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Dinosorceror, Administrator
Lava Dome Five Enterprises

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Dinosorceror, Administrator
Lava Dome Five Enterprises

markatisu, member since 12/04

Hobbies: Video Restoration and Cartoon Watching

markatisu, member since 12/04

Hobbies: Video Restoration and Cartoon Watching

If you need or want assistance with subtitles, maybe you could capture audio only and send it to me via an MP3 and I could type up some of the quotes.  I probably couldn't get some of the sound effects that are usually put in subtitles, nor would I know if a quote is by someone off-screen, but the dialogue is the big thing.  Let me know.

To markatisu:  The archives weren't really burned, but rather deliberately destroyed.  Disney took DiC over, but when DiC took back over, there was a large amount of fighting and quite a lot of stuff was destroyed/shredded/thrown away.

Also to markatisu:  If you can improve the DVDs beyond what Dinosorceror could do, that sounds excellent.

Restored----------------------------------------------------------------> Original

Yeah I have heard about the mess between Disney and DIC, its sad to see all the treasures that were hurt because of it, some of the best toons of the 80's suffered and will now require major international cooperation with the original studio in France to get things done

Above is an example of a simple restoration for color, the hardware I have can also remove noise, grain, vertical lines (looks like cross lines due to interference), etc. Its not a cut and dry process but there are many tapes especially in SP that look close to retail after being restored, audio can be increased and hiss/buzzing removed as well, only the worst video and most horrid audio is unfixable by consumer standards. Most people have treasures and never realize it because the equipment they are using is barely consumer grade

Dinosorceror is using a variation of a setup I myself have except instead of a DV Camcorder I use a Mac G4 equipped with a Matrox RTMac DV Capture Card , it is not compatible with the new G5 line so you can often find the whole thing for around $20-51, I got mine for $21.99 with shipping

http://shop.store.yahoo.com/toolfarm/matroxrtmac.html

So his captures should be a great representation of the set as it is, should he use something like Procoder or Tmpg to clean them up using filters or something like avisynth they could probably be close to using hardware to restore them.

The mono VHS issue is not a problem either, various sound programs can simulate the right or left track and keep it from sounding like an echo, most notably Soundforge or Nero Wave Editor, also most newer dvd players will take a mono track and play it through all the speakers to emulate stereo. However this should really be a non issue as nothing that early ever aired in stereo so it should not be expected, some stations even today do not air in stereo which is ironic when shows come out in Dolby Digital 5.1 but you never really hear anything different :tounge:

Great thing about this project is I think that things can only get better, the best creations I have ever seen are ones fans worked on together because you feel the love put into the project

Also I noticed something in one the other posts that I figured might need a clearer answer

"Unless you can get them synchronized exactly (down to the frame) it'd be impossible. If you could get that, I'd imagine it would be pretty straightforward although I've never done this myself."

This is actually not that hard, time consuming yes but not that hard at all, to do it easier it requires cuting out parts of the video and audio end resynching them (less chance of error along the way if you do it with this method because you can control the smaller time frame and catch errors) and them combining all the files back together. A program like Womble MPGVCR will allow you to cut down to the frame making it easy to pick and choose where the edits are, when I redub I cut it usually from one commercial break to the next, that way you are only dealing with 5-10 minutes at the most

Its harder to do this with PAL (European) and NTSC because the frame rate throws things off but 2 NTSC US sources should be fine. Live Action requires edits in something like Soundforge as close to 5000% or what would be seriously the equivalent of 0.01 or 0.005 seconds, animation is far easier because it was designed for multiple languages which means that the characters mouths while they make look as if they were designed for english movement actually had more than one language in mind, again it takes patience and given the scene (action, etc) a lot of trial and error. I have had to do this many times as part of a restoration project, most notably she-ra where the good quality episode drops out due to the tape and you had to fill it with another lower quality episode, of course that required resynching not only the video but the audio to match so it appeared seemless.

Ok now that I am done my thesis you can return to your reguarly scheduled program

markatisu, member since 12/04

Hobbies: Video Restoration and Cartoon Watching

It depends on the tape and what needs to be done, with hardware things like color correction and detail are easier since it involves knobs to adjust in real time. With hardware its all real time so when done correctly it only takes the amount of time that the video is running. With software it can take anywhere from 1hr-12hrs depending on what needs to be done.

Also the differences are minor on the computer screen but really big on the TV, PC/Mac Monitors and TV colorspace are different especially when it comes to black and white, most times you should really never try to do any intense kind of color restoration on the computer without testing each pass on the TV (burning a dvd-rw for instance). Prime example is the original screenshot above is super dark on tv but appears ok on the PC and the restored version looks lighter in screenshots but perfect on the TV, it can be a pain especially when people starting using only the computer to watch things and do not understand the differences between the two types.

There is also an underlying film to most VHS tapes that something like a BVP-4 or Signvideo unit can remove, if you have a lot of "muddy" looking or multi generational tapes this usually helps, though it can hurt the video as well

Its neat to do this stuff, I am always amazed by the things that can be done to certain tapes, technology is a great thing!

markatisu, member since 12/04

Hobbies: Video Restoration and Cartoon Watching