Sliders DVD Releases (Universal, Mill Creek, SD blu-ray, Restoration) (Page 5 of 5)

I've mostly been using Topaz Artemis HQ which is mostly about rendering film grain into pixel detail and removing compression artifacts. The medium and low quality Artemis settings are more aggressive with noise and compression artifact removal, but they create an overly airbrushed look.

The noise in the Lanczos upscaled files is compression noise, not image forming grain, so Topaz just removes it. It's not really worthwhile especially when Topaz needs 20 - 22 hours per episode. Usually, it only takes 7 - 9 hours to upscale a 480p image to 1080p in Topaz.

I watched two versions of "Prince of Wails" today: the version decompressed in Topaz and Lanczos scaled to 1080p, and the version scaled from the DVD file to 1080p via Lanczos on its own.

The Topaz-enhanced version is sharper in medium and closeup shots, but for wide shots, there's a painful fuzziness, blurriness and vagueness to the shots that is frustratingly jarring when the medium and closeup shots look so much better.

The Lanczos version is not as sharp in the medium and close up shots compared to the Topaz version. It's a little blurrier and the wide shots have the same lack of definition as the AI cleaned version. However, it looks better than just scaling the DVD image bicubically. Lanczos has softened the compression artifacts and now it looks like film grain. There's a sense of definition and texture. The wide shots with this noise look better; the noise partially fills in the lack of detail with some texture.

I prefer the Lanczos version because even though it isn't as sharp in the close up and medium shots, it's consistent: the haziness and noise are on all the shots, so you can get used to it as opposed to being distracted by the inconsistency of the Topaz version.

It doesn't look as good if you're watching it on a computer screen and studying the image closely, but it looks good when played on my Android TV.

I watched them both on my 55 inch HDTV, played on my Android TV box.

The Topaz enhanced version looks okay/good enough in mediums and closeups, but poor/terrible in wide shots. The Lanczos version looks okay in all shots, fuzzier and with a heavy level of what seems like film grain (but is really compression noise). The wide shots are still blurry and undetailed, but the film grain look makes it look consistent with the mediums and wides. It is consistent whereas the Topaz version keeps jumping back and forth between not-bad to terrible. Even if the episode is only looking okay, at least it looks okay from beginning to end. You get used to the visual quality and then you can get into the story.

Well, I took a seven minute clip of "Prince of Wails" and dropped it into Topaz for upscaling. It says it'll take nine hours so I guess we'll see if it's worth it.

Let me congratulate you for your herculean effort in playing with the next-generation tools available to folks to rescue older, outdated content that deserves the royal treatment.

You tested, you theorized, you tried 1000 times.  This is exactly how science works. 

The professor?  Well, he would be very proud!

very interesting

to me (just looking at a computer online)

this one looks way better:  https://mega.nz/file/PsgGnZDQ#c6oLZfbYA … PUiN8JonfQ

I'm doing this blind so i have no idea which is which

Well, they've been upscaled in two different ways and Topaz is a crowdpleaser for a variety of reasons.

Lanczos upscaling operates on a specific mathematical algorithm that I don't actually understand except to say that the extra pixels added to make the image bigger are blended smoothly into the final version. Where bicubic scaling can add pixelated edges to the larger image, Lanczos scaling is softer, more forgiving, and also has the effect of mildly diminishing the noise in a grainy image.

Topaz AI upscaling, however, looks to me like it's composed of multiple algorithms for a wide variety of textures: skin, hair, grass, pavement, metal, sky, clouds, wood, fabric -- with specific models applied to specific portions of each frame. (The ability to recognize the texture and apply the right model is the AI part.) The models are dependent on using film grain as a guide to reconstruct the image at a larger size and to re-render that grain as pixel detail. As a result, Topaz upscaling is sharper than Lanczos because Topaz is actively re-rendering the film grain as a rebuilt pixel-based image. Most grain-reduction methods operate by blurring the image, but Topaz converts that grain to sharpen the picture.

In contrast, Lanczos is simply stretching, but with its single-algorithm serving to make the added pixels (mostly) smooth. It isn't re-rendering film grain, so the grain stays intact, just slightly faded out. It offers a mild level of sharpening with added contrast at the edges, but mostly in a way that offsets any new blurriness from stretching.

Topaz is generally better for closeup and medium shots. However, for wide shots, there's a smudged, painted look because the film grain is only serving to render an undetailed, distant image and the AI tries to sharpen detail that isn't present. The same wide shots in Lanczos, however, maintain the original blurriness and graininess so that it doesn't look like a watercolour mishap. Season 1 episodes stored on low-res analog videotape also do better with Lanczos because there isn't any film grain to use for sharpening.

Because SLIDERS was composed largely of closeups and mediums for television, most people will prefer a Topaz AI upscale for the digital videotape episodes.

Something I noticed: the Lanczos versions of my upscales are very hard to shrink down from their 4 - 6GB file sizes. Compression reduces the video noise that's alleviating the visual issues.

I was also running my Topaz upscales of THE DEAD ZONE through Handbrake to reduce the file sizes a bit, taking them from 3 - 4 GB a file to about 1 - 2 GB a file. The video quality went from being a high quality film scan to a medium quality 1080p Netflix videostream and some of the film grain texture left intact by Topaz was screened out by Handbrake.

