I wasn't satisfied with the existing 4K remaster for Highway 35 so I made my own. Upscaled from scratch using higher quality source material and includes the 5.1 surround english track present in the original release, alongside portuguese, spanish and german dubs.
Before all, here’s an imgur gallery comparing the currently available 4K Remaster and my own personal remaster (Top is original 4K remaster, bottom is my own 1080p remaster): https://imgur.com/a/h1UTPwi
Every single Highway 35 remaster has had severe problems to them:
1. NTSC was used as a base for the previous remasters, when the PAL version should have been used instead. The original animation was rendered at 25 FPS, which is PAL standard, rather than NTSC’s 30 FPS. This can be manually verified by choosing an entire second of the movie and comparing the frame-by-frame difference between NTSC and PAL. As a result, the NTSC version is a “telecined” version of PAL which had some frames interlaced and repeated in order to “increase” the frame rate to 30 FPS. Not only does this creates combing artifacts, but even when deinterlaced it will leave ghosting and many repeated frames, the latter which makes some scene “jerk” as if the movie were stuttering.
2. The NTSC version of the full movie most often used is the one available in ISO format through The Internet Archive, which suffers from severe noise and color washing, while ISOS of individual episodes look to have maintained their original quality, likely a result of not being as compressed as the full movie in order to fit in the disc.
3. Most previous remasters were a straight upscale of the 16:9 movie with no editing, meaning that the first 22 minutes of it is cropped 4:3 made to fit 16:9. This has two significant consequences: a) Every scene has its intended composition compromised, with lots of details and information being cut from top and bottom, making the scene smaller than it should look. b) This adds zoom to the frames, which decreases density of detail and makes the already suboptimal 480p resolution look worse than it should.
4. The remasters more often than not have only a single audio track (English, stereo) and no subtitles. This is suboptimal because: a) The original movie had not only a proper stereo English track, but also a fully functional 5.1 surround one too, meaning that if you had the proper equipment and a 5.1 setup, you could watch the movie with 3D audio. b) The fan base of the Hot Wheels movies is surprisingly multinational, making a strong case to also include audio tracks of other languages as a selectable option. c) Subtitles are a good addition for those that prefer it and also for the hard of hearing.
With all of that in mind, I set out to make an edit that sought to solve or minimize every single one of the presented problems. Methodology:
1. Downloaded untouched PAL ISOs of WR EPs 1,2 and 4. (I couldn’t find a PAL EP3 ISO, so I used the standalone NTSC EP3 instead, which still provides much better quality than the movie, even if still plagued by telecining).
2. Extracted all video files from the ISOs using MakeMKV).
3. Detelecined the NTSC WR EP3 with Handbrake in order to bring it to the PAL standard, undoing interlaced frames and removing repeated ones. (Slow encoding setting selected for best quality)
4. Used Topaz Labs to remove noise and upscale all files to 1080p using Rhea model at 100 sharpen dynamic parameter (In all of the inputs, Color Space and Color Primary needed to be overridden to “BT470BG” and TRC to “GAMMA28”. If this is not done, the reds and greens will be completely inaccurate to the original movies).
5. Rewrapped the upscaled EPs from MKV to MP4 format with Shutter Encoder. (No re-encoding, lossless)
6. Edited together the 4:3 EP1 and the 16:9 other episodes using Premiere Pro, cutting down extra content in the EPs and making sure the end result would have the exact same runtime as the movie. Every single frame is a perfect match between the final result and the movie (Settings: Higher re-encoding, software rendering, and max render quality checked during output).
7. Rewrapped the output from MP4 to MKV.
8. Ripped all audio tracks and subtitles from the English, Portuguese, Spanish, and German version of the movie using MKV Toolnix and Shutter Encoder.
9. Edited all non-english audio files that lacked “Hot” by Smash Mouth as the credits song to include it. Exported audio as lossless FLAC.
- Baked in all audio and subtitles into the MKV video using MKVToolNix.
Misc: All re-encoding done at any step of the method occurred with H265 codec @ 8-bit “Main” 12Mbit/s bitrate.
Here's a link to the final result: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1q716FibGLOCgAtFQ5n8ztCZyDcrqOJxd/view?usp=drive_link
Edit: Forgot to say, credit goes to u/Acceler23 for providing the drive with all the languages. Also credits to Ferrashi and DashingRhythm for providing the ISOs of each episode.
Edit 2: Formatting.
Edit 3: If you can't download it and you are not logged into your google account, try logging in and downloading again.