Ashes of Time (1994) Theatrical Cut

[banzo95]

Lmaooo it's just useless merchandise! WKW is artistically dead. I hate the fact that he is promoting himself like he was the only mastermind behind his movies...there also were great personalities of HK cinema industry like Patrick Tam, Chris Doyle, Willam Chang, Andrew Lau, all the actors and actresses and the producers.

PS: Still, Chungking Express and Ashes of Time are two of my very favourite films

[banzo95]

New footage from the documentary One-Tenth of a Millimeter Apart (2021). Bts, deleted and alternative scenes. Some of them are raw, some are color graded. I don't know if those were even restored, but the image quality appears way cleaner and sharper than the Redux bluray. Highly recommended!

[shiftyeyes]

Hello! Hopefully there's still some interest in this movie here. I didn't know about this new forum so I've been looking in the other place.

New footage from the documentary One-Tenth of a Millimeter Apart (2021). Bts, deleted and alternative scenes. Some of them are raw, some are color graded. I don't know if those were even restored, but the image quality appears way cleaner and sharper than the Redux bluray. Highly recommended!

I was so excited to find this a few months ago. What a treasure! Some alternate stuff from the Ouyang vs the bandits/Hong Qi fights. There's an unused opening that establishes Ouyang's inn a bit better. More patrons, etc. In the final movie, you don't get to see anybody there except the main characters!

Some of it confused me. There's a scene of Huang hiring Ouyang for his services in what appears to be the same set where Maggie's scene at the end of the movie was shot. This doesn't really make sense in the context of the movie, but WKW is known for trying things out. I wonder if maybe there was a whole episode dedicated to Huang? As is, he kinda flits in and out of the movie. There's also an alternate version of Maggie's scene with Huang. Much of it is pretty high quality while other bits look like they're taken from an assembly of the film or something.

Most importantly is the deleted ending with Ouyang visiting White Camel Mountain and meeting the boy (which WKW confirms to be his son!) I was very excited to see this stuff as it seems to be the emotional throughline of the movie.

And to rub salt on our wound, there's a bit of extra stuff. A brief look at Joey Wong in the film. And what looks like a brief glimpse at fully restored footage of Brigitte Lin in the chili patch from the ending of the film!

Here are some screenshots: https://imgur.com/a/4Dqj2cN

[shiftyeyes]

Still obsessed with this film. 

Upscaled the original trailer from the Japanese DVD and posted it on YouTube.



Also made a version reconstructed from the upscale I've been working on from the various DVDs (previously described in this thread). You might think of it as a bit of a teaser.

[banzo95]

Awesome work!

[shiftyeyes]

I've been tinkering with my upscale for the better part of a year now. Think I've done as much as I can with it.

I think I've detailed some of this before, but to recap, much of it is sourced from the French TF1 disc and upscaled to HD using Topaz Video Enhance A.I.'s Proteus fine tune setting. I chose a setting that seemed to strike a good balance between detail, noise reduction (the TF1 is very noisy!) and other artifacts. The French TF1 disc runs only 1:31:26 (slowed from 25fps to 23.976fps) and is missing a few sequences (notably the opening Ouyang Feng and Huang Yaoshi fights, the Murong Yin/Yang lake sequence, all of the Chinese onscreen text interludes, and the last 2 min 30 sec). For these, I turned to the Japanese Pony Canyon DVD which is poorer in terms of PQ. The finale is actually upscaled from the Taiwanese disc. I did a frame by frame cleanup of these sequences in Photoshop (I don't have anything fancier) to try to eek as much quality out them. All of the sources are pretty dirty. I went back and cleaned a few scenes from the TF1 upscale as well. All told, about 20 min of the final version was cleaned frame by frame, but this was very labor intensive and the idea of doing the other 78 minutes was too daunting. A few more sequences could use some cleanup as well (namely the Blind Swordsman vs bandits fight and the Hong Qi fights), but you can only do so much I guess. I also noticed the TF1 appeared vertically stretched (it's 1.78:1) so it's been scaled to 1.85:1 here to better match the geometry from the Redux version. It's synced to the Japanese Pony Canyon. While I did have the Taiwanese version and worked on upscaling/restoring the end sequence, I opted to keep it to the Chinese/Hong Kong version of the film. Particularly, the audio from the Taiwanese version is awful and the dip in quality was too distracting. The end credits are from the TF1 which are a little longer. This upscale runs 1:38:32.

