ringwraith1973 said:

Pittrek,

I am not using deinterlacing I am doing an inverse telecine which can be achieved with Avinsynth.  I played with deinterlacing a couple times and it left a "step effect" on curves, it irritated me to no end so I have been researching how to get rid of that effect.  These cartoons were originally shot in 23.97 fps (frames per second) .. NTSC adds dummy frames for American tv at 29.97 fps and PAL adds dummy frames to 25 fps... if you don't at least deinterlace them (which i don't recommend now) though you will see a "comb" effect on monitors if you ever watch them on a computer screen...tvs compensate and re-interlace them.  Doing an inverse telecine restores the frames back to the way the animators did them at 23.97 fps...yes I have learned alot over the last month just because of me wanting to get it right.

Sorry, I didn't understand you correctly originally. Of course, IVTC is absolutely necessary

I stand corrected on the PAL but i have read in animation forums that there is still a need to reduce the number of frames with a form of IVTC or slow it down in the case you are speaking of and not just deinterlace it because it causes an undesirable effect.  I wouldn't use the same IVTC for the PAL that is done on the NTSC in that case.  I will email you the forum and website that i got my information from and you can pass that onto Pittrek as well.  I learned alot from it.  It spells out too the dangers of over noise reducing on frames as well but that is not what caused the missing "bolt" part I think that is in the film but i don't have the original caputre to compare it with.  

Thank you Moth3r for checking,

I actually tried this script a couple times but I didn't have any luck with it.  It still showed the blended fields on the PAL and NSTC clips when I used it.  I registered for that forum to ask for help too, a couple days ago but they have a 5 day waiting period before you can post any questions.  Go figure.

I have been stockpilling Droids and Ewoks videos for quite some time now.  Unfortunately I do not have the time or equipment to really make a good transfer.

I have numerous UK PAL VHS tapes with many duplicates.  I also have collected some of the different DVD sets floating around out there.  To include the one with the ontherunvideo.com watermark.

http://i.imgur.com/kVLns.jpg

I too have a copy of the Sci-Fi channel rips.  Here are some pictures of Coby and the Starhunters which isn't available anywhere in an official release (except apparently a Mexican set from the early 90's).   Keep in mind the below are rips that I made, not the actual DVDs.

Would be happy to share any and all of my files.  If anyone wants to get a handful of VHS tapes to try and find the best quality tape for each one, just let me know.  I don't have the time at the moment to do all of this.

Ted,

From your picture it looks like you have the same copies of DVD's from the Sci-fi channel that i do.  I also have a copy of the Saturday Morning fall preview with C3PO and R2-D2 that aired.  It may be a nice addition to the final copies. Do you know if yours are in PAL format or in NTSC?

Agreed.  It looks like we have the same ones.  My DVD's are NTSC.  I got them straight from the source about 5-6 months ago.

The Official VHS tapes are all PAL though except for a couple of J2 releases.

I got mine straight from the source as well ok this is good to know that we have multiple copies of the missing episodes as well.

Good to know.. I didn't realize the Sci-fi channel episodes are edited.  So instead of about 21-22 minutes you are saying the episodes are actually longer?  I saw that about a year or two ago another guy on this forum was creating a preservation set with all the different language sound tracks.  Do we know how successful he was or if he is still in the process of doing this?

yep. 

I have done a number of side by side comparrisons of the Sci-Fi channel rips to the ontherunvideo.com and the UK VHS rleases (heck even the official DVD's) and the Sci-Fi channel releases always have less footage.

I am sure this was down for two reasons...

a) for time

b) because there is a lot of painful moments in both series :)

Truth be told, the edits aren't that bad and actually kind of move the story along.  Comparable to most fan edits.

As far as the other person working on this a year ago...he kind of fell off the map.  And that was what sort of what motivated me to start stockpiling all of the videos that I do have.  This set needs to be done one of these days and we need to make sure that we have the best possible transfer when we do it.

Ted, you are right.  I looked at the Scifi version of Coby compared to the online torrents that have no logo on them, there is approximately 2 minutes shaved off the Scifi version like you said.  I was hoping that maybe this episode was the exception.  Its good we have a clean copy but it would be nice to find one with the two minutes put back on like you said the Mexico tape should have.  Do you have a copy of theontherunvideo.com version? Is it a clean copy?  I have noticed and it may be possible to remove the water mark if that is the only thing that it causing a discrepency.  I know somewhere out there too has to be a vhs source for the original broadcast, after all the torrents had to originate from somewhere.   For what it's worth I did a search for Coby and the Starhunters in Spanish on google...found one site but just reflects a timeline.  It's called "Coby y los Cazadores de Estrellas" if anyone can have luck searching for this tape it has to be out there so we can get it and add it to the series.

Ted and Pittrek, I sent you guys private messages.  I may have found an additional good lead.  Let me know what you think.

Dammit, they cut out 7 of 22 minutes ? I know that TV stations use to cut the shown material to be able to show you more of the "more important" stuff (= commercials), but this is ridiculous.

the ontherunvideo versions is clean as all getup.  Almost positive they used the Mexican VHS release with original broadcast sound.  If anything, if we could get our hands on the Mexican VHS (which I have had zero luck in tracking down) then we could use the audio from this set.

Because that watermark is all sorts of annoying.

The only info I have seen on the Mexican VHS set was on the SWCCMTY web page, that just recently changed its layout.  It is so frustrating now.

But they have a Yahoo group here http://groups.yahoo.com/group/swccmty/ If anyone knows how to speak spanish.  

I actually have a pretty horrible .wmv and .flv rip of their version.  It is a clean video just very very pixelated. As you can see, it is only 320x240.  Everything appears in order visually, just the audio is dubbed in spanish. If I remember correctly, the VHS was just simply called "Los Droids 3" or something incredibly hard to search for.

The semitransparent watermark can be removed quite easily, e.g. with the DeLogo filter for VirtualDubMod, so that's not a problem

The ontherunvideo logo isn't semi transparent.  it is deep black :(

OK I probably used an incorrect term (English is not my native language), what I was trying to say is that there are parts of the logo, which are transparent (you can see the background through those parts) - at least according to the screenshots you uploaded. That's the type of logos which can be removed almost perfectly