[In progress] Armageddon 35mm Trailer Regrade + Cinema DTS + Dolby Headphone

[deleted user]

Started this one out just wanting to do a Dolby Headphone track for Armageddon. The Blu Ray track didn't satisfy me, so I set out on a quest to find the best audio. Made the other thread for that, if you remember.

Ended up getting the Cinema DTS from a generous donor. Decided to use it, because it was A) a nice new skill to learn and B) It sounded a bit better than the other tracks I had tried.

It still wasn't quite ideal for the Dolby Headphone thing. The center was too loud for my taste. Ended up just reducing the center channel by 3 dB and including that as an extra track; let's call it the TomArrow mix (original is still included of course). That pretty much did the trick for me personally.

Anyway, by then I had invested such a ridiculous amount of time I thought why not go full retard; so I ordered a 35mm trailer from eBay. Went ahead and scanned individual frames with my 35mm scanner (somehow I weirdly pulled the whole trailer through it without having to cut it up, lol). Used DrDre's ColorMatch to create a 3D Lut. That worked really well. Did some mild adjustments to the 3D LUT in Photoshop and 3D LUT Creator, et voila.

Here's a lazy comparison between vanilla Blu Ray and my regrade: http://screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/133846

Man, this was fun. Some of the trailer shots still had the cables in them used to pull around the exploding cars, but they had been retouched out of the final movie.

Anyway.

Looks much more cinematic now, if you ask me. No annoying punchy colors (lower saturation), almost none of the horrible green cast over everything, nice contrast and tones, but whatever, you can see it yourself. Now, in combination with the Cinema DTS, I think it feels so much more like a "real movie" and less like a Disney Channel cartoon.

Okay, anyway, there's still a few things I wanna do before I release (final video encode is finished):
- Sync the LD AC3 and PCM tracks to include them (kindly provided by zoidberg while I was working on the grading!)
- Create a Soundtrack-only audio track made from the bootlegged score and the official soundtrack. Most of the score is already synced, soundtrack still missing.
- Actually, that's already it.

Anyway, I expect this to be finished anywhen between 1 week and 2 months, depending on how my laziness allows it. Now that I finally found a way to do a nice actual encode (and succeeded), I feel motivated to bring my first big project (kinda) over the finish line.

Final file will be a 4:4:4 1920x800 10bit x264 mkv file around 30GB, with Cinema DTS + two Dolby Headphone tracks as lossless FLAC (the normal one and my special mix), the LD PCM as FLAC, LD AC3 as AC3 (assuming I don't need to change the speed, which I think I don't need to do), FLAC soundtrack-only track, FLAC Soundtrack Dolby Headphone track (experimental) and the Criterion commentary tracks as AC3.

That's it. Possibly I forgot to mention something but whatever. Oh yeah, there will be a little (but to most people likely meaningless) surprise, but I will not mention it until the release.

P.S. If the DTS track from that super rare and super expensive LD were to turn up and be as good as everyone says, I'd totally include it as well.

[CSchmidlapp]

Great stuff Tom
The score only option is a great inclusion for me, as it's my favorite part of the film.

[spoRv]

According to the title, you will release just the trailer regraded, right? Or the whole movie, regraded as trailer?

[deleted user]

Haha spoRv - of course I will release the entire movie regraded as the trailer!

@CSchmidlapp Yep the score is fantastic

[CSchmidlapp]

Is it also worth doing the Directors Cut while you have all the materials to hand?
I know of no HD master but the PAL DVD might upgrade nicely enough to cover the extra shots.
The US criterion DVD could be used to sync to and port the 5.1 and commentary tracks untouched (unless you wanted to do a hybrid?).
It would be nice to get a score sync to this also

[deleted user]

Not currently planning it personally, but it's an idea. Another possible thing to do would be to replace the shots that have been altered for the new Blu Ray master with the original shots. As for syncing the score to it, whoever attempts such a project could just use my already existing score sync and simply add in the missing parts (if there are any). I also have to note that not all parts are actually covered by the soundtrack, or I am unable to find a few parts. Mostly minor things, but still noteworthy. I'll probably add a subtitle track solely for annotating noteworthy details about the score track (like when something is missing).

Question to you all: When there is no music, should I keep silence or use the normal audio instead, for example the LD PCM stereo audio? And if I use the normal audio there, should I crossfade or always fade in and fade out again? My original approach was to just keep those parts silent, but it may not be much of a joy to watch then. But neither do I really want to crossfade the soundtrack with the actual score, that seems kinda wrong, so I'd probably opt for simply fading in the normal audio whenever there is no score and then fading it out before score comes back. What ya think?

[CSchmidlapp]

Oh Yes, there we're a few shots replaced. Might be worth creating a Theatrical Accurate version for your project.
Do you have the 'Complete' score? And I think silence is the best way.

[deleted user]

Might be worth it, but I'm too lazy atm tbh. I'll leave it as an open option for the future! Technically, my colors are also "only" accurate to the trailer, not to the actual film print, so it's only a "kind of" theatrical version anyway.

Yeah I have the "complete" bootleg. 33 on the first CD, 21 on the second. Though I hear there are different versions going around with varying track numbers, but this is the only one I could find (and find in lossless form). One example of something that's missing is shortly before "Death of Mir". It has a bass very similar to the beginning of "Death of Mir", but the melody is not as dramatic yet. Kind of a prelude. It's rather short, only a few seconds in the movie, but it's not included on any track I checked (though I might have missed it).

You think silence is best? Hmmm. Maybe I should just make both versions and include them both. Though my thought process here is: You can always reduce the normal audio-version to the silence version, but not vice versa, so it seems wiser to include the more "complete" one. What do you think? When movie studios release such tracks, what is their typical approach?

[CSchmidlapp]

The studios normally have silence.
Blade (1997) also contains the edited versions of the 'POP' songs that are included in the film.

[deleted user]

Ah ok. Well, then I'll probably go with the original idea and keep silence. Not 100% sure yet. Maybe someone else has something to say about it?

Yeah, soundtrack will be included as well (songs). Though obviously it won't be the identical mixes used in the movie (but the same really applies to the score as well).