There are NTSC copies of most of the Ewoks episodes from Mexico.  Shouldn't have the blending problems that we see on the PAL tapes, but I have yet to get my hands on any of them.

http://swccmty.page.tl/Los-Ewoks.htm

He also has the Droids tapes. http://swccmty.page.tl/Los-Androides.htm

I would love to see those tapes, but it looks like the Mexico tapes are the hardest to come by from ANY country.  I have had better luck tracking down Japanese tapes and those sucked as they don't even use our alphabet! :P

I sent the guy that runs the site an email and have started to talk to him.  He seems like a pretty nice guy so we will see what happens.

VideoCollector, I think that I am good with the bumpers.  I was more looking for the Ewoks/Droids Adventure Hour intro.  But I haven't been able to find a complete one of those.  Oh well :(

If you do get the chance would you maybe just throw them up on sendspace.com (or something similar?) they should be small enough to where it is easy.  And would save on postage.

Hello guys!!

Hello swccmty!  Good to see you here!

You have some tapes that I think we are all very interested in seeing :)

Not many people have had much luck tracking down those Mexican VHS tapes.  Not sure how you did it! 

And you said that you have a copy of Coby too?!  Very excited to see it.

Yes!!! let put inhere what have in vhs

from Droids (los androies)

Vol.1 - The white witch, Escape into terror, the trigon unleashed, a Race to the Finish

Vol.2 missing!!!! have it on dvd vhs capture but has one single error and got freeze image at first episode :(

Vol.3- coby and the starhunters, tail of roon comets, roon games, across the roon sea, the forzen citadel

The Great Heep long feature.

all in latin spanish, i think you dont know the difference, spanish latin is for central and south america, but simply spanish are very very diferents, different voices, and accents, only for spain...

uploading Great Heep and Coby special request for retardedted :)

hey! i send to Ted an uplead for Great Heep in latin spanish, maybe will work fine for the project, what do you think ted?????

swccmty - can you put here some screenshots of your version ? Just to see if it's better than VideoCollector's capture ?

I think that your tape looks very good!  And I definitely think that they can be used for the DVD set if we change up the capturing methods.  I know that you had said that you would try a new capture, so I just wanted to give you a few hints before you try :)

Right now the encoding is:

• 640x480
• 30fps
• progressive (frame blended)
• WMV

What would be best for the DVD set would be:

• 720x480
• 29.97fps
• interlaced
• AVI.  But if you want to upload to the internet you can convert to MP4/MKV to preserve more of the quality.

Again, I think that your tapes look great and you have a nice vcr and capture card.  It is just the WMV encoding that makes it difficult to use in a DVD set.  The video looks good small and on a computer screen but then when you blow it up to a large TV it will look pixelated. 

Here are some examples...

You overall picture looks pretty good from the VHS, VCR and capture card.

But when there is a lot of activity on screen it can tend to get blocky.  And this is a direct result of the encoding (WMV) being used.  These artifacts will not be present when using a higher quality encode such as AVI (and to a certain extent a high quality MP4 encode).

And example of the "blended frames" is when you see two frames at the same time.  This can be the result of not using the proper frame rate as well as the progressive encoding used.

I am having trouble telling if those are the exact same blended frames as the PAL set or not.  

Here is an example from my captures, this is from episode 2 where there is a dark background with a very bright and active laser moving around on the screen.  I am definitely trying to keep the blocky noise down.

But at the end of the day this is VHS we are talking about.  There are going to be bad frames and noise all over the place.  So it will never really look perfect. :P

Either way, the Coby episode would still be an upgrade from anything else that we currently have.  And I am sure that we are all very interested in seeing that :)

Thanks again Swccmty, for sharing this with us.  I know we are all very excited to see this DVD set!!! 

Also, if you do a raw AVI capture I would be more than happy to send you some sort of flash drive to mail back to me in the USA as well as giving you money for shipping.  The file sizes can sometimes get to be too much for most upload sites. :)

Real problem!!!

MAN!!! i look for my original VHS El Gran Heep and unfortunatly is so F**k up!!! very damaged by moisture!!!! i dont know how the hell this happen!!! damn it, i chekc all my other vhs and stuff and has no damaged at all, it seems the tape was very damaged, even fungus, oh! man, im very angry right now! rally really is very frustrating, all of them are un a tupper sealed box!!!!

i think the only copy of heep was i send you, i already recorded several years before....

i will try to resotre the tape and box but i have no garantee to have nice results... shame on me....

now you guys are my only hope......

i will send Coby tonight :S

Sorry to hear about The Great Heep.  That really sucks.