Out of curiosity, I ran the very grainy blu-ray Turbine version of "As Time Goes By" through Handbrake at the "Super HQ" setting -- and Handbrake blurred out almost half the film grain and there was a slight loss of video quality. It's interesting: Universal's DVD compression in the early 2000s seemed to add compression noise; Mill Creek compression in 2016 added noise.

However, modern video compression codecs seem to screen out video grain and noise in the process of crunching a video file into a smaller container. I ran "As Time Goes By" but with the file size set to "Production Standard" and this time, all the graininess (and sharpness) remained.

I have to wonder if my technique for processing the DVD files has been a problem with SLIDERS, episodes 102 - 109. While I copy the file off the discs, I have to run them through Handbrake to deinterlace them or the final file has horizontal lines flashing across the screen.

I ran Seasons 2 - 5 through this preset and saved the video file at 'Super HQ' and the upscales turned out fine, but those files were already pretty sharp and Topaz had plenty to work with for increasing the resolution. I ran THE DEAD ZONE files through this same preset and the files definitely lost some grain as well, but again, the underlying image was good enough to upscale.

I wonder if my deinterlacing has been blurring the image and removing film grain from the Season 1 episodes. For other video sources, it was fine. But Season 1 was already blurry and lacking film grain; it couldn't have afforded to lose anything. I'm going to re-copy the disc files again and review the raw files.

**

I'd actually like to try another experiment.

Originally, I was only upscaling SLIDERS episodes to 720p and got okay results with Season 1 and great results with Season 2 onward. Season 1 episodes looked decent in mediums and closeups but like watercolour paintings in the wide shots.

After that, I read a bunch of articles from the DOCTOR WHO restoration workers upscaling old 1970s DOCTOR WHO episodes from 650 line analog videotape to 1080p for blu-ray releases. Their preference was to aim for 1080p so that the upscaling would be controlled in terms of their work on the video file and not by the television, so I began outputting my SLIDERS upscales to 1080p.

With episodes 102 - 109 of SLIDERS, however, I think that's proven to be a mistake because SLIDERS analog videotape episodes are 250 line videotape, 38.5 per cent the resolution of a 1970s DOCTOR WHO episodes. I haven't been happy with the AI upscales, but that's probably because I've been stretching the 250 line videotape files too far. These are 480p files; increasing them by 125 per cent via AI is too much whereas increasing them by a modest 50 per cent via AI is more achievable.

Originally, I upscaled the episodes from 480p to 720p using Topaz Artemis LQ for maximum compression artifact removal and sharpening, but I think that was also too far; there isn't enough to sharpen and it looks like a watercolour in wide shots. Topaz Artemis HQ doesn't try to sharpen too much; it's assuming that underneath the compression, the video won't benefit from further sharpening which is correct for SLIDERS' episodes 102 - 109 because they're too blurry for sharpening.

One of my subsequent experiments was running 102 - 109 through Topaz but leaving it a 480p file that had been deartifacted and denoised and then Lanczos scaling this version to 1080p. The results were good but inconsistent: wide shots looked fragmented or blurry while mediums and closeups looked decent.

When running the raw DVD files through Lanczos without Topaz, the 1080p versions were not as sharp in mediums and closeups and had compression noise, but the video quality was consistent across all shots instead of going from clear to blurry. The noise actually helped as a sort of filler data cross the blurry shots.

I'm wondering if using Topaz AI's Artemis HQ to remove the compression raise the resolution by 50 per cent (without trying to sharpen what isn't there like the Artemis LQ version) will yield at least a modest improvement on the initial 480p to 720p upscale.

I'm wondering if then using bicubic scaling to raise the resolution by another 50 per cent to 1080p will also be effective.

It will definitely add a little pixelation back into the image, but that will hopefully make all the wides, mediums and closeups look more consistent, with the pixelation serving a similar function to the compression noise.

I'm going to try it with "Luck of the Draw" and "Prince of Wails" which, to me, had the worst looking wide shots after AI upscaling.

It's indeed very strange that Season 5 goes for anywhere from $80 - $300 USD on some websites for the DVD set. My guess is that sales were good for Seasons 1 - 2, average for Season 3 and so bad for Season 4 that Universal Home Media grudgingly put out Season 5 but in an extremely low quantity anticipating low sales.

That said -- if you get the low bitrate Mill Creek DVD set, the Season 4 - 5 episodes don't really suffer very much from the overcompression.

Seasons 4 - 5, due to the reduced Sci-Fi Channel budget, clearly made a switch from 35mm film to 16mm film which is cheaper due to being smaller. 16mm film has extremely large film grains compared to 35mm film, so those film grains remain large and present even when downscaled to standard definition digital videotape and compressed for Mill Creek's DVDs.

The large grains that for the image keep it sharp and clear; the textures of all surfaces are defined and detailed (for 16mm reduced to standard definition, anyway). You can see all the grooves in Kari Wuhrer's lips. In the Turbine version, however, you can make out the pores in her skin.

In terms of upscaling, you can also get pretty much the same quality for S4 - S5 whether using Mill Creek or Universal. The reason is, once again, the 16mm film grains. AI upscaling algorithms are based on mapping additional pixels to the video image based on the film grain within the image. 16mm film grains, even under Mill Creek compression, are present and retained and AI has no trouble mining that film grain for pixel re-rendering.

