Toho Kingdom

While RedMenace and I are waiting for certain elements and sources for our collaborative Godzilla 1985 project, I though I'd do something I'd wanted to do for a while, which is make an HD version of the international English export version of Godzilla vs. Biollante, in the same style that I did for The Return of Godzilla. This will improve upon ROG in quite a few ways. For one, instead of the 720 workflow I used for ROG, I'll be using a 1080p workflow for this film. I'll be using Premiere Pro and After Effects instead of HitFilm Pro. I'll also be using Dr. Dre's color matching tools to more accurately color correct the Japanese footage to the 1993 HBO LaserDisc but most of the CC will be manual, as well as this time, shot-by-shot.

Be on the lookout! expect something even better than the Return of Godzilla EOST.

EDIT:
As you can probably tell, the project is on a temporary hiatus, but for a very good reason. As you read in the original description, me and RedMenaceOfficial are working on our collaborative Godzilla 1985 project, and we've recently gotten all of the needed elements in for that project, and we're working diligently to get that going! So, yes, the Biollante project is on pause, but this is so we can focus on our Godzilla 1985 restoration, which will take much more time and effort to complete, but we're excited to take on the job!

Cool! Can't wait to check it out.

New update, I decided to make a short little video going into further detail about how I use Dr. Dre's color matching tool to accurately color correct the blu-ray footage for EOST.

Awesome! I can't wait to see this!

This is going to be awesome!!! I need to get this Dr. Dre Color correction tool. This would help me with my fan edits!

UPDATE: I'm about a hair less than a third of the way through, color correction, rotoscoping and "un-texting" included. It's going slower than I hoped, as since its the summer I'm getting a lot more restoration commissions. That being said, while I am a third of the way through, I did do one of the battle scenes in the rain, so it's not 30%, more like about 40% of the film is color corrected and English-textified. I'm also working on trying to find an even more accurate grain overlay. I initially considered using some Vision 3 500T I had, and scanning the grain, but I figured that is a bit too modern of a film stock. The Godzilla films used Fuji stock, them being Asian productions (Asian countries use Fuji much more often than Kodak), so I'm looking into that. But, so far, it's going smoothly, with about 2 mins of footage being accomplished every day, as the ratio of minutes of footage color corrected to worktime to CC is about 1:45, meaning a minute of footage takes about 45 minutes to color correct, not including any special effects to remove text. To satiate those interested, here's a little comparison of the most blaring differences between the Blu-Ray footage and the color corrected scenes:

Blu-Ray:


EOST Color Correction:

Looking forward to this. But hope you're not gonna make the colors so blue and dark like they were in the sd master to where you couldn't make out a unconscious Godzilla at the end? Also I'm very much looking forward to the new 1985 you two are collaberatiing on and for the sake of the project and making it look as good as possible. Please let red menace know as I've tried countless times telling them that when you are using sd elements you need to upscale and give them a very healthy bitrate for it to mesh more with the hd source of the rest of the film. As it has been a big problem with many of the other restorations that is a very avoidable problem. As with the others where they've used the Monsters hd footage or even the simitar discs for other films they just apparently dropped it into the edit and they come out very poor looking as it's not converted to hd just by doing that

To G-MAN, about the color correction, I will be making it as dark as the LaserDisc, which, actually, has more color information and Godzilla is actually able to be seen in the shot you're referring to. Example here:

As for me and Red's project, I can't share too much, but I will say you should be pleasantly surprised, as our project is from one source, and is all in a UHD workflow.

Servanov wrote:To G-MAN, about the color correction, I will be making it as dark as the LaserDisc, which, actually, has more color information and Godzilla is actually able to be seen in the shot you're referring to. Example here:

As for me and Red's project, I can't share too much, but I will say you should be pleasantly surprised, as our project is from one source, and is all in a UHD workflow.

Ok I just know the color grading on the old source wasn't really the best.

