Time At The Top (1999) Elisha Cuthbert (v2.0 620p H264 12000Kbps TVEAI VHS)
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0160986/
Starring:
Timothy Busfield, Elisha Cuthbert, Gabrielle Boni
"14-year old Susan Shawson travels back in time in her building's elevator. As altered by a retired physicist living in her building, it transports her from Philadelphia of 1998 back to the same place in 1881. There she meets Victoria Walker, a girl her own age in need of assistance with her own family problems. Gradually discovering the power of her time machine, Susan, Victoria, and her young brother Robert travel back and forth in time and succeed in changing both the past and the future."
This is one of Elisha Cuthbert's first films and IMO she did a great job. It has not been released on Bluray, DVD, WEB-DL, or streaming.
This is the version 2.0 release using the Dione Interlaced Robust v3 upscaling model which gives a great improvement in picture quality compared to the v1.1 release. No sharpening filters were used or needed (a big issue with v1.1). What you see is the output of TVEAI with a touch of realistic film grain. While not as perfect as a DVD, it's impressive for a 20 year old VHS tape and I may do a few other movies only released on VHS.
This release at 8GB is about twice the size of prior releases. While Dione's exceptional performance allowed a larger resolution, you can blame the larger size on the added film grain.
Screencaps:
Tech stuff (watch and enjoy the movie first!):
I made a new 2020 rip of the VHS tape using a recently serviced prosumer S-VHS editing deck with TBC (Time Base Corrector)- the Panasonic AG-1980, and a newer capture card- a Hauppauge HVR-1150.
v2.0 release:
This uses a modified Dione Interlaced Robust v3 upscale and deinterlacing model in Topaz VEAI 2.3. The mod disables the extra sharpening as that only oversharpens. It also disables the extra noise reduction as the AI model removes most of the noise. The Dione AI models dramatically beat QTGMC in retained detail. The deinterlacing quality is as good as QTGMC. To say that they are an improvement is an understatement.
I removed all of the major VHS glitches by frame duplication and replacement and fixed a few with Photoshop and MS Paint. There are still few minor glitches remaining. Only with enough repeated watching can one catch them all. I'm not that OCD. I used a neat Avisynth filter written by one of the experts on Doom9.org, FillDrops, to remove the added duplicates and interpolate replacement frames. It works well and all the double-frame caused judder is gone. There are a few cases where triple repeated frames had to be used and are not fixed by FillDrops. Those aren't easily fixable manually. Again I'm not that OCD...
v1.1 release:
I created English subtitles from scratch as none existed. I had some trouble with them, especially the 1880s English slang. If you can help out, please do so.
After watching the movie, turn it up and see if you can figure out these lines, or any others that may be questionable. Please post to this video's comments section on 1337x. At some point, I'll add in the changes and release a new version. The first release had 3 times as many unknown lines.
"----" indicates I had no clue what was said:
00:17:03.284 Miss Autumn. This house must be too taxing for you ---- - ----?
"Miss Autumn?" is that 1880s slang? "too taxing for you do I assume?" what?
00:38:35.632 ---- ---- ---- ---- to make your name.
01:30:38.392 Oh that's ---- saves me 5 minutes. Look I've seen shock before. How it takes people sometimes.
Equipment used: Panasonic AG-1980, Hauppauge HVR-1150, Core2Quad XP PC, Core2Duo Windows XP PC, and for the heavy lifting a Windows 10 4.9GHz 8 core Intel PC with two GTX 1080Ti GPUs.
Software used: Virtualdub 1.8.7 and 2, Huffyuv, Lagarith, FLAC, Avisynth+, ImageSource, DPID, FillDrops, Audition, Photoshop, Videoredo 5, Topaz Video Enhance AI 2.3.0, MS Paint (XP), Irfanview, Davinci Resolve Studio, FilmConvert Nitrate, x264, Foobar2000, Nero AAC, Notepad++, SubtitleEdit, MkvMerge, MkvExtract, Mediainfo.
The Avisynth+ scripts and process I used:
01.avs
AviSource("tatt10.avi")
TFM()
TDecimate()
Set compression to Huffyuv (Lagarith doesn't preserve the interlace flag needed for Dione to work). Save as AVI.
TVEAI with Dione Interlaced Robust v3 at 200%. Crop off. PNG sequence output. Note the dione-td-3.json file was modded in Notepad++, changing "Blurry" to "None", changing "Noise" to "None", which are *critical* steps to avoid over-sharpening and over-noise reduction. You need VEAI 2.3 to be able to perform this mod. There is a post by me on the Topaz support forums about doing this (I discovered it).
