Phoenix II Episode 09 (remastered HDR)

Restoration proof-of-concept for Kuranya Pictures.
1. MPEG-2 8Mbps 4:2:0 576pSF25 to 1080p50 intermediate-1 with bwdif maximum motion-thresh=0:spatial-thresh=0 and CCIR 601 EBU primaries. Import with a further 709-to-601 LUT to improve skin tone.
2. Separate processing of telecine film frames, with BBC WHP283 800% HLG boost on the first (lighter, warmer) exposure to add cold-CRT look, and ITU 800% HLG boost on the second (darker, colder) exposure for film look, maximising effective dynamic range
3. Separate processing of telecine film frames, with vertical directional blur 12px (2K domain) plus sharpen 7px on the first (lighter, warmer) exposure to retain detail, and vertical directional blur 24px (2K domain), no sharpen on the second (darker, colder) exposure to substantially remove vertical over-sharpening from the original telecine transfer process; some instances of 288p resolution still occur but only on horizontal edges, whereas most areas retain most of 576p, unlike a simple drop-field "filmising" effect
4. Building software shutter with alternating transparency to recombine both processing elements into 2x 50fps frames, removing any motion beyond 25fps. Build separately for blue logo, and any change in field dominance during the mid-fade. Add 4-frame-8-field motion blur (7 layers with 20% opacity each) to video sequence of opening credits, masked onto Green Screen Overlay for the red elements @ 0°-150º luma @ 210º-240º shrink=-2 soften=+2 to remove chroma crawl.
5. Cropping visible elements manually at 100.5% before 4m54s03 and 101.0% +2px x-axis transform after that. Film changes alignment or phase at 4:28:24, fixed. Cleanup of title card white lines (VBI data?) and film dirt on blue logo. Export to non-AI delivery of 1080p50 but probably skip step 3 in that case.
6. 1440x1080p50 to 720x576p50 intermediate-2, plus non-square PAR to activate further better 601 handling at the next stage, and with ProRes 4:4:4:4 to preserve vertical chroma detail. Main body and blue logo scaled to 150% 1080x864 intermediate-3 to maximise detail and minimise artefacts, using iris-1 at 70-25-50-0-40-0 and 5-100, again to maximise detail and minimise artefacts, then a simple scale to 2880x2160 with sharpen=3.3. Any scenes with blur-blocking (one with Wallace & Lew) required prob-3 at 70-33-60-0-40-0 5-100 to prevent unwanted over-sharpening in background faces, but output to 1920x1080 then sharpen=3.3 to try to match the sharper effect of iris-1. Pure-video elements in the opening credits used iris-1 again but on 70-25-60-0-40-100 5-100 to an output of 2880x2160 with no sharpening. Not using PAR on the 576p input resulted in 1-2 pixels of usable frame being obscured, and less realism in grass, etc.
7. Another software shutter with alternating transparency to take the 2nd of 2 identical frames each time, because with iris-1 in particular, the second of two identical input frames are sharper. Apply a further sharpen=3.3 (in the 4K domain) on film elements only, to enhance them further.
8. Ensure the opening credits are 601-adapted for the red print, and ITU-only for the cast call to focus on the film look. Rebuild the credit sequence with a restored freeze frame card, taken from the first field of 50fps that held more detail than every other field or frame. Use Green Screen Overlay with minimum chroma @ 240º and 75% luma, max Shrink/Expand and max Soften, in 5x overlapping layers (500% opacity) to relay in the VIP credits over the restored freeze frame. Take a piece from another frame to rebuild the rightmost several pixels showing black during most of the freeze frame.
9. Output to ProRes 422 at 2880x2160 intermediate-4 and via that to x265 12-bit on 'grain' with 'slower', qf=18.

[@whophd]

I'm not sure, but it really looks like UA-cam created the HDR (Rec.2020) assets only when the video went from private to public. This was months after I uploaded it at the end of August 2023. As of late December 2023, the HDR version still was not available (on the unlisted video). It premiered 4 days ago and probably went to HDR hours later.

[@stoobeedoo]

As someone who bought the DVD boxset a while back, I didn't spend the dosh on Janus at the ABC Shop at the time and regret it, becuase now finding Janus on DVD is like finding a unicorn. I think it is in some libraries here and there. How did you get access to the HDR/film format? Do you know some of the producers of the show, or is the series able to be purchased digitally now?The only digital version I saw around was a DVD-Rip that was in old Xvid format. Nobody ever shared Janus, though, which is a shame.
UPDATE: ABC have recently put it back on iView, hasn't been on there for almost 12 years! They might not have the rights to Janus, though, which is a shame. The quality isn't the best, though - a lot of video noise in the picture.

[@whophd]

I managed to find the Janus DVDs up the back of an Indian seller somewhere, literally looking for years for the second series. My plan is to restore them all and put them up here if nobody expresses an interest in re-releasing them properly. What I'm basically doing is unstitching the telecine'd telerecordings to get at the individual film cell, which was sampled twice at different exposures and different colour temperatures. That gives an expanded dynamic range and I blend that together again, except that one of the samples is more suitable for removing the vertical oversharpening (that is unavoidable with analogue technology, when the only kind of electronic motion image was video). Of course if I could access the original film cells I'd scan them at 2K or 4K but that's likely been trashed during production. Even better would be the original VIDEO, from the portable TV cameras used on set, but I'm even more sure those were trashed during production - if we could somehow access that, it would be incredible to deinterlace with technology just 15 years newer, and the upscaling technology 15 years after that would take it to 4K - there's always plenty to work with in studio quality material; colour grading it back to the hybrid film-video look would be a delicate task in the 2020s but absolutely straightforward.
Compared to any of that, ABC iView merely takes the original product composited in the 1990s and digitises into iView on a good but orthodox brightness transfer function. All the vertical oversharpening issues are still baked in, but at least iView aren't limited to 360p quality anymore.

[@whophd]

Part of the challenge is that LCD TVs and computer monitors (LCDs and CRTs) never had the strong contrast of CRT TVs back in '70s, '80s and '90s. But you can turn that into a double-edged sword by working in the HDR colour space in the 2020s, and this automatically creates a better result than popping a DVD into a computer or DVD player. You have to treat this content for what it is - a film image, transferred in a really oddball way before being digitised - and not for what the DVD data says it is, which just says the technical equivalent of "late 20th century colour video", very naïve.

[@stoobeedoo]

@@whophd The work you're doing looks really good. I was studying Broadcasting at TAFE and learned stuff on analogue when it was already being phased out for digital. As for Phoenix, it's without a doubt one of Australia's best crime dramas, and the authenticity it has to police procedure and bureaucracy of the time is second to none - it's up there with shows like The Wire. No police drama in Australia ever came close. The darker, cynical crime dramas like Phoenix, Janus, Scales of Justice, that broke the black/white, goodies vs baddies mentality of most crime dramas fell so far under the radar that most Aussies haven't even heard of them, yet they're far better than most of the mainstream crime dramas we've produced.