A Better Tomorrow - Cinema Polish

[captainsolo]

Someone in a LD group I’m in has the rare 1997 Bandai John Woo set for sale. Is this the same one you have listed in the OP as already having the audio captured from? I’d love to get it but it’s still pretty expensive and without any English subs.

[Colek]

I have all Laserdiscs of ABT1, except Hong Kong one, but I have capture of it from friendly user here.

If you mean this boxset - https://www.lddb.com/laserdisc/13723/BEL...o:-Box-Set - I do own it.

[captainsolo]

Thanks that is indeed the one I mean. That saves me a chunk of change!

[Colek]

I am going to release regraded preview on BT today, I don't really have much time lately to sit down and work on projects as such, so I am only putting out the regraded video with Laserdisc/JP Bluray audio and English subtitles for now.

Regrade was based on HK Laserdisc, there are few frames in this encode that are 'bad', but they should not interrupt your normal watching experience, as they're visible for literally just 1/4th of second 2 or 3 times. It'll be fixed once I have time to get on this project again in next release.

[PDB]

Looks good Colek

[Colek]

Thanks, PDB, I've made it using Dr. Dre's tool based on 25 different frames, I am happy with the result (it works way better than original release), but I still need to work on it slightly. I didn't want to keep people waiting for this release though, so I decided that releasing main feature regraded is the best I could do now. University is lots of work for me right now (programming).

[iguanaclerk]

I just watched it. Thanks for the work you put into this, especially sourcing and syncing the mono sound. Did you use an auto contrast/brightness filter or something (either intentionally or by accident with the encoder you used)? The brightness bounces around from frame to frame, often flickering and pulsing up and down. It looks similar to the auto brightness function on some televisions and results in the same distracting artifacts. Other than that, the general LUT seemed nice, but it's hard to tell with the contrast going all over the place.

[Colek]

I did not use auto contract/brightness filters, but I think the issue is with LUT itself which has problems on very grainy shots (that's where the artifacts come from). I would just like to work on these shots manually, but I got no time as for now. The colors/brightness overall varies in original remaster as well, my thought is that John Woo when he originally released the movie just didn't really take color grading as important.

[iguanaclerk]

I found an encode of the original bluray, and it doesn't seem to exhibit the same behavior. I will try to show it here.

Two side by side frames from the bluray: http://www.framecompare.com/image-compar...n/01BFNNNU
Two side by side frames from the regrade: http://www.framecompare.com/image-compar...n/WYLWNNNX

It doesn't look like flickering brightness that I've seen on film prints or anything like that. Rather, the brightness steps up and down when the film gets brighter or darker, compensating for the change in lighting, doing so suddenly over one frame. These frame steps happen several times over a shot.

I thought perhaps that the brightness fluctuates similarly in the bluray (and that it was a filter applied by the restoration team), but that wasn't noticeable because of the shallow contrast and color cast. However, I boosted the levels of the two blu ray frames, and they still don't seem to suddenly shift the way they do in the regrade. http://www.framecompare.com/image-compar...n/01B1NNNU. I'm not quite sure what's going one, but it's present throughout the film to varying degrees.

[Serums]

The screengrabs look great, Colek. Do you plan to make it available elsewhere?