More tokusatsu HD reconstructions

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Toby21
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More tokusatsu HD reconstructions

Post by Toby21 »

I’ve noticed that several others have posted about the HD reconstructions they have done, and I’ve spoken with a few of them, but wanted to introduce myself. I’ve actually been doing similar reconstructions for awhile. Almost as soon as I found the Hi-Visions transfers I wanted to make HD versions of the English Godzilla movies I grew up with. I actually made my own HD versions of all the Godzilla movies many years ago, and then I found out through this forum that others had the same idea too. I’ve enjoyed seeing how each person has tackled this type of thing, and often we’ve done it in different ways. I’ve enjoyed talking with others about how they handled things like re-grading those awful Hi-Vision scans, or recreating the English titles.

As I mentioned, I had already done most of my Godzilla reconstructions circa 2015 so recently I’ve moved on to many of the other tokusatsu movies. My goal is to be able to watch as many of these movies in their English versions, but in HD. I thought it was about time I shared with others some examples of my work too.

One of the projects I have kept coming back to over the years has been the King Brothers version of Rodan. Most of the available digital copies out there are horribly compressed. And, while the Monsters HD version does look slightly better, its cropped. At my count, there are 17 sections of stock footage, plus another dozen or so special effects shots that just aren’t included in the Japanese version of the film. Whether these are from some “workprint” supplied to the American distributor or left-over B-roll material who knows, but the quality in the SD scans of this film has always been lacking. Upscaling the material to HD made it stand out like a sore thumb next to the high-quality Toho HD material. My goal was always to make the material blend as seamlessly as possible between the various sources. Last year, finally, the cost of AI upscaling software reached a more reasonable price. I was using this software for other projects and decided to try it on the US-only Rodan material. While its still not as good as a real 1080p scan of the film, the results were promising. Along with heavy grading and further processing I thought the result was good enough to try again for an HD version of the US edit. Again, the results are never going to be perfect, but I’m finally happy with versions that lets the material stand side-by-side without it being so noticeable.

Most recently, like many of you reading this post, I was excited to get the new Toho 4K release for King Kong vs Godzilla. While I was happy to finally see the film in such brilliant quality, I also began to think about my first 4K reconstruction project. I love both versions of the film, but the English editions will always hold a soft spot in my heart, so I wanted to try and make a 4K version of the Universal edition. Initially, I had the same concerns that I had with Rodan. While there is a fairly nice HD version released from Universal, the US material is often very noisy and dirty. I wanted my 4K reconstruction to blend the two sources as well as possible. Using the same AI upscaling software I was able to upscale the US footage, enhancing the detail, while also cleaning it slightly. With further processing the US material was able to look similar to the footage from the new Toho disc. And, of course, all of the poor quality stock footage from the Mysterians was replaced with, well, “stock footage” taken form the HD version of that film. I also gave all the footage a more ‘cheery’ color-grade than the mostly desaturated look on the Toho disc. To me, these films are fun and happy and the color-grade should match. I’m very happy with the end result, and hope there can be many other 4K projects in my future.

Being a ‘newbie’ I can’t post pictures here yet, but I have posted some before and after shots on my Twitter if anyone wants to check them out. My Twitter handle is @G_Aikosha.

I’ve also done English language reconstructions of Atragon, Matango, the Mysterians, War of the Gargantuas, and most recently the Human Vapor. What has struck me most when working on these is just how bright and colorful these films are. Many of the SD/DVD versions we’ve seen over the years are drab and dark in their presentation. While working on the HD version of the Human Vapor I was surprised just how colorful that movie is. So many bright reds, deep blues, purples, and pinks. Its almost a revelation to see these films in HD (whether the original Japanese or the English versions). I’m currently working on an HD reconstruction of the Secret of the Telegian, but have several others planed after that. In no particular order I plan to make HD versions of Latitude Zero, Dogora, Gorath, Varan, Space Amoeba and the Last War.

If anyone wants to check up on my progress, just come over to my Twitter. I’ll also try to make some more posts here as I complete some of these reconstructions.

