Sliders: New DVD with Correct Episode Order, Fan Upscaling Experiments (Page 3 of 4)

"Prince of Wails" upscaling sample: the sliders provide Prince Harold with the Bill of Rights and Wade is asked to stay on. https://mega.nz/folder/5E1WnZxJ#Zgg_4d2jHZTolIin-iSevw
I feel I'm neglecting poor Rembrandt, so next is going to be his performance in "The King is Back."

I believe he's using the same source material, the Universal DVD set. He said that the Pilot looked great after upscaling but everything else looked bad -- undoubtedly because the Pilot does not have the interlacing errors that mar all the other episodes. I only have Seasons 1 - 3 from Universal, but I can confirm that "The Guardian" had the same interlacing error lines across the image that had to be decombed in Handbrake before the upscale in Topaz.

There is going to be a 20 per cent drop in my upscale quality when I switch to Seasons 4 - 5 because I only have Mill Creek for those. However, it'll also be a bit faster because I don't have to deinterlace the DVD rips from Mill Creek. I could buy Season 4 for $20, but I feel like David Peckinpah and Bill Dial's estates should pay me for procuring it. I could buy Season 5 for apparently $150 on DVD, but I would sooner throw that $150 down a drain.

Still image adjustment is possibly a way to upscale a standard definition video: by upscaling each frame of the video into a high resolution still, then running a mass filter on all the stills to increase pixel contrast and improve colour, brightness and remove distortions, then reassembling the frames back into a video with the original audio. However, that’s a bit too much for me, this project is something I need to have running while I’m doing other things.

Rembrandt's concert in "The King is Back" in FakeD HD! https://mega.nz/folder/5E1WnZxJ#Zgg_4d2jHZTolIin-iSevw

"Obsession" in FakeD: The sliders react to Wade's marriage proposal from Derek Bond, and Derek invades Wade's privacy. You can see the skin texture on Sabrina's face. https://mega.nz/folder/5E1WnZxJ#Zgg_4d2jHZTolIin-iSevw

Some of those looked really great.  Frankly I didn't think the quality on the Comet TV web feed was that bad, while the Peacock isn't great.  It's really down to the bitrate on a lot of these.  If they had released a BluRay it would be perfect.

Any chance you can upscale "Cry Like a Man?"

"Virtual Slide" is still in the process of upscaling. I had a brief look at it and I have to say, the grainy Mill Creek release is upscaling rather nicely, although I felt a jolt of fear and panic when the software paused on the opening titles on a frame of Kari Wuhrer that was taken from "The Breeder."

I wrote the upscaling software designers an email and asked if there were some enhancement algorithm that would replace Kari Wuhrer with Sabrina Lloyd in any and all SLIDERS episodes. They said they'd look into it and get back to me.

I’m only guessing, but “Fever” to me looks deliberately dark, dingy and desaturated to present its vision of a diseased world. It also looks like it was shot on 35mm film and then transferred to videotape. 35mm film creates a crisp, clear image but loses a lot of detail in reducing it to a standard definition format.

In contrast, “Virtual Slide” is being made to look bright and warm regardless of whether that’s appropriate for the story, and it looks like it was shot on 16mm film before the tape transfer. 16mm film can be detailed, but it has less than half the image information of 35mm and is also extremely grainy. This graininess has remained on the master tapes, survived the digital scan and severe overcompression which the AI can use well.

That said, I don’t think “Virtual Slide” looks ‘better’ as much as it looks conventional, but that’s a matter of taste.

On the subject of the upscaling endeavor, is there a way to (in essence) rotoscope the foreground images and upscale them apart from the background? I think that might eliminate the waxyness of the background.

I think one of the Star Wars despecialized blu ray editions do something similar.

JWSlider3

It would be quite an undertaking, but I feel it would be a more true High Definition end result.

"Season's Greedings": The Punchening. This is how I've always thought of the scene where Quinn assaults a mall manager for no good reason whatsoever. It also has an ending that Tracy Torme loathes.

I still kind of like it. https://mega.nz/folder/5E1WnZxJ#Zgg_4d2jHZTolIin-iSevw

He told me he hated it for being everything he didn't want SLIDERS to be: formulaic, predictable and safe with the sliders saying good-bye to everyone and triggering the vortex offscreen to save a few bucks and sliding out, without any sort of closing commentary on consumerism or debt or anything thought provoking that would prevent it from being forgotten five minutes after watching it. He also hated Quinn punching out the mall manager like "GI Joe." (I didn't understand the reference then and I still don't.)

I still kind of like it.

Where would I find that?

The plug and play won't do anything with a 320x240 video other than make it look like a watercolour painting in motion, sadly.

That stinks!  Honestly the ones I'd most like to see upconverted are the low res BTS stuff. 

This may require more technical tweaking than PnP but I've seen nice results from 320x240/15fps stuff upscaled using DAIN.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CS4JNfnEEcA

I upscaled some select scenes from "California Reich" and "Slidecage." "Slidecage" stands out to me -- it was the first time Temporal Flux and I really talked about SLIDERS and he told me how Quinn was seriously out of character in this scene due to Jerry O'Connell's poor performance. It was the first time I really thought to question the onscreen product and view it as a constructed product rather than an objective TV reality.

Also, thanks to Cez who has recommended a hosting option.

https://mega.nz/folder/5E1WnZxJ#Zgg_4d2jHZTolIin-iSevw

I asked Cez (of LEGO SLIDERS fame) if there were any scenes he'd ever wanted to see in HD and he said he'd like the "Stoker"' scenes of Wade because of her singing. I swore at him and invoked a blood curse upon him to be attacked by electric bolts fired from a magic guitar for daring to ask me to do this.

Here are the Wade scenes: https://mega.nz/folder/5E1WnZxJ#Zgg_4d2jHZTolIin-iSevw

Look, he did LEGO SLIDERS. He earned this.

Although, to be fair, I've actually rewatched "Stoker" a few times. It's a dangerous and deadly practice, but there's a sequence in SLIDERS REBORN where Quinn-2 summons the Season 3 monsters to attack San Francisco. While Quinn, Wade, Rembrandt and Arturo are busy with dinosaurs and dragons and zombies and whatnot, Quinn's daughter Laurel is menaced by the rock star vampires.

I had to rewatch "Stoker" to describe Morgan as "a tall gentleman in a velvet suit jacket and a high necked shirt with a cravat. His crisp cheekbones frame a predatory smile" who looks like "a reject from a Victorian romance novel." And to describe Harker as "a sunglasses-wearing man with bleached and frosted hair, a dark leather duster" and a "feral snarl in his glee" who "looks like an escapee from an 80s rock concert." They feed on Laurel but poison themselves in doing so because she injected herself with pureed garlic before that.

I actually don't know if the human circulation system would work that quickly, but I was originally going to have Laurel defeat them with high intensity sound until Transmodiar reminded me that the rock star vampires are rock star vampires. Transmodiar suggested using sunlight, but I pointed out that Harker kills the music critic during the day, then wondered if maybe "Stoker" had forgotten about using a day-to-light filter for the shots. "Filter!" Transmodiar chortled. "When a show stops caring, they don't care about time of day!"

This episode made me really upset and angry when I rewatched it for SLIDERS REBORN and I remain somewhat comforted to have written a scene where the vampires are dispatched by some spices in a kitchen.