DVDFab is interesting, but at the time it was available for a discount, I was in the middle of an upscale and couldn't run it. I'm still pretty deep in the world of Topaz, but it would be neat if a parallel upscaling project used DVD Fab and described what results they're getting. On my end, Seasons 2 - 3 look great after a Topaz Artemis HQ upscale to 1080p whether using the Turbine SD blu-ray or the Universal discs. (I only attempted to upscale "As Time Goes By" to 720p off the Mill Creek DVD and it actually looked okay but not as sharp and crisp the Universal or Turbine based upscales.) And Seasons 4 - 5 from Mill Creek look terrific after an upscale as well.

16mm film downscaled to standard definition digital videotape yields excellent results. It's bitterly ironic that SLIDERS was at its lowest point in Seasons 4 - 5 with casting and budget and stewardship but those two seasons have the best video quality.

Son of a biscuit! Season 3 is truly the Season of Hell. Even two decades later, it's still screwing people over. I am so sorry to hear this. Can you get a return on the mispackaged set?

Other than storage capacity savings, what is the primary reason to reduce sizes?  My understanding is a blu-ray movie is pretty larger (and that's about 2x length of a sliders episode) so moving to 1 to 2 gigs would seem to be messing with the quality, no? 

And you are seeing some of that I guess...

Interesting.  And, not that it's a problem, but you have to wonder if there was any undesired loss on s2 or even s3 and to what degree.  S2's video quality on the dvds still look more like s1 than s4 or s5.  S3 feels like a turning point and as you said elsewhere, s4&5 (the cheapest production) is what would have been the ideal scenario across all season's from a video quality standpoint.

"One of my subsequent experiments was running 102 - 109 through Topaz but leaving it a 480p file that had been deartifacted and denoised and then Lanczos scaling this version to 1080p."

This means without artemis, correct?  eg Topaz just deartifacted and denoised, correct?  Or was that done via artemis HQ?

So you mean running topaz HQ *after* upscaling via lanczos?  (edit: actually i think that's your normal workflow)

Interesting...  so are you suggesting lanczos followed by artemis hq followed by bicubic scaling?

The observation you made about not going to 1080 on s1-9 is interestiing.  The AI just can't work with the content as well.

Just as a note in general, I observed a pretty intriguing thing the other day.  The Jodorowsky's Dune BOOK / bible that was made when he was trying to pitch hollywood a feature in the 70s was bought for $3m by a bunch of cryto/nft bros recently.  There are a limit number of books out there.  They then and went raised 12 MILLION dollars from the nft/crypto community to basically share ownership of a future project to make tv/film content based on the book (inspired).  Yes, without dune rights etc.  Not using the brand I guess.  The "investors" don't even get a share of profit as I understand it, and it's supposedly not profit driven or whatever.

They are even looking at costs of an animated series -- supposedly most series for 13 episodes cost $3m to make though I am sure it at least doubles at times.

It's all very interesting to me because I think about our own community.  Like, I don't think we can repeat any of that, but would we be able to raise say 100-150k for a true restoration of S1?  If our show was cooler to 20-30 year olds with expendable income and overlap into the nft/crypto world, I'd say yea... sure.  But our audience is generally at least 40 and 35 youngest, and don't have the same expendable income or risk tolerance.

MY thing is, at the end of the day, a true scan of the negative of s1, even if you didn't put in the special effects, i think would be eye-opening to the community and it would feel newish.  Maybe you could even go 16:9 if cameras and boom mikes are not in the way.  It's the sorta passion project I wish we could rally around.  Because I don't think it will happen by companies motivated by profit.

That said, I also think an alternative is a fan related project that would essentially do it in an upscaling way.  If scans couldn't be made but let's say, we raised enough money to actually get some license to pay uni (my guess is it would minmally be $50k -- maybe just 25k for s1, i dont know) and then released the title as an actual blu-ray and you hope to break even.

In that case, I would think an approach of treating wide shots with its own up scale and medium / close with their own and compiling it on a timeline would be needed for the best look for s1.

All this is fantasy of course, but you just wonder what we as a community could pull together if we say could get a little push from a jerry or john.  I would also very much like to see distributors, like Peacock, asking Universal to at minimum do an upscale job (though clearly it would not meet the quality of yours unless they somehow had access to better raw assets).

Update: Yay! Season 4 was delivered today. At least I got all the right discs on season 4. I will be getting season 3 package #2 tomorrow (crossing fingers I get all the right discs on that one). Seasons 1-2 (my personal favorites) will be coming later this week.

What I wouldn't have given to have Tracy Torme` just be THE guy in charge for all five seasons.

Oh, well. With a potential 6 in the works...I'll be happy having him return.

Anyway...ripping with Handbrake produces blank/grayed out video on the DVDs in Season 3. The only ripping program I have that works is DVD Fab. Not sure what's up with that.

Yes! I always use the deinterlace function on films (and TV shows) I rip for this reason.

BTW, side comment: I said it years ago and I'll say it now: watching Kari Wuhrer act is like watching (listening to...?) nails on a chalkboard.

Well I guess this speaks to the inconsistency between episodes with s1....

You mention a lot of things here with turbine vs. Universal.  Related to that I seem to recall strongly preferring most episodes of s2 turbine over universal (with goodfellas being an exception bc it played really pixelated and jaggy on my equipment).

