Sliders DVD Releases (Universal, Mill Creek, SD blu-ray, Restoration) (Page 10 of 16)

Well, I wonder, with Season 1: what if the solution is to aim for 480p instead of aiming for 720p or 1080p or 4K?

I have recently been upscaling a 2000s TV show called 15/LOVE which is another shot on film, edited on digital videotape product. The low budget videotape is not really adequate for a 720p upscale and it looks like a slightly below average DVD. I found that when aiming for 480p only and just using Topaz to sharpen up the details and add film grain, it went to excellent DVD quality, but aiming higher than that would have caused too much warping as the AI didn't have enough film grain to enhance. Could high quality DVD level video be achievable with the Season 1 episodes?

I personally don't see the point of making Seasons 2 - 5 look HD if Season 1 is only ever going to be SD; I'd say identify the best that can be done with Season 1 and then ensure Seasons 2 - 5 match that. No one needs to see a pristine rendering of the radioactive worm in Season 3 while only getting a fuzzy rendering of Quinn and Wade's first date.

The Universal DVD for Season 1, Episodes 2 - 9 is blurry, smeared and dull and half of the episodes have interlacing issues meaning there are jagged edges on any straight lines. Turbine's blu-ray files for these episodes are even blurrier and more desaturated, but the interlacing has been cleaned up. It looks to me like Episodes 2 - 9 were stored on low-res analog videotape and stretched to the slightly higher resolution of PAL.

Since Turbine uses the PAL masters, those Season 1 episodes have poorer video quality. However, it looks like Turbine's version is interlaced correctly and doesn't have the jagged lines. It looks to me like Universal's home video department misidentified the even and odd fields when authoring their DVDs while Turbine got it right.

I'm going to run an upscale on "As Time Goes By", "Season's Greedings" and "New Gods for Old" just to see if Turbine files gain anything from upscaling files that range from good to really good, and then I'll see if "Summer of Love" turns out well if aiming for the lower hanging target of a good 480p upscale.

I think the ghosting you describe is because your player is American and can't handle the European PAL format correctly. I've copied the blu-ray files to MKV and that distortion is not in the raw files. There isn't ghosting on mine, but I think I just lucked out that this discounted blu-ray player I bought from a refurbished-tech store could adjust for different framerates.

"As Time Goes By" finished. I can report that the AI-upscaled Turbine file looks astonishingly good and well beyond on-the-fly filters for SD upscaling. Topaz has resolved the mild fuzziness and transformed all of the blockiness in the Turbine file into crisp, crystalline detail. Also, the new grain effect prevents the waxy look of earlier upscales.

Turbine has added film grain texture to offset the waxy effect of my previous upscales. I was really impressed by how the Pilot episode, being shot and edited on film, could be AI-restored to 1080p and its original film look thanks to Topaz's new film grain feature. This 720p version of "As Time Goes By" looks as crisp as the film-look of the restored Pilot, although I did have to up the grain layer by 25 percent. I don't think a 1080p upscale would quite as sharp, however, as "As Time Goes By" was shot on film but transferred to 1996-era 540 line videotape.

The AI upscale definitely looks better than the Turbine version on an upscaling TV. The small, blocky texture on the the Turbine image looked nice at living room distance; it looked like film grain. However, the AI has converted that into sharper detail and texture: the grainy approximation of texture has become actual texture for dirt on the ground, for the actors' skin. It captures the sharpness of HD quality at edges, although it still doesn't have the fine detail of a true HD image. The wide shots still have a bit of telltale AI-imprecision although the grain effect has offset it so it doesn't distract. 1080p would probably make the lack detail and the wide shot issues more prominent.

Currently upscaling "Season's Greedings". I don't know if Turbine can this one better than the TV's on-the-fly upscaler, however. Season 3 seems to be using a 1997 digital videotape format for editing and effects that seems to capture even more of the original film's detail in a downscaled state.

It's truly ironic: each subsequent season of SLIDERS seemed to get crisper, sharper and more detailed even as the writing production became clumsier, shoddier and shabbier. The better SLIDERS' image quality became, the less it had to show.

I don't recall doing more with Turbine's Season 2 beyond the second Daelin segment of "As Time Goes By", and I lost my enthusiasm for upscaling SLIDERS because if Season 1 doesn't look good, what's the point of upscaling any other episode? I also didn't work on it enough to figure out if AI upscaling was any better than on-the-fly smoothing and sharpening. However, it looks like Season 2 does upscale really well and benefits from AI upscaling and not just some non-adaptive filters.