02-run4-tatt10-DIRobv3-imgsrc-crop-resize-tweak-DPID1.7-836x620.avs
SetFilterMTMode("DEFAULT_MT_MODE", MT_MULTI_INSTANCE)
SetFilterMTMode("ImageSource", MT_SERIALIZED)
SetFilterMTMode("FillDrops", MT_SERIALIZED)
ImageSource("u:\w9\run4\%06d.png",fps=23.976,start=000000,end=138219,use_DevIL=true,pixel_type="RGB24")
CropVD(22,22,0,14)
ConvertToYV12(interlaced=false)
DPID(836,620,lambdaU=1.7,lambdaV=1.7,lambdaY=1.7)
Tweak(bright=0,cont=1.00,sat=1.15,hue=0)
ConvertToRGB(matrix="Rec709")
ConvertToYV12(interlaced=false)
FillDrops(thresh=0.4)
prefetch(8)
Save as ProresHQ MOV for importing in Resolve (Resolve recognizes none of the standard lossless formats).
In Resolve, FilmConvert Nitrate effect, defaults on everything except grain strength at 60% and grain size 4. Save as AVI uncompressed, 8 bit, 10 bit, RGB, YUY, doesn't matter. Resolve saves in a non-standard AVI format, but Virtualdub2 can open.
Open directly in Virtualdub2 and compress with x264. I used veryslow, film, and CRF 17. The newly added film grain is difficult to compress and why v2.0 is larger.
The audio is from the original length trimmed capture tatt10.avi. I think I used MKVMerge & MKVExtract to get the WAV, from which I used Foobar2000 to make to the M4A. There are many ways to achieve this. This release has AAC (384Kbps) rather than FLAC as I could not get MKVMerge to AV sync the FLAC for unknown reasons.
Mediainfo:
General
Unique ID : 180464341011871029666899293230022428633 (0x87C42AF69261F3D682E16EBD45AE87D9)
Complete name : Time At The Top (1999) Elisha Cuthbert (v2.0 620p H264 12000Kbps TVEAI VHS).mkv
Format : Matroska
Format version : Version 4
File size : 8.04 GiB
Duration : 1 h 36 min
Overall bit rate : 12.0 Mb/s
Encoded date : UTC 2022-08-02 04:24:35
Writing application : mkvmerge v9.6.0 ('Slave To Your Mind') 32bit
Writing library : libebml v1.3.4 + libmatroska v1.4.5
Video
ID : 1
Format : AVC
Format/Info : Advanced Video Codec
Format profile : [email protected]
Format settings : CABAC / 15 Ref Frames
Format settings, CABAC : Yes
Format settings, Reference frames : 15 frames
Codec ID : V_MPEG4/ISO/AVC
Duration : 1 h 36 min
Bit rate : 11.6 Mb/s
Width : 836 pixels
Height : 620 pixels
Display aspect ratio : 4:3
Frame rate mode : Constant
Frame rate : 23.976 (24000/1001) FPS
Color space : YUV
Chroma subsampling : 4:2:0
Bit depth : 8 bits
Scan type : Progressive
Bits/(Pixel*Frame) : 0.932
Stream size : 7.78 GiB (97%)
Writing library : x264 core 157 r2935M 545de2f
Encoding settings : cabac=1 / ref=15 / deblock=1:-1:-1 / analyse=0x3:0x133 / me=umh / subme=10 / psy=1 / psy_rd=1.00:0.15 / mixed_ref=1 / me_range=24 / chroma_me=1 / trellis=2 / 8x8dct=1 / cqm=0 / deadzone=21,11 / fast_pskip=1 / chroma_qp_offset=-3 / threads=12 / lookahead_threads=2 / sliced_threads=0 / nr=0 / decimate=1 / interlaced=0 / bluray_compat=0 / constrained_intra=0 / bframes=8 / b_pyramid=2 / b_adapt=2 / b_bias=0 / direct=3 / weightb=1 / open_gop=0 / weightp=2 / keyint=250 / keyint_min=23 / scenecut=40 / intra_refresh=0 / rc_lookahead=60 / rc=crf / mbtree=1 / crf=17.0 / qcomp=0.60 / qpmin=0 / qpmax=69 / qpstep=4 / ip_ratio=1.40 / aq=1:1.00
Default : Yes
Forced : No
Color range : Limited
Matrix coefficients : BT.709
Audio
ID : 2
Format : AAC LC
Format/Info : Advanced Audio Codec Low Complexity
Codec ID : A_AAC-2
Duration : 1 h 36 min
Bit rate : 384 kb/s
Channel(s) : 2 channels
Channel layout : L R
Sampling rate : 48.0 kHz
Frame rate : 46.875 FPS (1024 SPF)
Compression mode : Lossy
Delay relative to video : 9 ms
Stream size : 264 MiB (3%)
Language : English
Default : Yes
Forced : No
Text
ID : 3
Format : UTF-8
Codec ID : S_TEXT/UTF8
Codec ID/Info : UTF-8 Plain Text
Duration : 1 h 33 min
Bit rate : 69 b/s
Count of elements : 1178
Stream size : 47.5 KiB (0%)
Language : English
Default : No
Forced : No
