GamesMaster HD: 4K Restoration

[Roareye]

Several more varieties of shots from the show. A bit of a mix across the seasons (My info may be a bit wrong as I'm more focused on frame by frame transfers atm, feel free to correct me) ;

Vic Reeves makes Dominik Diamond laugh just after his challenge in Season 2

REEVES S2 Dom Close.jpg (6.21 MiB) Viewed 3972 times

Simon Amstell (later host of Never Mind The Buzzcocks and a comedian in his own right) appears on Season 3 while still a young man

Simon Amstell S3 Entrance.jpg (4.69 MiB) Viewed 3972 times

Bridgette Wilson during her interview in Season 4, on set for the Mortal Kombat movie

Bridgette Wilson S4 MK Sonya Close.jpg (6.17 MiB) Viewed 3972 times

The famous/infamous Season 6 challenge with Zoe Ball, a shot of her playing the game from the front (before she is distracted by Dom's innuendo)

Zoe Ball S6 Manx TT Challenge Front.jpg (7.03 MiB) Viewed 3972 times

Tracy Shaw completing the snowboarding challenge in Season 6

Tracy Shaw S6 Snowboarding Challenge Close.jpg (6.22 MiB) Viewed 3972 times

The GamesMaster head from Season 6's intro

GM S6 Head.jpg (5.29 MiB) Viewed 3972 times

[Roareye]

A few more. These restorations take time. Dom's first monologue took me 3 days. Could maybe get it down to 2 or 2.5 days when on a roll, but still. We carry on, got bugger all else to do (Except playing Streets of Rage 4, doing that between processes).

Dom's wink and thumbs up from the Season 7 intro sequence

TESTDomWinksS7.jpg (6.13 MiB) Viewed 3961 times

I always felt Season 5 looked bad aesthetically, something to do with the type of tape used I think. It's got a grainy unpolished quality to it. So it's nice to see the restoration pull the image back together in this shot so well. Gives me hope for future scenes here. These two are both from Dominik introducing the "Executioner", both the first and final frames of that shot. The image quality varies between light and dark in the original, whereas here it's kept a consistent quality to Dom's face during the transition.

TESTDomAnnouncesExecutionerLight.jpg (5.08 MiB) Viewed 3961 times

TESTDomAnnouncesExecutionerDark.jpg (5.08 MiB) Viewed 3961 times

For phones and lo-res screens, here's a 720p close up of Dom's face from these shots (The face is at 4K res, obviously missing the rest of the frame).

UpscaleVSRestoration001.jpg (666.7 KiB) Viewed 3961 times

UpscaleVSRestoration002.jpg (618.17 KiB) Viewed 3961 times

Pretty impressive for a shot that really didn't look good upscaled.

[Roareye]

A few more updates. Still so much to do, but pushing slightly closer towards victory haha

"James Bond" after losing his Season 6 challenge on two Virtua Cop 2 arcade cabinets.

TESTBondClose.jpg (4.93 MiB) Viewed 3948 times

Season 3 celebrity challenge

TEST-CELEB003.jpg (6.9 MiB) Viewed 3948 times

Season 5 celebrity challenge

TESTCelebSkiing.jpg (6.89 MiB) Viewed 3948 times

[Roareye]

Wow! So many image views this last week, over 120 on each of the stills on the previous post! Either two people are constantly clicking every single image or we have an increased footfall through here. Either is awesome ^_^

Sorry it's been nearly a week. Been through a bit of a home dilemma, nothing too heavy and all resolved now, so back on the wagon. I'll post a few more updates as I get back through the work. Here's a shot from the Dave Perry's "tips" chatter where Dominik Diamond is mocking him silently.

TEST-DaveDomPodiumS4-001.jpg (5.84 MiB) Viewed 3817 times

Here's Dave Perry's face in close-up. Essentially this is the native 10K size, but I've cut away the rest of the image so the image's size is 4K without shrinking the image itself.

DavePerry10K-S4Close.jpg (5.66 MiB) Viewed 3817 times

[Cyber-Hazuki]

Just got an email regarding the DVDs so thought i'd drop by, these images look amazing quality, in fact its incredible!! I'm blown away!

[Roareye]

Just got an email regarding the DVDs so thought i'd drop by, these images look amazing quality, in fact its incredible!! I'm blown away!

Thanks Cyber-Hazuki! It takes a long time but I think it's worth it.

An update for you guys, the first 2 minutes of the episode in 4K resolution!
There's still some work that needs doing, even within this 2 minutes. At least 3 (short) shots need me to composite alternate restorations over the top (in basic terms, some need the faces from one restoration but need the background detail from others), and Dom's glasses seem to phase in and out during the opening monologue so I'll need to fix that, but other than that it's clean and ready to watch. It certainly doesn't distract too much from the image detail and stability. Let me know what you guys think.

PS. I've restored many more shots, but not in sequence (as you can tell from my jumping around the episode for nice clean restored shots earlier in this topic). I'm going to settle down and focus on consecutive shots now to get the episode visibly closer to completion. The benefit though is that there's a lot less for me to restore later as I've kinda done half of it. But that's subject for later lol

[Roareye]

Gee, no thoughts? XD

[azel]

It looks awesome, certainly sounds like a lot of time/effort but the results look worth it!

[Roareye]

It looks awesome, certainly sounds like a lot of time/effort but the results look worth it!

Thanks Azel. I'm still going with this but I've had distractions with BFI funding for my film, another restoration job for SEGA's Cyber Razor Cut, started a new recurring review series for my Youtube channel etc. Lots going on but finally reached a comfortable neutral, so back on this. The first process (the longest part) is done up to Dom's second speech (just after the Dave Perry SM64 section). Once this is done things should accelerate as there's less frames in almost all of the following segments.

[Exoddus]

Looks great. Shame the source material isn't great. Considering GamesMaster was one of channel 4's top 10 programs at the time and it had millions of viewers every week and lasted 7 series. It's a real shame the episodes never had a DVD release.

With how popular Netflix, BBC iplayer, Amazon Prime video etc is. Surly they could now release them to an online digital platform? They clearly didn't want to produce a physical GamesMaster release but why not digital? I mean, I can watch every episode of The Hurricanes for free on STV online but there's no official way to watch Gamesmaster!

The video games business is now larger than both the film and music industries combined. Gamesmaster has become an important show because of the video games history it documents. But we're still stuck to the VHS rips, which I'm still very grateful for.

It's probably been 5 years since I last watched them all. Probably do that again soon.