Chief Mouse
So first of all, I have to say I'm sorry. Last year in October I was in the middle of working on this concert when my monitor died and since I was largely out of money at that time our friend Brianswig suggested a crowd funding. I can't thank this community enough for the generosity! :) Anyway, I promised Earls Court as a reward. Unfortunately it has taken *way* longer than I originally intended due to some mishaps with the audio (let's just say I am not an audio guy, if I was this wouldn't have taken nearly as long) but I won't get into that so to not waste the precious white space on this thread. After many tests, re-renders, more tests and more re-renders, here it finally is!
Things to note.
This perhaps may be an upgrade *but* it is by no means perfect. It feels more like a compromise since nothing will come close to the official material. Why compromise? Well. This was a new tape transfer done specially for improvement purposes. Thanks to these certain people. They wanted to remain anonymous for their own reasons so I'll respect that and won't reveal any details. The transfer was made by Brianswig and here's his comment on the lineage - "SVHS source, played back from a Phillips VR1000 via an external TBC and captured digitally on a matrox RT2500 as DV AVI."
So the tape, it is the best one we've had yet but it had big problems. Firstly, a huge ass timecode, very similar to that of Antiden's version if anyone remembers it. Secondly, two horizontal lines of shifted pixels that randomly appear and disappear throughout the concert. Once you see them you can't unsee them. Just shifting the pixels won't work because as I said it appears randomly, but thankfully in the same place.
For the timecode the raw VHS transfer shared by CMI a few years ago due to my request was very fitting. Back then I didn't find it just good enough but for a patch job it's perfect. It was shared here - http://www.queenzone.com/forums/1390695/queen-1977-06-06-london-earls-court.aspx . It had some dropped frames throughout the concert so every now and then the sync needed to be adjusted so that the masked timecode part of the image doesn't drift out of sync with the rest of the image.
For those who don't know, this was the original that was remastered by Sniville and then improved and packaged further by Pittrek thus making what we considered the definitive version for years. My goal was to top that at least as far as image quality. The problem with this source was that it cut off for a few seconds at a few points during the concert, which means that the timecode would be left visible for a few seconds about 3 or so times at certain parts of the show. I dug out some extremely old, crappy and dark looking NTSC version that I had lying around for some reason and used it to patch up these bits of timecode. It was a nightmare making it blend so that it's not very noticeable. I won't tell exactly where this was cos it wouldn't be fun huh? Feel free to notice if you can! :-)
Another problem with the raw VHS version I used for main timecode masking was that the frame position would ever so slightly change angle by angle. Meaning if I aligned it perfectly to a certain shot, it might be a bit off in the next shot. I didn't go through this shot by shot because it would be a nightmare. So if you notice that John has a hint of double legs in a wide shot or whatever - that's just how it is.
Now, about those shifted pixels. TBC was performed so they must have been burned in the tape. Those lines can't be masked with the other source because it would be very noticeable since the area is small. I wasn't quite sure how to tackle that. I'm not that smart in Avisynth as some of you may think. Luckily I have a certain genius friend from another community who kindly helped me out with a solution to this! For the most part the fix works really damn well. You can notice some faint lines if diagonal looking objects in the frame are beneath these masks. So again, not perfect but as good as it gets. Way better than shifted pixels anyway.
The main image was cleaned up as per my usual process, nothing much to say.
The audio was sent to me by our friend Real Wizard. It comes from the Miracle Express VHS. Nitroboy helped out at the end big time when he took it upon himself to EQ, sync and prepare the audio for muxing to the video. He also made the chapters. So special thanks to my friend Nitroboy (Simon Christensen)! Thanks to Chinwonder for ever being willing to help and proof-watching the work in progress video and the final video for me. As some of you may know, I have previously shared some buggy versions which I later on had to figure out how to fix and reupload and rename the thread title and all that awful hassle! The videos would just stop playing at a certain point unless you skip past it. Still not quite sure why that happened. Anyway, this one should have no playback problems.
And here's a comparison of Pittrek's version vs this one -
P.S. we finally see texture of Freddie's face & skin :D
https://mega.nz/#!9Ooj1SxD!ORqTu3u_rkw4VrsY2FkIOWsFrYlJxsBEBbRsTaQQqAs .