However I think I recall maybe preferring s1 on universal vs.turbine and I just tried to find what I wrote it anything in this thread and don't see notes.

My blu ray player that could handle the pal format has since broke.

I'm sorry to hear about your PAL capable player, RussianCabbie.

QuinnSlidr -- I've generally found that the episodes from "Summer of Love" to "Luck of the Draw" are not AI upscalable due to having been transferred to low-res analog videotape that has lost all the film grain needed for an AI re-rendering. But I'll be curious to know if you get different results. The other issue is, of course, the aliasing issues on five episodes of Season 1.

I looked into the aliasing issue some more when I probably could've been eating lunch and...

Wide Shot Woes and Jagged Edges: A lot of the AI sharpened wide shots from specific Season 1 episodes of the Universal DVD looked bad after AI upscaling, even when the AI was just to deblock, deartifact, and leave the 480 image at 480. There was a weird broken stained glass effect across those shots. This was particularly present in "Prince of Wails," "Fever," "Last Days," "Eggheads" and "Luck of the Draw." These are the episodes with severe aliasing issues which lead to flickering, jagged edges on straight lines that I think confuse the AI in what pixels to add even for simple cleanup (and it was already confused by the lack of film grain). These jagged edges are in the raw DVD files.

A Normal Amount: "Summer of Love" and "The King is Back" don't have this problem. There are a couple shots in "The Weaker Sex" where aliasing is present (the scene when a woman stops her car in front of Rembrandt when he's singing on the street) -- and it isn't severe and at a fairly normal level for DVD, an interlaced medium. But it is really bad on the other five episodes.

Odd and Even Fields: SLIDERS was shot on film but transferred to videotape, an interlaced format where the video signal contains two fields (even and odd) for rendering the image. Most interlaced video will suffer from at least a little aliasing (like in "The Weaker Sex"), but when these two fields aren't aligned correctly, it will be glaring and distracting.

How Did This Happen? It looks like when Universal made the DVDs in 2004, the process for identifying odd and even fields from analog videotape for digital file conversion was limited. Rather than convert each videotape twice and choose the file that turned out correctly, Universal chose randomly, got it right three times out of eight (four out of nine if you count the pilot), and didn't bother to re-encode for the five that they got wrong.

Our Mill Creek Enemies: The Mill Creek DVDs have the same aliasing issues on the same scenes.

Our German Allies: Turbine, while using poorer quality PAL masters, doesn't have aliasing issues on their SD blu-ray. They may have received videotapes and transferred the fields correctly through 2016 technology or trial and error. (I mean, you only have to do it twice to get it right.) They may have received PAL digital files that didn't have the field errors (although given Universal's ineptitude, it seems unlikely). They may have received digital files with field errors but corrected them. They don't remember if they received digital files or videotapes.

Can this be fixed? I can't seem to do it easily. Handbrake has a "Chroma Smooth" function for this sort of distortion, but it blurs the whole image and those jagged, flickering lines still remain. Topaz has a few "anti-aliasing" presets, but it can't seem to smooth out the issue either; it's meant for reducing low levels of aliasing correctly encoded interlaced video, not video that's swapped the odd and even fields. There are a number of deinterlacing filters I could try and Turbine probably has the right software for it.

CPU Without GPU: AVIDemux has a bunch of options for deinterlacing and swapping the fields, but AVIDemux doesn't use my graphics processing card, instead using only the CPU. CPU-only video processing is very slow, so for me, trying different deinterlacing processes to find the right one would take hours for each one just to complete a five minute clip -- and I refuse to this any more.

Resignation: I refuse to spend any more time trying to clean up the hackwork done by Universal's home video department which they refused to perform properly even with simple trial and error back in 2004. Which they refused to correct even when they had years before sending the files to Mill Creek and Hulu and Peacock and Netflix. I am done trying to upscale the Universal DVD files. Universal is incompetent. It's not my job to fix their work. I will never put another disc from the Dual Dimension set into one of of my drives again.

Turbine: I put the Turbine version of "Prince of Wails" through Topaz this morning. No upscaling to a higher resolution, just trying to AI sharpen away the blurriness. It just finished and it looks to be on the same level of sharpness as the Universal version of this episode -- not terrific, but not downright fuzzy. It's good enough to scale via Lanczos to 1080p and it doesn't have Universal's field errors. I'm going to run the sharpening on all the Turbine versions of the non-Pilot Season 1 episodes and upscale them to 1080p via Lanczos.

Curiosity: "Prince of Wails," "Fever," "Last Days," "Eggheads" and "Luck of the Draw" will definitely be replaced with the Turbine-based upscales. "Summer of Love" off the Turbine version is really blurry and discoloured, but it'd still be worth it to see the results. "The Weaker Sex" and "The King is Back" might be best as the versions sourced from Universal, but it'd be nice to complete the set with them.

Good bye, Universal's Dual Dimension set -- and good riddance. (The Pilot, "Summer of Love," "The Weaker Sex" and "The King is Back" looked good, though.)

I wonder if they had two different staff members doing this work?  And each person may have choose a different setting.

Big companies.  They don't care the way fans do.

I think you've discovered something really interesting and important here with regard to the deinterlacing and the 3  / 5 split of aligned properly vs. not for season 1.

