertain to them trying to erase some fairly subtle and fairly 90s humour, which must have been determined to be A Bit Too Rude for 2019:







Of the above four now-censored scenes, the only one that even slightly raises an eyebrow for me is that second one, wherein the protagonist Max reacts with intense excitement to having a positive interaction with the girl he likes and then proceeds to dance around the room with a seemingly amused school secretary... but in the theatrical/LD/DVD version, as you can see from the above, he's not particularly self-aware of where he's putting his hands. I can definitely see that being interpreted as problematic, if noticed at all, although honestly it's only ever for maybe 1-3 frames at a time that you'd see the offending hand positioning so it's not exactly something that jumps out at you unless you're navigating frame by frame or specifically looking for it. The others are innocuous and in some cases fairly hilarious imo, particularly that first one (which would only conceivably be an issue if it was more than a few frames of contact and/or wasn't in what is very clearly coded as a clichéd dream sequence in the mind of a pubescent teenage boy). But that's not even really the point: the point is that it's been changed and is now no longer the original cut of the film for that reason. And as you'll know from my constant banging on about it with STAR WARS and THE EXORCIST and all those other films that have been messed with, I'm not OK with that.

To make matters worse, even after I then decided to basically just stick with watching the DVD in general (with my custom LD audio), I then discovered one really huge sync error on the DVD, in the video I intended to keep rather than the audio I intended to discard: the title sequence at the very start has the text "WALT DISNEY PICTURES presents" appear in sync with a flourish in the music before fading out for the next piece of text to take its place, except that on the DVD, it doesn't do either of those things. Instead, it appears 16 frames (2/3 of a second) too late, putting it very noticeably out of sync with the music, and abruptly pops out of existence instead of fading out as it should. So even the already low quality DVD video isn't good to go without further edits.

So now, as with THE EXORCIST, this has turned into a video-and-audio project instead of a straightforward audio resync.

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Firstly, I've already resynced the LD audio to both the Blu-ray and the DVD (although in the case of the DVD, I deliberately did NOT attempt to resync the audio to fall in sync with the "WALT DISNEY presents" text because this would sound awful and it wasn't "fixed" on the DVD audio anyway), so the initial goal's already met. But I want to get the DVD looking at least basically watchable, even if I can't necessarily make it look great.

The easy bit was arguably fixing the sync issue with that mis-timed text, so I did that quickly by excising some frames from before it (which clearly weren't meant to be there), looping some frames of blue background afterwards, and creating a dissolve to fade the text into the looped background frames in an approximation of the original fade out from the theatrical/LD/BD cut. Easy peasy:


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But getting the noisy 2001 DVD encode to look decent in 720p is a bit trickier. I could theoretically just leave it as 720 x 576, but I'd have to re-encode it anyway regardless because of the edits to the video, and I'd also have to either use non-square storage ratio (e.g. by setting "-sar 59:54" in the encoder) or rescale it anyway to get square pixels at 768 x 576, and I figure if I'm going to be doing those things then the quality is probably going to suffer *more* than if I just go ahead and upscale it (because at least if I up-and-then-downscale I can do things like antialiasing to try to improve it at least a tiny bit).

I'm messing about with different upscaling methods like I did on THE EXORCIST and I think I'm probably going to just keep using the same basic methodology that I used on that one for this as well. I tested out some specialised upscaling filters/scripts like SuperRes and so forth but they all resulted in an overly sharp image that just accentuated the already heavy grain, video noise, edge enhancement ringing/haloing and video compression artefacts that were in the original DVD encode. The way I did THE EXORCIST looked... well, fine, but certainly not mindblowing. It's softer by design than most of the rescaling filters people seem to commonly recommend, because I honestly feel like it looks better that way due to all the noise/artefacts in the original source. Still, it's highly subjective, and often the differences between one method and another are so minute that I can't really decide definitively which looks best. What I did for THE EXORCIST was a bicubic upscale (4x) followed by a bilinear downscale to the target resolution; I did that initially on this as well, but I figured maybe it's also worth giving a spline method a bash to see how it looks. It is indeed sharper, which is why I didn't use it before, but I don't know if it necessarily looks bad and in some ways the little bit of extra sharpness arguably helps with the hard outlines of the animation.

Here's how it looks after the "Exorcist method" of bicubic upscale then bilinear downscale. Obviously this has also been compressed by Vimeo so it will probably look a bit worse than it would if you were looking at an x264 encode directly on my machine (same pw again):

Finally, a couple of particularly noisy/artefacty comparisons between bicubic-then-bilinear and bicubic-then-spline36 scaling so you can see how small a difference it is, but nonetheless that the spline scaler does give a sharper image (for better or worse):

Out of curiosity, since the changes are very minor and in very localized spots, I wonder if to make the most of the blu-ray's quality, would it be possible to try and isolate the specific changes and sort of mask around it (on the upscale) and overlay it on top of the blu-ray with a bit of feathering to help blend it in?

