Fox's Peter Pan and the Pirates

[jerryshadoe]

Ok, so I kinda spilled the beans about this project in a different thread, so I might as well make a thread for this. THIS WILL NOT BE COMPLETE UNTIL MAY/JUNE 2016!!!

Anyway, thanx to the fact that Fox Kids Worldwide was bought in July 2001 by Disney, who already has a Peter Pan franchise, this has been thrown into the Disney Vaults to probably never see the light of day again

There are French, German, and some Spanish episodes out there, but they are all sourced from poor quality VHS rips (although I have seen a couple German TVrips that were better) The English language episodes that are available of this are almost non-existent. Yes, there have been a couple of episodes (I, literally, think it was 5 episodes) that were released on DVD in the UK about 10 years ago, but that's it. What's floating around on the net is a series that contains only TWO DVD sourced episodes (out of 65) with all of the rest being sourced from low quality VHS rips of the re-runs of the series in the late 90s. Because of this, they do NOT contain the original intro/end credits sequences (intro is half as long, same runtime for end credits) and some of them (sh*t, like half of them) are practically unwatchable because of awful PQ. BUT...

... then I stumbled upon two Russian DVDs of the series, (containing a total of 46 episodes, although with no English audio) a bootleg set of Russian DVB/SATrips, (containing 62 episodes, also no English audio) and a bootleg set of Polish TVrips (containing 63 episodes, also no English audio) Between all of them I can make a complete set that has video sourced from digital sources (instead of VHS) :victory:

BUT... there are still two massive problems:

1) The audio for 63 of the episodes will have to be synced from the English VHSrips available. BOOO!!

The audio is not of the best quality, is nearly all mono, (all episodes had Stereo sound and the DVD copies in English and all of the Russian/Polish audio is stereo) has clipping issues, was encoded at a ridiculously low bitrate/sampling rate, will require a lot of work to get it sounding better

2) ALL PAL transfers of this series have field blending due to incorrect NTSC to PAL transfer. I have verified by means of comparing an NTSC US tv broadcast, an NTSC US broadcast in Spanish, the UK/Russian DVDs, French/German/Spanish/Polish VHS/TVrips that the runtime on ALL (for any particular episode I compared) versions is the same. This means that some of the frames are permanently damaged. There will be nothing I can really do about these. The ONLY part I can restore to a much better state (although some frames will still not be perfect) is the original intro. Because the episodes were transfered in full (in some cases in other series, I have seen a single instance of the same intro would be used for an entire series but not here) from different sources, with different start points, the damage to the frames occurs at different times. Between 5 different video sources (all from different episodes on the Russian DVD set) I am able to pick the best frame for each frame. The damage occurs on different frames and at various levels. I am half-way through the intro which is about 1600 frames and it takes me about 4-5 hours to get through 100 frames (!) (this is due to the fact that because they are different transfers, they are all slightly differently framed, have to be color-matched to each other, are slightly different quality and have to be slightly filtered to match each other, need some clean-up to get rid of field-blending damage, etc... - kinda reminds me of the work I'm still doing on my Winnie the Pooh project which has similar problems; although there I have even more sources to work with which is a good thing for restoration, but a bad thing time-wise because it takes that much longer)

IF ANYONE has audio that is NOT sourced from the set that is floating around (most of the set is also on youtube) that would be a HUGE help and greatly appreciated. (although if not, I will make due with what I have because it's all still useable)

Similarly, if there are any digital NTSC sourced captures I'm not aware of, please let me know via PM

By no means can this be considered a restoration project, but it is a preservation project of the best sources available for now...

Any and all comments are welcome

[titanic]

Jerryshadoe I found in a torrent tracker the complete series.
it says:
DivX 5.2.0
640 x 496
48000Hz 192 kb/s tot, stereo (2/0)

I guess this is the set you mentioned?
There aren't any screenshots.
These are avi files ranging from 250 to 350-400 MBs.

[jerryshadoe]

Yes, it's the same source I referenced in my OP

And those stats are only for the first episode (which is actually sourced from the UK DVD)

Most of the other episodes are Xvid (not Divx5) encoded, various frame sizes, and are 22kHz 64kbps (or lower) mono mp3

[jerryshadoe]

For those interested...

