I was familiar with the channel previously but it’s really been hitting my feed hard recently. The YouTube algorithm must be being kind to him.

The best example I’ve seen from him was his YYZ Rush in Rio upscale. It also shows some of the limits of upscaling. Particularity in the crowd shots. His description really tells you how much work can go into this kind of thing.

This DVD has been my biggest challenge yet in terms of finding a way to improve it. It is one of my least watched Rush DVD’s and it’s a known fact that there were some issues recording this show and it’s a miracle it was recorded at all. As a drummer a big reason why I don’t watch the original much is the drums came out really weird, thin, clicky and almost MIDI sounding, so the only way I was going to tackle Rio was if I could improve that. Long story short, I found a way to extract the drums, duplicate them, use various effects on the additional track to try and add missing frequencies and ambience lost in the original mix. Additionally I tried to remove all crowd noise from the rear surround channels and what I found under that was some of the drum ambience / overhead mic audio, so I also tried to smooth it out and layed that on top of everything, among other various things I did with the audio like making a new stereo mix from the DTS-HD Bluray disc I own with less intense crowd noise and more focus on the instruments, from there I just used trial and error with all sorts of plugins in FL studio.

As for the video, it was also a big challenge due to the fact that there seemed to be all sorts of cameras shooting all sorts of resolutions and lightings, and that is very unusual and makes improving the overall video nearly impossible. So I broke the video down in to three resolutions and used different upscaling algorithms on each one, then stitched them together, which actually wasn’t quite as hard as I thought. Anyway, not sure how many songs i’ll try and do off this show because of the amount of work, but at least I have the templates now that I could use again and speed up the process. If there was any song that deserved to be remastered from this show it was YYZ because of it’s reputation, so at least we got that.