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All that should be done is to utilize the best transfers currently available: German/Italian and have every major audio mono track with alternate language titles.
I finally have the German bds of AFOD and FAFDM on the way but there is a certain different look to the mondo Italian FAFDM which is a different transfer.
The US LD mono is unfiltered and wonderful but the FAFDM LD is cut.
I'm not sure what exactly the goal of this is. It'd be nice to have one version containing all foreign dubs and titles, but far easier to simply make individual ones if necessary. If I were to do one it would have English titles with english mono and Italian mono.
There is no reason for pan and scan. It took years to even get letterboxed releases so why would anyone want to go back to butchered pan and scanned compositions?
Damn Fool Idealistic Crusader
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Basically, the goal is to make a definitive edition of the Dollars Trilogy. As for the panning and scanning, the only reason why I'm even bothering with that is to allow for a seamless open matte of the network prologue for AFOD. The foreign titles I'll see recreated if necessary (for the English titles of AFOD I think all that might be necessary is resizing and regrading so as to blend in more easily), but I'm sure there's already good Italian, English, and German titles for everything, at least as far as AFOD and FAFDM are concerned.
And regarding English mono tracks, at least in the cases of AFOD and FAFDM the German Tobis Blu-rays seem to have good lossless English mono tracks that I'm fairly sure will do just as fine as those on the US laser videodiscs, with the added attraction of being uncut (which is why I have already had the Tobis Blu-ray of FAFDM for a few years). The Italian RHV Blu-ray of AFOD, which I intend to use as a video source on the advice of Lil Brutto, does have an English mono track, but it's lossy.
Regarding the restoration of FAFDM, do you think I might want to regrade to the Mondo Blu-ray? And I'd like to know which Spanish DVD of AFOD would be the best source for the Spanish (Castilian) audio. Impulso or Warner Bros.? I haven't found any reviews for any Spanish DVD thereof, so I can't say I know if anyone had anything good to say about the Spanish audio tracks on them.
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Well, now that I've got better Hexagons for the job courtesy of jonno, let's talk a bit about title recreations. Apart from the PEA logo for FAFDM and TGTBATU, there's also many of the non-Italian and non-English titles, and even some of the Italian and English titles, such as, for example:
[Image: iv2.jpg]
[Image: ev2.jpg]
Both taken from a Dutch DVD containing the Italian version and the UK theatrical cut and retrieved from AFOD's page on Movie-Censorship.com. An ideal recreation for the purposes of this project would be at 1080p. Needless to say, they both need to be regraded to the RHV Blu-ray as well.
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2017-03-25, 11:42 PM
(This post was last modified: 2017-03-26, 12:32 AM by Koopa Luath.
Edit Reason: Update on the mpls production
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Sometimes, jumpiness about perceived visual ruinations of classics can be a good thing. I just now found out that some private collector accidentally discovered lost footage from TGTBATU while trying to make his own fan restoration thereof. Needless to say, I plan to include those newly-discovered scenes in my own restoration of the complete trilogy as possible.
UPDATE: Regarding the MPLS experiment... I tried combining two short video clips with TSSplitter and gave the suffix as ".mpls", and from the look of a playback on Windows Media Player it appears to have been successful.
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2017-03-28, 10:03 PM
(This post was last modified: 2017-03-29, 04:16 AM by Koopa Luath.
Edit Reason: Markup fix
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As I iron things out with the MPLS creation thing, I'm recording the two cassettes of Fistful I got, one the 1988 VHS from MGM/UA Home Video, and the other the 1982 rental VHS from 20th Century-Fox Video. I'm trying to see what the better pan-and-scan job would be for the pan-and-scan version (necessary because of the open matte prologue I plan on integrating into one version, like I said earlier). I am doing the recording with the contrast, brightness, saturation, hue and sharpness adjusted in accordance with the THX Optimizer feature on my T2 Skynet Edition Blu-ray from Lions Gate, and with RCA composite cables. As I do so, I got the idea: why not compare all home video releases as I go along? On that I'm going to need a little help. But, it'll be useful, I'll wager, as I work on these restorations. Also, I'm still trying to get the RHV Blu-ray of Fistful, from which I'll be drawing the video and Italian audio tracks. Regarding the colors, I'm trying to get good browns, blues and greens while maintaining the yellow tint Sergio Leone appears to have wanted.
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Hint: if it does exist, use the THX optimizer found on a VHS tape to get better VHS optimization...
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Thanks, but what I'm trying to do is get good colors based on the Rec. 709 color spec, or else as close to that spec as possible, as I'm planning to do this restoration in high definition at full 1080p. Plus, each release, at least prior to MGM's policy of DVD globalisation, looks different, or so the common wisdom dictates.
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As for bonus features, I'm thinking of starting with the trailers. Using my just-recently-captured MGM/UA VHS of Fistful, I'm going to attempt a mockup of what its trailer would look like on the pan-and-scan discs. As for the widescreen mockup, I'll do it as soon as I can get my hands on any widescreen disc.
Either way, I'm going to need some title recreations, both for Clint Eastwood's name and the actual film title itself.
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A bit of an issue regarding the remastered Blu of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly: when looking for the original mono, would a "V2" on the inner ring suffice to indicate that the English mono track is, indeed, the original mono? Because I looked at a Blu I found at my local video store for the numbers indicated by DVD Compare, and all I could find was a "V2".
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2017-05-09, 07:58 AM
(This post was last modified: 2017-05-09, 07:59 AM by Koopa Luath.
Edit Reason: A spot of clarification
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Update: I just grabbed the Network Prologue from the Fox Blu-ray of AFOD and applied the Yadif process to double the framerate and get the best possible quality for the inevitable 24p conversion. It still looks bad even in standard definition (I haven't yet applied the NNEDI3 and Lanczos filters to upscale it to high definition), but, as the saying goes, "garbage in, garbage out".
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