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Preserving Soviet spy movies: The Secret Agent's Blunder & The Secret Agent's Destiny

sasqwatch

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Please note: this is a preservation (or restoration, if I may be so bold). No editing, per se, has been performed, although the processes and tools used have much in common in with fanedits. I hope this is an appropriate forum and that members are interested!

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I'm fascinated both by spies and the bizarro world of Soviet culture, and thus was excited to stumble across the "Secret Agent" series of films from the USSR. (There are four, running from 1968 to 1986.) Unfortunately, though, it turns out that the DVDs are all but unwatchable--the video quality is utter crap, with multiple generations of problems baked in, and the subtitles are often impenetrable and unintionally hilarious. ("Such a cute guy with a criminal record is way better than someone else.")

But at least subtitles exist, unlike so many other old Soviet movies, and I could see that these were good movies underneath all the garbage. So I embarked on an effort to clean things up and make sense of the dialog. It ended up taking much more time and effort than I anticipated--a full two months of work for the first two films. (A lot of learning and experimenting were required, so future projects might go a little faster.) I'm only doing the first two films in the series, though--I've read that the last two aren't as good, and I've just had enough (I can hardly think or talk about anything else right now...).

I'm pretty happy with the results. I encourage everyone to have a look at the following brief before and after clips, which I think illustrate the work performed better than anything else (the second is a little more dramatic, and alas, streaming video isn't known for preserving quality):

[align=center]


Additional details and screenshots follow.
 

Dwight Fry

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Impressive work! I'm definitely interested, these seem to be the kind of bizarre movies I tend to adore.

The place for this thread is likely the preserv subforum, though. But let the Powers That Be decide on that.
 

sasqwatch

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Dwight Fry said:
The place for this thread is likely the preserv subforum, though. But let the Powers That Be decide on that.

Perhaps a noob mistake on my part. You may be quite right, although this project seems to straddle both worlds. If the mods feel this thread is more appropriate there, would you kindly move it? Thank you!
 

sasqwatch

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The Secret Agent’s Blunder
Ошибка Резидента / Oshibka Rezidenta

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1969 USSR box office leader, 35.4 million viewers
Directed by Veniamin Dorman
In Russian (occasionally in translation over German) with English subtitles
IMDB

The KGB learns that Mikhail Tulyev (Georgiy Zhzhonov), a Western spy and the son of an exiled Russian aristocrat, has been planted in the USSR. Tulyev seeks information on a purported Soviet nuclear weapons facility while playing cat-and-mouse with KGB counterintelligence.


Rich with Cold War themes and Soviet cultural references, The Secret Agent’s Blunder will be enjoyed by fans of realistic espionage drama (cf. le Carré) and Sovietophiles alike.


The first installment in the Secret Agent series: The Secret Agent’s Blunder (1968), The Secret Agent's Destiny (1970), The Secret Agent’s Return (1982), and The End of Operation “Secret Agent” (1986). Russian president Vladimir Putin, a former KGB agent himself, has stated that his career as an intelligence officer was prompted in part by Zhzhonov’s performance in these films.

This version is the result of efforts to improve both the video and subtitles from the low-quality Ruscico DVD.

Video has been exactingly cleaned up as follows:
- Cropped windowboxing (source DVD is overcropped on the sides, unfortunately)
- Stabilized gate weave
- Removed flickering
- Removed chroma noise (rainbowing and yellow tinting)
- Corrected / balanced levels
- Recovered details and reduced aliasing
- Cleaned noise and banding
- (See the before / after reel and bottommost screenshot below)

Subtitles have been edited line-by-line for readability and accuracy. There are two English subtitle tracks, identical save for format:
- Default track: lower resolution IDX (VobSub) format; compatible with many standalone media players
- Secondary track: high resolution SSA format; recommended if watching on a computer

Technical details:
- B&W, 25 fps, 696x352
- (Resolution unaltered from DVD except for removal of black windowboxing)
- (Displayed at 742x352 with 1.066 PAL pixel aspect ratio)
- 48 kHz, 192 Kbps mono AC3 (unaltered DVD original)
- x264 in MKV

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TV's Frink

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sasqwatch said:
Edit: Not sure if my original post was deleted or moved. I don't think I broke any rules, except perhaps placing this in the wrong subforum. Anyway, I can't seem to find it...

Should be restored now.
 

TV's Frink

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sasqwatch said:
Anyway, Frink was kind enough to restore both my original post and my follow-up with more information about one of the films. But then I went and edited that second post and it's disappeared again. :-( I'll create another post with info about the second film and msg the mods at that point, if necessary.

Should be restored again. That definitely shouldn't be happening, so I'll kick it up to the code monkey and see what's going on.
 

sasqwatch

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The Secret Agent’s Destiny
Судьба Резидента / Sudba Rezidenta

86fd61eddc1b0cc7d4455d5630faf9529d7ff398.jpg


USSR 1970
Directed by Veniamin Dorman
IMDB

1970 USSR box office leader, 28.7 million viewers
In Russian (occasionally in translation over German and French) with English subtitles


Part 1: Cards on the Table (79 minutes)
Part 2: Western Trail (69 minutes)


The KGB has captured Western spy Mikhail Tulyev (Georgiy Zhzhonov) and strives to utilize him in their counterintelligence tactics against the West. In the meantime, a bright but naive young Soviet engineer, Vladimir Barkov (Andrei Vertogradov), is ensnared by Western intelligence agencies.