Am working on syncing the audio for all the episodes right now. The video... well, there's not much I can do about the blended frames in this one. There is a lot of damage that can't be fixed because when the series got transferred from NTSC to PAL, they didn't apply any speed-up. I spent waaaaaaaaaaaaaay more time on trying to fix the damage than I should have, only to realize that the results looked worse due to jerking of the footage when in motion, especially during scenes that have a lot of it. Tried many different approaches and unlike my "Winnie the Pooh" project, this is just doomed

Still, even with the frame blending, this will be a rather HUGE upgrade to what is available, since all the episodes come from DVD or DVB broadcasts, while what's available out there now, is rather crappy rips from VHS that were recorded originally in SLP/EP mode.

I'm finishing this and will be releasing it within the next couple of weeks, guaranteed. Anyone here interested?

[Avatar_Emil]

I'm interested.

[jerryshadoe]

I have to put my foot in my mouth on the "guarantee" I made in last post, LOL

Turns out, that some of the episodes (including the pilot[!]) are MISSING footage on the English masters that I have. For that matter, all English sources I have found (which are either old NTSC VHS rips or PAL DVD rips from the UK, Germany, or Russia) ALL miss this same footage. So, "how did you figure out there is footage missing?," I hear some of you asking...

Well, for all episodes but one, I have an additional TVrip source from Poland that is dubbed into Polish. I also have over half of the series (nearly 40 episodes) sourced from French VHSrips. On those two, the "missing" footage is PRESENT and it's funny because apparently my memory (even after 25 years[!]) wasn't failing me when I thought that some of the scenes "jump" forward, skipping over something. I don't believe this was intentional censorship, but merely a f*** up on the part of whoever oversaw the transfers.

So, now I have to splice in the footage from those sources (both video and audio) and for the parts that contain dialog (and almost all of them do) create subtitle tracks and translate the dialog from Polish (which I can do) back into English. This has extended the time that I am having to put into this project, because it's not a matter of just syncing the English audio to the DVD/DVB footage anymore... Fortunately, all of this is simple sh** except for the editing of the spliced footage. The footage that I have to splice in comes from the Polish TV broadcasts and contains not one, but two different logos:

- an age rating on the top-left part of screen that is a green triangle with a "7" in it

- a TV station logo on the top-right part of the screen that is kind intrusive

None of the clips that are missing are any longer than 3-5 seconds, so there isn't a lot of frames for me to go through and have to correct, but still this adds time to completion of this project. I am having to color correct the footage to match the rest so that the switch isn't too jarring. I am also having to patch the logos, with color corrected footage from the French VHSrips which are only of good enough quality to be used for logo patches. So far, the spliced in video looks pretty good and although you can tell that it's spliced in (the cropping is slightly different, as in more, so you notice that) it's not too distracting and by the time your brain catches on to the fact that the video changed sources, it switches back to the better one.

The translations for the missing bit should be simple since I'm fluent in both languages. I debated on whether to hard-sub the missing bits and decided against it because this would destroy the video that I already had to fix due to the logos and I thought this would make the switch in sources even more jarring. And, in the event that I track down the English audio for the missing parts (highly doubt this one though) it would be pointless... and... it's unfair to those that will be watching the Polish version (since I'm including the audio because I have it, so why not?) and even more unfair to those watching the Russian version, which I will include too for the same reason as the Polish audio. I will NOT be including any other audio tracks. The reasoning behind this is... well... there's two reasons... the first is that I have too many other projects that I need to finish and each extra audio track is that much more time I have to spend on completing this project... BUT, the MAIN reason why I won't include other audio tracks is because I simply haven't been able to find the entire series dubbed into another language. I found over half in French, about a third in German, a few in Brazilian Portuguese and a few in Latino Spanish that had CAM audio (! - it was obvious someone used a mic next to the speaker of the TV))

As I move on this project, I will post more updates if there's anything substantial to note. Also, within the next week or so (don't quote me on this, because I'm hella busy lately) I will post some screenshots comparing the available footage for the English copy that's available freely on the internet (even on youtube) and the awesome quality copies that I'm using for the video

[ninja83]

I have to put my foot in my mouth on the "guarantee" I made in last post, LOL

Turns out, that some of the episodes (including the pilot[!]) are MISSING footage on the English masters that I have. For that matter, all English sources I have found (which are either old NTSC VHS rips or PAL DVD rips from the UK, Germany, or Russia) ALL miss this same footage. So, "how did you figure out there is footage missing?," I hear some of you asking...

