Film logo preservation and talk thread

[deleted user]

@pipefan413 That is horrifying. Incomprehensible. I don't care about the movie much, but if this was me, I'd find the best DVD, train an AI and then AI upscale it. Should work rather well for 3D stuff I imagine. Or just straight out try with Topaz Video Enhance if lazy.

[pipefan413]

@pipefan413 That is horrifying. Incomprehensible. I don't care about the movie much, but if this was me, I'd find the best DVD, train an AI and then AI upscale it. Should work rather well for 3D stuff I imagine. Or just straight out try with Topaz Video Enhance if lazy.

Indeed.

I'm veering toward "lazy" for the time being mostly because

1. I've never even used Topaz before, never mind anything more advanced

2. I have about a million things I want to get to a watchable state relatively soon so spending loads of time on what should basically be a fairly simple edit ("should") seems uneconomical time-wise

However, perhaps that would be the way to go. I just dunno where to even start.


To be honest, I think I'm probably going to begin with the LDs because I *think* that even the earliest DVDs were straight-to-digital transfers that never involved any film stock, whereas the LD transfers were 35 mm scans. This is partly why I was asking about things like TooT in the BATB:WIP thread: I'm curious what it might look like if I were to combine several LD captures. I've got the DTS 5.1 off the last US DVD already, I believe alinskey has the JP LD's AC-3, and I've got the PCM off the CAV LD as well (one of the LDs I have is a sealed copy of the PAL UK one which might be handy as a resolution bump for something like AutoOverlay). However, I would also like to be able to fix the start of the Blu-ray for those who might not want to watch a standard def LaserDisc capture.

[deleted user]

Topaz is really simple to use, not much work involved.

About LDs, I'd say generally the AI upscaling works best with digital sources, analogue captures less well, or require a specifically trained model perhaps.

[pipefan413]

Topaz is really simple to use, not much work involved.

About LDs, I'd say generally the AI upscaling works best with digital sources, analogue captures less well, or require a specifically trained model perhaps.

I suppose that's logical enough, you get more fuzzy-lookin' quirks with analogue that don't really exist in the same way on DVD... with DVD the bigger issues are *too much* sharpness in my experience (gravelly looking noise and horrible edge enhancement halos).

[jonno]

Topaz's performance with analogue stuff (or rougher digital sources) can be massively improved by doing a careful denoise pass first (e.g. with Neat Video).

I'm still not overly keen on the way it handles text, though - when I'm doing trailers and such, I tend to cut in the credits from another upscaler (I quite like AE's detail-preserving upscale).

[pipefan413]

Here's a really big one for me and it's one that absolutely infuriates me every time I remember it... TOY STORY.

Y'know the iconic 3D animated version of the Disney castle logo they created specifically to go with the fact that TOY STORY was the first fully 3D computer animated film ever made? That was so key to the film that they made it part of the film's score, giving it an equally iconic (and now intensely nostalgic) orchestral soundtrack, which on the CD soundtrack is the beginning of "Andy's Birthday"? Yeah, they butchered it on the Blu-ray for no good reason.

Well, I had a look at the original UK DVD and decided that it's perfectly watchable as is, so I don't really see much point in faffing about with the Blu-ray for the time being. It actually looks extremely good despite being a fairly low-bitrate DVD transfer, probably in no small part because it's a direct-from-digital transfer with zero grain (which is a shame but even the DTS LaserDisc transfer looks extremely digital and grainless so I'm not convinced it's from 35 mm either, it's a pretty late LD).

I took the DTS from the LaserDisc and aligned it very very carefully with the slowed-down-to-24/1.001 fps UK DVD video. *All* editing of the audio was done by calculating which DTS frames needed removed to align it well, and then cutting the data directly in a hex editor. I also fixed the DTS headers in a hex editor before doing the editing itself, since they're not quite right straight out of DTS parser. The only edit that wasn't a straight trim was at the start, where I had to remove a small bit of the tail end of the THX logo sound (which doesn't appear on the DVD): here I just checked for the best possible edit point so as to not cause an audible pop then dropped in 49 frames of pure silence encoded as DTS from the very beginning of the LaserDisc capture, replacing 49 frames of unwanted sound, right before the film soundtrack starts in earnest.

Each DTS frame on a LaserDisc DTS bitstream begins with a header which starts with the following bytes, after the header has been corrected from how it's spat out of DTS Parser:

7F FE 80 01 FC 7C DF F2 62 C0 0D 3A 80

I put together a pretty detailed breakdown of the header in a spreadsheet, the most relevant bit of which looks like this:



Note that "fsize" = 3583, which means each DTS frame is 3584 bytes long. So I can just search for "7F FE 80 01 FC 7C DF F2 62 C0 0D 3A 80", then highlight blocks of 3584 bytes and cut them as necessary, which is exactly what I did. For example, to select 25 frames of DTS, 25 x 3584 = 89,600‬ bytes. The bits highlighted in blue in the above image/spreadsheet are bytes that are written somewhat inaccurately by DTS Parser. It writes fsize as 00111000000000 (binary) which is 3584 in decimal, but it should count from zero which makes the correct value 00110111111111 which is 3583 in decimal. Similarly, it interprets the bitrate as "open", as in "unspecified", which I don't think is exactly "wrong" but LaserDisc DTS is 1234 kbps (DTS CD format) which should ideally be coded in the header as the binary value 10110.

Similarly, each frame contains 32 blocks ("nblks" = 31) of 32 samples ("short" = 31), which is 1024 PCM samples. That was useful for looking at the waveforms in Audacity and seeing where each frame started and ended.


EDIT: Here's the fixed opening with the LaserDisc DTS over it!

pw =

One-Eyed Bart

For comparison, the Blu-ray:

[pipefan413]

Good info:

By the way, the Shout Factory release of John Carpenter's film "Someone's Watching Me!" has the Warner logo designed by Saul Bass in 1.37:1.

Excellent. Ta, @Onti!

[SpaceBlackKnight]

Good info:

By the way, the Shout Factory release of John Carpenter's film "Someone's Watching Me!" has the Warner logo designed by Saul Bass in 1.37:1.

Excellent. Ta, @Onti!

Unfortunately, the Big W opening logo on the 4:3 version is noticeably cropped from the widescreen version (luckily the rest of the movie is opened up in that version). Take a look at the 1.85 version and you'll see what I mean.

[pipefan413]

Unfortunately, the Big W opening logo on the 4:3 version is noticeably cropped from the widescreen version (luckily the rest of the movie is opened up in that version). Take a look at the 1.85 version and you'll see what I mean.

Ah. That's exactly why I recommended finding an actual 4:3 source rather than cropping a 1.66:1 or 1.85:1 one. Dang.

[SpaceBlackKnight]

Ah. That's exactly why I recommended finding an actual 4:3 source rather than cropping a 1.66:1 or 1.85:1 one. Dang.

The only place with the Big W logo in HD and 4:3 is this one from The Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Movie: