Shaman - Ritualive 20th Anniversary Edition Full Concert (60FPS 4K AI Upscale Remaster + Recolor)

Original: is 480i (30FPS interlaced, but naturally 60 after conversion to progressive video), taken from the 18th Anniversary Edition. Upscale to 400% it’s original resolution, to 2560x1920, stretched to 2880x2160. Manual recolor done by me with the intent of removing the blue filter used broadly in most of the footage from the concert, to make the concert feel more lively. Learned a new version of Topaz Video AI for this, could probably do better in a few months to a year but the 20th anniversary is now. Observations: Upscale color graded to 6500K color temperature screens. If you want you can add a bit more red color to your screen in their respective settings menu if skin tones don’t look as warm\intense as they did in the previews I posted before. This might be the 10th attempt at rendering this concert. I put some film grain but it is not very noticeable in darker scenes no matter the bitrate I use, even though the rendering uses Maximum Depth, while it does look good enough in the project. The “golden camera“ has remained since nobody complained. Fairy Tale was the hardest to “clean up“ and recolor due to it having double the blue filter amount, which kinda decreased all colors on average when trying to restore from the edited version that was officially released, that is also why it looks less colorful in general. The difference in sharpness between the shots is because of how the cameras at the concert were configured\calibrated. Usually those cameras that move above the crowd are worse in quality of manual calibration because folks back in the day did not see the point in calibrating them that much since “no one was gonna notice“. You can notice the same thing on Angra’s Rebirth World Tour. My guess is all cameras were either of a different brand or were calibrated manually without no set standard, which is normal for the time but it does show itself in modern upscaling and restoration projects. Like with Rebirth World Tour I personally I wish I had access to the original masters so I could do my own cut of the concert without any of the original editor’s filters. It would be much easier to create a more valid 4K experience from a raw 720i source rather than compressed 480i. I did notice some camera changes that felt improvised in the 18th Anniversary Edition, with a 1-2 frame delay, which to me means it was manually edited post release to hide something or to swap a shot for whatever reason they might have had. It would likely go unnoticed in a 30fps interlaced video but it did show up in the upscale. In general, watching it back, there are things and color levels I would change but I have rendered this concert like 10 times already. Maybe in 2 or 3 years I will redo this concert to see if wielding more experience and the progress of technology helps me release a better version of this edit of mine. I think I said this before but personally I find a lot of 480i to 4K upscales to be redundant with 1080p\1440p upscales since almost nothing is improved at 4K compared to 1080p for a 480p\480i source video, but since 1440p and 4K take about the same time to render I went with 4K. I just did not want to do another 1080p focused release, even if you can watch this in whatever resolution you desire. You could also consider the 4K availability as a HD\FHD upscale with lack of compression from Youtube since the 4K bitrate is far higher than normal 1080p on this platform. I was originally gonna publish a more saturated version regarding skin colors, but I worried it was gonna look too red on some monitors\TVs. Also, in hindsight I probably shouldn’t have used the 4K upscale for the background just to blur it afterwards.