The Iron Horse (John Ford, 1924) - Piano score by William Perry (BluRay Quality, tinted)

After two years of stagnation, this restoration project finally sees the light of the day. Right on time for the 95th anniversary of this movie. I took the Blu-Ray release by Twilight Time and edited it to match the Paul Killiam version, which features a piano score by William Perry (as can be seen in /watch/)gVJ4XhOFb3KFJ . The editing process consisted in: * Changing the video speed, as (1) the Blu-Ray release introduces duplicate frames to reach 24fps from something that would otherwise play at around 18 fps, and (2) the Paul Killiam version plays the original frames at 24 fps (and is thus shorter than the Blu-Ray release). * Splitting the Blu-Ray release into about 150 fragments, to have it match frame-to-frame the version by Paul Killiam. Doing so was the only way to ensure synchronization with the soundtrack by William Perry. * Recreating the tints that Karl Malkames restored in the Paul Killiam version, but were destroyed by the poor quality of VHS. For this purpose I developed my own tinting filter for AviSynth+, now avaiable at https://github.com/magiblot/HSLTint . My top priority when recreating the tints has been to preserve the brightness in the Blu-Ray release and preventing eye tiredness. * Preserving the Paul Killiam titles at the beginning and the end of the movie. YouTube user radiotelefonia (/user/radiotelefonia) recreated them and I added a few cheap old movie effects (using MSU Old Cinema Filter) to disguise them a bit. In fact, radiotelefonia suggested this restoration project and provided me with the VHS rip video file where I took the audio from. The differences between the Blu-Ray release and the Paul Killiam version are not few. Apart from the differences in speed I explained before, Paul Killiam's is missing a few shots --such as when Davy and Miriam meet the night after the railroad has been finished-- and has a few scenes slowed-down by 1.5 --such as when Ruby shoots to a man in the saloon. I replicated these slowdowns by repeating frames instead of blending them. The tints are barely distinguishable in the VHS rip. In the end, I used 3 different tints: orange for indoors, blue for nighttime and yellow for outdoors scenes towards the end of the movie, just in the same places where I believe the VHS shows them. To tell the truth, I have never seen actual monochromic film tints, so if you find the ones I chose unrealistic, I'm sorry. On another technical note, the final video processing has been done in one step -- meaning that the Blu-Ray source has been re-encoded just once (unlike my previous upload of The General, due to technical limitations back then), thus preserving as much grain as possible, and resulting in the gigantic 94 GiB video file I throwed at YouTube. Under YouTube's compression, the film looks great at 1440p and 2160p, if you can afford these resolutions. The downside of not having denoised the source is that 1080p and below look blurry as hell. So, that's all can I remember I wanted to explain about this project. Enjoy! #JohnFord

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