Godzilla Aikō-sha
@G_Aikosha (Twitter)

ultrase7en
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Re: More tokusatsu HD reconstructions

Post by ultrase7en »

Awesome! Right or wrong, I prefer watching the English dubs of most of the Toho SFX movies. Keep the preservations coming!

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Toby21
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Re: More tokusatsu HD reconstructions

Post by Toby21 »

Just wanted to mention that I have completed another HD Toho reconstruction – this time for The Secret of the Telegian (1963).

If you’re unfamiliar with the film, it is the second in what is loosely called Toho’s Transforming Human Series (coming after The H-Man and followed by The Human Vapor). The Japanese version, directed by Jun Fukuda, was released there in 1960, but its arrival in America was delayed. It was eventually licensed to the Herts-Lion International Corporation. They eventually released only a black & white version to American television stations in 1964 through their distribution arm, Westhampton Film Corporation. Although in monochrome, it appears they released the uncut Toho International version – including a shot of a topless pinup the gangsters are shooting dart pistols at. It is assumed they possibly left this up to local station managers to review and edit if they saw fit. 😊

What I thought at first would be a very basic reconstruction soon turned up issues. In the end, I tracked down 4 different audio sources. While some initially appeared to be from the same original, it became clear that each had its own problems. One of them had been edited and duplicated scenes, while another had been time compressed (possibly due to a frame rate conversion). Even the “best” quality version had some severe drop-out and a VERY audible background hum. If you’ve ever tried to clean up audio before, you’ll know that by trying to remove one “noise” you can create other, often worse, artefacts. I used some tools to isolate the hum and judiciously lessen its sound without affecting the overall quality. For the drop-outs, I mapped a different version of the same sequence in from other copy (thankfully without the sound issue) and essentially repaired these.

While I was dealing with the audio issues, I also had to make some decisions on how to handle the English titles. With other projects in the past, I’ve tried to key in the original credits where possible, but with the only available copy in black & white I was unsure if this was the best option. Other copies floating around the Internet had just chosen to add a color filter over the sequence, but I wanted to retain the original background plate from the Japanese version. In the end, I decided to go for the somewhat controversial idea of recreating the titles. While not 100% authentic, I do feel they fit the rest of the HD footage. And, I can always update them later if a better copy of the International version become available. While I was at it, I also recreated the unique (I think) TohoScope intro for this film, which reads “TOHO CO., LTD.” Rather than the more standard “TOHO COMPANY, LTD.” Finally, the Westhampton logo was faithfully recreated for the English version.

The final shot of the English version appears to use a different, longer take of one of the volcano shots. As the only copy I have of this is from the very poor, b&w version, I have used a similar shot; slowed down to fit the sequence.

As I started to color-grade the HD rip I noticed that the original Toho grading was all over the place – no surprise there! I, hopefully, have given it a more natural color-grade throughout, sometimes regrading from shot to shot. I’m hoping that the entire presentation now is more consistent.

Finally, I added chapter points and a icon “cover” image to the file to complete the reconstruction. After the English version was wrapped up, I also rendered a new file for the Japanese version. I re-timed the subtitles throughout to sync to my master and including both a PGS (BD version) and SRT (text) version of them in the file, and added the chapters and cover image.

While I still can’t post images yet, you can find before and after shots on my Twitter. Anyone interested in checking out either version, or any of my other reconstructions can DM me on Twitter for links.

Godzilla Aikō-sha
@G_Aikosha (Twitter handle - can’t include links yet).

ultrase7en
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Re: More tokusatsu HD reconstructions

Post by ultrase7en »

Your reconstructions of The Mysterians and The Human Vapor looked and sounded fantastic! Thank you for taking the time and effort to preserve these rare English dubs.

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G-MAN
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Re: More tokusatsu HD reconstructions

Post by G-MAN »

Toby21 wrote: Sun Jul 18, 2021 3:36 pm Just wanted to mention that I have completed another HD Toho reconstruction – this time for The Secret of the Telegian (1963).

