Ghost in the Shell

[CSchmidlapp]

(Converted from HDR to SDR but not by me )

Whoa! Thanks for posting that. Another small step for ghost-kind.

That comment was in no way meant as a slight on the good fellow who produced these screen shot's.  
Or that I'm able to produce better results using my means.

Here is what I get using an Avisynth script I put together from pieces posted over the forum.



I think it is quite a nice approximation of what it would look like on a 10bit 4K HDR panel.

When viewing in realtime (MadVr, latest version), I think there is still to much of a push toward Red.
A white balance on the opening credits would produce an image much closer to how it looked on 35mm.  
Its also to bright, and correcting that gives it a bit more of a neon look I remember quite vividly.
The screenshots above from the Avisynth script not so much.
 
This seams to be a common thing in transfers to home video from IP's, where the characteristics of the release print film, and development process, don't seem to be taken into consideration.

On my original project render we talked about briefly earlier in the thread, you shed light on the fact there is to much of a Green push in the mid tones based on the original cell scans.  With the UHD down-convert there is much more colour information to play with, and therefore I'm going to have a play soon

[BronzeTitan]

Another "whoa!"! Thanks for the new shots! Working noise_reduction/edge_sharpening/etc in UHD, with all it's extra & finer info, really should make for a much better end result.

That comment was in no way meant as a slight on the good fellow who produced these screen shot's.

I know. Giving credit where credit it due. (While we're confessing, I did steal my saying from Neil Armstrong [first steps on the moon]. Sorry Neil, please don't sue me ... I loves NASA and gives it all the money!) (Well, okay, that's a stolen quote, too.    )

With the UHD down-convert there is much more colour information to play with, and therefore I'm going to have a play soon

Looking forward your samples! (This means I must upgrade to UHD. Just when I've caught up to HD with low-cost hardware and free software, they up-the-ante. It's highway robbery! Sure, take my money, but give me the UHD !    )

[Doctor M]

It's unlikely there is 4k worth of detail in any step of GitS's creation. If the 4k disc looks good, it's only because they've made a pig's ear of every single 1080p release. This is another candidate for conversion from UHD to "plain old" HD.

[der richter]

hello, i am der richter the person behind Judgment. recently someone on my project blog mentioned this thread and suggested that i should reply.

first of all i might be able to get rid of some confusion about the HDTV raw you were talking about and i was using. the actual source was an MPEG2 HD TS from BS-i/BS-Hi (BS Hi-vision, now BS-TBS), probably from around 2000-2005. that TS was used to encode the original WMV3 raw that i obtained (from a certain russian site) and used for my first release (CRC32 2A6DFEBA). as far as i know the original TS from the TV broadcast wasn't released and is unobtainable. the 720p HDTV raw tagged with PSNR was encoded from that WMV3 raw, at least that's the conclusion i came to when in looked into that release and after i talked to the people involved with that release.

so i read the whole thread and you were talking about my first release which is basically just a remux of the original raw. though since then i made a new one (based on that HDTV raw) with colour corrections, level corrections, etc (CRC32 1CE4C716). since i didn't have any reference material all corrections are based on my own judgement. anyway i will just quote my release post:

This is a re-encode of my original release, since the source/MPEG2 stream is not available anymore. This is a huge improvement over the original video and as before a lot better than the BD source.
This encode is not completely issue free and perfect. not all of the MPEG2/WMV artifacts could be fixed completely without damaging other areas of the video. The video is still quite dirty in places and not all spots have been fixed. Tbh one could probably sit on this for an eternity and won’t be able to fix them all.

