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Jacob already teasing the cover & screen shots of THE KILLER custom from HKR.
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This one is requiring substantial work to get it to a reasonable quality level.
I've looked at every version that's been released and they all are pretty terrible. However, with substantial effort and all the tools at my disposal I think I'm able to reconstruct a reasonable quality version with the correct color grading, the original titles and credits and the proper resolution and framerate.
The process I'm currently following to restore The Killer is as follows:
1. Fix field blending using AviSynth to restore proper 1080p 23.976fps
2. Reconstruct original titles and credits
3. Remove dirt, dust, scratches, broken frames
4. De-Noise with Neat Video
5. Color grade using Dr Dre's Color Matching Tool using the Criterion version as a reference
6. Adjust white balance, fix black level and contrast
7. Upscale to 8K using Topaz Video Enhance AI
8. In Phoenix, use DVO Aperture increase perceived sharpness and DVO Regrain RGB to add fine film grain
The first two steps are already complete and a large part of step 3 is complete as well.
The rest of these steps are subject to change based on the testing I'm running.
Some of these processes take a very long time so I have to determine whether the time investment is worth it.
I've been using Topaz Gigapixel AI for a while. If you don't know, it's an image upscaler that uses Deep Learning or Neural Networks to increase the detail of photos. It can be used for video, but it isn't really designed for it. However, this new program called Video Enhance AI uses a similar principle but is designed to work with video.
From my limited testing, it can produce really great results far exceeding any other upscaling technique I've tried.
I've found that in some instances if you upscale a 1080p clip to 4K or even 8K using it's algorithms and then encode it back to 1080p after editing, the resulting image can look more detailed and sharper than if you kept it at 1080p the entire time. The downside is that it takes a really long time to upscale even a short clip.
Here are a few images from a sequence I'm currently working on. These are a work in progress. I haven't done all of the steps I outlined above, but I've done some of them. In particular this clip has been color-grading using the Criterion version as a reference. This is the way the film was intended to look. Most DVD and Blu-ray releases of this film are far too blue and washed out.
As I said, these are not finished and I'll continue refining the process until I get as good a result as I can for this film.
What you can't see, obviously, is what it looks like in motion which is what really counts. If any of you have seen the Dragon Dynasty release you know that they absolutely butchered the motion quality with a cheap field blending which caused constant jerky motion, ghosting all over the frame and a lack of detail whenever there was movement on the screen which is most of the time.
They had a good quality PAL source to work with but instead of properly converting it to 23.976 progressive 1080, they encoded it at 29.97 interlaced which caused all of the problems I mentioned. It's another example of western studios simply not caring at all about these films.
Luckily I got some AviSynth wizards to help me write the perfect script to fix all this. It took about two days to fully render but all those problems have been fixed now.
I'll be posting a lot more updates on this title soon. I don't have anywhere to go with this pandemic situation anyway.
I've looked at every version that's been released and they all are pretty terrible. However, with substantial effort and all the tools at my disposal I think I'm able to reconstruct a reasonable quality version with the correct color grading, the original titles and credits and the proper resolution and framerate.
The process I'm currently following to restore The Killer is as follows:
1. Fix field blending using AviSynth to restore proper 1080p 23.976fps
2. Reconstruct original titles and credits
3. Remove dirt, dust, scratches, broken frames
4. De-Noise with Neat Video
5. Color grade using Dr Dre's Color Matching Tool using the Criterion version as a reference
6. Adjust white balance, fix black level and contrast
7. Upscale to 8K using Topaz Video Enhance AI
8. In Phoenix, use DVO Aperture increase perceived sharpness and DVO Regrain RGB to add fine film grain
The first two steps are already complete and a large part of step 3 is complete as well.
The rest of these steps are subject to change based on the testing I'm running.
Some of these processes take a very long time so I have to determine whether the time investment is worth it.
I've been using Topaz Gigapixel AI for a while. If you don't know, it's an image upscaler that uses Deep Learning or Neural Networks to increase the detail of photos. It can be used for video, but it isn't really designed for it. However, this new program called Video Enhance AI uses a similar principle but is designed to work with video.
From my limited testing, it can produce really great results far exceeding any other upscaling technique I've tried.
I've found that in some instances if you upscale a 1080p clip to 4K or even 8K using it's algorithms and then encode it back to 1080p after editing, the resulting image can look more detailed and sharper than if you kept it at 1080p the entire time. The downside is that it takes a really long time to upscale even a short clip.
Here are a few images from a sequence I'm currently working on. These are a work in progress. I haven't done all of the steps I outlined above, but I've done some of them. In particular this clip has been color-grading using the Criterion version as a reference. This is the way the film was intended to look. Most DVD and Blu-ray releases of this film are far too blue and washed out.
As I said, these are not finished and I'll continue refining the process until I get as good a result as I can for this film.
What you can't see, obviously, is what it looks like in motion which is what really counts. If any of you have seen the Dragon Dynasty release you know that they absolutely butchered the motion quality with a cheap field blending which caused constant jerky motion, ghosting all over the frame and a lack of detail whenever there was movement on the screen which is most of the time.
They had a good quality PAL source to work with but instead of properly converting it to 23.976 progressive 1080, they encoded it at 29.97 interlaced which caused all of the problems I mentioned. It's another example of western studios simply not caring at all about these films.
Luckily I got some AviSynth wizards to help me write the perfect script to fix all this. It took about two days to fully render but all those problems have been fixed now.
I'll be posting a lot more updates on this title soon. I don't have anywhere to go with this pandemic situation anyway.
Order HKR Titles:
https://hkrservices.lpages.co/hong-k...ue-collection/
https://hkrservices.lpages.co/hong-k...ital-versions/
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