If you’re unfamiliar with the film, it is the second in what is loosely called Toho’s Transforming Human Series (coming after The H-Man and followed by The Human Vapor). The Japanese version, directed by Jun Fukuda, was released there in 1960, but its arrival in America was delayed. It was eventually licensed to the Herts-Lion International Corporation. They eventually released only a black & white version to American television stations in 1964 through their distribution arm, Westhampton Film Corporation. Although in monochrome, it appears they released the uncut Toho International version – including a shot of a topless pinup the gangsters are shooting dart pistols at. It is assumed they possibly left this up to local station managers to review and edit if they saw fit. 😊

What I thought at first would be a very basic reconstruction soon turned up issues. In the end, I tracked down 4 different audio sources. While some initially appeared to be from the same original, it became clear that each had its own problems. One of them had been edited and duplicated scenes, while another had been time compressed (possibly due to a frame rate conversion). Even the “best” quality version had some severe drop-out and a VERY audible background hum. If you’ve ever tried to clean up audio before, you’ll know that by trying to remove one “noise” you can create other, often worse, artefacts. I used some tools to isolate the hum and judiciously lessen its sound without affecting the overall quality. For the drop-outs, I mapped a different version of the same sequence in from other copy (thankfully without the sound issue) and essentially repaired these.

While I was dealing with the audio issues, I also had to make some decisions on how to handle the English titles. With other projects in the past, I’ve tried to key in the original credits where possible, but with the only available copy in black & white I was unsure if this was the best option. Other copies floating around the Internet had just chosen to add a color filter over the sequence, but I wanted to retain the original background plate from the Japanese version. In the end, I decided to go for the somewhat controversial idea of recreating the titles. While not 100% authentic, I do feel they fit the rest of the HD footage. And, I can always update them later if a better copy of the International version become available. While I was at it, I also recreated the unique (I think) TohoScope intro for this film, which reads “TOHO CO., LTD.” Rather than the more standard “TOHO COMPANY, LTD.” Finally, the Westhampton logo was faithfully recreated for the English version.

The final shot of the English version appears to use a different, longer take of one of the volcano shots. As the only copy I have of this is from the very poor, b&w version, I have used a similar shot; slowed down to fit the sequence.

As I started to color-grade the HD rip I noticed that the original Toho grading was all over the place – no surprise there! I, hopefully, have given it a more natural color-grade throughout, sometimes regrading from shot to shot. I’m hoping that the entire presentation now is more consistent.

Finally, I added chapter points and a icon “cover” image to the file to complete the reconstruction. After the English version was wrapped up, I also rendered a new file for the Japanese version. I re-timed the subtitles throughout to sync to my master and including both a PGS (BD version) and SRT (text) version of them in the file, and added the chapters and cover image.

While I still can’t post images yet, you can find before and after shots on my Twitter. Anyone interested in checking out either version, or any of my other reconstructions can DM me on Twitter for links.

Godzilla Aikō-sha
@G_Aikosha (Twitter handle - can’t include links yet).
Very excited to finally see Secret of the Telegian and I bet you knocked it out of the park like alot of your other reconstructions I've been grateful to check out.

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Re: More tokusatsu HD reconstructions

Post by Terasawa »

Toby21 wrote: Sun Jul 18, 2021 3:36 pmWhile I was at it, I also recreated the unique (I think) TohoScope intro for this film, which reads “TOHO CO., LTD.” Rather than the more standard “TOHO COMPANY, LTD.”
The full logo, in color, is very rare. On video, I believe it's only turned up in Toho's Last War export trailer. You'll see it at about 1:20 in this video. Note that the logo was abbreviated for trailer use -- the full-length logo is still unaccounted for on home media.



The bottom line of text is cropped out of the Telegian transfer because 16mm has a naturally tighter aspect ratio than 35mm.
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Toby21
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Re: More tokusatsu HD reconstructions

Post by Toby21 »

Terasawa wrote: Tue Jul 27, 2021 3:12 pm The full logo, in color, is very rare. On video, I believe it's only turned up in Toho's Last War export trailer. You'll see it at about 1:20 in this video. Note that the logo was abbreviated for trailer use -- the full-length logo is still unaccounted for on home media.

The bottom line of text is cropped out of the Telegian transfer because 16mm has a naturally tighter aspect ratio than 35mm.
Thanks, and good to know. The Telegian Toho intro is also uniquely golden in hue, althought that might be just down to the color grade. I found I could easily correct it back to the more blue-ish version, but that didn't seem appropriate. If I take another stab at Telegian, I'll be sure to add the "JAPAN" bit towards the bottom of the ident.