Since I was mixing footage from different versions, I had to grade them for a consistent viewing experience. The Asian discs are all vaguely similar in terms of colors: reddish and a bit subdued. The French disc is a bit murky in terms of color and contrast. Tends to go rather cool and blue-greenish. I chose to use the Mei Ah disc as color reference since it seemed the most consistent of the Asian DVDs to me. I tried to address some issues such as poor blacks and mismatched shots within the same scene. I did the best I could, but I'm still very much an amateur at this stuff. Added a grain layer as well.  Here's some screenshots from this version (not that different from what I shared a year ago):



After looking at this for many months, I saw some comparisons from banzo95 and even David Bordwell's piece seemed to suggest the Redux version's colors weren't as radical as I had thought. So I thought I'd have some fun and do a Redux-inspired grade. I think I prefer this one. Sort of a middle ground between the reddish Mei Ah and the more yellow/colorful Redux. But really, who's to say what's accurate? 



Here are fun comparisons of two shots. Top are all the various DVD versions including the Taiwanese version which is mostly included just because it's open matte (but at variable aspect ratios). Bottom includes the raw upscale, color version 1, color version 2, and the 2008 Redux version for comparison.





For audio, I made a track that's largely based on the TF1 Cantonese stereo audio, which sounded the cleanest to me. It's been converted from PAL. It does not appear that pitch correction was used on the original French DVD so none was applied in the conversion to 23.976 fps. Further, I did notice lipsync seemed a bit inconsistent, so I re-synced the dialogue it to match the sync on the Redux version. I filled in the gaps with audio from the Cantonese (for the dialogue) and Mandarin (for non-dialogue; it sounded better) tracks from the Pony Canyon release. I also made a Cantonese-Mandarin hybrid track using Brigitte Lin's Mandarin dialogue from the Mandarin dub (she is dubbed by a different actress for the Cantonese version). Some of the cutting between the two tracks may be inconsistent (different background noise/tone particularly during one of the cave scenes) so this is more experimental in nature. Again, I'm not the most experienced at this stuff, so it's just stereo audio from the editor in Da Vinci Resolve. 

For subtitles, the first track is based on PipperPiper's work here, but I've matched it closer to the Mei Ah burned in subs just for preservation purposes (still making some grammar corrections though). The second is mostly from the Redux subs though I changed some translations to my liking. 

There are some more issues to be addressed, namely using shots from Redux to fill in some missing stuff from the TF1 version where I think the Pony Canyon source looks rather poor. I'll post more details, screenshots later.

[banzo95]

Man, this is INSANE. I really don't have any words

[shiftyeyes]

Here are a few more comparisons. 







I've uploaded many more. Hopefully this link works:
https://imgur.com/a/oHPp7oH

So here's what I wanted to get some opinions on. There are certain shots that are missing from the TF1 release but are included in the Redux version. Upscaling the Mei Ah or Pony Canyon releases results in a drop in quality (noise, image instability, odd A.I. artifacts from upscaling low-res footage) that may be distracting. Are there any objections to sourcing these from the Redux version? When I started this project, I had intended to not use the Redux version at all but I think it may help in these instances.





Going even further, the Chinese on screen text portions of the film are also not in the TF1. The Pony Canyon version has these as textless which is good, but they're also very poor quality. I tried recreating them by extracting the text from Redux and even re-arranging them in Photoshop to better match the layout. I can try cleaning up the Pony Canyon version a bit more, but I think it'll still be a soft, artifacty mush. 



Of particular note, the one for Hong Qi fades to black in the Redux version.







Are there any feelings about using Redux footage?

[stwd4nder2]

I'm not super familiar with the film, but based of those comparisons I think your recreations look better then the recolored redux footage.

[PDB]

Go with the way you feel is the best. If a hybrid of HD and upscaled SD is the best way to handle it, I think you should go with that.