Samurai Dick - The Uncut and Restored version (2.0)
Completed 2/19/2011
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The Story:
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Samurai Dick was one of the first porn films I ever saw, and it was an all-time personal favorite.  Many years later, after I had moved out of my parent's home, I tried to obain my own copy of this movie - it proved to be difficult.  VCA originally released this in 1984 on VHS (I don't know of any laserdisc issue, but I'd be willing to pay big bucks if one were to surface).  The re-released it sometime in the 1990s, but for some reason they edited the living crap out of it, chopping out around 10 minutes of footage - and a lot of that footage was pretty hot (to me).  I'd say most of that footage was the entire "american hotdog" interrogation scene, but little bits were clipped out all over the place, and it made me mad.  Maybe they considered it "tasteless," or maybe they just wanted to use a shorter VHS tape to save money, who could say?  There was no "official" DVD release - Excalibur Films did a straight VHS dump of the edited version onto a DVD -  no cleanup, no menu, not even any chapters.  They didn't even bother to adjust the tracking on their VCR.
So I spent many years trying to find an UNCUT version of Samurai Dick, and one day it showed up on Ebay.  I paid quite a bit of money for it, and now the entire world will get the benefit from it!
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The Restoration:
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My first capture was done with an old ATI TV Wonder, and it didn't look very good.  There were some serious "banding" issues, as the tape itself had degenerated since 1984.  I released it as-is anyhow, compressed in two-pass H.263 (using XVid), on Empornium and PureTNA (may they rest in peace).  When these two websites went down, I decided it was probably time to make a better capture and do some restoration work before re-releasing it elsewhere.
I have since obtained a Grass Valley ADVC-300 (http://www.grassvalley.com/products/advc300), which has a timebase correcter (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timebase_correction) built into it.  This eliminated all of the banding issues, so the capture itself was much cleaner.  The ADVC-300 is not a VfW device, and only captures in DV at 720x480.  I converted this into Lagarith (http://lags.leetcode.net/codec.html), a lossless codec, so that I could run AVISynth (http://avisynth.org/) filters (I haven't had any luck getting AVISynth to read my DV files directly).  This version was compressed in H.264, 1200 bitrate, using x264 in two passes.
I am no expert with AVISynth, but I've been playing with it a lot lately.  I'm sure there are some better filters I could be using, and perhaps someday I'll make an ever better restored version.  These is still some noise towards the bottom of the frame.  I found I could eliminate this completely by upping the sigma setting on FFT3DFilter to 8, but I was concerned about losing too much detail from an already less-than-ideal source.  I decided that setting the sigma to 4 was a good compromise between detail and noise.
I separated the trailers at the end of the tape into a separate file and ran them through the same filter script.