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Re: More tokusatsu HD reconstructions

Post by Terasawa »

On the subject of Japanese Tohoscope logos, there are at least two color variants. The Japanese release of Telegian uses the earlier variant, dating to 1957, seen here. The English language version seen in the Last War trailer and Telegian is based on the 1960-64 variant.
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Toby21
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Re: More tokusatsu HD reconstructions

Post by Toby21 »

Wanted to post an update that I just finished an updated HD reconstruction of the US version of War of the Gargantuas.

I had a few requests for War of the Gargantuas, but I wasn’t particularly happy with the results of my 2018 reconstruction. As you might know, there are a lot of alternate and new shots in the US version of the movie. As far as I’m aware, the only full widescreen version of the US movie had been released by Classic Media in 2008. And that version is notoriously dark, as well as being 30fps and badly interlaced. In order to combine this version with the Japanese bluray not only do you need to upscale the footage, but change the frame rate and also deal with the interlacing issue. Either issue on its own can introduce new artefacts, but combined…. Well, let’s say the results were never gonna be great. So, even though I had completed a reconstruction of WotG in 2018, I didn’t feel it was good enough to share.

Jump ahead to 2021 and now there are better tools to deal with both of those issues, and also to help upscale the images so they don’t look so jittery or have other motion artefacts. My goal is always to have material from different sources look so similar it doesn’t take the viewer out of the experience when watching the movie. I finally feel this new reconstruction of WotG accomplishes that.

Along with the obvious color re-grade to improve the Toho BD footage, I decided to spruce up a few other things. There are several captions throughout the US version that are not present in the Japanese footage. To maintain the HD quality for the majority of the footage, I recreated these captions in a very similar font. Of course, with any new digital titles, you can’t simply add them to old footage. They must be graded and the edges blurred to look similar to what the original captions were. After I did these captions, I realized the opening titles shots also looked poor. Although I had tried my best to reduce the motion artefacting, some of these looked really poor after upscaling. I was able to track down another font that is extremely similar to the one used for the titles and tweak it a bit to recreate all of the opening and closing credits. Finally, I recreated the UPA intro. After color-grading the CM footage, I found it was overly saturated in blue. Once corrected it appears that the UPA screens were actually meant to be more natural in tone. New titles are also often *too* stable. The original scan of the film print on the CM disc shows slight “weave”, so these title cards appear to bob around a bit. As an added bit of authenticity, I scanned this weave to stabilize the footage, and then reversed it to apply the exact same weave movements from the CM scan to my new captions. Just a bit of fun to make the reconstruction a bit more “realistic”.

I have included two versions of the audio track. The first is from a 2007 Toho Video DVD released in Japan. This was a release of the UPA version of the film (along with the AIP version of Frankenstein Conquers the World). The video was unusable as it is severely cropped, but the audio was significantly better than the Classic Media edition. The CM audio track is included also though, as well as two fan commentaries; and also chapters for easy playback.

Finally, as I had already recreated the titles, I decided to re-make the US trailer as well. I posted a slightly edited version a few days ago on Twitter (to keep it under the maximum length for Twitter), but the full HD version is included at the end of the reconstruction.

Being a “newbie” I can’t post images, but I have several before and after shots at my Twitter (handle below since I can't leave links). I also can’t send or receive PMs here yet, but DM me on Twitter for a link if you’re interested.

Godzilla Aikō-sha
@G_Aikosha

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Re: More tokusatsu HD reconstructions

Post by WaverBoy »

Followed you on Twitter, sent you a DM, can’t wait to check out your lovely reconstructions!

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Toby21
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Re: More tokusatsu HD reconstructions

Post by Toby21 »

WaverBoy wrote: Fri Sep 03, 2021 5:40 pm Followed you on Twitter, sent you a DM, can’t wait to check out your lovely reconstructions!
And I've messaged you back. :)

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Re: More tokusatsu HD reconstructions

Post by WaverBoy »

Toby21 wrote: Sun Aug 15, 2021 3:56 pm Wanted to post an update that I just finished an updated HD reconstruction of the US version of War of the Gargantuas.