Video:
– Several 1000 frames (severely damaged by MPEG2/WMV artifacts) were restored (per frame)
– Several 100.000 spots on several 10.000 of frames were removed and fixed (per frame)
– Frames edges were fixed (per scene)
– Remnants of the Logo have been removed
– Colour and range correction have been made (red/yellow tints etc.) (per scene)
– Some combing remnants were fixed
– Heavy sharpening artifacts were removed as good as possible (ringing/haloing)
– Chroma bleeding has been fixed
– Everything was cleaned up to remove encoding artifacts
– Everything was stabilised
– Banding was removed (per scene)
– Frames were matched to the BD source (audio matches properly now)

Audio:
– Japanese audio: Sourced from a DTS-HD MA track
– Japanese audio: Cut to make it properly sync with the video (bad mastering, BD audio wasn’t in sync on the BD)
– Japanese audio: A missing dialogue line was added
– Japanese audio: The original Japanese ending theme was re-inserted (U2’s “One Minute Warning” replaced with “Reincarnation”)
– English audio: Sourced from the 6.1 DTS-ES track instead of the UK BD’s DTS-HD MA track because of severe mastering problems, same problems on the US DTS stream
– English audio: Problems were missing sound effects and bad mixing (more infos here and here)

Subtitle:
– The opening Sign was redone
– Song lyrics were added
– Dialogue styling was adjusted
– Some lines were fixed

the work of a few years went into this project. anyway i am not going to claim that this is the holy grail and ultimate release, but it certainly is a big improvement in my opinion. see the comparison here between the BD (first Japanese BD release) my first release and the new filtered version ("Judgment filter" represents just the filtering not the encode). from some history of the various filtering stages you can look at this and that comparison.

recently i got my hands on a proper MPEG2 TS from WOWOW which uses the same transfer the original HDTV raw uses (see this comparison and "WOWOW ts"). i was planning to use it for a third release. though now with the new UHD BD i might change my plan a little bit.

i also got my hands on screenshots of the UHD BD, see this comparison, and made matching screenshots of the BD and my two releases. the source of those screens are from this thread. i don't know how those screenshots were made and how the HDR meta data was handled. they could have been discarded. if any kind of tone mapping was done i can't say which method/algorithm/curve was used. so they should be taken with a bit of caution.

atm i am playing with the thought of using the UHD BD and the new MPEG2 TS i got from WOWOW to merge details from each other into a new clip, without going further into this. as a reference i did something similar with the anime movie Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust. the BD had lost details in the higher and lower ranges and had very bad and ugly noise there instead. the DVD in comparison still had those details, but was differently "warped" (new transfer) per scene. so linear stretching didn't work to match both spatial. in the end i could write a script that automatically matched both transfers/sources per frame and was able to merge lost details from the DVD into the BD. i did some more things to the source, like fixing scratches and dirt, some colour and level corrections, etc. for the interested this comparisons shows what i did.

anyway, if you have any questions for me regarding my Ghost in the Shell releases or related, feel free to.

[Doctor M]

So your original release was a MPEG2 TS that you never had, that someone converted to WMV3 and you remuxed it as the Judgement release?

Then the WMV3 already inverse telecined when you got it? I always felt the interlace artifacts and decimation issues were some of the biggest problems. Macroblocking can always be mitigated.

In your screenshots you show Judgement, Judgement v2 and Judgement Filtered. I'm not sure I know what v2 is from your explanation above.
(Although the first thing I see in screenshot 1 is that a snap or something on the Major's collar disappears in the v2 and filtered image, but are present on the v1 and Blu-ray. Not to mention all the lost grain.)

Btw, thank you so much for your original release. I've always loved it. I can't wait to see what you do next... although I wouldn't mind getting my hands on the WOWOW files.

[der richter]

So your original release was a MPEG2 TS that you never had, that someone converted to WMV3 and you remuxed it as the Judgement release?

yes. i only did the subtitle work on my first GitS release, incidentally it was also my very first project and what got me into avisynth etc. 

Then the WMV3 already inverse telecined when you got it?  I always felt the interlace artifacts and decimation issues were some of the biggest problems.  Macroblocking can always be mitigated.

yes. though for the green panning scene at the beginning with the numbers, i believe that was intentionally made like this.

In your screenshots you show Judgement, Judgement v2 and Judgement Filtered.  I'm not sure I know what v2 is from your explanation above.

v2 is just the encode of the filter and screenshots of the actual released file. since filtering took quite a lot of my computers resources and it was easier to test hundreds of encoding settings on it, i decided to encode it into a lossless intermediate file first. that's what the filtered screenshots are from.

