creative

 
 

THE TEN in 1080p - movie editing and restoration project

THE TEN in 1080p

movie editing and restoration project

tools/skills used: HD DVDs, FFmpeg, DaVinci Resolve, Handbrake, Adobe Audition, SubtitleEdit, MKVToolNix

I have this obsession with a movie called THE TEN, an absurdist comedy written and directed by David Wain, the genius behind WET HOT AMERICAN SUMMER and one of the many members of The State. The movie is comprised of a series of ridiculous interwoven stories “inspired by” the ten commandments and was critically panned upon release in 2007. It’s got Adam Brody stuck in the ground, Winona Ryder falling in love with a ventriloquist dummy, Ken Marino sewing a pair of scissors into a patient as a goof, and Paul Rudd cheesing in front of some giant stone tablets. It’s strange, crass, and it takes itself the opposite of seriously. Almost everything about it absolutely owns.

what on earth will i ever do with these

The Problem

I have standards (sometimes known as issues) when it comes to video and audio quality that often get in the way of enjoying something outright. THE TEN was released in 2008, during a transitional period when Blu-ray and HD DVD were battling it out like VHS vs. Betamax. As we all know, HD DVD lost the war—nobody ever talks about HD DVD anymore (except me, I’m about to talk to about HD DVD a lot)—and Blu-ray became the standard for high definition. And while THE TEN did get a brief HD DVD release in the U.S., high definition 1080p video was overkill for a lot of online video enjoyers back in 2008, and I’ve only been able to track down a 720p encode of the HD DVD. Surely I could find a Blu-ray copy?

A Little Bit Faster, Now

The movie did eventually come out on Blu-ray, but only in a few regions in Europe. European releases use the PAL video format, which runs slightly faster (25 frames per second) than the NTSC standard used in the U.S. (23.97 frames per second). Depending how the studio converts their film, this often results in the movie having a slightly shorter runtime and the audio having a slightly higher pitch. For many people, this might not be a problem, but I know how Paul Rudd is supposed to sound. To top it off, THE TEN makes use of many transitional title cards, and the regional Blu-rays have locally translated versions of that on-screen text.

I was stuck with two options:

  1. a lower-quality, standard-definition version of the movie that was otherwise good
  2. a higher-resolution copy that ran too fast and had foreign text.

I’ll take neither, thanks!

Taking Matters Into My Own Hands

In 2018, after letting this frustration stew for a few years, I decided to take matters into my own hands. I bought an HD DVD player and a sealed copy of The Ten on HD DVD off of eBay. The plan was to archive the disc and encode a proper 1080p version myself. Preservation! But after plugging the old Xbox 360 HD DVD drive into my PC, inserting the disc, and copying the disc contents to my PC for decryption, the process kept failing. I couldn’t figure out what was wrong—the disc was visually flawless, no scratches, nothing. After trying a few more times, I accepted that I got a bad disc and I ordered another sealed copy. After waiting a week for it to arrive I was met with the same issue. Hmmm.

Disc Rot!

I did some heavy googling and I learned that HD DVDs are particularly susceptible to “disc rot”—especially from certain manufacturing plants. As it turns out, The Ten was one of many HD DVDs manufactured with this flaw. I reached out to the eBay seller and worked out a deal to buy his remaining sealed HD DVDs of the movie. And when they arrived, every copy failed to read properly. I still own seven copies of THE TEN on HD DVD (as you can see in the image above), and none of them work.

I was defeated. I gave up. I resigned myself to living with these two imperfect versions of the movie on my media server, and I didn’t want to watch either of them. But giving up on a project like this never clears my mental space. This was no longer just about having a good copy of a very dumb movie—it was about the principle of preservation, of restoring something obscure that no one else cared enough about to save.

A New Approach

Almost 7 years later, with some unexpected free time and a list of unfinished projects always haunting me, I decided to revisit the project with a new approach. The plan was ambitious: create a hybrid version splicing together elements from the European Blu-ray and the U.S. HD DVD 720p encode. I spent a day in DaVinci Resolve replacing the frames that had German text with the corresponding frames from the U.S. copy, carefully matching color and contrast to ensure the edit was imperceptible. I did a deep dive on re-timing PAL video to NTSC, using FFmpeg to adjust the frame rate of the Blu-ray to match the U.S. version so it ran at the correct speed without any noticeable glitches. This process took a few days of trial and error and wasn’t a lossless process, but in the end I had a 1080p version of the movie at its original 23.97fps speed with English title cards that looked like they belonged. But after all that, there was one major problem: the audio.

Artifacts

The retimed Blu-ray didn’t quite sync with the HD DVD audio. I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why. I still don’t know why. I chalked it up to differences in exports for their respective formats. And upon looking into retiming the audio like I did with the video… that was also out of the question. Speeding audio up raises the pitch and slowing it down lowers the pitch, but you end up with aliasing and quantization artifacts—distortions and glitches that sound off to the human ear. I gave it a shot, but nothing sounded good. Here I was, another solid week or so dedicated to finally getting this thing sorted, and despite all my efforts, I had hit another brick wall. Frustrated, I abandoned the project again.

The Missing Piece

A month or two later, I was up at about one in the morning, adjusting to new medication that left me restless. On a whim I decided to do a little more searching, just to check some places I hadn’t looked, but keeping expectations low. And what do you know: almost exactly a year prior, someone had uploaded THE TEN, claiming to be ripped from a Blu-ray. It was an encoding I hadn’t seen before, but it looked like my white whale—23.97fps. Intrigued, I downloaded it and confirmed its runtime matched the U.S. HD DVD version almost exactly. The bitrate was lower than I’d like, resulting in noticeable compression artifacts in the video, but the audio quality was up to my standards. I layered the audio track over the video I had meticulously edited couple months earlier and hit play, expecting nothing. Everything synchronized perfectly. Literally no adjustments were needed—the stars had aligned. I lost my mind.

I sat there in disbelief at two in the morning, sleep-deprived but elated. After seven years of searching, giving up, experimenting, and giving up, I had finally built the perfect version of THE TEN out of parts: high bitrate, proper frame rate, accurate audio, and English title cards. With a desire to close the project up for good, I spent the next couple hours transcribing English subtitles by hand for a segment set in Mexico, making to perfectly recreate the HD DVD’s burned-in subtitles. I was so close to the end I could taste it. It was the culmination of hours of obsessive work and a little bit of luck.

Ten Down

At 5:44 AM I texted my friends that it was done. Finally done.

This project was just as absurd and silly as the movie itself—a true labor of love. I have felt crazy putting this much effort into preserving a better quality copy of movie that many people will never hear of, let alone watch. But it’s a testament—an old testament?—to my passion for media preservation, attention to detail, and a refusal to settle for “good enough”. THE TEN may not mean much to the world, but to me, it’s perfect. Even more perfect.