I had a few requests for War of the Gargantuas, but I wasn’t particularly happy with the results of my 2018 reconstruction. As you might know, there are a lot of alternate and new shots in the US version of the movie. As far as I’m aware, the only full widescreen version of the US movie had been released by Classic Media in 2008. And that version is notoriously dark, as well as being 30fps and badly interlaced. In order to combine this version with the Japanese bluray not only do you need to upscale the footage, but change the frame rate and also deal with the interlacing issue. Either issue on its own can introduce new artefacts, but combined…. Well, let’s say the results were never gonna be great. So, even though I had completed a reconstruction of WotG in 2018, I didn’t feel it was good enough to share.

Jump ahead to 2021 and now there are better tools to deal with both of those issues, and also to help upscale the images so they don’t look so jittery or have other motion artefacts. My goal is always to have material from different sources look so similar it doesn’t take the viewer out of the experience when watching the movie. I finally feel this new reconstruction of WotG accomplishes that.

Along with the obvious color re-grade to improve the Toho BD footage, I decided to spruce up a few other things. There are several captions throughout the US version that are not present in the Japanese footage. To maintain the HD quality for the majority of the footage, I recreated these captions in a very similar font. Of course, with any new digital titles, you can’t simply add them to old footage. They must be graded and the edges blurred to look similar to what the original captions were. After I did these captions, I realized the opening titles shots also looked poor. Although I had tried my best to reduce the motion artefacting, some of these looked really poor after upscaling. I was able to track down another font that is extremely similar to the one used for the titles and tweak it a bit to recreate all of the opening and closing credits. Finally, I recreated the UPA intro. After color-grading the CM footage, I found it was overly saturated in blue. Once corrected it appears that the UPA screens were actually meant to be more natural in tone. New titles are also often *too* stable. The original scan of the film print on the CM disc shows slight “weave”, so these title cards appear to bob around a bit. As an added bit of authenticity, I scanned this weave to stabilize the footage, and then reversed it to apply the exact same weave movements from the CM scan to my new captions. Just a bit of fun to make the reconstruction a bit more “realistic”.

I have included two versions of the audio track. The first is from a 2007 Toho Video DVD released in Japan. This was a release of the UPA version of the film (along with the AIP version of Frankenstein Conquers the World). The video was unusable as it is severely cropped, but the audio was significantly better than the Classic Media edition. The CM audio track is included also though, as well as two fan commentaries; and also chapters for easy playback.

Finally, as I had already recreated the titles, I decided to re-make the US trailer as well. I posted a slightly edited version a few days ago on Twitter (to keep it under the maximum length for Twitter), but the full HD version is included at the end of the reconstruction.

Being a “newbie” I can’t post images, but I have several before and after shots at my Twitter (handle below since I can't leave links). I also can’t send or receive PMs here yet, but DM me on Twitter for a link if you’re interested.

Godzilla Aikō-sha
@G_Aikosha
I’m watching this right now. Phenomenal work, especially your expert recreation of the UPA logo and opening credits, and the upscaling and matching of the unique UPA shots — I had no idea how many there were! The film looks and plays so much better overall, now that we’ve got the bulk of it in HD and all color-corrected, and the Toho DVD soundtrack is indeed significantly more robust, with a beefier low end, just fantastic — and the fan commentaries and trailer are the icing on the cake! Great job — thank you so so much for this! 🙏🏻🙏🏻🙏🏻

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Re: More tokusatsu HD reconstructions

Post by Toby21 »

Finally back with another classic Toho English-dub reconstruction. Full details are available on my Twitter page, along with lots of images. Personally, I love the US versions, so I’ve been looking forward to making an HD version for awhile now.

Anolis in Germany had released a Blu-ray of Gorath a couple of years ago. Fans have loved their discs for years because they often present both the original Japanese version alongside a recreation of the German release. Not sure how they manage that with Toho, but it was certainly helpful to get a head start on this reconstruction.