I did attempt to upscale every Season 1 episode with Turbine at which point I realized Turbine's Season 1 video quality was actually worse than Universal's Season 1.

I'm just doing some experiments out of curiosity. I have the feeling that Topaz won't be able to do much with the Turbine versions of Seasons 3, 4 and 5 since those benefitted from advancements in digital videotape while Season 2 was using digital videotape in its earliest form.

Well, here's a comparison for "As Time Goes By: 540i Turbine on the left (stretched) and Topaz upscaling it to 720p on the right. As you can see, Topaz has given "As Time Goes By" quite the boost in visual quality, getting it closer to the original film.

And the 720p version of "Season's Greedings" next to the 720x540 blu-ray version -- well, it's better, but a TV upscaler that did sharpening and smoothing wouldn't look very different. The only real difference is that Topaz AI has refined the detail rather than just upping pixel contrast.

A TV upscaler adds more jagged edges to the grass; Topaz AI actually rebuilds the grass. But from a living room standpoint, Season 3 already looked crisp and clear, and all Topaz AI does it make it look a little crisper and clearer.

540i on the left (stretched to fill the screen) and 720p on the right:

Look at the magnificent stature of JRD on the pics of ATGB.

I see you updated your post to include As Time Goes By

Definitely gains there.  It looks like a 10 percent lift maybe 15.  I would say Seasons Greedings looked 5 to 10 from the screen shots.

It really is too bad we don't have a better source for season 1.

The Pilot Episode: The Universal DVDs are best, the Turbine blu-ray from Germany is bad, the Mill Creek DVD is terrible.

Remaining Season 1 Episodes: The Universal DVDs are bad, the Turbine blu-ray from Germany is very bad, the Mill Creek DVD is terrible.

Season 2: The Turbine blu-ray from Germany is very good, the Universal DVD version is good, the Mill Creek DVD is terrible.

Season 3: The Turbine blu-ray from Germany is great, the Universal DVD version is very good, the Mill Creek DVD is terrible.

Seasons 4 and 5: The Turbine blu-ray from Germany is amazing, the Universal DVD is very good, the Mill Creek DVD is bad.

Full details on Page 1 of this thread here:
https://sliders.tv/bboard/viewtopic.php?pid=2078#p2078

Funny observation about DOCTOR WHO:

I remember watching Series 5 and Series 6 of DOCTOR WHO (2005) where Matt Smith, to my eyes, seemed to age so much between the two seasons. The smooth visage of Matt Smith's Doctor in Series 5 seemed to have become more weathered and lined in Series 6. It was very appropriate because Matt Smith's Doctor in Series 6 is actually several hundred years older than he was in Series 5.

However, I recently watched Matt Smith's debut episode in HD instead of DVD and... Smith's face actually looks pretty much like it will in Series 6. It's just that I watched Series 5 in standard definition which blurred/smoothed facial textures on my old 32 inch TV and I watched Series 6 in HD on a 40 inch television, and in HD, the sharpness shows all the pores and marks and lines in Smith's face.

So the Universal DVD release is out of print.  I've tried buying it from 2 sellers who just cancel the order a few days later because it's not actually in the warehouse anymore.  I've emailed the publisher (Via Vision) who say they won't be printing any more in future.   I don't want to "download" it for various reasons, one of which is image quality.

Can anyone help?  I only want the original discs.  I do not want someone else's transcode.  I want the original MPEG2 stream that is on the disc, untouched, unaltered, 720x480i29.97.   Then I can do my own realtime IVTC with my own optimal IVTC settings in an Avisynth script.   At some point I may do a script for each episode to optimally preserve the 60i elements such as some of the animations found in the intro and some other random scenes which use different frame rates so they all go nicely into a 60p container without transcoding.

Have bought the Mill Creek release & found the image quality subpar - desaturated colours, zoomed in slightly, and this weird double-line drop shadow type effect on fine details:

Have previewed a transcode of the Universal release and it doesn't have these artefacts on the same episode.  These are not deinterlacing artefacts by the way, nor are they frame blending artefacts - image was captured from a static progressive frame.  If I had to guess I'd say it's probably some primitive deflicker filter to reduce interlace flicker on CRTs that got baked into the source at some point in the chain, and then further janked up by a weird scaling algorithm used by ancient analogue equipment.

Detelecine (or IVTC as I called it) won't get rid of the drop shadow effect in that image I posted, because that image is from a progressive frame, and IVTC will identify and preserve these progressive frames through its field matching process.

I think you may be describing combing, which looks like this if the video is displayed raw without any IVTC or deinterlacing at all:

Hmm, not sure what's going on. 