I am sure universal never knew this and I an sure that not anyone else knew of this issue either.

I just did some googling and since you are so well versed in some of the technical end of things, I would invite you to reach out to this gentleman and see if you can get a conversation going.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/bpfunke

Maybe just maybe they'd correct their digital files in their local archive and we'd see the distribution of them down the road.  That would mean rescannjng the master tapes for those episodes I guess .

Here is some other names.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/robertblair … _browsemap

https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryanbeckfor … _browsemap

https://www.linkedin.com/in/shawnodonne … _browsemap

https://www.linkedin.com/in/lisa-stewar … _browsemap

You could reach out to them individually and ask if they are the appropriate person to report an issue with for the SLIDERS (1995-2000) digital files distributed on the dvds and presumably to their other domestic partners (peacock, comet/sinclair).

Most of those technicians probably work on more current programming and it might be a team in the West coast where physical master tapes are located but if they can look someone in and you get the right person (in terms of kindness) they might be willing to talk about that stuff on the technical front and look into it. Maybe even fix it.

The fact that nbcuniversal is still landing syndication deals for the content at least makes it somewhat of a current technical issue..

Well, you're right that they probably wouldn't care enough to fix it.

I'm still glad you were able to discover the issue though.  A lot of what we historically thought was the problem was overcompression.

The deblur feature seems like an interesting feature.  Really nice to have.   I bet that can help a lot on older tv content.... If you watch some of the stuff on the nostalgia tv networks... especially I think sitcoms... It seems a lot of them could use that.

With regard to Universal, yea I'll try to let some of these folks know about that issue.  None if those ppl are home entertainment but more digital asset management.  So if they ever did rescan the master tapes to get new digital files, we might see the rewards on new vod partners or syndication partners who receive the digital assets.  Even peacock should be able to show sliders a bit more respectfully... If that's the platform that is supposedly so important to the future of the company.

Of course having proper files would also therefore help with upscaling but I'm not so sure we'd be able to get our hands on them so easily since another DVD release is fairly unlikely.

Well, you could just get the Mill Creek complete set for Season 5. For upscaling purposes, it makes little difference.

Also, as you are working on the Universal discs, I can tell you: I was able to mostly fix the aliasing issue in Universal's "Prince of Wails" with a field-swap deinterlacer in AVIDemux.

In the Universal disc, the scene of the sliders encountering Hurley and the soldiers in Oakland was riddled with jagged edges on the humvee and the car. After using Kernel Deint and setting it to reverse the field order, the lines of the humvee and car were smoother, but there were still artifacts within the smoothed out lines and image flickering across them.

That said, I am only an amateur and some more experienced encoder enthusiasts say that the NTSC version is fine and it's the Turbine / PAL video files that are mis-aligned. https://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?p=1869424

I can only speak to my own particular hardware and software: I've run every Season 1 - 2 episode of SLIDERS through the GPU-augmented Handbrake's decomb filter using both Turbine and Universal. For me, only Universal's "Prince of Wails," "Fever," "Last Days," "Eggheads" and "Luck of the Draw" have the mis-arranged fields after Handbrake's deinterlacing. The other Universal episodes were mostly fine, the Turbine episodes converted to progressive video via Handbrake really well.

Certainly, there is *some* aliasing in the Turbine versions, but any video that was ever interlaced will have some. "Last Days" opens with a shot of a still street; in the Universal version, the straight lines are pixelated and blocky and flickering. In the Turbine version, those lines are smooth -- but there is a little flicker. To me, that's normal.

My guess would be that Turbine has a field-swap deinterlacer for files that haven't been encoded correctly.

If someone else wants to experiment with deinterlacing field swappers, they might find the right one for the five alias-troubled Universal episodes. However, I won't keep using the Universal DVDs for anything. I've realized that my relationship NBCUniversal has become abusive.

I am a devoted fan of SLIDERS as a television series and intellectual property, but I'm not going to devote myself to unpaid servitude for a multi-billion dollar global conglomerate that has the ability to deinterlace their own videotapes.

It's one thing to upscale a standard definition video product to HD as a fan; that's having purchased a product and looking at improving the playback options. It's also fine for me to write fan fiction; that's imagining what SLIDERS could be and typing it up.

But it is grossly inappropriate for me, a hobbyist fan, to provide free labour to a wealthy corporation just because I care about an intellectual property that happens to exist on one of their ledgers. I won't call five NBCUniversal employees to raise and repair the video quality issues. That's ridiculous. It is not my job to fix a standard definition video product that Universal sold to me broken.

NBCUniversal owns SLIDERS, but SLIDERS is not NBCUniversal.

In contrast, my relationship with Turbine is appropriate for a content distributor and a fan. I wanted SLIDERS in standard definition. They sold it to me. Their version of SLIDERS is encoded correctly and the episodes are in order and there is no damage from compression.

Any effort to bring Turbine's content to HD is to build upon the solid foundation of their diligence, not to correct incompetence in their product. Their version of Season 1 was not upscalable using the 2020 version of Topaz, but the 2021 edition is yielding some interesting results.

