I didn’t want to start a whole new topic for this and I suppose it’s not the biggest deal in the world but quite a few, if not most, of the episodes that were featured for sale in the ‘MST3K: Classic Collection’ (86 episodes in total) are not properly labeled from a resolution standpoint.
The 540p downloads end up only being closer to 640x480 (roughly). Whereas many (if not most) of the ‘Ultimate Digital Upgrade’ (45 episodes in total) are at full 720x540 (roughly). This can not only be recognized by the dimensions of the metadata but the file size itself. Most of the one’s that are encoded at 540p are over 1GB.
If the webmaster ever were to go back and re-encode the afore mentioned episodes that only come in at 480p, that would be greatly appreciated. Those true 540p episodes look dynamite. As clean as any dvd through a progressive upscale.
You’re a hero, sir! We depend on captioning to enjoy this show, and so far the captions included on the monthly vault picks have included some bizarre errors. Thankfully they’re not too frequent, but they do take one out of the moment…
I was saying somewhere back in an old conversation – possibly in the Kickstarter comments – that a small team of MSTies could easily correct captions to catch every nuance of a joke – and would be more than happy to. Maybe once everything gets into the Gizmoplex and is stable the team will take us up on that offer. The current captions on the older experiments come from all kinds of sources (including, I’d bet, machine auto-captioning on some eps) and they are infamously wrong in many cases. I know I’d be willing to take on an episode and do my best to correct its captions (starting with an existing caption track), including marking sections where I know it’s wrong but can’t make out the right words, and then pass it on for someone to do a better pass and so forth – with a set of volunteers and someone managing the assembly lines we could have near-perfect captions in no time! Well, in some amount of time, but still.
I heartily second this. Finding the time to do this for free could be a little challenging, but it’s a labor of love and everybody wins – we all end up with much better captions, and it doesn’t cost Alternaversal any money (well, maybe a little money, but certainly not as much as sourcing them, and the accuracy will be light-years better). My only ask would be that the final captions be made available standalone, as SRT files or even plain text, so those of us who prefer the slightly better video quality of disc rips can apply the subtitles to our existing videos.
Labor of love is a great way to describe it. I think the key would be a bit of ownership – rather than hundreds of people trying to crowd-source improved captions, some kind of management that assigns a single volunteer to a specific experiment for a chunk of time. Maybe the volunteer gets a full pass through, maybe they only get part of the movie checked – but then it passes on to the next person. With a clear markup standard that includes incremental improvements and notes (so one person can pass on their best thoughts and guesses to the next person), the whole track would eventually be as perfect as possible. Maybe a list of caption credits that names the team who did the improvements could be tied to the title?
If it were managed well – not only would lots of us find the time, but it could be something where not having as much time as we thought we did – i.e., volunteering to contribute and then realizing you couldn’t get through as much as you wanted – would not actually hurt the overall project. The workflow would just pass on to the next volunteer. Given that some of these titles are more than 30 years old, taking another week or month to improve a title isn’t a big deal.
Or – there are completely different ways to manage it. I’m down for this one, though, if the team wants to implement it …
Editor of 31 years speaking…and to make sure I wasn’t crazy, I conferred with a colleague who’s done more media conversion than I’ve had hot dinners:
Your problem is trying to deinterlace it in the first place. If something originated interlaced, leave it that way. It was shot in NTSC, and thus, interlaced. It is the format of origin. Let it be what it is. Converting it to something else, as you’ve seen, just makes things worse.
The only time you need to deinterlace an intrinsically interlaced source is when you’re uploading to YouTube or Vimeo or something like that. For home use in any video player device or app, it will “properly ‘bob’ the fields” as my colleague put it. The DVD you ripped it from played it fine on your computer or whatever, right? The ripped interlaced file will play the same way (if the settings aren’t whack).
Not only is it not a necessity in this case, it is a hindrance.
*if you’re talking a progressive source such as a movie that was LATER put in an interlaced format, that’s another matter. But MST3K was a TV show shot on video, full stop.
Great advice, thank you! I hadn’t articulated it to myself this succinctly, but on some level I knew it. My motivation for deinterlacing is twofold: future-proofing the videos and device compatibility. Since nothing (or virtually nothing) is shot interlaced anymore, I suspect fewer software players will support it over time, ultimately reaching a point where playing interlaced video will be like trying to play Flash video. This may be an irrational fear – maybe it won’t happen, or maybe it will take so long that it outlives me.
For devices, I don’t watch much on non-desktop hardware, but I like having the option, so my related concern is that phones, tablets, consoles, etc. usually have baked-in players with no option to upgrade or install a better one, so appealing to the lowest common denominator (using only modern codecs/schemes) seems wise.
I struggled with the generational loss of recompressing MST3K at all. The original, interlaced MPEG-2 from disc did indeed play fine, but the space/cost savings was so vast with H264/H265 that I just couldn’t ignore it, and once I started down that path, it seemed prudent to deinterlace while I was at it.
The MST eps on twitch suffer from interlacing quite often. Is there a way to deinterlace in a browser? I searched for an extension in Firefox but came up empty.
But a DVD player for example deinterlaces so you don’t see artifacts. Isn’t that what the whole post above is saying about keeping the material interlaced and let the player handle the deinterlace? Or am I understanding it wrong?
Just found this terrific article about AI upscaling, still working through it (it’s a huge article). Looks like Topaz is still the best software out there, although there are more options than I was aware of.