Here is the same frame Universal vs Mill Creek:

I am quite confident this is not a deinterlacing or detelecining artefact, as both have been field matched to weave to a progressive frame.

edit: this is from the end credits of S01E03 Summer Of Love

Actually I just realised I've seen these type of double line artefacts before. It can happen when interlaced video is scaled without deinterlacing.   i.e just taking each field of 720x240 and resizing them individually, then weaving them back together into a progressive frame.   It creates this "mice teeth" effect because the fields were resized independently of eachother and don't fit back together quite properly.  I observed this on a recent Bluray release of the show Fawlty towers - https://forum.doom9.org/showpost.php?p= … stcount=71

So my hypothesis is that Mill Creeks version went through this field scaling process at some stage which offset the field structure slightly.   In the screenshots you can see it is zoomed in slightly compared to Universal, maybe that was when it happened.

I'm just an amateur but I learned a lot recently about Avisynth & deinterlacing from some helpful users on Doom9 forum ("THE in-place to be for everyone interested in DVD conversion").

Why don't the lines show in my detelecined S1 files during playback on my Android TV box? My guess is that it's some combination of the player app or the SoC in the Android TV box.

You're clearly in a position of superior knowledge despite self-identifying as an amateur, so let me ask you: looking at even the transcodes of the S1 discs --

What went wrong with Universal's home video department when they handled SLIDERS? Why are there so many combing artifacts and double line artifacts? Why is the video quality ghastly for the S1 episodes but excellent for the Pilot, pretty good for Season 2 and really good for S3 - S5? I have my theories, but what are yours?

Why is the file quality even worse in the Mill Creek version? What would you suggest for correcting the errors in the Universal discs?

Also, as someone who knows more than I do: would you have any suggestions for cleaning up these files and engaging in AI upscaling for Episodes 1.02 - 1.09?

I'm glad you found your discs. It would be interesting to know if the PAL versions of the Universal DVD releases are any better or worse than the NTSC DVD or the German PAL-masters on the SD blu-ray.

The SD blu-ray release had very poor video quality Season 1 (including the pilot), worse than NTSC Universal, but the SD blu-ray looked absolutely terrific for Seasons 2 - 5. Season 2 is a little fuzzy and heavily grainy, but it looks rather nice at living room distance and the film grain texture allowed for terrific looking AI upscales. Seasons 3 - 5 look great in that you have razor sharpness for all the god-awful Season 3 monsters and pathetic Season 4 Kromagg makeup and tedious conversations of Season 5.

Of course, that's my perspective from my amateur eyes and you are clearly a well-informed video maven as opposed to some guy messing around in Handbrake and Topaz for a half-hour before queuing up the jobs and going to bed.

Well, when my external blu-ray cable arrives (the old one broke), I'm going to recopy 1.02 - 1.09 from the Universal discs, run them through detelecine to produce h.264 files at 480p, and see if the latest version of Topaz video can clean them up at 480p and at least get a decent SD image. The Universal episodes aren't clear enough to bring them to even 720p, but I would like to get them looking at least as good as the Universal versions of Season 2. It's a cultural injustice that "The Breeder" looks so crisp and sharp while "Eggheads" is a blurry mess.

Here's a comparison on an episode where the Universal version also suffers from field alignment problem (S01E07 The Weaker Sex)

Scene 1: Mill Creek NTSC , Via Vision PAL , Universal NTSC
Scene 2: Mill Creek NTSC , Via Vision PAL , Universal NTSC

Judging from what pneumatic has said, Universal's home video department converted the Season 1 analog video tapes into DVD with a primitive anti-flicker method for interlaced video, designed to make the image more attractive on CRT televisions. The diode pattern of a CRT TV would likely hide these flaws, but when these DVDs and digital files are played on modern LCD televisions, there are problems.

You see jagged edge throughout Season 1 episodes for straight lines (signs, furniture, buildings, cars) and the horizontal lines across the opening titles and the credits. This distortion in the even-odd fields of interlaced DVD video are now part of the digital NTSC masters that Universal delivers to home video distributors and streaming services.

I'm sorry to hear your PAL DVDs aren't good. I have the German Turbine blu-ray set which uses the standard definition PAL files. Season 1 looks very blurry, worse than Universal, but without the combing artifacts. Even the Turbine Pilot, which looks amazing on the Universal DVD, is blurry. Probably, Season 1 was stored on non-digital, analog videotape and stretched to the PAL resolution.

