Twin Dragons (1992) desaturation and colour correction

[Serums]

Yep. Hopefully any difference in sound/mixing between both sources is minimal and any transitions will be as seamless as can be.

[pipefan413]

So it turns out the Hong Kong LaserDisc does not have the Cantonese mono on digital left and Mandarin mono on digital right as I expected it probably would based on other bilingual mono tracks (e.g. the Japanese Disney ones). It has the Cantonese dub using the full digital track (L+R), and the Mandarin dub using the full analogue track (L+R). That's a bit of a bummer because it means that it isn't necessarily quite so simple to do my usual method of syncing the digital audio to the analogue audio, and it also means that I can't do a "bit perfect" 44.1 kHz digital capture of the Mandarin dub as I can (and am) for the Cantonese. But I can still record analogue at 48 kHz with 20-bit depth and potentially at 96 kHz with 24-bit depth, although the latter won't be in perfect sync with the video due to tiny discrepancies in analogue-to-digital sampling rates between capture devices. In any case, the whole thing is capturing now: analogue video, analogue 48 kHz 20-bit Mandarin, and digital 44.1 kHz 16-bit Cantonese.

Furthermore, it doesn't actually have either track in their original mono form, which would explain why it uses both channels for each dub instead of putting one dub on the left channel and another on the right. Instead, it's got each track as Chace "Surround Stereo": in other words, they've processed the mono tracks to create a matrixed surround track (mono -> L/R/S, seemingly), similar to how Dolby used to matrix 4 channels into 2 (L/C/R/S -> Lt/Rt). That's also a huge bummer since it's non-original and I was hoping this would have the original mono tracks, but it might still be an interesting track to archive!



DIGITAL: 粤語版本（立體聲）=> Cantonese (stereo)
ANALOG: 國語版本（立體聲）=> Mandarin (stereo)

I reckon this is simultaneously more interesting and less useful in a practical sense. I was hoping we'd be able to either use the entire Cantonese track as the main original mono source and potentially patch it from the Japanese LD, or use the mono from this as patching source for the JP LD, but since it doesn't actually have any mono tracks that isn't necessarily as directly applicable as it might've been. ;_;

EDIT: Hey, here's something weird and also interesting... y'know how I mentioned there being a line missing from the Cantonese mono on the German Blu-ray Disc?

I also noticed a glaring missing line of dialogue in the 2.0 Cantonese track on the German Blu-ray while syncing the videos

Well, that same exact line appears to missing from the Cantonese Chace "surround stereo" track on this Hong Kong LD, even though it's present on the Japanese LD. So maybe the German Blu-ray's 2.0 track *is* this Chace "surround stereo" conversion, only resampled to 48 kHz? I guess it might be possible to figure that out by looking at the spectrograms...

[Serums]

That's definitely unexpected news, but all the same it'll be a nice track to archive! Thanks for the hard work once again! Those surround tracks are still pretty good to have as they were often exclusive to the laserdiscs. I do have a line on a DVD with the original mono tracks (or we could use the Joy Sales, speed and distortion issues pending) so this fact isn't the end of the world as such.

It'll be interesting to compare the HK laserdisc's track to that of the German BD in case the latter is a reconversion. And the LD should provide the final reference for the colours even though I'm pretty happy with them as they are.

[pipefan413]

That's definitely unexpected news, but all the same it'll be a nice track to archive! Thanks for the hard work once again! Those surround tracks are still pretty good to have as they were often exclusive to the laserdiscs. I do have a line on a DVD with the original mono tracks (or we could use the Joy Sales, speed and distortion issues pending) so this fact isn't the end of the world as such.

It'll be interesting to compare the HK laserdisc's track to that of the German BD in case the latter is a reconversion. And the LD should provide the final reference for the colours even though I'm pretty happy with them as they are.

The two LDs seem to have different colours, just to throw a spanner into things, hahaha! I might be wrong, but it could be something to do with IRE; I don't know for sure what IRE HK LDs usually use, because I don't have any other HK LDs in my collection thus far. I know Japan's broadcast standard changed to 0 IRE around 1985 but apparently they kept using 7.5 for most LaserDiscs after that point so it's kind of a crapshoot; I thought the colours looked a bit oversaturated doing the capture at 7.5 IRE but changing to 0 made the blacks look grey so I expect 7.5 is right for this disc. If need be, I can recapture it at 0 IRE, but I'm running low on disk space now so I'm going to have the keep one and scrap the other I think. So many captures, so little storage...

I can either send you the full raw capture (Lagarith compressed) or render out an x264 or something, depends what you need from it. If you want it run through IVTC perfectly then you'll need the raw cap with 4:2:2 subsampling, if you just want it as a colour ref then I can probably just fling it through TFM.TDecimate, convert to 4:2:0, and render to x264 (or even just render without doing the IVTC if you prefer). Ditto for the JP LD. I'll get the audio to you ASAP in any case, let me know re. the video.

And yeah, you're right, this is kind of a pain but it's also an interesting turn of events since these weird Chace tracks are something of a novelty. It would be a bit unfortunate if it turned out to basically just be the same track they put on the German BD but it might be that the missing line was also missing on the actual original mono (which Chace ran through their "surround stereo" process) then got fixed for the Japanese release, or something. Either way, it's got that doorbell sound at the right time etc. so maybe can be mixed down to mono and used to patch anyway, I haven't tried anything like that yet of course.

[Serums]

Thanks for that!

HK was PAL in terms of broadcast, but I'm not sure if they stuck to that exclusively for home media. I should be fine with x264 for the videos as if just be using them for colour reference and/or a base point for syncing the audio.

I'll try to compare the surround track to the German BD as well. I'll dig out my Joy Sales DVD tomorrow too and check for the missing line.

[pipefan413]

Thanks for that!

HK was PAL in terms of broadcast, but I'm not sure if they stuck to that exclusively for home media. I should be fine with x264 for the videos as if just be using them for colour reference and/or a base point for syncing the audio.

I'll try to compare the surround track to the German BD as well. I'll dig out my Joy Sales DVD tomorrow too and check for the missing line.

I thought that might be the case because I have a HK SEGA Mega Drive for example and it's PAL, but this HK LD is definitely NTSC, so who knows if that's IRE 0 or 7.5. 0 has grey letterboxing bars so probably 7.5.

Cool, I'll try to get stuff rendered out ASAP then!

[Serums]

It sounds like 7.5 would be the go then. No worries, thanks!

[Serums]

Update on this one: The colour correction is sorted and we're moving forward with the audio that we have. Thanks very much to pipefan413 for materials for the latter.

Happy new year!

Edit: coming really soon! Just nailing down the last of the audio and subtitle sync.

[Serums]

Would anyone happen to know if any early (particularly pre-DVD) releases of 'Twin Dragons' actually use the theme song (Jackie Chan's 'My Feelings') over the end credits? We're trying to establish if it might have been theatrically released with it in any territory before we decide to include the track.

Other than that, we're on track to release this one soon!

[Memorex]

Started out with the Universe dvd in the '90s, which was quite awful with the cantonese track going out of sync for the entire finale.
The Joy Sales classic dvd wasn't that much better, and these days I resort to custom dvd based on the french HKV release.

It's great that you have started this project, and the samples provided of the color correction looks great indeed!
Combined with the original english dub, this will make an ideal release. Keep up the good work!

*Edit* Wasn't aware that I had just been released!