Well, for all episodes but one, I have an additional TVrip source from Poland that is dubbed into Polish. I also have over half of the series (nearly 40 episodes) sourced from French VHSrips. On those two, the "missing" footage is PRESENT and it's funny because apparently my memory (even after 25 years[!]) wasn't failing me when I thought that some of the scenes "jump" forward, skipping over something. I don't believe this was intentional censorship, but merely a f*** up on the part of whoever oversaw the transfers.

So, now I have to splice in the footage from those sources (both video and audio) and for the parts that contain dialog (and almost all of them do) create subtitle tracks and translate the dialog from Polish (which I can do) back into English. This has extended the time that I am having to put into this project, because it's not a matter of just syncing the English audio to the DVD/DVB footage anymore... Fortunately, all of this is simple sh** except for the editing of the spliced footage. The footage that I have to splice in comes from the Polish TV broadcasts and contains not one, but two different logos:

- an age rating on the top-left part of screen that is a green triangle with a "7" in it

- a TV station logo on the top-right part of the screen that is kind intrusive

None of the clips that are missing are any longer than 3-5 seconds, so there isn't a lot of frames for me to go through and have to correct, but still this adds time to completion of this project. I am having to color correct the footage to match the rest so that the switch isn't too jarring. I am also having to patch the logos, with color corrected footage from the French VHSrips which are only of good enough quality to be used for logo patches. So far, the spliced in video looks pretty good and although you can tell that it's spliced in (the cropping is slightly different, as in more, so you notice that) it's not too distracting and by the time your brain catches on to the fact that the video changed sources, it switches back to the better one.

The translations for the missing bit should be simple since I'm fluent in both languages. I debated on whether to hard-sub the missing bits and decided against it because this would destroy the video that I already had to fix due to the logos and I thought this would make the switch in sources even more jarring. And, in the event that I track down the English audio for the missing parts (highly doubt this one though) it would be pointless... and... it's unfair to those that will be watching the Polish version (since I'm including the audio because I have it, so why not?) and even more unfair to those watching the Russian version, which I will include too for the same reason as the Polish audio. I will NOT be including any other audio tracks. The reasoning behind this is... well... there's two reasons... the first is that I have too many other projects that I need to finish and each extra audio track is that much more time I have to spend on completing this project... BUT, the MAIN reason why I won't include other audio tracks is because I simply haven't been able to find the entire series dubbed into another language. I found over half in French, about a third in German, a few in Brazilian Portuguese and a few in Latino Spanish that had CAM audio (! - it was obvious someone used a mic next to the speaker of the TV))

As I move on this project, I will post more updates if there's anything substantial to note. Also, within the next week or so (don't quote me on this, because I'm hella busy lately) I will post some screenshots comparing the available footage for the English copy that's available freely on the internet (even on youtube) and the awesome quality copies that I'm using for the video

hello there.
Since it has been some time I'm thinking you are not working on the project any longer?
thanks man! Would love to see peter pan again!

[jerryshadoe]

Believe it or not, this is one of the few projects that I'm still working on and will release before the end of the year. I had a lot of work and health issues within the last 18 months and didn't have enough time to work on stuff... However, this project is very dear to me and didn't get axed from my project queue list, like numerous other had to be due to time.

I will be posting updates in this thread sometime during the summer, as I am completing a couple of older projects first...

Stay tuned

[ninja83]

Believe it or not, this is one of the few projects that I'm still working on and will release before the end of the year. I had a lot of work and health issues within the last 18 months and didn't have enough time to work on stuff... However, this project is very dear to me and didn't get axed from my project queue list, like numerous other had to be due to time.

I will be posting updates in this thread sometime during the summer, as I am completing a couple of older projects first...

Stay tuned  

Thanks Jerry. Will do!
Sent you a PM as well.

[jehanbosch]

I am a little puzzled.
Are you not aware that the Italians made 3 excellent DVDs of the Fox Peter Pan series.
I even had them copied for other fans..
And of course half of the episodes are on a 6 French DVDs in a box set.
Although deleted it is not scarce. The quality is not very good.
Finally i managed to get hold of the 4 British VHS and had them converted to DVD.
And i shared everything with a Brasilian/American male fan and an American lady.
My Brasilian friend is trying to obtain Russian DVDs of the series but they are deleted.
And because i only have Russian music acquaintances i am not progressing.
The American lady has transferred the American VHS to digital.
And i am still searching for the Australian VHS.
To end this: a British Box Set with 3 DVDs was for a very short time released.
However, i suspect the contents were identical to the Italian DVDs.
Last words: I like this Fox series but still prefer the equally dark "Peter Pan No Bouken"from Japan.