"Prince of Wails" from Turbine looks really nice after Topaz has deblurred it and added some film grain texture while keeping the file at 480p. Before Topaz, the Turbine file was about 25 per cent blurrier than the Universal version. After Turbine, I'd say it's about 5 per cent blurrier. I did do some work before Topaz, increasing the saturation levels a bit. I'm now putting this file through Topaz again to be deblurred and upscaled to 1080p. It might be as much a disaster as my previous upscales of this file, but it'd be nice to know what can and can't be done.

I ran a short upscaling test on a segment of Turbine's "Prince of Wails" (Artemis High Quality, deblur, 1080p output) and I have to say, I think we're getting somewhere at last with these Season 1 episodes.

Sample video: https://mega.nz/file/O9YzHC7a#nX7JrcQHk … 79AO6_sFXo

Instead of trying re-render the image with absent film grain, Topaz's deblur seems to selectively increase pixel contrast to reduce blurriness while blending the pixels in smoothly to avoid blockiness. Looking at the results up close, there is some of that watercolour effect in the wides, but watching it at living room distance, it isn't really a big deal.

I am going to increase the amount of film grain by 25 per cent, however, just to fill in a bit of the absent detail and this time, I'm running the whole episode which will take 10 hours.

My relationship with Turbine is already proving healthy and rewarding.

I am adding grain via Topaz. I feel that grain adds some weight and body to the image and fills in some of the missing detail. I think the objective here is no longer grain-to-pixel sharpening, but deblurring the PAL video master.

However...

I just reviewed the new "Prince of Wails" 1080p upscale and it looks good -- but still a little 'bare.' I'm running it again now but increasing the grain by another 10 per cent. I would like to show you a sample, except I'm running into that problem I had earlier: when I extract a file via Handbrake, I find that the H.264 codec, even at the highest file size, filters out the Topaz-added grain texture! Even when the full episode is 5.8GB and the extracted five minute sample is 3.6GB, it doesn't look any different from what I posted last night.

Okay, Handbrake has a (very slow, CPU-only) process for 'tuning' a video to maintain the grain.

"Prince of Wails." The sliders meet Hurley! Again! This is Turbine, upscaled via Topaz Artemis High Quality (deblur) with film grain added after the upscale.
https://mega.nz/file/L5JigBLI#M6ZAtduC_ … Lp6S0d4CUY

For me, my low hanging target for the Season 1 Turbine upscales is to get them to look like the Season 2 Turbine files -- grainy and filmic. I think it's achievable to get a below average HD file that looks like an above average SD file.

Also, if I change my mind later, the grain can easily be removed: it only takes 2 - 4 minutes to re-encode the file in Handbrake with a GPU-augmented codec that deletes the data layer with the grain. Better to have it and not want it than to want it and not have it.

Here's the opening of "Fever." One of the things I have always admired about Jerry O'Connell as an actor: he is very good at fake eating. In both "Prince of Wails" and "Fever," he fake eats very convincingly even though, intellectually, I know he's not eating anything. Check out his fake eating in "Fever" in this upscaled sample here:
https://mega.nz/file/m94kQahB#vvrU5ndfc … PQ9BQGZ2ZE

Fever looks good. I have always found the blurriness of the opening particularly disturbing, especially with the VOD distributors etc.

It's odd: the Turbine episodes are blurrier than the Universal episodes, but with the 2021 Topaz toolkit, Turbine is working out better than Universal.

I couldn't figure out what to do with the Universal Season 1 episodes after the Pilot. Even with the new Topaz tools, every attempt to deblur the Season 1 Universal files created either a smudged 1080p watercolour painting or oversharpened, deformed artifacts across the video image -- or improved the image so little that non-AI scaling was faster and better.

Even the Universal version of "Summer of Love," which didn't have the interlacing issues, came out of Topaz 2021 badly: it's really smudged, like a bad painting. It's like the compression and the lack of film grain just confuses the algorithm and when an episode like "Prince of Wails" has interlacing problems on top of that, Topaz is just lost.

My successes with upscaling DUE SOUTH and THE DEAD ZONE from compressed DVDs made me think that Topaz could lift off video compression and reveal what was underneath. But I suspect this isn't quite true: while Topaz can remove compression, it is dependent on film grain to reconstruct what is under that compression. When there is compression but no grain, Topaz can't rebuild the image correctly, so removing the compression artifacts off the Universal files only makes them worse.

In contrast, the Turbine versions of Season 1 only have one problem for Topaz to address. The Turbine episodes are blurry and Topaz needs to deblur them (and upping the saturation a bit in AVIDemux before the uspcale is good too). There isn't any compression noise to lift off, so Topaz doesn't need to rebuild the image using film grain; it just needs to review the pixels of this blurry image and increase the pixel contrast within the boundaries of each part of the image.

Some findings:

"Summer of Love" from Turbine is still in progress, but I'm looking at the frames as they upscale and they do not look good after the deblur. It is the fuzziest episode in the Turbine set. I wonder if I might go to the MP4 file I have of the Universal version and use Topaz 2021's noise-removal preset to take off the compression artifacts -- while leaving it at 480p. Then run Topaz' deblurring function to bring it to 1080p. Topaz 2021 separating the tools instead of just having them all combined into a few presets may offer some paths forward here.

