Info:
This is a restoration of the Skyline Pigeon performance from Ryan White’s funeral.
V1 (March 2023)
I published my first attempt at cleaning up the video of Elton John singing Skyline Pigeon at Ryan White’s funeral. The only video I could find was a reupload with a watermark, not to mention bad video and audio. The audio was cleaned up using Audacity, and I fixed the video the best I could by cropping and fixing the saturation (using a news broadcast as a reference.)
V2 (January 2025)
In early 2025, with some new tools at my disposal, I decided to take another stab at it. Still couldn’t do much for the video, but the audio could definitely be improved, as I overdid the noise reduction a bit. The audio was cleaned up using a tool named “Ultimate Vocal Remover” and a denoise model created by “aufr33”. This gave infinitely better results than Audacity, even considering the quality of the original audio. I also dialed back the saturation just a bit.
This was “version 2”, I posted my results to r/eltonjohn (as I did V1), and I figured that would be it…until a few hours later when a comment told me that the full broadcast was on youtube in much better quality. Which I wasn’t aware of.
V3 (January 2025)
Using the new source, I did basically the same things listed above in V1 and V2. The video was now uncropped, unwatermarked, and with much better color. The audio quality unfortunately wasn’t as good as the original, but it was more complete (having more in the beginning/end). The new source was used to patch the original audio, with the same denoise applied to it.
This is probably the best this video will ever look and sound unless somehow a master tape of the broadcast were to be made available, which I doubt exists.
