Mickey's Christmas Carol

IMDb (8.0/10)

Genres
Animation, Short, Comedy

Actors
Alan Young, Wayne Allwine, Hal Smith

Plot Summary
The classic Disney animated characters play the roles in this animated retelling of the Charles Dickens masterpiece.

Note from Encoder
Merry Christmas 2023 from QxR!

This is an encode of a fan-made DVD upscale. Full credit goes to PHOENIX on BeyondHD.

Original release notes from PHOENIX:

"This is a DVD FanRes. A FanRes is a Fan Restoration. An unofficial restoration.
This was a Restoration of the European PAL DVD to have the same attributes
as the official Disney Blu-ray, but be better than the Disney Blu-ray."

"The Blu-ray is infamous for being upscaled and upscaled quite poorly with multiple
negatives. Like loss of picture (zoom and cropped), stabilized heavily which cut out
a further like 10% of the picture around all edges, upscaled to 1920x1080, heavily
denoised, and heavily over-sharpened."

"However, this release does what Disney wanted to do, but an actual good job.
The process is archived here: https://gist.github.com/rlaphoenix/0957656a97559c397ec12544743f2898
But the gist of it is it loaded the source progressively, and converted it to a constant
NTSC frame rate. It then removed the Halo'ing/ringing on edges, a small bit of pillarboxing,
and used VSGAN with 2X_DigitalFilmV5_Lite to upscale and filter from about 714x576 to 1428x1152.
This model is trained with other CEL animated data to understand artifacts in terms of data and fixes them.
That process with VSGAN did the majority of the work here. From there it just downscaled back to 1440x1080.
It also did some post-processing to do with pixel format and color space, as well as some psycho-visual
enhancements to help it all fit together."

"One thing that helped a ton here is the use of pvsfunc PD2V's recover() func to get a progressive
stream from the DVD without needing to deinterlace. This can rarely be used, but in this instance it was.
The reference to QTGMC in the script was just a fallback in case one or two frames did truly need to be
deinterlaced, which doesn't seem like it ever was the case. The interlacing the DVD had could be called
"fake interlacing", and is somewhat common for 24fps material being transcoded for PAL DVDs."

"If you are unsure if this is just a crappy resize with a bit of fancy wording and buzzwords, please compare
the Blu-ray (e.g. BHDStudio's encode) with this release. You will see that it is a huge huge improvement.
Even comparing it with the DVD will amaze."

"Blu-ray vs. my other 16:9 DVD FanRes: https://slow.pics/c/K8Gs5MuB
DVD vs. this 4:3 OAR DVD FanRes: https://slow.pics/c/5quBFmeo"



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