Season 2 looks good with heavy film grain texture. Season 3 looks very good with a very crisp visual quality. Seasons 4 - 5 look excellent.

I also have the Universal Dual Dimension Set (Seasons 1 - 2) and the Universal Season 3 set. I find that the Universal version of the pilot is beautiful, but the next eight episodes are blurry and filled with combing issues. Seasons 2 - 3 look good but a slight step down from the Turbine versions.

Oddly, I find that the Mill Creek versions of Seasons 4 and 5 look good despite the compression (although the Turbine versions look great). This is probably because Seasons 4 - 5 were shot on cheaper 16mm film which has larger image forming grains that could survive videotape transfer and DVD compression more capably than 35mm film.

Also oddly: the SD blu-ray versions of Season 1 look very good on my TV and blu-ray player. My TV was increasing the pixel contrast, deepening the colour. This and the lack of jagged edges made the blu-ray look a lot better than the DVDs. Only when looking at the raw files on my computer did I see the blurriness of the Season 1 blu-ray image quality.

The Universal versions of Season 1, despite the field errors, have a lot more texture and detail (although it's still quite low).

I found that the blu-ray versions of Seasons 2 - 5 are excellent for Topaz AI to upscale to 720p and 1080p results thanks to the high levels of film grain needed for an AI to rebuild a video image at a higher resolution.

I have never seen the VIA Vision files, so I can't speak to how that distributor may have messed up the PAL masters or if those same flaws are in the Turbine SD blu-ray.

I'm currently running a new round of upscales for Episodes 1.02 - 1.09.

In the past, I think the main issue for 1.02 - 1.09 has been combing errors. In my first AI upscaling attempt, the jagged edges on any straight lines (signs, furniture) would get stretched out and distorted and appear and disappear. It was visually distracting. And the video quality under these distortions was extremely muddy, almost like a watercolour painting.

In my second attempt, I found that while the detelecine setting smoothed out these lines, the smoothing was also creating a blurriness across those detelecined surfaces. The AI upscaler couldn't sharpen the image effectively, and stretching the video to 1080p gave everything a painfully waxy look that no amount of AI grain could offset.

In my third attempt, I tried having the AI upscaling leave the files at 480p, and then used Lanczos to stretch the upscaled 480p image to 1080p. The results were a little less waxy than before, but not by much.

However, I think I may have been muddying the DVD files. I was converting the files from DVD VOB files to MKV with MakeMKV followed by using Handbrake to detelecine the files and get them to h.264 MP4 and then using AVIDemux to increase the colour saturation. During all these conversions, I set the bit rate to Super HQ which was a bit below the Production Max preset.

At the time, I thought it wouldn't make any difference to create 1GB SuperHQ files instead of 2.5GB Production Max files. Certainly, it made no visible difference for Season 2 - 5 video files.

But since then, I've been comparing SuperHQ and Production Max transcodes of the Universal files... and the Production Max transcodes have just a little more texture and detail (although it's still not much). I think my conversion methods (Handbrake encoding at the Super-HQ preset) reduced image quality in video files that didn't have much margin for loss.

For my new attempt, I'm having Handbrake detelecine and output at the Production Max preset. The Production Max files are 2.5GB per episode. I'm then having AVIDemux add colour and save at the Lossless HQ preset. It's giving me files that are 7 - 9GB per episode.

These files still look rather hazy and undetailed; I don't think they can be upscaled to a higher resolution.

I'm currently running the files through Topaz AI, but I'm setting Topaz to only output 480p files. It's possible that Topaz AI can refine the 480p image to deblur the fuzziness, sharpen up the textures, apply AI grain to offset the lack of the detail, and get the episodes to passable DVD quality and look almost as good as Season 2 on the Universal discs.

Right now, the 'best' video quality for Episodes 1.02 - 1.09 is on the Universal discs and that quality is poor. I would like to get it looking okay, even if it would only rest on my hard drive.

Just to clarify: at first that's what I thought was happening, but now I think it's a field alignment issue caused by the fields being scaled independently of eachother before being weaved back together.  This effect is "baked into" the source and I'm not sure there's any way to reverse it.

I believe the technical term is "generation loss" - every time it gets re-recorded a bit of quality is lost.  Of course, you could compensate by setting the bitrate very high.   

In my setup I'm using MakeMKV to "remux" the MPEG2 stream on the disc into a mkv file, which doesn't cause any generation loss (it's just copy pasting the MPEG2 stream from disc to mkv file).   Then to play it I write my Avisynth detelecine processing options in a text file and save it with a .avs extension, and open the .avs file with MPC-HC media player and the Avisynth processing gets done in realtime.   This is the highest quality method as it avoids transcoding to another format like x264 which results in some generation loss  (unless you set the bitrate very high... for me it's mostly a convenience thing as encoding video takes a lot of time with my CPU pegged at 100%, and if I want to change something in my Avisynth script, I'd have to re-encode the whole lot).