(Although the first thing I see in screenshot 1 is that a snap or something on the Major's collar disappears in the v2 and filtered image, but are present on the v1 and Blu-ray.  Not to mention all the lost grain.)

yeah that spot was judged unintentional and just be dirt. so it was removed. sry, if you like grain the HDTV cap shouldn't be to your liking (at least in that aspect) in the first place. the whole thing is littered in noise (the WOWOW TS i have is even more noisy) and because of the re-encoding to WM3 it's also completely artifact ridden. imo what was left of the grain (in the WMV3 raw) is mostly unrecoverable artifact ridden dirt, sadly. though don't misunderstand me, i would leave good/clean grain untouched. if the BDs weren't such a denoised blurry mess i would have liked to use that grain and merge it back into my release, though that just on a side note.

on another side note, if i do another release i will try to preserve more of the grain or merge grain from a cleaner source back in. or do it the other way around, using for example the UHD BD and merge the broken luminance details from the HDTV cap back into it. though i would like to have a look at the UHD BD first.

there is also the possibility to join me in my work and influence the final outcome, like the_E_y_Es did when he marked thousands of spots for me by hand.

Btw, thank you so much for your original release.  I've always loved it.  I can't wait to see what you do next... although I wouldn't mind getting my hands on the WOWOW files.

the file is around 12GB and i don't mind sharing it. though since i am not accustomed to the rules here yet i am bit reluctant to post any files here openly.

[Doctor M]

Private Message sent, der richter.

[CSchmidlapp]

Welcome Der Richter.
Your project sounds amazing . Thanks for taking the time to visit here good sir.
I created a simple 'Music Only' track Id like to give you for your project.

[BronzeTitan]

hello, i am der richter the person behind Judgment.

Hi, and welcome to FanRes! And thanks for Judgment, it's info, and the work you put into it! 

I never could get straight the pedigree of GITS with all the various abbreviations and resolutions and iterations (for restoration projects).

Is this the correct pathology?

1) HDTV MPEG2 HD (1080i?) .TS capture (sometime in 2000-2005)
2) WMV3 HD file (1080p?) was a re-encode of the MPEG2 (when?)
3) "PSNR" (short for ??) WMV3 HD file (720p) was a re-encode of the WMV3 HD (1080p?) (when?)
4) "WOWOW" MPEG2 HD (1080i?) .TS capture is an independent capture (when?)

BTW, do you know anything about a digital-download (?) extra from a DVD release, mentioned earlier in this thread?

SO ... Judgment (version 1) was the file/samples used in my earliest comparisons (for visible area, and for color testing from published backgrounds posted as samples at various websites)?
AND ... Judgment-1's source was #2 (above) and Judgment-2's source was also #2?
AND ... your release-name Judgment means your "my own judgment"? 

If you don't mind, would you mention the software (and add-on filters/plug-ins) you used, and your opinion of each's effectiveness for it's purpose? Were there particular procedures that worked miracles for particular fixes? Aside from the AUDIO, did you use any commercial releases as fill-ins or corrections/enhancements? -- if so, where were they inserted?

I hope you don't mind all the questions -- we Titans have really big noses (i.e. "nosy"). 

BTW, when you begin your remake, would you consider starting a new thread here to document your procedures and progress? That would be cool!

[Doctor M]

From what I gather it is:
1) HDTV MPEG2 HD (1080i) .TS capture (sometime in 2000-2005)
2) WMV3 IVTC'd 1080p encoding posted to a Russian site.
3) "Judgement", der richter's MKV remux of #2. Apparently not re-encoded.
4) "PSNR" (an anime release group: http://anidb.net/perl-bin/animedb.pl?sho...p&gid=2258 ) - 720p re-encoding of #2. (Probably early 2007)
(Although I disagree about the source. PSNR has different duplicate, missing frames & interlace artifacts than #3, so likely sourced from #1.)
5) "Judgement v2", der richter's cleaned up re-do from #2. (Released 2017, and yet we all missed it...)
6) "WOWOW" MPEG2 HD (1080i?) .TS. A raw capture of a Japan satellite TV broadcast likely from the same master as #1.