Remasters Are The Ultimate Labor of Love

[Kionon]

It is precisely that ambiguity which leads to that impression. As far as I know, most people deinterlace before even looking at their footage, and then they open it up in Vdub (or whatever) to look at it and decide what additional filtering needs to be done. Nobody just honors pulldown flags and then opens up the raw video to make sure it's interlaced :\

You're articulating the idea that your impression is universal or widely held... You haven't convinced me this is the case. Of course I don't honor pull down flags, indeed, they're removed during the ripping process. Which is how you get 720x480, regardless of the intended aspect ratio. All I did in the second image is remove the letter boxing to make it easier to compare across all three images. Otherwise, I didn't touch it until I filtered everything, including adjusting the aspect ratio, detelecining/deinterlacing, etc.

[Zarxrax]

Remastering other people's videos is an interesting idea. There are a few old videos I would love to see remastered, and I don't think I have ever really considered doing it myself. In a way it definitely feels... weird... to mess around with someone else's work. I can understand the arguments for it though. This could be something I might like to do, but I'll have to think it over.

[Kionon]

Remastering other people's videos is an interesting idea. There are a few old videos I would love to see remastered, and I don't think I have ever really considered doing it myself. In a way it definitely feels... weird... to mess around with someone else's work. I can understand the arguments for it though. This could be something I might like to do, but I'll have to think it over.

I understand that, and as I said, my justification is that I'm like an art preservationist. My job is to do my best to "restore" the art to modern standards of video quality and nothing else.

I definitely don't believe remastering one's OWN videos (which is really more akin to reediting) is the same as remastering the work of others. When I "remaster" my own videos, I may make small changes. I may even swap out scenes. The whole video will still obviously be a version of the same video, but not the same version. With remastering the work of others, this must be avoided inasmuch as the technological differences allow. Again, an art preservationist's work will never be 100% the same. The goal is get it as close to 99.99% repeating that even the original artist can't see the those differences. Similarly, I want Julian to watch Robot Girl: The Upgrade and only see the video quality difference. I want him to recognise every cut made as his own.

[the Black Monarch]

Of course I don't honor pull down flags, indeed, they're removed during the ripping process. Which is how you get 720x480

Ripping, resolution, and pulldown flags all have nothing to do with each other

If a DVD has pulldown flags and you ignore them, then your video won't be interlaced. If the DVD is "hard" NTSC, then it has no pulldown flags to remove.

[Kionon]

Ripping, resolution, and pulldown flags all have nothing to do with each other

Depends very much on what you mean. If I understand what you mean, it isn't the part of the process to which I am referring, and at this point I've lost patience (in both threads) with what I am perceiving as incivility.

If a DVD has pulldown flags and you ignore them, then your video won't be interlaced. If the DVD is "hard" NTSC, then it has no pulldown flags to remove.

Take it up with the 2000s era DVD manufacturers (who did a shitty job), where pulldown flags both existed and interlacing/telecining was hardcoded. I can't go back in time and shake my finger at them and tell them not to do it.

[the Black Monarch]

Ripping = copying VOB files from the DVD to your hard drive.

It's literally not possible to create a playable DVD the way you describe. If you take a 29.97 FPS, hard-interlaced video stream and apply pulldown flags to it, you'll end up with a frame rate above 59.94 fps, which TVs and DVD players won't be able to play. Are you talking about DVDs that alternate between soft pulldown and hard NTSC because the TV shows themselves were edited on tape, leaving them full of 60 hz content and orphaned fields, and the DVD authors can't do anything about that?

[seasons]

hey, did you ever get around to suffering a major head trauma?

Asking because I want to watch this.

[seasons]

Also, getting back to the post I made on the last page (no reason to keep this a secret, especially given the small chance I'm ever going to do this), this was the AMV I really want to see remastered (probably inspired by the original music video, at least to a certain degree).



The watermarks have always annoyed me and I want to see this video in a higher quality than 480p.

Granted, Planetes came out in 2003 so the original footage would need to be professionally remastered to get a meaningful Blu-ray quality release before this could be done. Apparently, this actually happened in Japan but the retail price is more than I can stomach and I don't trust any torrents to be the real deal. I have no desire to edit with footage that's just upscaled DVD or broadcast footage, and without anything to compare it to, I don't trust my eyes well enough to truly tell if that's what I'd be working with.

There are also numerous moments in this video where I'd want to clean up orphaned frames (0:46, 2:04, 2:18, 2:26, 3:02, 3:39, 4:04, 4:41), which I'm sure were the result of mistakes or technical problems. I am regarding these mistakes as technical issues that need/deserve to be corrected, and not as alterations to the original work, which I guess by definition they are, but I like to think that the original editors wanted their AMV to be as free from these errors as possible, and that correcting them is an act of paying respect to their original vision. I realize that it's impossible to precisely assume what their original vision was outside of the finished video that they've shared with the world, and that someone could say this is a slippery slope (see the next paragraph where I gleefully slide right down it).

Taking that one step further, there are moments where I'm kind of baffled by certain decisions that were made on the timeline when this was created, and feel confident in my feel for the song and the anime that I could "perfect" the effect that the editors were going for in certain ways that wouldn't be a betrayal of the concept they had in mind, nor would it be disrespectful of what they set out to make or actually made. Having watched someone edit a video on Windows Movie Maker, a version of which I know was widely available 12+ years ago when this video was made, I know how hard it is to make precision cuts or to edit in a truly nonlinear fashion, which does make getting the final product exactly as you want it to be a very difficult and tedious and sometimes impossible process. Actually making changes to anything here would make it something other than a remaster, and if I actually did so, I wouldn't call it a remaster at all, but something else.

No idea if I'd go so far as to make editorial alterations to this, but at the very least it deserves a cleaner remaster with higher quality footage and some spot-editing on a handful of cuts that didn't quite come out as they were intended to.

[seasons]

Just my opinion, but I don't think this thread is about the semantics of the step by step process of deinterlacing ripped footage off of old DVDs.

[Kionon]

Just my opinion, but I don't think this thread is about the semantics of the step by step process of deinterlacing ripped footage off of old DVDs.

As the thread originator, your assessment is accurate. If this was meant to be a technical filtering discussion (which I have been doing for a long time now and understand just fine with great results), I'd have put it in the technical forums. This thread is about the philosophy, ethics, and purpose of remasters. Either of your own work or (likely more controversial) the work of others.