The Alamo - Roadshow Edition (LD preservation and upscale)

[Chewtobacca]

This is a preservation of the LD of The Alamo (ML 102581), which contains the restored 1960 Roadshow edition.  It includes the overture, intermission, entr'acte, and exit music.  The idea behind this release is to give people a version that they can stand to watch on modern equipment, one that preserves the LD in reasonably high quality.  After capture, the video was processed as follows.

• IVTC
  
• clean-up
  
• upscale to 720p
  
• side-breaks edited out
  
• encoded to fit a BD-25
  

The disc has 2.0 PCM.

Credits
zoidberg: capture
Chewtobacca: video processing
jonno: upload
PDB: technical support
althor1138: technical support

Many thanks go to jonno for making this available and to zoidberg for the capture!  Beyond the myspleen upload, I've no plans for distribution.  If you want this, please grab it while it's hot.

[Doctor M]

I wondered if anyone would do this. Thanks!

[Chewtobacca]

^ You're welcome.

I updated the OP because I forgot to credit PDB and althor. Sorry, guys!

[Doctor M]

Was there really enough recoverable information to go to 720p? Didn't the laserdisc have only about 320 lines?
I didn't see screenshots on MySpleen.

[Chewtobacca]

There was a whole range of reasons why I chose to go to 720p.  I like releases to be in a form that people can burn to disc "as is" if they want to, and I wanted to keep the audio PCM for purists.  My first thought was to make two DVD-9s, but many people still don't like burning them, and others would want the whole thing on one disc.  It's possible to encode 480p for BD, but only with a soft 2:3 pulldown and the fake-interlaced switch set, and free muxers tend not to like such streams, so you have to monkey around with disabling b-frames; besides, my experience is that players often have issues with such discs no matter what you do in terms of settings.  Therefore, I upscaled to 720p.  The result is not that big, fits on one disc despite running well over three hours, and retains the PCM.

[Doctor M]

You could just as well have gone with 480p and mastered it as a BD with the PCM track.
With a really high bitrate you'd still use more than half a BD25 easily.

To go to 720p you'd need a really serious upscaler like DarkJedi was using to make the 720p SW releases from the GOUT discs.

(To be clear, none of this is a complaint. I'm good with this as-is, I'm just thinking from technical what-ifs.)

[Chewtobacca]

You could just as well have gone with 480p and mastered it as a BD with the PCM track.

Did you read what I wrote about 480p BD and why I chose not to do that?

To go to 720p you'd need a really serious upscaler like DarkJedi was using to make the 720p SW releases from the GOUT discs.

Not if I chose to do so for a variety of reasons, only some of which bear on the resolution itself.

(To be clear, none of this is a complaint.  I'm good with this as-is, I'm just thinking from technical what-ifs.)

Thanks, but I understand the technical ramifications of the way that the video was processed and am happy with the results, especially as this release was intended as a way of giving people a version to tide them over until a better one appears.  There's considerable potential for improving the way the LD was processed, combining it with footage from the theatrical cut, and so on.  But that's the kind of work that can take quite a while, and in the meantime, fans would be left with few options if they simply wanted to watch the Roadshow cut of the film.

[Doctor M]

Oops, read about the 480p limitation and then immediately forgot I read it.
I never heard about the soft 2:3 pulldown limitation on BD. Is that for mpeg2 and X264?

[Chewtobacca]

For BD, 720*480 primary streams need to be 29.97i, either hard telecined or 23.976fps+2:3-pulldown flags.  That's true of h.264 or MPEG-2.  Even if you follow the stringent requirements for h.264 to the letter and your muxer accepts the input, many players simply don't like the resulting disc and refuse to play it.  I tried every combination of settings years ago, and none would result in a disc that played reliably across a range of makes and models.

In my experience, BD players are more tolerant of abnormalities in MPEG-2 streams than h.264 streams, so an out-of-spec 480p stream without pulldown flags would be more likely to play, especially if you flagged the stream properly, which few people do.  But I wasn't about to use MPEG-2: someone would only recompress the disc for the sake of it, probably neglecting to remove the pulldown in the process and creating complaints about "interlacing".

[DeafYakuza]

Soon I will capture the sound AC-3 5.1 from Laserdisc. I have this LD with AC-3 sound. I'm just waiting for a very good Graphic Card NVIDIA TITAN Xp Collector's Edition that I bought and am also waiting for a new workflow of HPZ8 and lastly I will build together before it will captured the AC-3 sound by AJA Kona LHe Plus/LHi respectively FS1 device.