Early bird: How the C64 was made

Dear Supporters,

And now for something completely (a little bit) different! 

You may have seen the original low quality German VHS factory tour of MOS and Commodore that's been around for years (https://youtu.be/xu8Fi0tC9IA). Sadly a higher quality version never showed up. I've been wanting to do this for a while but the technology only recently got to an acceptable level. It's not perfect, but I feel that it's better and more palatable than the original, all just in time for the C64's 40th anniversary. I hope you enjoy it!  

🔈 AUDIO: I created a file of the German captions and translated it to English then re-synced that to the footage, and reworded it where needed. I also added back in all the sound effects from a foley library because the original German audio was muted.  

📺 VIDEO: I used Topaz Labs machine learning video enhancer (https://www.topazlabs.com/video-enhance-ai) to create 5 versions of the footage. Some levels of restoration can make the people look cartoony, so by using different levels, I was able to cut each shot to its most natural look and ensure it was an improvement over the original. Occasionally I use the original shot with only upscaling to 4K. Some shots actually use different levels on different parts of the same frame using masks, so you might see sharp C64 motherboards, but the worker's more natural less reworked face above them, all in one image.   

There are qutie extreme flashing colours in the original. I placed a duplicate of each shot above the original, made it 50% transparent, and offset it by 1 frame. This reduces the flashing producing a more uniform effect. Sadly some flashing remains, but removing this further would have led to ghosting of movement.  

I then trimmed the flickering edges of the image off and extended it to near widescreen using a blurred enlarged version to fill the sides.   

I also cut out about 7 minutes of unnecessary stock footage, corporate marketing, & overly long shots to again make things more watchable.  

🌆 THUMBNAIL: This too is a remastered black and white low-res shot, with faces enhanced using Remini, colourized, and some other little tricks to bring it more to life!

Anyway, all getting a bit technical, but long story short, I hope you enjoy this look inside how the Commodore 64 was made, in honour of its 40th birthday this month!

Video: https://youtu.be/WBqGyf8eQVk

Your friend in retro, Perifractic