With its rose-colored depiction of Soviet society and deep Cold War paranoia, The Secret Agent’s Destiny will be enjoyed by cultural history aficionados as well as fans of realistic spy fiction.


The second installment in the Secret Agent series.

This version is the result of efforts to improve both the video and subtitles from the low-quality Ruscico DVD.

Video has been exactingly cleaned up as follows:
- Cropped windowboxing (source DVD is overcropped on the sides, unfortunately)
- Stabilized gate weave
- Removed flickering
- Removed blue tint
- Corrected levels and restored crushed blacks
- Recovered details and reduced aliasing
- Cleaned noise and banding
- (See the before / after reel and bottommost screenshot below)

Subtitles have been edited line-by-line for readability and accuracy. There are two English subtitle tracks, identical save for format:
- Default track: lower resolution IDX (VobSub) format; compatible with many standalone media players
- Secondary track: high resolution SSA format; recommended if watching on a computer

Technical details:
- B&W, 25 fps, 692x376
- (Resolution unaltered from DVD except for removal of black windowboxing)
- (Displayed at 738x376 with 1.066 PAL pixel aspect ratio)
- 48 kHz, 192 Kbps mono AC3 (unaltered DVD original)
- x264 in MKV


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cMXz3.png
 

Neglify

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sasqwatch said:
Note: I accidentally flip-flopped the images from two movies, but I'm afraid to make any edits. These images go with the first movie; the images in the previous thread belong here. I'll fix once the board get the kinks worked out. :)

I think you're good to edit your posts. Usually new members with less than 5 posts need attachments (pictures, videos) moderated, but you're up to 7 posts now. Try it and let's see what happens.
 

sasqwatch

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Thanks Frink and Neglify, everything seems to be working now.

All video clean up was done with AviSynth. I'd welcome any discussion of that tool, the overall process, the films themselves, or anything connected to Soviet culture, etc., etc.

My AviSynth workflow was as follows:
  • Crop to remove most of the letterboxing
  • A variant of Stab to remove judder/gate weave (nice function but can add green tinting--fortunately not a problem for B&W)
  • Greyscale to nuke all color
  • Autolevels (tuned pretty weak so it just hits the really bad elements; had to work scene-by-scene since the automatic scene change detection wasn't reliable)
  • QTGMC for some beautiful comb removal, denoising, and detail restoration; really amazing function
  • Crop remaining letterboxing
  • Fix miscellaneous nasty bits with manual adjustments (jumpy frames, crooked images, dark images, etc.)
  • [Render intermediate, lossless AVI]
  • Deflicker with a customized, weak temporal softener (with an edge mask to avoid detail loss)
  • Remove jumpy/"nervous" elements with a strong dose of TemporalSoften (using masks to target specific areas only)
  • Hit the whole thing with a very light TemporalSoften yet again--readers may be getting nervous about three temporal softens in a row, but they were all applied with extreme caution. This last instance helped a lot with subtle in-frame jumpiness, and reduced my final encodes by about 300MB.
  • Scrutinize current output and manually tweak filtering and levels scene-by-scene, as appropriate
  • Eliminate banding with Dither. Another awesome function.
  • Restore grain with GrainFactory3
  • Render final AVI and encode w/x264

Subtitles were done through a lot of careful watching and re-watching, as well as a lot of googling to understand WTF Soviet citizens in the 1960s would be talking about (and to get better translations of a few songs and poems in the films). That was pretty fascinating, actually. I also picked up a tiny bit of Russian during this process, and that helped to get the subtitle cadence correct, as well as to restore little phrases like "comrade" (tovarisch) which were missing from the original.

It was a lot fun but I'm not particularly anxious to do it again. ;-)
 

wabid

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In case you are someday interested in doing the last two, check out this avisynth filter.
I learned a lot just by pulling it apart.

This looks like an incredibly cool project. Would you be interested in rerendering your final avi into ntsc?
 

sasqwatch

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Thanks for your interest, wabid. I'm aware of your standard-setting work and it's cool have to your comment.

Autolevels did have a role in this effort. Agreed that it can do a very nice job, but I found that it could be a bit "jumpy" and that missed scene changes could be pretty ugly. Thus I ended up setting all scene changes manually, and using a fairly high radius (100 frames) to keep the levels uniform shot-by-shot:
Code:
autolevels(sceneChgThresh=255,filterRadius=100,ignore_high=0.0003,ignore_low=0.0003,frameOverrides="E0-18151,S18152,S18345,S18469,S18532,S18598,S18662,S18742,S18881,S19038,S19162,S19266,S19369,S19664,S20100,S20814,E20814-49796,S49797,S50221,S50851,E50851-57268,S57269,S57309,E57309-57900,S57901,S58277,E58277-59479,S59480,S59560,E59560-71990,S71991,S72334,E72334-80564,S80565,S80735,S80968,E80968-101786")

I liked its work on whites but I still messed with levels manually, too--mostly to reduce contrast (output black levels) and thus alleviate crushed blacks.

In your experience with Autolevels across multiple projects, have you found that a lot of tuning is needed for each source, or have you found a solid base setting that you rely on?

Does PAL/NTSC still matter? I'm in NTSC-land, myself, but my standalone device purchased at Best Buy plays these just fine on my TV. I'm open to being persuaded, but I'm hesitant to fracture the distribution and I don't want to mess with the audio (since things would have to slow down from 25fps to 24.997 in order to do a pulldown to 29.997).

Cheers.
 
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