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Not sure if the broadcast rights could be double dipped, but here’s a new channel to keep an eye on for Sliders:

https://bleedingcool.com/tv/rewind-tv-l … -tv-focus/

The new channel’s parent, Antenna TV, is something in my part of the country, so it could be a regional difference that would allow them to also have the Sliders broadcast rights.  We’ll see

It does seem their focus is comedy, so at most I would only expect something like Sliders once a week (like MeTV does with their Saturday Night Sci-Fi block)

I admit that it is rather sad to think of Kyle tweeting madly at STAR TREK producers not realizing that his posts have gone from being buried in a sea of comments to being totally invisible. But Kyle has unfortunately crossed a line.

Tracy Torme, as I wrote above, is clearly not on the same end of the political spectrum as I am. But Tracy Torme, regardless of who he votes for or criticizes politically -- he wears a mask and advises that others do the same. Kyle brags that he does not wear a mask and encourages people to get sick and die. Torme, regardless of what alt-right/right-wing podcasts he appears on, knows from his pandemic research for I AM LEGEND that he must get vaccinated. Kyle declares that vaccination is posturing self-poisoning. This is not just a difference of opinion; these are willful falsehoods that could get people killed. For all my faults and failings -- and for all of Torme's -- we would never allow our actions or statements to encourage people to physically hurt themselves or others.

I'm so relieved that Slider_Quinn21 is getting vaccinated and that the vaccine is so readily available in the States. Here in Canada, my mother got her first shot, but we simply don't have the manufacturing capacity to do as well as America in distribution. In addition, my province has started making some terrible, terrible moves. The premier (think a state governor) keeps declaring 'lockdowns' -- but the only lockdowns are for shops, restaurants, hair salons -- and that simply isn't where the cases are coming.

The majority of the infections are in offices, call centres, construction, warehouses, manufacturing plants, food processing. The majority of the infected are people who don't get paid sick days and have no ability to stay at home, so they go to work, get infected, spread the infection and end up in the intensive care units which are filled to bursting. But the premier won't lock down construction and big business because that's where most of his voters and financial supporters exist.

In addition, this rampant spread has caused rampant viral mutation and our vaccine distribution isn't enough to outrun it. At this point, the province will, rather than lock down the industries that have the highest transmission rates, pass laws declaring that doctors will not be liable if they withhold medical resources from deathly ill patients in favour of caring for patients who have a better chance of being saved.

Canada has always defined itself as being not as bad as the United States. But now, the United States has some capacity to manufacture vaccines and Canada has none whatsoever and is relying on imports. Canada also has Justin Trudeau. He is a sweet, pleasant, Quinn Mallory-esque prime minister (think president) who can't seem to go six months without some self-inflicted screwup of his own making (much like Quinn).

In contrast, President Joe Biden seems to have learned not to trip over his own feet (aside from that moment in December 2020 where he broke his foot playing tug of war with his dog).

**

In other news, UNIVERSAL SIGNS has apparently been available in a supposedly HD format on Vimeo. https://vimeo.com/ondemand/universalsigns UNIVERSAL SIGNS is a 2008 film starring Sabrina Lloyd. It's particularly funny because when I first started writing SLIDERS screenplays in 2011, I had trouble getting Wade's voice from watching SLIDERS itself. I saw UNIVERSAL SIGNS was for sale on DVD through the film's website, eagerly purchased a copy and anticipated playing it with my eyes shut to concentrate on Sabrina's voice -- only to discover it was a silent movie, performed entirely in sign language and had no spoken dialogue (or at least none you could hear). I eventually had to find DOPAMINE, also featuring Lloyd as a troubled schoolteacher, and that got it to work.

Anyway, it is supposedly in HD on Vimeo, but I bought and downloaded it -- and it's a shockingly poor image. It's 720p, but the bit rate is so painfully low that the video is filled with blocky artifacts and blurriness. It looks like it was filmed digitally but hypercompressed for online download.

However, I was able to run the 720p file through Topaz and deblock it entirely, smoothing out the artifacts and bringing out each strand of Sabrina Lloyd's hair and the marks and pores on her face. I emailed the company to ask if there were an AI option to also add an audio track to the movie with all of Sabrina Lloyd's dialogue made audible and they said they'd get back to me after Easter.

**

Cyberlink PowerDVD has a neat Smart Stretch function. It zooms in slightly on 4:3 video, then stretches the edges of the video, reducing the percentage of the stretch as it gets closer to the center of the frame. This converts 4:3 to 16:9 while only losing at most 5 - 6 per cent of the frame. This appears to be proprietary, however. You yourself attempted a smart stretch on your own software and found that it distorted the frame. This doesn't happen in PowerDVD.

However, I don't use PowerDVD anymore. I used it on a home theatre PC, but I've since then replaced it with an Android TV box in my living room. Alternatively, I watch videos on an Android tablet. Watching anything on a laptop is rather cumbersome now because I have to plug in an external drive. I haven't found any Android TV or mobile apps with smart stretching and I've just accepted that 4:3 video will be pillarboxed. Zach Snyder seems to be into it with his JUSTICE LEAGUE cut.

