Baraka 1992 720p BluRay DTS x264-CtrlHD

Year: 1992
8.5/10 8.5/10
Votes: 21,753
Runtime: 96 mins
Language:
Country: USA
All Genres: Documentary, War
Director: Ron Fricke

.PLOT
Without words, cameras show us the world, with an emphasis
not on "where," but on "what's there." It begins with
morning, natural landscapes and people at prayer: volcanoes,
water falls, veldts, and forests; several hundred monks do a
monkey chant. Indigenous peoples apply body paint; whole
villages dance. The film moves to destruction of nature via
logging, blasting, and strip mining. Images of poverty,
rapid urban life, and factories give way to war,
concentration camps, and mass graves. Ancient ruins come
into view, and then a sacred river where pilgrims bathe and
funeral pyres burn. Prayer and nature return. A monk rings a
huge bell; stars wheel across the sky.


.GENERAL iNFORMATiON
RUNTiME.......: 1h:37m:48s
SiZE..........: 4.37GB (DVD5)
ViDEO.CODEC...: x264, 2pass, L4.1
FRAMERATE.....: 23.976fps
BiTRATE.......: 4892Kbps
RESOLUTiON....: 1280x584
AUDiO1........: English DTS-core @ 1536 Kbps
AUDiO2........: -
SUBTiTLES.....: Ara,Bul,Cze,Dan,Eng,Fre,Gre,Ita,Per,Rom,Rus,Ser,Slv,Spa,Tur (embedded srt and rar'd)
CHAPTERS......: Named like on Blu-ray
SOURCE........: Baraka 1992 Blu-ray 1080p VC1 DTS-HD MA 5.1
iMDB.RATiNG...: 8.3/10 (11,451 votes)
iMDB.LiNK.....: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0103767/


.POST iNFORMATiON
ENCODER.......: 9mm
RELEASE.DATE..: 2011-05-05


.NOTES
Baraka is one of the greatest (and favourite) cinematographic
masterpieces. Despite all the great efforts put
into the high quality restoration and 8K transfer, they
managed to mess it up on the Blu-ray. How? The dreaded
"panning stairs" scene! You see, in the section of the movie
about the genocides, several shots from different genocides
were intermixed in about 10sec for each clip. Sadly, three
of those clips last actually 5sec so they duplicated frames
to double the clip length, obviously to give us enough time
to appreciate the horrors of humanity and to keep up with the
slow moving camera in the other clips. This is understandable.
However, they blew it by duplicating frames, which resulted
in totally juddery clips that broke the fluidness of the film.

To fix that, I deleted the duplicate frames (giving 11.988fps),
then did a frame interpolation between the non-duplicates
(restoring 23.976fps), in order to preserve the film's runtime
and to avoid having to speed up the audio tempo.

The results were stunningly beautiful and fluid with vitually
no visible artifacts :)

The fixed film is 4 frames shorter than the original (140716 vs 140712).
That is due to the deletion of the dupe frames where it's not
possible to interpolate between the last frame of those clips and
the following I frame (different scene).
Also I deleted one frame that was very warped with a black bottom pixel
on the source (frame 92580). If left intact, it would have caused a
noticeable warped image on 3 frames!

e.g. A d B d C d D d E d W --> A i B i C i D i E
(where d = duplicate, i = interpolated, W = warped frame)

Of course, the audio gets a slight sync offset (167ms) after the fixed clips
for the rest of the movie, but this is not an issue since there is no speech.

There were other flaws in the genocide scene, like warping after I-frames
or bad colors on parts of some frames. I fixed a few of them and left the
rest alone since they were single frames at different timecodes, barely
noticeable when the movie is played normally.

And finally, fixed the contrast of the top 2 pixels using overlay method.

Thanks to Lazarus for suggeting the use of the InterFrame script


.LOG
x264 [info]: frame I:736 Avg QP:16.48 size:143386 PSNR Mean Y:47.32 U:49.06 V:49.53 Avg:47.85 Global:46.67
x264 [info]: frame P:33218 Avg QP:18.20 size: 46019 PSNR Mean Y:46.10 U:48.64 V:49.07 Avg:46.68 Global:44.45
x264 [info]: frame B:106758 Avg QP:19.83 size: 18270 PSNR Mean Y:44.06 U:47.12 V:47.79 Avg:44.89 Global:43.76
x264 [info]: Weighted P-Frames: Y:11.4% UV:3.0%