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out of the bars, out in the streets
2008-12-10 22:48:07
SH Remasters Project: 36/90
I'm not much further along, but it's an important further along; SH056 has been reassembled from its component parts and slightly tweaked to make the intro come out the way it was originally supposed to. I really ought to run off a Lagarith master so I don't have to reassemble this in the future, should distro codecs improve again. I also had to redo the final build of SH055 because the filters weren't absolutely correct, and spend probably too much time working out how to make SH057 look less like crap. Of course, that's half the challenge; any doofus can take a perfect uncompressed master from perfectly filtered, correctly authored DVDs and build a higher-bitrate distro version, but it takes something more to go in to a bad source and try to trick people into thinking it looks better, or there's more data there than there actually is, or that the picture damage is actually artistic and intended in the context of the video. Of course, I haven't gotten into the stretch where that starts to be true yet, but what the hell.
Eventually, uploads will start on these, but I have no idea when. This is going to depend a lot on network ability and my initiative to do uploads in addition to remasters, and the degree to which these mostly independent variables intersect.
--Kai out
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killing time about to begin
2008-12-09 21:33:19
SH Remasters Project: 34/90
One way or another, I'm now more than a third of the way through this process; 055 is currently cooking the second pass, and I'm probably going to skip over #56 until tomorrow night. This is because #56 exists in 3 parts, which I want to assemble correctly, but that's going to require Magix work; probably not a whole night's work, but it'll probably overrun what I have available tonight.
Another fact about 038 of interest only to me:
A while back, I got a higher-bitrate version of Skyclad's cover of Priest's "Dreamer Deciever" in my email from a fan. Naturally, in the process of doing the remasters, I wanted to see if I could sub this in and get a better sound, because the edits were going to match if I got things lined up right in Magix unless somebody did something weird like speed-mod it -- and even that I could probably correct, as long as the data loss wasn't so severe. The only thing was, when I listened to it in a close comparison with the audio in the MPEG2 track, there were no differences. Literally, none; even down to a few analog holes in the original audio and some of the re-filled fuzz.
So, what happened? I had upsampled the audio originally, and 038 was available in its high-quality version through the old AMV CD distro; it's not out of the question that someone got this CD, grouted out the song to listen to in other formats, had their generic MP3 repository open to some filesharing prog, and the resulting version got out onto the great wide internet. Eventually, it got back to said fan, and then back to me. Circle of life, I guess.
--Kai out
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move and appear
2008-12-06 18:16:51
SH Remasters Project: 27/90
I'm past the break of the third demo, and plugging steadily away. Uploads may be coming in the near future, but I have to do a second check on the stuff before #38 to see if I can't fix them up with a warpsharp pass. I'm really leery about this video, because if it's used on anything that has any kind of detail or high motion, it wipes it straight the fuck out. However, it rebuilt #38 pretty damn well; low motion, a bad original source that needed fine lines rebuilt out of fat jagged ones, and most of the damage caused by low resolution rather than a lack of filesize. The only other one that it's been useful on was #44, which had a ton of other problems, but I want to give it a try on the other mid-thirties videos that were made of similar piles of junk.
Most of the time, the remastered audio is miles better than the original; if you've got a lot of high-end hi-hats or crashes, blastbeats on the low end, and thick distorted mids, stuff's not gonna compress well. The one exception's been 045: on that one, the necro sound fits a little better, but a remaster is a remaster; if I went back to the demos for a rawer version of the song, that'd be more of a remake. Hopefully I'll have more time this weekend; it was rough passing up Gojira, but In Flames these days is a downer and I have absolutely no interest in All That Remains.
--Kai out -
sworn to the dark
2008-12-01 20:52:24
SH Remasters Project: 19/90
Since the last update, SH029 through 35 finished, and SH036 will probably be done by the time I finish writing this. On pace, no surprises yet; this'll probably stay constant up to the point where I have to re-assemble #56 out of its component parts...and this time, I'll have the resolution both in screensize and editor granularity to make it come out like it was supposed to.
No uploads yet; work is fucking deadly and my home connection is still unstable.
One of the signal things I'm learning from this project is the need to do stuff right on the front end, and to establish a unified look-and-feel to anything that's supposed to be unified. I'm getting into the second broken-capture-card section of my catalog, which covers some inconsistently good (well, some are; some are consistent but consistently bad) videos from really cruddy source; 034 is probably from VCD originally, 035 is just bad encodes, 036 is from a broken DVD rip, 037 is from the first generation of digisubs, and 038 is capped, obviously, from laserdisc. All but 037 started off as 320x240, so the effect of any cleanup that I can do is highly debatable. The thing that's really getting my goat, though, is that I can't do a lot as regards fixing contrast, etc, because of the limited data in the original source. A lot of this is a lost cause, but I should have done more going into MPEG2 from the source files to preserve what I could, because trying to fix this in post sucks and is mostly intractable.
The adaptive solution, of course, is to just not use bad source in the first place, but with where the technology and the culture was in 2002, I'm not sure that these videos could even have been done under such constraints. On some, that was probably the right path (SH034 at least), but on others, I should have bit the bullet and cleaned them up more, rather than working from crud or not doing them at all.
Unintended cultural note:
As remarked previously, a lot of videos in the span that's being remastered sound like junk. Since these were being done for the music more than for the anime, I'm not sure that I would have intentionally let such egregious junk out the door. The problem is that my speakers at the time were pretty crappy, and I listen to a lot of true black metal, which, frankly, sounds like crap on any speaker system you route it through; it's kind of supposed to. Due to this coincidence, I did not have sufficient aural baselines to tell that the distro builds sounded more like crap than usual -- until recently, where better speakers have revealed a lot of over-distortion, especially in the high end, and making these remasters more of a necessity. It may be an exaggeration, but in a certain sense there might not be a remasters project if the start of SH030 (after the intro) didn't sound more like someone crumpling up a Hypocrisy CD than playing it. Seriously, that one sounds like fucking dirt, and it's about time it got fixed.
--Kai out
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not a king, i'm just a bard
2008-11-30 16:17:11
SH Remasters Project: 13/90
So far, SH011 and 017 through 023, plus SH028, 031, and 101-104 are complete, and SH029 is currently cooking. The current plan is to do all the normal videos, then circle back for the demos (which is why 024-027 got skipped for now) and then the INSO material and some random omake bits that I happened to unearth. Also, I did manage to re-locate the master for SH085, so that one will be getting remastered as well.
A word about interlacing: I'm not removing it. The reason is pretty simple; take a look at the current build of SH104 to see what it would likely look like -- blurred all to crap and actively degraded. This is because everything up through SH092 was edited at 29.97 fps from, mostly, interlaced source: accordingly, the i-frames are not where they can be deterministically removed, so the alternatives are either to a) go through frame by frame and replace i-frames with surrounding p-frames manually, or b) ignore it entirely on the assumption that people are going to be watching this at full speed, and just let closure fill in.
The current plan is about 4 remasters per day, and then I eventually have to start uploading these. Accordingly, the projection is to finish just before Christmas, but as usual, shows and other life stuff will likely interfere.
--Kai out
JOURNAL: Kai Stromler (Kai Stromler)
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