I present you the alternate, brick ending of the Virtual Season 6! Do you remember that I didn’t explain what happened to alternate four original Sliders? “Oh no…!”

WATCH the new ending >> www.facebook.com/SlidersPL/posts/2556016391367599

Here you can watch the original ending >> www.youtube.com/watch?v=LI5AVU2Gj-U

and here you can read the original ending >>  www.sliders.pl/summary6_13_en.php

Video made by @BrickLadyAgata

I have uploaded the endings for "Genesis" and "Prophets and Loss."
https://mega.nz/folder/5E1WnZxJ#Zgg_4d2jHZTolIin-iSevw

I didn't plan to upscale these, but Transmodiar asked for "Genesis" and "Common Ground" footage in HD for his fan edit and I accidentally ripped "Prophets and Loss" from the DVD and decided to upscale that too.

The results are actually quite nice (in terms of video quality). (I'm guessing that) Seasons 4 - 5 switched from 35mm film to 16mm film that was transferred to video with a high level of grain that was retained in Mill Creek's overcompressed release. It's grain that the AI can latch onto for a good result.

My God, I can only imagine what poor Linda Henning made of her appearances Seasons 4 and 5.

Oh, there's no question that the name for people like you is the same for people like me. Hell, if Cez wants it, I can also provide the half-baked S4 credits I started when I was editing a "better" version of "Genesis." It's not finished, but it's his if he wants it!

HD scenes from "Dead Man Sliding" (Wade, Rembrandt and Arturo corner Quinn-2) and "Prince of Slides" (Rembrandt faces off against Rembrandt & Quinn Mallory apparently knows how to swordfight now -- which could be part of Quinn's sports obsession except there was no fencing gear in his room in the Pilot).

https://gofile.io/d/7MIbW5

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

TF posted a screencap of "Prince of Wails" in another thread. Compare it to the upscale and note where the AI struggles: onscreen text that's blurry is unreadable even after upscaling.

"Fever": The final faceoff and Wade's awakening: https://gofile.io/d/zULVOv

"Virtual Slide": the finale. https://gofile.io/d/lYT0xn

Very interesting comparison between the distinct visual tones of Season 1 and Season 4 where Season 1 seems to be filling in a lot of bare studio space with extras and set dressing whereas Season 4 is either using the same standing set and backlot over and over again or is simply bare.

"Fever" is from the Universal DVD. "Virtual Slide" is from Mill Creek, but the image quality doesn't seem that different to me thanks to the upscaling having more to work on the Mill Creek set once we get to the last two seasons. It looks to me like the new post production company for Seasons 4 - 5 used a different film-to-video process -- or Seasons 4 - 5 used 16mm film that was transferred to tape. Either way, it created a level of graininess that remains even after overcompression, grain that the upscale can treat as texture.

Rembrandt's concert in "The King is Back" in FakeD HD! https://gofile.io/d/PfPmtx

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.

I upscaled the end of "Time and Again World" to 1080p and downscaled it to 720p and played it side by side with the original 720p ending. There was no difference.

**

Don't forget that the GPU is also a factor in AI upscaling. I don't know how essential 32GB of RAM, but without it, I wouldn't be able to do my day job in Photoshop, InDesign, Adobe Premiere and Illustrator while Handbrake and/or Topaz run minimized in the background. My PC would become unusable.

Also, each disc takes about 30 minutes to rip and then 10 minutes per episode to deinterlace each file in Handbrake followed by 9 - 10 hours to enhance the video in Topaz. I don't think it's feasible to ask every single SLIDERS fan to do this and I don't believe Universal will do it -- they could have just scanned the master tapes properly the first time and decombed the digital assets.

But I'll be happy to give them the files when I'm done, although -- I'm not doing all 88 episodes of SLIDERS. I'll just do Seasons 1, 2, and a select few from 3 - 5. Anyone who wants to watch "Map of the Mind" in FakeD will have to do it themselves!

Well. Let's not go nuts. The stairs on Quinn's house are clearing giving the AI a lot of trouble in the upscale. The Sorcerer scenes suffer badly when there are high levels of light that blow out the character's faces in the highlights.

It is probably fixable and I know Transmodiar will have thoughts, but I'm going to refer back to what Transmodiar said when I told him how terribly my first draft outline of SLIDERS REBORN had turned out -- let's just aim to get matters from terrible to adequate.

I wish there were some way for me to share the full results with everyone, but my legal department has advised me not to open that door.

Here is the Constitution handoff and slideout from "Time and Again World" in HD. Note the limitations of AI upscaling: wide shots are fuzzy because there isn't detail to enhance, the bridge against the dark sky is crushed into blackness. But medium shots and closeups of actor's faces -- that's where the AI works its magic best.

https://gofile.io/d/uvGMU5