(2020-11-16, 04:53 AM)LucasGodzilla Wrote: Out of curiosity, since the changes are very minor and in very localized spots, I wonder if to make the most of the blu-ray's quality, would it be possible to try and isolate the specific changes and sort of mask around it (on the upscale) and overlay it on top of the blu-ray with a bit of feathering to help blend it in?

I initially was considering selectively inserting whole frames where needed but there's basically no way it would ever blend... I would absolutely do what you just said and indeed have talked (off forum) about doing exactly that but it's currently way beyond my skillset. I've done very little video editing in general and certainly nothing of that sort. But I know exactly which frames would need changed and where, so if I were to figure out how to do it to a high enough standard I definitely would. Apparently it should be possible in Vegas, which I bought a while back but still haven't really used yet.

That is outrageous they bothered to change these things. Way more trouble than it was worth on their behalf. A few are very pointless and a few I semi-understand but it's still ridiculous. Nothing was that bad and probably happens fast in motion anyways.

Quote:but it's currently way beyond my skillset

Pipefan413, I've tackled these kinds of problems before. The one that seems easiest -- as a start/test of specific method here -- is the final one, the dressing room, and I volunteer to take a look at fixing that one for you if you wish. No guarantees at this point, but I do get into these kinds of things so if you send me materials I'll at least give you serious thoughts if not full-out work.

If you're interested then I'd request the segment in both formats saved as Largarith lossless codec avi if that's doable for you (and if indeed I do the full/finished work I'd return it to you also lossless of course). No audio needed of course.

So, there's my little offer

(2020-11-16, 10:11 AM)WXM Wrote: Pipefan413, I've tackled these kinds of problems before. The one that seems easiest -- as a start/test of specific method here -- is the final one, the dressing room, and I volunteer to take a look at fixing that one for you if you wish. No guarantees at this point, but I do get into these kinds of things so if you send me materials I'll at least give you serious thoughts if not full-out work.

If you're interested then I'd request the segment in both formats saved as Largarith lossless codec avi if that's doable for you (and if indeed I do the full/finished work I'd return it to you also lossless of course). No audio needed of course.

So, there's my little offer

Aye the butt edits are probably the most achievable. One's a few lines needing drawn back in and reversal of a recolour. The other is literally 2 wee black lines (buttcrack).

The dance bit is certainly annoying because it's quite a lot of frames and they're all separated out to like 1-4 at a time or so. But I think compositing a hand back into a fairly small section of the image is doable too if some care and skill is employed.

The problem though, and the thing that basically made me abandon the idea completely and instead focus my efforts on upscaling experimentation, is scene 1. They've shifted not only the main character's entire head (hardly an element you won't notice if composited back from a lower-quality source), but also his back. It's a huge portion of the frame, for something like 5 or 6 consecutive frames, maybe more.

I can definitely segment out each censored scene as Lags, just might not get done today. I'll let you know. Thanks.

Quote:annoying because it's quite a lot of frames

that's always a brutal thing. I did a brute-force fix of something for one of my own projects once, frame by frame using Photoshop, and because it was a many-seconds-long shot it took me like a hundred hours work for just those few seconds! Silly determination. (Not saying I'd go that far for you here though, sorry! )

Upscaling, I'll leave that to you on your end, happy to get your couple o' different attempts at the DVD side upscale. It seems Gigapixel AI or something would be great, eh? (You've surely seen the Felidae Upscale thread just a bop down from this one currently.) It seems you (also) suspect that approach could be the golden ticket here. Sadly, I don't have Gig AI or its cousins though, nor do you it appears.

Since it looks like you're needing only a few mere seconds total upscaled, have you asked someone who has that super upscaling software if they'd do it for you? It's not like you're asking to have a full ep of something upscaled. If you strung together the entirety of all full five shots into one file, what would the running time be? Twenty-to-thirty seconds I'm wildly guessing?

Anyway, it seems like you have a good handle on what ideally needs to be done. I guess we'll see if I'm of any use ala taking-a-look-wise or will-tackle-some-work-wise.

I heard somewhere the US 4:3 DVD features the same alterations (which appears to have been done film based on the IP or interneg and not digitally) as the Blu. Disney supposedly made these changes as far back as the US VHS/TV airings, due to alleged complaints from parents during the theatrical run. The R2 DVD is a different transfer than the R1 and is somehow based on the unaltered theatrical version.

