Season 2 Episode 1 SD scenes in HD remaster

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sebalvarez
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Season 2 Episode 1 SD scenes in HD remaster

Post by sebalvarez »

I recently started watching Twin Peaks on Netflix (which I had only seen once when I was about 20), and I was pleasantly surprised that it had been remastered in HD and preserving the original aspect ratio. Now I see that it's available on a Blu-ray set, but I was wondering if anyone here has that set, if you can check on something for me.

On the first episode of season 2, there are a few scenes that are in SD, at least in the Netflix version. These are very easy to tell because the film transfers to HD are extremely crisp, while these SD scenes not only look with far less definition, they also look like they put an HD camera in front of a screen that was playing the SD material and then they added some artificial sharpness and grain to it. They also seem to have an added vignette, although I don't know if that's on purpose.

These are the times for the scenes I'm talking about (HH:MM:SS):

01:05:39 to 01:07:34

01:31:00 to 01:31:06 (this one stands out like a cockroach on a white wall because it looks really bad, like half SD)

01:32:00 to 01:32:05 (there's also a very short SD scene right before this one)

I was wondering if these are also in SD in the Blu-ray, or if perhaps Netflix got some previous version of the masters that wasn't finished. My guess is that these scenes are in SD because they have some sort of visual effects which they would have to recreate for the HD version, and D. Lynch might have said no to that because it wouldn't be faithful to the original.

If you have the Blu-ray version, would you mind checking on that and post back?

Thanks,

Sebastian
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Re: Season 2 Episode 1 SD scenes in HD remaster

Post by Jerry Horne »

As you rightly surmised, the issue was (mainly?) FX shots. Some were painstakingly redone, whilst others remained in SD. There is some discussion in the official thread here:

http://www.dugpa.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=862

p.s. Yes, they are on the Blu-Ray as well.
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Jasper
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Re: Season 2 Episode 1 SD scenes in HD remaster

Post by Jasper »

I'd like to make a more general observation about the Blu-Ray and what's on Netflix. I haven't watched TP on Netflix, but I seem to recall that Netflix had a HD version up before the Blu-Ray work was ever completed, meaning that the Blu-Ray is in fact a newer, better version of the material. I guess Netflix could have updated to the Blu-Ray version by now, but I don't know. I just thought that this might be worth mentioning.

I think the Blu-Ray box is really fantastic, and keep in mind that it's got 90 minutes of deleted/extended material from FWWM, which is pretty great stuff.
sebalvarez
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Re: Season 2 Episode 1 SD scenes in HD remaster

Post by sebalvarez »

Thanks for your replies. I was going to buy the set, but as much as I want it, I think I'm going to wait. Partly because of the price, but mostly because if they did the Blu-ray set, at some point in the next few years they're going to do the UHD Blu-ray set. I mean, they have the negatives, so they can do an UHD version as easily as they did the HD one, even easier, because now they have the EDLs from the re-edited version.

I haven't seen what HD Blu-rays look like on UHD TVs (which they mistakenly call 4K) but I know that when HDTVs came out, DVDs would look horrible in them, even with the best upscaling Blu-ray players. I already have a large collection of Blu-rays, I don't want to keep adding to that because my DVD collection is in a box long forgotten. I assume that HD Blu-rays wouldn't look as bad on UHD TV sets as DVDs look on HDTVs, simply because of the small size of DVD compared to HD, but still I'd rather wait for the UHD version.

But about the visual effects, there has to be something else. It seems to me that perhaps they couldn't find the negatives for those scenes, or perhaps they were heavily damaged. For example, the scene where the giant throws that ball of light at agent Cooper, you can do that in After Effects or any half decent compositing program in just a few minutes. It's not the kind of visual effect in sci-fi series from the same time where they used 3D modeling and they would have to methodically rebuild models because the models are in Lightwave format from the early 90's, and then re-render all that.

Another example, in the SD part that starts at 01:05:39 (the cut from agent Rosenfield to agent Cooper) and goes all the way to 01:07:34 (the cut from Andy to Lucy), there are no visual effects. It's just a series of very long cross dissolves, which are far easier to do nowadays in any editing software than what they probably were when they edited these the first time around. Even worse, they look poor enough when the cross dissolve is finished or before it starts, but during the dissolves the quality gets even worse, one field is removed and the other jumps up and down which is usually the case when SD interlaced material is upscaled to HD without taking proper precautions.

There's this article that is several years old about the remastering to HD (http://dugpa.com/interviews/remastering-twin-peaks/), but it was for the DVD Gold set in 2007. I would assume that they got the HD masters from that project to author the Blu-ray set. I haven't read the whole article, just parts of it, and they did a lot of work in the conversion. So to me there has to be something else behind these scenes that remain in SD. I mean, why would they go through such a painstaking process and not redo these few scenes that wouldn't take barely any extra time? As it is, even after rescanning and fixing the negatives, they still had to spend a huge amount of time doing reconstruction, because back in 1989 or 1990 the original series was most likely edited in a Moviola with the actual film (Avid had just been released in 1989), so they had to watch each episode, make cuts and either export an EDL or put the takes from the new transfer on a track above the original. So still that took a considerable amount of time. Why would they not do the same for these three sections, when two can be done directly in the NLE and the one with the giant can be done in a few minutes in After Effects, even when they did this in 2007? Doesn't make any sense to me.
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Re: Season 2 Episode 1 SD scenes in HD remaster

Post by dugpa »

I can confirm that the negative for those shots are gone. Many weekends were spent searching for the missing negative but unfortunately they are gone.

Many of the FX shots including original negative used for the dissolves, fx, etc. were stored separately and lost over the years.

We did manage to find the Bob in Train Car shot for that Episode.
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Re: Season 2 Episode 1 SD scenes in HD remaster

Post by Ross »

I wonder why the one segment of Audrey & Earle in the library got lost since there were no no dissolves or effects?

Plus of course almost all of the deleted scenes were tossed out.
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Re: Season 2 Episode 1 SD scenes in HD remaster

Post by dugpa »

That one is a mystery too. Searched for that one as well. Believe me when I say no stone was left unturned. Nearly three additional months were added to the project just to search out negative for episodes and deleted scenes. What was released is all that could be found.


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Ross
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Re: Season 2 Episode 1 SD scenes in HD remaster

Post by Ross »

dugpa wrote:That one is a mystery too. Searched for that one as well. Believe me when I say no stone was left unturned. Nearly three additional months were added to the project just to search out negative for episodes and deleted scenes. What was released is all that could be found.
Yes- they did an amazing job. So many little fixes & upgrades and even the boom mike removals. Too bad anything was lost, but we know that no stone was left unturned!

The good thing about the new season is we know nothing will be scrapped!
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