And that's good so hopefully a film print then. And glad to hear as like I said there is so many issues with some of Red's earlier works and while I love what they do I wish they would take my advice on using the simitar stuff as I've tried to help them a few times but never seem to take my advice.

Also what is the progress of both projects? Pm me if you can't openly say

Finally found a way to find out how many shots I've corrected so far. I'm at 0:39:16 (h,m,s) (sans MiraMax Logo) and I've realized the screenshot names in Premiere will tell you how many screenshots you've made. I make two for each shot (one BD and one LaserDisc), so still no. 666 will mean that I've done 333 shots, give or take a few. Also feeling accomplished to hit the devil's milestone.

Another little video I thought you guys might enjoy, about the mistakes in Godzilla vs. Biollante and a little bit of history that may answer some of the questions about said mistakes.

^ Cool video, thanks for sharing that. I've noticed "Researth" before.

At some point in the mid '80s Toho must have started using a different title house (or doing it in-house) for the English titles and credits. Compare the English text in Bye-Bye Jupiter, Zero, Gunhed and the first four Kawakita Godzilla movies to comparable text and credits (and title design) in the '70s export versions or even ROG. GvB is one of the better ones of the films I just mentioned but still pretty sloppy: English text haphazardly placed over Japanese visuals, bad typesetting, etc.

Also, some of the same typesetting errors in GvB are also present in Gunhed. (Look at the vertical placement of the uppercase I.) I wonder if these were done at the same time circa 1990.



An audio error in the export version that I'm sure most or all of us is aware of is the warped soundtrack during the Super X II launch. I know someone who saw a 35mm print of the film in Germany in the last several years and according to him that same audio error was present on that print.

The visible in-frame matting on that one shot may not have been visible if Toho hadn't cheaped out on its 2008 HiVision telecines.

Terasawa wrote: Also, some of the same typesetting errors in GvB are also present in Gunhed. (Look at the vertical placement of the uppercase I.) I wonder if these were done at the same time circa 1990.

Yeah, I noticed the kerning on the subtitles made me individually place things, notably, the letter "T." The text also slants about 2-3 degrees down and to the right.

Terasawa wrote:An audio error in the export version that I'm sure most or all of us is aware of is the warped soundtrack during the Super X II launch. I know someone who saw a 35mm print of the film in Germany in the last several years and according to him that same audio error was present on that print.

That's actually one of the few things I tried to clean up for this version (I ended up not doing it). There is a similar warped sound issue in the very beginning on the Blue Toho Eiga logo, though not nearly as bad, which I did fix. I took the BD audio, and used my somewhat limited knowledge and did my best to do some equalization to make the whole Eng audio track clearer, do some noise removal, and cleaned up some popping and clicking in the opening.

New update! I've made all the footage textless, and all I have to do is CC for the remaining forty minutes or so. Here's a little comparison between the versions of the movie! I tried to upload to YouTube, but it got claimed before it was even done processing.

https://vimeo.com/375988142

Servanov wrote:New update! I've made all the footage textless, and all I have to do is CC for the remaining forty minutes or so. Here's a little comparison between the versions of the movie! I tried to upload to YouTube, but it got claimed before it was even done processing.

https://vimeo.com/375988142

Nice job! I'm especially impressed with the cast and crew credits. They look so accurate to the originals.

Awesome! Looking forward to this!

Another thing I forgot to mention is this is my first project where I'm using a tool called Gigapixel AI to upscale the LD footage to HD, and it looks great!

Wanted to make a little video not about the reconstruction itself, but rather some things I've noticed while making it. Specifically, the cinematography, which I don't think this film gets enough credit for.

Thankfully, things are going faster than I expected and I've only got the last two reels to go! Once that's done, I'll export a final encode to show to some select people and then when everything's finalized I'll make a commentary and then release.

Is this project still being worked on? I'm really looking forward to it, and I also enjoyed your behind-the-scenes videos.