I also heard Goofy Movie had a DD 5.1 mix but the US versions were DS. Possibly this 5.1 mix was only heard on a rare theatrical or overseas run (another example, American Graffiti, had a 4 track stereo mix made for the overseas runs whersas the original US mix was mono).

(2020-11-16, 11:13 AM)WXM Wrote: It seems Gigapixel AI or something would be great, eh? (You've surely seen the Felidae Upscale thread just a bop down from this one currently.) It seems you (also) suspect that approach could be the golden ticket here. Sadly, I don't have Gig AI or its cousins though, nor do you it appears.

Since it looks like you're needing only a few mere seconds total upscaled, have you asked someone who has that super upscaling software if they'd do it for you? It's not like you're asking to have a full ep of something upscaled. If you strung together the entirety of all full five shots into one file, what would the running time be? Twenty-to-thirty seconds I'm wildly guessing?

Honestly? Probably more like 10 seconds or less. But it isn't *just* that the footage would need upscaled; it also has a *significantly* harsher grain structure, way more noise from extreme MPEG-2 compression (and other pretty bad artefacts like haloing from intense edge enhancement typical of low-filesize DVD encodes like this where they want to lower the bitrate without getting a really soft looking image), and the framing is different so I'd need to also drop down the Blu-ray to match it. The colour is also a bit different. For some shots, such as the dream sequence bit, I'm pretty sure even the best upscaling effort would still make the reversions stick out like a sore thumb, and I'm no Harmy/oohteedee so I don't have any illusions about being able to tackle such a thing without both significantly better technical resources and significantly more experience dealing with this kind of thing. It would be nice to try, but frankly I have much bigger priorities right now: some real-life crap is going really really badly at the moment, for one, and I'm mostly distracting myself by buying, capturing, and eventually syncing a metric f***ton of LaserDiscs before they rot themselves out of existence (which in itself is no small feat, since I don't want to have to redo it all over again later if there's something wrong with my archival chain). So I wouldn't necessarily be looking to upscale just insert shots at this stage, I'm saying I've upscaled the entire film from start to finish using a fairly simple script I wrote, similar to one I used on my Halloween project. It's hardly going to blow any minds, but it works, and gives a watchable (if very obviously upscaled) result.

(2020-11-16, 11:14 AM)SpaceBlackKnight Wrote: I heard somewhere the US 4:3 DVD features the same alterations (which appears to have been done film based on the IP or interneg and not digitally) as the Blu. Disney supposedly made these changes as far back as the US VHS/TV airings, due to alleged complaints from parents during the theatrical run. The R2 DVD is a different transfer than the R1 and is somehow based on the unaltered theatrical version.

Interesting, and also kind of worrying because it probably makes it even less likely we'd ever see the unaltered version released ever again. The LaserDisc is unaltered as well but looks like crap next to the Blu-ray (obviously) and arguably the DVD. It's a CLV disc and it never got a CAV release which doesn't help with things like horizontal high frequency smearing and so forth.

(2020-11-16, 11:14 AM)SpaceBlackKnight Wrote: I also heard Goofy Movie had a DD 5.1 mix but the US versions were DS. Possibly this 5.1 mix was only heard on a rare theatrical or overseas run (another example, American Graffiti, had a 4 track stereo mix made for the overseas runs whersas the original US mix was mono).

I don't think I mentioned in this post but did talk elsewhere about the 5.1: the UK DVD claims to *have* a 5.1 mix, but it doesn't. The box also has other errors like claiming it has subtitles that it doesn't have, and so on.



I wonder if they planned to include it then had issues sourcing it, or if it maybe didn't actually have a 5.1 mix to begin with and this DVD box error is the thing that started a rumour about a 5.1 mix existing. I have a copy of TRAINSPOTTING that claims to have the original Dolby Stereo as PCM, but it doesn't, and I realised that the reason it had that mistake was that they'd just reused the same inlay template they previously used for SHALLOW GRAVE because they left the copyright notice for SHALLOW GRAVE on it instead of it saying anything about the copyright status of TRAINSPOTTING...

I wonder if the BD - apart the forementioned censored bits - has a good video quality; if so, there are IMHO three solutions (from best but hard to work with):

1. replace only the censored part of the image with upscaled DVD by hand
   
2. replace only the censored part of the image with upscaled DVD "automagically"
   
3. replace the whole censored shots with upscaled DVD
   

If you provide a single censored shot from BD and DVD (both untoched), I'll test a DVD clean&upscale, and if the result is near to BD (no promises, though!), could be used as solution #3.