In terms of aliasing: I've been reviewing the raw Universal files of the episodes that are not suffering from misaligned fields throughout most of the episode. The Universal version of the pilot has some aliasing. There are some jagged edges in Quinn's car when he stops his car by the park, flickeringly jagged lines when Quinn runs past the homeless Communist, jagged lines across Arturo's classroom seats. I'd consider this normal for a DVD; you're always going to have at least a little. It's only annoying when it's in any and every shot with straight lines for entire episodes like Universal's "Prince of Wails," "Fever," "Last Days," "Eggheads" and "Luck of the Draw."

However, the Turbine version of the pilot, while blurrier, has significantly less of this flicker and jaggedness in the park scene and almost none in Arturo's classroom.

While mostly fine, Universal's "The Weaker Sex" had some flickering jagged edges in the scene with Rembrandt singing and a lady stopping her car to talk to him; those are not present in the Turbine version. Universal's version of "The King is Back" is also pretty alias-free except in one notable scene: after Arturo's crowdsurfing incident, the Motel 12 doorframe is very jagged and flickery. Again, I would consider all this acceptable for an interlaced DVD, especially in how occasional it is. However, the Turbine versions of "The Weaker Sex" and "The King is Back" don't have these issues.

I wonder if a part of it is that the Turbine versions are at 24 frames per second instead of 29, and fewer frames means less opportunity for field issues in interlaced video, but I think Turbine must have done processing cleanup here because it's unlikely Universal did a better job on the PAL masters than they did on the NTSC files.

**

Handbrake has a function called "Detelecine" which is supposed to address flicker caused when film has been converted to videotape (like with SLIDERS). I'd previously just been deinterlacing when when converting the DVD files from interlaced into a progressive (which makes it easier to upscale because the AI only has to improve image quality instead of merging two separate video fields).

Detelecine is a lot slower than just simple deinterlacing; a 3 - 5 minute deinterlace job becomes 10 - 20 minutes with detelecine. After running both the Turbine and Universal versions of the Pilot through detelecine: the Turbine version had no flicker or jagged edges and the Pilot's aliasing was about 80 per cent gone.

The Universal version of the Pilot is a sharper file, so that's probably the one to stick with for upscaling.

Out of morbid interest, I ran the detelecine function on the Universal version of "Prince of Wails" -- just the scene where the sliders in Oakland encounter Hurley's soldiers. Detelecine could only reduce the jagged edges in the cars by about half -- it's still really distracting, and it throws off the upscaling process. Detelecine still needs the file to be in a correctly interlaced format.

**

Out of professional interest, I ran the interlaced version of Turbine's "Fever" through Topaz' built in deinterlacer. Topaz could not properly deinterlace this file; the shot of the opening scene where the camera pans across the flags were filled with horizontal lines.

I edited my post as some of my Handbrake samples finished. Detelecine can reduce 'normal' levels of aliasing, but it can't fix video files like the five Universal episodes where the fields are mis-arranged.

**

My guess is that ghostly blurring is due to different deinterlacing techniques in different players. My blu-ray player deinterlaces the Turbine files well, as do my codecs for Handbrake. But not everyone has had the same experience; over at Doom9, those experienced video encoders insist that there are no interlacing issues with the NTSC DVDs and it's the PAL blu-ray that's a mess of misarranged fields.

I don't think that you can sync up a 24 FPS video file with a 29 FPS video file. Even when I play the NTSC and PAL files side by side for comparison, they quickly go out of sync because of the frame rate difference.

**

I think my final upscale will likely use the Universal versions of Pilot and the Turbine versions of "Prince of Wails," "Fever," "Last Days," "Eggheads" and "Luck of the Draw." I am not sure about "The Weaker Sex" and "The King is Back" yet; the Turbine versions of those two are in the queue.

I want to try using Topaz to denoise the Universal version of "Summer of Love" while leaving it at 480p, then drag the denoised file into Topaz again for a deblurring upscale to 1080p. If the results are good, then the Universal versions of "The Weaker Sex" and "The King is Back" would benefit from the same.

New report on anti-aliasing for the Universal discs. The aliasing problem is solved.

Handbrake by default has deinterlacing enabled on its presets, but I disabled it and switched on detelecine all by itself and am getting much-improved results for the problem episodes of the Universal set.

The Universal version of "Prince of Wails" has that scene of the sliders encountering Hurley and the soldiers in Oakland; it has always been a mess of jagged edges; detelecine reduced that to being mildly artifacted with faint flicker.

I also ran 30 seconds of Universal's "Fever" through detelecine only -- specifically, 30 seconds in the drugstore with all the aliasing on the shelves. Those jagged edges were smoothed out and reduced to a slight flicker.

I ran a scene from Universal's "Eggheads" through detelecine; specifically, the scene of Arturo meeting his wife. The house has always been horribly distorted and the cars were riddled with jagged edges. Those have been smoothed out too to a mild flicker.

Detelecine was able to completely almost totally remove the jagged edges from the Universal version of the Pilot and there's only a faint flicker where those used to be.

The Universal version of "Last Days" had a lot of aliasing in the opening shots; the Turbine version of "Last Days" had a faint flicker. Detelecine didn't do anything to amend the Turbine version of "Last Days," but for the Universal version, the aliasing was reduced to being about the same as Turbine's.

I'll report back later about "The King is Back" and "Luck of the Draw."

Well, that's a bit of good news...

I am glad you've come to see.the benefits of a proper color correction.  