Lol

I am loving it too!

I hope that costs eventually come down enough for universal to go through their library and just re-scan the damn footage (and automatically insert upscaled versions of cgi shots).  But I guess they never will.

Got the 2008 Universal PAL release today and sadly it appears identical to the 2013 Via Vision PAL release - the MPEG2 streams have identical file sizes, and MediaInfo reports the same properties for both.    Visually I can see no difference with an A-B comparison in photoshop toggling the second layer on and off.   

The Via Vision PAL box set from 2019 is I believe identical to their 2013 release since the product codes printed on the case spine are the same for both, eg. "VVE454" for season 1 & 2.

Universal NTSC version is still a month away from eBay international shipping, so no Sliders for a few weeks

Universal NTSC packaging is bulky and the cardboard looks a bit tatty in seller's photos, so I'll probably store the discs in the Universal PAL cases.   That way it's still Universal - consistent with the printing on the discs, just a "better" version of Universal

I might still keep the PAL discs as a reference in case I come across some odd episode that might be cleaner.

Oh and if you hadn't noticed in the screenshots I posted earlier, the PAL version can also be much dimmer in terms of brightness, so that's another reason to dislike it.

Sorry to hear PAL has let you down again. Is it just the Season 1 episodes that are poor, or is it all five seasons? Seasons 2 - 5 look great on the German-released Turbine blu-ray which uses the PAL masters.

We may not want to assume that pneumatic lives in the United States. In fact, given their linguistic patterns and specific vocabulary choices, I would surmise that pneumatic lives in Australia.

(I'm just messing with you, that's the geolocated IP address indicated by the Bboard.)

From what I’m told, Universal keeps everything.  They have a massive film vault on their Hollywood backlot (located just a few blocks from where the Chandler Hotel facade stood).  It was feared the film vault was damaged in the fire that destroyed the Chandler, but the film was untouched.  The music vault was unfortunately a different story.

I was not a fan of the new BTTF Blu-Ray as well, but I think I heard that it was more reflective of how it may have first appeared in theaters?

The only way way Sliders gets re-scanned is if Universal does a mass catalog project, as you eluded to, or they decide to scan the titles in distribution -- SLIDERS is lucky enough to still have enough audience demand to be considered a "classic" to be on Peacock.   However, I fear it will go the way of Netflix and Hulu, where they were once comfortable having Sliders on their service  (through 2016, and 2017 respectively, I believe) but eventually as they build high quality, original content, they want nothing to do with it.   The problem is, SLIDERS, looks like shit so it's shelf life will never be as long because of how it looks.   Unless they fix that, eventually, I think Peacock will consider it too low quality to have on there. 

At the same time, Universal could simply do better upconversion and handling of assets and I think it would make for a dramatically more viable product for streaming services over time.   

A.I. keeps getting better and better... I am not sure if it will ever be able to deal with the field alignment issues being spoken on here but if there algorithms take that into account (assuming it is a common enough problem with older content for them to factor in), then make AI can give us a fairly decent replacement for a scan in the future.

Just the existing topaz experiments have taken the content a long way in my opinion.

if they do a reboot, on the other hand, they may want to pretend the first one never existed lol.

The "poppy" colors of the 2015 release are perfect for BTTF, and it's hyper-real, comic-book like sensability.

In the case of BACK TO THE FUTURE, the colours were always meant to look rich and hypersaturated. But what looked colourful and vivid on theatre projection screens in 1985 was looking faded and washed out on LCD televisions in 2015. Movie theatre screens were dimmer than the screens in our living rooms today.

In addition, the 2015 remaster of BACK TO THE FUTURE wasn't recoloured by a random someone, it was done by Bob Gale, the original writer, producer and storytelling force behind the series. Robert Zemeckis, the director, has always struck me as more the technical genius behind the movie, but less the creator and more the special effects facilitator.

Now, not every change made by the original creator of a property will be effective. George Lucas' hideous STAR WARS recolourings and replacement effects are a disaster.

However, I feel Bob Gale had the right approach: he adjusted the colouring of each scene individually, not just amping up the colour vibrance across the board. He wasn't trying to change BACK TO THE FUTURE as much as he wanted it to look as good on 2015 TVs as it did in 1985 movie theatres.