The Thief and the Cobbler: Recobbled Cut Mark 4

[Garrett Gilchrist]

Within the past few days I've inked one hundred and sixteen pages of promotional art for (and from) The Thief and the Cobbler.

I've mostly done this while streaming live on Youtube. I also assembled, corrected and digitally colored the first eight pieces of this artwork, including recoloring a Thief from 2006. The result was intended to look like cels from the film, depicting its major characters.

It was also intended to replace promotional artwork I inked back in 2006, for the original Recobbled Cut DVD covers, which I felt is not up to my current standards and could be much improved now. I assembled a new poster and DVD cover for the film, as well as a similar cover for the Thief and the Cobbler Nintendo (NES/Famicom) game I released recently.

I will probably assemble and retouch the rest of this artwork as line art, but not color it. I may color some of it. I am considering creating a coloring book with this material.

I was inking over sources that varied widely in quality. That included my own inks from 2006 in some cases, or low quality screenshots which I'd pencilled over digitally, or otherwise reworked in Photoshop. That included character images assembled from multiple sources. In some cases I was working from good scans of actual line art from the film, or small patchy xeroxes of it. In all cases I inked at a large size to try to retain as much detail as possible.


Also:

I am now soliciting Thief and the Cobbler pixel art to be used for nonograms.

This would be black and white pixel art (those two colors only!), with black areas to anchor the pixels wherever possible, up to 50x50 in size but usually around 25x25.

Other Thief and the Cobbler related puzzles and brain teasers would theoretically be accepted.

[DaveHolmes]

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[Garrett Gilchrist]

LM organized and labeled the files at the time.

I kept several copies on my hard drive because I wasn't sure if one version was missing stuff that others had. It got a little confusing.

They're part of the ... eighth Thief and the Cobbler Scrapbook, which I think I uploaded to my Archive with the others.

More recently I created a Photoshop file to theoretically make the watermarks less visible, though I only used it once to date.

[DaveHolmes]

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[Garrett Gilchrist]

On my HD there's a 310 MB version and an 821 MB version, both organized by LM. The latter I have a duplicate of apparently, probably with different organization. It's 1095 files I think.

Available here:
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/ ... sp=sharing

There are some color backgrounds in there; LM says there probably hasn't been any new uploads, but it would be hard to tell at this point unless we spot something not in the current collection.

Also available on Facebook here:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/thiefan ... ter=albums

Here is the Oscars site where you can run a search for "Arabian Knight" or "Cobbler," which currently gives 4348 results.
https://collections.new.oscars.org/Deta ... e/70171893

At the time, a lot of the listings had no image although they may have been updated since. Having 4348 results does not mean 4348 images. If you skip ahead to later pages you'll notice they tend to have no images. Our search at the time was exhaustive.

Here is a collection we put together of URLs to the images found when searching for "Arabian Knight." This was how we downloaded the material at the time. It no longer seems to work, but may give you an idea of intended URL format.
https://pastebin.com/K3hXz1Cy

Probably current format:
https://collections.new.oscars.org/reve ... format=jpg

[DaveHolmes]

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[Frogacuda]

How have newer tools like Topaz AI Video Enhance changed the way that you approach restoration projects? What difference do you think a product like that would have made if you had access to it when working on The Recobbled Cut?

It wouldn't have affected The Recobbled Cut, at least in the state the technology currently exists in. I am not impressed by current versions of Topaz AI Video Enhance, or other animation-based upscalers I've seen. The tech will probably get better before too long.

There is an AI upscale of Arabian Knight floating around that someone did which does not meet my standards.

I would say at this point user error is giving AI upscaling a lot of its bad rap. People are 1000 percent dumb about how they use this tool and what it's capable of. Usually a combination of poor sources/pretreatment, zero understanding of settings (i.e. "maxing everything), and pushing it past where the tech is viable (going from a VHS or 480 DVD directly up to 4K in one pass, for example). The results are usually horrifying.

For example, I recently came across this absolute horror show mangling a classic anime:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LzscpreJUNM

Admittedly a difficult subject to get to 4K, an SD-only anime (480p) with a tremendous amount of detail and scenes with artificial noise/static obscuring them. But to prove a point, I spent a night futzing with it and came up with this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T5cwK9R_9CA

Both of us used the same tool (Topaz), just one of us understood how to use that tool. The result isn't perfect, and again this is difficult source material being upscaled 400%, so it's far from an ideal use case. If I was the sort of person who spent years remastering a movie frame by frame, I would surely tweak my upscale shot-for-shot to smooth out some of the problematic outliers. But my point here is that it's a much more useful too than you'd think, especially in the hands of someone who cares to get it right.

[Garrett Gilchrist]

That does look fine, especially in the noiseless scenes. And, as you say, better than the first video linked, which is nothing but upscale artifacts.

I suppose noise could be removed from the intentionally noisy scenes to ease the process.

[DaveHolmes]

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[Frogacuda]

Reminds me of the recent YouTube trend the past few years of everyone uploading songs with the vocals removed since there's a zillion apps to do it now.

I was using filters in Goldwave 20 years ago that did the exact same thing - and they had the exact same limitations (artifacts left behind, dynamics missing, etc.) - you have to actually dick around with EQ to make it sound decent

Just throwing everything through a filter and calling it a day is horribly lazy

Right. In addition to having models like Proteus that allow for a lot of tweaking to find the sweet spot for a given input, there are a lot of things you can do to mitigate, like doing multiple passes with different settings or models and layering them, as well as "stepping up" to larger resolutions in 200% increments, instead of trying to do it all in one pass.

Working with good source material and processing it correctly is also a big one, you know people using bad deinterlacing or telecine methods or leaving blended frames and such.

I suppose noise could be removed from the intentionally noisy scenes to ease the process.

Not very helpful in this case, actually. In this case the "noise", while easy enough to remove, would be impossible to put back in as it's not really random noise but a pretty distinctive texture/sequence overlaid on the scene. And, when you remove it, you'd find the loss of detail and the impact that has on the scene quite noticeable.

If you watch the original, the AI has mostly done a good job of reproducing the noise effect. It's weird looking, but it's been preserved faithfully. It does, of course, have an impact on what's underneath the noise, and these scenes are a LOT more sensitive to artifacts, which is why I have dialed the sharpening and de-blur way down in these parts. You can still spot some parts where it gets a little wonky, though, again this was a demo I made in an evening, so I wasn't trying for perfect, just better.