The Anolis reconstruction of the German release appears to include the prologue that was initially part of a preview screening in the US. Since that prologue no longer seems to exist with its English dialogue, or was ever syndicated widely, I didn’t plan to include it in my reconstruction. I also compared the Anolis English audio track to several other sources for the US version. The Anolis reconstruction was missing several small sections of audio, particularly around reel changes. Also, for some reason, the Anolis version repeats about two minutes of the destruction footage near the end of the film. I could find no other English version that did this, so I chose not to include. In all other cases, I patched the audio to remain faithful to the US version and be as complete as possible.

Although I went back to the Japanese version of the film, also included on this Blu-ray, for the majority of my version, the Anolis reconstruction was very helpful in sourcing good, clean footage for several bits of footage found in the US edition only. These appear to have been upscaled from an old broadcast master, but were much better quality than any other sources I had access to.

Interestingly, there was one section in the Anolis edit that was particularly poor. This comprised several quick scenes of news reports from around the world. I just so happen to also be working on a reconstruction of The Last War and noted that the original footage had been lifted from that movie by Brenco back in the 1960s. As with many scenes in The Last War there were burnt-in Japanese subtitles. My preference is always to remove these, if possible, and present the entire image. I was able to remove these subtitles using several various tricks and tools, so that footage appears in my reconstruction in a much better format.

Additionally, there were several other scenes in Gorath with burnt-in subtitles. Anolis chose to just zoom the picture to hide these. The problem with that is both that you lose picture area, and that the zoomed image never looks as good as the footage around it. In all instances, I have removed these subtitles; some with simple tricks, others with some After Effects CGI (to varying degrees to success) and in at least one instance, by painting them out one frame at a time. The results aren’t always perfect, but to me they are less jarring than having a subtitle appear all of a sudden on screen in what is ostensibly an English version of the film. I’ll make two versions available, one with the CGI replacement for the most image-area available, and another with this footage zoomed in.

Anolis also did their own reconstruction of the opening titles, but I quickly realized that this was very basic, and used the wrong footage underneath. I can’t really blame them, since it wasn’t exactly easy to find the right footage used in the original film edit. The sequence in question (from when the title card starts to appear) is actually just 4 frames. The same 4 frames, then repeated backwards, then forwards again, then backwards – 40 times in a row! Once I tracked down those 4 frames, it was fairly easy to track the title card (with the correct font – many thanks to @biorante_blog) along the same path. With a few extra filters hopefully it looks more authentic to the original.

The final issue with the Anolis Blu-ray was the overt compression artefacts visible. I have used software to mitigate most of these, but with Toho releasing their own Blu-ray soon I’ll be sure to examine that version closely. It should be fairly easy to drop in the new version if it has a better bitrate. So, there may be a 2.0 version coming along later.

Since I am still a "newbie" on the forum, I can't send/receive PMs, so reach out to me on Twitter if you're interested in knowing more. There are also quite a few images you can check out. Twitter handle below...

#PreserveTheDubs

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@G_Aikosha

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Toby21
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Re: More tokusatsu HD reconstructions

Post by Toby21 »

I haven’t been doing many Godzilla reconstructions lately. Mostly, because I made HD versions for myself a decade ago, and, others have come along and created some amazing reconstructions in more recent years. But I’ve always loved Godzilla vs the Smog Monster. I used to stay up till 5 am every time it was on the Late, Late Movie. “Save the Earth” is embedded in my brain tissue! I always planned to revisit Smog Monster first when I was able to get my hands on the new restorations. Even though, these are only in HD (4K hippies dancing on Mt Fuji will have to wait), the quality of the new restorations is still miles better than any version we’ve had before.

Plus, I’ve learned a lot of new skills and tricks over the years, so it was about time I updated my reconstruction of the AIP version of Godzilla vs the Smog Monster – song and all. This came together fairly quickly, but, of course, this was my second time around. I already knew where I was going to run into issues and what sections would need the most work. First hurdle was to create a brand-new customized font for the opening title cards. The fun part of making your own custom font set – you get to call it whatever you want. So ‘Hedorah’s Eggs’ now graces my computer’s font list! In order to replace the title cards though, I had to remove the Katakana from the original opening. Once these were clean, it was a simple matter to place the new title cards.