I've always maintained that while the coloring on season 4 and 5 is respectable, the early stuff just has too many issues to consider it  anything but distorted from the original image.

Ok. As I recall, the hardware with your gpu broke.  I must have missed.it but did you get a new one?  I mean you've been doing a lot of processing lately so that would make sense but I guess i.assumed you were still held back by some limitation due to lack of a proper one.

Oh ok.  That's a good bit of info for anyone reading this in the future.

All good information.

You are right, it is fitting, given the history.   Heck, the internet saved the show from being canceled twice. 

Of course, you are under no obligation to do any of this work.  Nevertheless, that you have chosen to do so, is trail blazing and important for the community.   Everything you have found out, I am not sure, anyone else really could have figured out. 

The fact that you are actually documenting it and updating the first post, for a sort of cookbook and work diary of sorts, is amazing.  There's a lot of knowledge you are sharing. 

I remember seeing a webpage where fans upgraded an animated show, I believe it was Avatar The Last Airbender.  They posted some instructions for others to be able to replicate it.  I thought that was extremely well-thought out of them as it really does enable fans to overcome a studio dragging their feet and doing it on their own.

I do think it's important we keep sliders alive and going through all the continued stuff, whether it be social media, podcasts, fan fic, upgrades that make the old content "new".  No show has ever come close to replacing it for me, and I am sure many others, and we have had probably 5-10k scripted series come to tv since then.   

I mentioned it to you once before but if the tech ever gets there it would be amazing to build a library of phrases / words spoken by the characters (drawn from 88 episodes) that could then be used (and perhaps algorithmically altered for inflection in context of a sentence) for new fan scripts, audio dramas etc.  Throw in eventually a little photo-realistic CGI modeling and well.  No need for a studio.

Something pretty interesting I noticed. I was watching an archived game from 2012 that the NBA put out of a classic game between the Miami Heat and Oklahoma City Thunder.  It was originally broadcast in 16:9, HD.  So their archive should have been fully HD etc.

But very strangly, the players uniforms on the Thunder are a bright blue (a bit brighter than maybe the uniform color actually is) but the text on the jerseys, including even the numbers, is completely BLOTCHED out.  It's just almost all blue.  And there's a water color effect.  On close up shots, it's fine.  But the traditional broadcast shots, it's like this.  Almost as if they intentionally wanted to blur out all text from the uniforms due to a copyright issue.  But that's not it. 

So I am starting to wonder if any upscaling/faux HDing was done to the content...

@Tucker re edits yea would be quite interesting.

Google Matt's "the exodus excised" which I think is on video or daily motion.

Combined part 1 and 2 of the exodus.

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In other news re: universals horrible handling of the material, I am watching the pilot that was from an on demand purchase from my cable operator (verizon).

The image is stretched like a 4:3 was stretched to 16:9 BUT the image is still cut off on left and right with black vertical bars. So it is still a 4:3  picture.

Not only that the motion is strobbed.  And there is wave like, undulation in the image at times.  And the colors look dark.

They are taking something from 1995 and making it like it was recorded off a vhs off some nostalgia channel showing something from the 1970s.

Sliders is not that old but they keep dating it by distributing it like this.

Universal has changed hands so many times, I'm amazed they remember they own it.

working on downloading these bad boys now!

In order to preserve the grain texture, the files are encoded as H.265, a newer codec that allows for more data at smaller sizes. VLC has the decoder built in. https://www.videolan.org/vlc/

My personal video player package of choice is K-Lite. https://www.codecguide.com/download_kl.htm

Well, I took a look more at the samples last night.

I have to say, looking at Last Days, which was a pretty problematic-looking episode with the original dvd source, that this up-res probably is superior to the original up-res.

It obviously has less flaws with the wide shots, so if you were to put this on Peacock or release it on blu-ray, these would probably be the better up-res specs.

It's a very artfully done up res job.  It finds a right balance and the coloring is better and less dark compared to the previous version.  Also, it's got a naturalistic feel to it, and it really done have the feel of transferred film stock, with the grain and texture.

So I think it's really wonderful to see SLIDERS both with this new S1 up-res job, and also the original up-res job, which had some great strengths in the close up shots and it gave a different sort of feel with the smoothness.   On balance, the new one is probably better treatment for s1 for wide distribution.  But I love that we've gotten to see both approaches.

It would be interesting to try to find out from the editor of the pilot (if they are still alive) whether the pilot was truly edited on film or video tape.  I might have to do some googling.

But how?

I know, I was just merely saying how impressive it was. Just a play with words.

I was telling Jim_Hall on Twitter: I am amazed by his beautiful restoration work on SLIDERS publicity photos which he acquired at considerable expense and cleaned up in Photoshop with an astonishing level of dedication and effort. I've been using Gigapixel on some old low-res publicity photos of LONELYGIRL15 myself, but it really shines with Jim_Hall starting with 35mm slides.

this is awesome!

just enjoying ireactions samples from the upscale/restoration project again.

WOW, how incredible it came out.  Wish something like this was commercially available to the fan community.  It really is such a gift to be able to see SLIDERS had it been shot with more moddern equipment.

While the outfits can feel dated at times, the picture quality makes it feel much more recent and gives a longer shelf life to the programming in my opinion.

not clear why peacock doesn't do something like this.