That copy looked very nice Swccmty.  Again it was 30fps progressive and of a lower quality encode.  This one being Xvid.

But you had said that this was from a year ago, so I am very much looking forward to a second capture of Coby if you are still up for it.

There is still a lot of frame blending from using 30fps/progressive as you can see in this frame.

It is somewhat hard to remove those bad frames once they have become progressive.  Much easier when they are still interlaced. 

On a side note, swccmty do you know where someone would buy these mexican VHS tapes?  I would like to try capturing some myself if possible.  I might try and get a copy of The Great Heep if possible.

found this kind of VHS is like something impossible, very very rare, what i`ve found was only luck, very rare to find on sell, i know a guy who sell  2 original VHS but the ewoks series, if you`re interested his email is orlock.rincon@gmail.com

see ya!

Well this project is sort of stalling while I wait for the best possible sources of the two remaining Droids episodes (Coby and Heep).  Swccmty is having some problems with his PC which he will need to sort out before he is able to capture Coby again.  Concerning The Great Heep, I actually have a nice S-VHS PAL player en route that I can use to make the Great Heep transfer with.

So, would anyone be interested in just the SciFi channel set for the time being?  I already have all of the parts for that and it is just a matter of cleaning them up.  The drawbacks would be that each episode is edited down by 3-4 minutes and the quality of the recordings are about a 7/10 compared to my complete set made from commercial sources which will be closer to 10/10.

I could probably get that wrapped up in about a week (to do it right). And then maybe just throw an mp4/mkv set up on MySpleen.  Sounds interesting?

Or would you guys rather just wait for the complete set it pristine quality?  I don't want to flood the landscape with Droids episodes.

I've been following this thread for a while and I'm very excited about this project. I think getting the best quality possible is the most important thing so I can certainly wait longer. Will the final release be full DVD folders with menus?

I've been lurking on this forum basically just to see this set, and I'm happy to wait a little while to get a great-quality copy.

By the way, how do you plan to release it?  As a DVD with menus, with all the episodes on one disk?  As a multiple-disk set?  How many disks would be necessary for minimal quality loss?

And thank you for all the work!  I'm really looking forward to this.

I am leaning towards 2 dual-layer discs with menus, but it may be 4 single-layer DVDs in the end.  

And possibly also a mp4/mkv set sourced from the AVI files and not the DVD set.

retartedted said:

I am leaning towards 2 dual-layer discs with menus, but it may be 4 single-layer DVDs in the end.  

And possibly also a mp4/mkv set sourced from the AVI files and not the DVD set.

I think single layers are more commonplace so it might be better just to go that route. Can you set the layer change point on the program being used? 

Ed, do you need Fritz's capture ?

It looks like this : http://www.megaupload.com/?d=LMFUC6XV

pittrek said:

Ed, do you need Fritz's capture ?

 

It looks like this : http://www.megaupload.com/?d=LMFUC6XV

Thanks.  But I actually have an SVHS PAL vcr headed my way right now.  So I kind of want to see how the UK tapes look on that first.   No guarantee that it will be better though.  I will just have to wait and see.

Pretty much I have quality versions of Droids episodes 1-8, 10-13.  A pretty good copy of Great Heep.  And we are waiting to see about episode 9.

Just waiting to get the whole set at best quality sorted out before I release as to avoid multiple releases.

Concerning Ewoks, not so sure.

After having a really bad quality copy of Droids from about 5-6 years ago (hell I even made vcd discs back then) I am def. looking forward to this, hopefully episode 9 will be up to your standards.

retartedted said:

Concerning Ewoks, not so sure.

Concerning Hobbits ... sorry Ewoks...

I have had a very very very hard time last weeks (my mother died) but I tried various methods for removing the blended frames. Without success.

Therefore I decided I will continue with my original plan, that means I will do a "version 1.0" which will only be a simple PAL capture with most of the "video noise" removed . I have done episodes 1 & 2 till now and I'm quite satisfied with the result.

In cca 2-3 weeks something nice will appear on myspleen :)