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Within The Woods Film Can DVD

In addition to the various retail DVDs available around the world, there are also a number of fanmade DVD projects made over the years. This page details one such project assembled by myself, the webmaster. It's worth pointing out that fanmade DVDs are not meant as a pirated replacement for legally bought discs, but a companion to them, produced as a labour of love by die hard fans to offer other fans something more which isn't commercially available.



 

Completion Date:  November 5, 2019 Production Time:  7 Weeks Number Of Discs:  1 Language(s):  English Subtitle(s):  None Source(s):  Bootleg NTSC VHS Tapes

 

The Evil Dead prototype Within The Woods, has a special place in many Evil Dead fans' hearts. This was a DVD project to assemble my current best quality version on to one standalone disc, along with a second version which had been restored (brightened, re-coloured, de-noised and with audio noise reduction), in a disc-sized aged mini film can. I originally had the idea for a fanmade DVD supplied inside a mini film can the year before, but was unable to find any suitable tins, short of having them custom made. In September 2019 I discovered UK DVD supplies company Riviera Multimedia, was selling disc tins that were perfect, and cheap at around £1 each. I ordered ten, with one for me and the other nine to be shared with other Evil Dead fans online as trade-only.

DVD tin artwork photo (click to enlarge)

 

Only once I knew I had the tins sorted, did I want to start on the DVD disc itself. On the whole I'm a firm believer that it's hard to improve on very poor quality VHS. where you might improve one aspect, you loose elsewhere, and normally it's just better to get the highest quality transfer possible from the source VHS tapes you have, than anything you can do digitally afterwards. That said, UK fan Garrett Gilchrist did a fantastic restoring the somewhat noisy and partially jumpy VHS transfer of the 'Severely Edited For Television' Mexican TV Version of Evil Dead II, back in 2016 (which is featured on disc 4 of the Evil Dead - The Rare Collection Blu-Ray Box-Set). In December 2018 I asked if he could have a look at my best quality copy of Within The Woods and see if he could do a similar restoration project. Over the following week, he created an 18p version to work from; as it was originally projected, then de-noised & re-coloured each scene, and restored some of the credits, outputting a 29i file which could then be added into a DVD project. Separately, some noise reduction filters were also run on the audio track. I've added a 4-way screenshot comparison below showing my best versions, with the restoration bottom-right.

Overall the result is an improvement. While brightening the image does make the grain/noise more apparent, it's a trade off which does work. Either way, I decided to include both the restored and unrestored original transfers, so people could choose which one they wanted to watch. The DVD was simply assembled using GIMP, Adobe Photoshop, Premiere and Encore. It has one main motion menu, made up to look like an aged fake photocopied flyer for the only cinema screening back in 1979 at the Punch & Judy theatre in Detroit. I started by modifying a scan of the real 1981 Book Of The Dead premiere flyer, eventually evolving into the version you see below-right.

I first posted this project on the Evil Dead Collector's Initiative on September 26, 2019, with a few progress updates before formerly offering copies as trade only; first come first served, on November 5, 2019.

In November 2019, Garrett did some further tests using a program EBSynth which is designed to add painterly effects to video footage. It's useful for colourizing video footage, and doing other kinds of special effects. You provide an image sequence of motion frames, and a keyframe which has been painted over in some way, and the program then tracks the motion of your video while applying whatever is different about that keyframe to it. Garrett used the 24 screenshots uploaded by Don May Jr (president of DVD company Synapse) from his copy of Within The Woods on the MHVF forum in January 2002, upscaled with Topaz AI Gigapixel, then fed them into EBSynth along with the corresponding motion shots from the film. Some of the shots look pretty decent, but otherwise it tends to look like painted/abstract art rather than video, which was the original intent of the software, and further, this method is only possible where a higher quality still of the each single shot is available.

In theory, EBSynth can work for any scene where you have a low quality copy of the shot and a higher quality still frame which matches exactly otherwise. Or a scene you only have in black & white but then colourize one frame from. In practice, low quality material tends to look weird after a few frames either direction from the keyframe. While these tests in themselves were not overly fruitful, a couple of the below video screenshots found their way onto Facebook, so the tests are detailed here so people don't assume the screenshots came from a better quality bootleg source somewhere out there.