Good Site to Upgrade Video Quality of Old Cartoons

[davidflecha17]

Now this whole site is in Russian and I believe all the shows are in Russian too. They do have a lot of shows though in case you have a bad quality episode of a show and you want to upgrade. I am doing this with Taz-Mania. The first two retail volumes were not complete and volume 2 is completely out of order. I don't know if they will release the episodes they skipped over in any future volumes.

Here's the site:

funmult.ru

Here's what I do to upgrade my episodes.

1) I use an add-on called flashgot to get the episodes from that site. Make sure the picture quality is the highest. After I get the .mp4 files, I convert them to dvd format. I use convert x to dvd.

2) Once I have the dvd formatted episodes, I open up MPEGVCR. Here I open up 2 videos, one with the old quality set, and one with the new quality set.

3) You will have to do some cutting to match the times exactly. You want to make sure the episodes start at the same exact time and end at the same exact time. I noticed that my English Taz episodes had scenes cut off so the times wouldn't match perfectly. If that happens with you then you have to go through both videos and see where the cut took place and then you would have to cut that video to the new quality episode. If your show had commercial breaks, you have to maker sure the fade out and in times are the same. Always look at the times for each video.

4) Once you have both episodes being the same length, save both of them. Call them different names, old episode and new episode.

5) I use this program called Pazera Audio Extractor to take out the English audio from the old episode. You end up with an .ac3 file

6) Now I open Tsunami DVD Author there I open the new episode but instead of using the original audio track, I use the .ac3 file from the old episode. You can preview the episode too to see if everything is in sync. If not then either the video is corrupted or the episode comes back from a fade-in sooner. Author the episode and you are done.


I am sure there are other ways to do this using different programs.

[lordsmurf]

TDA3 or TAW4/5? Because 4/5 is a big improvement. The menus are actually somewhat decent now! Worth a look.

You can split the original audio file (AAC?) with YAMB. But it's still AAC, not AC3. So you'd need something else to convert. This all-in-one solution, for once, sounds helpful. Just watch so the bitrate is good -- at least 256k, if not 384k. You don't want some medium-quality 192k or 224k AC3, especially if the source has any noise in it (hiss, etc). Noise causes the medium compression to be low-quality compression!

A good cheat is to use Adobe Premiere Pro for the audio streams. You can see the waveforms, unlike Womble. I wish Womble had the audio visually. You can then export the audio only as WAV from Premiere (or use AME to export as AC3, MP2, etc). You only need Womble if editing the MPEG (non-reencoding, unlike Premiere). You're usually editing one or the other, not both.

You may also like Womble MPEG Video Wizard more than MPEG-VCR. I do.

Can't wait to see the finished project.