Robot Girl: The Upgrade

[Kionon]

I've remastered Julian Fong’s (Ingress) Robot Girl from 2000. It’s one of my favorite videos of all time, and I’ve kept my copy of Boku no Marie for years, and ripped at that on a hard drive, just because I thought one day I would finally get around to it. But I never did, because remasters are kind of thankless, even though they shouldn’t be. Honestly, they are a labor of love and a service to the community.

This video was made on a 2008 Mac Pro with 2x quad-core 2.8GHz Xeon processors, 4.5 TB of storage, RAID 0 SSD boot disk, 18GBs of ram, and a GeForce GTX 660 running MacOS High Sierra 10.13.3. Programs used include: Adobe Premiere CS5, Photoshop CS3, Avidemux, Avisynth (through WINE, I really need to learn VaporSynth), MPEG StreamClip, and AMVTool. This type of machine was excessively expensive when it came out in 2008. In 2000, this amount of power would have been unheard of for a video like this one.

Accordingly, in addition to the much better video quality of the DVD source, I upscaled and filtered my upscale. Thus I am providing two versions. A 960x720p HD version and a 640x480p version, the latter which should look very clean and crisp relatively speaking. Please do not expect a 1999 title to look like a 2018 title. I did the best I could as the DVDs were crap and still really hard to filter. Julian's original file is 320x240 and was ripped from VHS, so this is a major improvement.

[Mol]

Mhm it's such a simple idea, yet really whole time on my back of head i had the feeling it was lacking something (adhd i guess). Still not bad in a way it's a interesing video to analyse.

[Kionon]

Mhm it's such a simple idea, yet really whole time on my back of head i had the feeling it was lacking something (adhd i guess). Still not bad in a way it's a interesing video to analyse.

I kept all of Julian's original edits. Even ones he called mistakes in retrospect. This was a remaster, and I personally find it ethically problematic to modify others work if it is supposed to be a remaster. So if there's anything lacking in the decision making of the video, you'll need to take it up with him (assuming you can find him). I just wanted to be able to enjoy the video in better condition than 320x240 MPEG-1!

[Mol]

Ye i know. You did good on that Sorry for mess.

[kyle_m]

wow kio this is cool vid! is this a frame to frame remaster?

[Kionon]

wow kio this is cool vid! is this a frame to frame remaster?

That was the goal. I did my best to do frame by frame. Due to the low quality of the original source material versus the remaster source material, they were couple of blended frames from the original that didn't match up exactly. Also, at various points Julian used half speed or 175% speed to accomplish his internal sync, so if it's not perfect, it's 99%. Such are the limitations of substantial differences in source material.