There were several other minor changes to make, including removing other burnt-in subtitles. The other noticeable changes in the AIP version involves one of the animations, and a map of Fuji City. The animation to replace the Katakana for the English “Hedorah” was pretty straight-forward. The work to recreate the map, not as much. Here I needed to create another custom font, and using the map from the original movie, I was able to craft a fairly accurate facsimile. Then it was a simple matter to track the same movements from the AIP edit.

The nice thing about these more recent Toho/Hi-Vision restorations is they don’t require as much color-correction. Unfortunately the original file I was working with showed a fair bit or macro-blocking, I was able to counteract that with some AI software, also adding back some of the grain that was lost from an overabundant DVNR use. Broadcast streams still often heavily noise-reduce images to make their digital broadcast streams work better, but it can often have the affect of making skin look sort of plastic. While no fake grain can add authentic film grain back to an image, this now feels more natural. At least until these new restorations get a UHD physical release (fingers-crossed).

While I think some people prefer the Kraken release of Godzilla vs Hedorah, I’ve always thought that print was far too dirty to be of any real use for reconstructions. Sure, the picture is sharp, but its hidden under a muddy transfer, most of which isn’t natural film grain. The new transfer is crisp and sharp, without all of that image noise to hide the detail. All of a sudden I was able to see new aspects of the film hidden before. It seems funny to say this about a film based around pollution, but I finally have a bright and shiny version of Godzilla vs the Smog Monster that makes me smile every time I watch it.

Still a "newbie" on the forum, so I can't send/receive PMs or post images, but feel free reach out to me on Twitter if you're interested in knowing more. I've also posted many comparison shots over there you can check out. Twitter handle below...

#PreserveTheDubs

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@G_Aikosha

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Re: More tokusatsu HD reconstructions

Post by Toby21 »

I just finished up 2 more Tokusatsu HD reconstructions of US versions:

Dagora, the Space Monster and Yog - Monster form Space

Not much to say as this time the edits were fairly minor. Most of the work involved recreating the US opening and closing titles for each in widescreen HD. Yes, its doubtful that Dagora ever had widescreen credits, so this is a little creative lisense. If you want the full-screen 4:3 experience you can always put black construction paper on the sides of your screen. LOL

Now that I'm a a full-fledged member I can post a couple of pics...

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Visit my Twitter for more images and DM me there, or now you can PM me here too for more details and links to download.
#PreserveTheDubs

Godzilla Aikō-sha
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ultrase7en
Samurai
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Re: More tokusatsu HD reconstructions

Post by ultrase7en »

Awesome work! Thanks for putting the time and effort into these preservations.

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sam33
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Re: More tokusatsu HD reconstructions

Post by sam33 »

Wonderful work Toby!
I tried to message you this AM, but it's still in my out box?
I wonder if your inbox is full?

ANYWAY, thanks again for this great work.
DAGORA is an underrated film IMO and a favorite of mine, so thanks for lavishing some love on this TOHO classic.
I first saw it on a crappy low-power TV station in the 80s, and was still taken with it.
Akiko W. has never been more beautiful!

Keep up the great work -

Added in 6 minutes 50 seconds:
Nevermind -
A fellow has clued me in that messages stay in the outbox until read.

I have yet to see a good version of GORATH, that one never played in my small town when I was a kid, nor on TV that I know of.
I know that along with RODAN it was one of the most messed with films in the US cut, so great for you that you are trying to rescue it!
Last edited by sam33 on Wed Nov 16, 2022 11:15 am, edited 2 times in total.
SAM33

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Toby21
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Re: More tokusatsu HD reconstructions

Post by Toby21 »

Just a quick note that I've recently completed a couple more reconstructions. Or in this case, as these were only ever TV versions I suppose you'd call these fan-edits as they are in widescreen.

First, one of my favorite Tokusatsu movies - Matango! With the recent restoration it looks even more stunning! For anyone who prefers the English dubs this makes for great late night viewing.

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I also had a request to do a reconstruction for the AIP version of The X from Outer Space. Some of the edits AIP made were interesting and it was fun to reconstruct.

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There are more screen captures available on my Twitter (link in signature) or PM me here or on Twitter if you'd like more details.
#PreserveTheDubs

Godzilla Aikō-sha
My Twitter

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