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Idea & Info Wanted: GOUT improved versions? — Page 2

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adywan said:

I'm pretty sure that ANH & ESB PAL GOUT are just upscaled from the NTSC master but ROTJ PAL has more detail than the NTSC and looks to be from a PAL master. There was a thread with some comparisons between the PAL & NTSC GOUT versions which showed this but i can't remember which one it was

I carried out a comparison of the PAL and NTSC version of ANH, and the difference in quality was negligible. The DVDs clearly use the same master as that used for the DC laserdisc - same dirt spots and so on. Thread discussing it is here.

However, this is the first I've heard of a difference in the PAL & NTSC versions of ROTJ.

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The PAL version seems brighter- maybe that's why there's a perception of added detail? Seems counterintuitive that they'd use the NTSC for the first two, but bothered to dig up the PAL for the third.

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Mielr said:

The PAL version seems brighter- maybe that's why there's a perception of added detail? Seems counterintuitive that they'd use the NTSC for the first two, but bothered to dig up the PAL for the third.

I agree.  The brightness makes the PAL seem better at first, but I actually think the NTSC has slightly better detail - though there's not much in it. 

They're very close, but the transfers definitely have slightly different cropping.  The PAL seems to have more at the top and the NTSC more at the bottom.  

Maybe because ROTJ was a compaatively recent film they still had a separate PAL master available.  Did the NTSC and PAL laserdiscs have the same masters?

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Judging from what I see on that sample, PAL has (little) more details. I's not just that it's brighter.

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I'd never heard about this either. Those images have been resized, making it more difficult to tell. However, the source is most definitely not the same:

If anyone can upload some screencaps off the ntsc Jedi (mine are just from an LD rip), we can have a closer look at the detail. It doesn't seem counterintuitive to me that they used a different master tape for Jedi - it seems counterintuitive to me that they used what was probably a D-3 tape in 2006 to master a DVD instead of scanning the few Non-SE scenes required to convert the 2004 DVD to the theatrical version. Heck, maybe they couldn't find the 1993 "definitive Collection" master tape for Jedi and just used a different one.

But I didn't know that they released an English THX version in PAL, I'm under the impression that they only released PAL THX LD's in foreign language versions?

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There was an English language PAL THX release in 1995 - but only on VHS.

We didn't get the laserdisc release in the UK. :-(

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@ jfett?  Which is which in your screenshot comparisons?  Is the NTSC on top, like the comparison Adywan posted?

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The PAL "GOUT" is top, the NTSC "Laserdisc rip" is bottom, I think it's from the "Gonzo" set (which was converted to anamorphic, hence why the picture is vertically stretched). The main thing I noticed was that the cropping is different. More on the sides of the PAL, but less on the bottom. It doesn't necessarily mean that the GOUT came from a PAL source, but it certainly came from a different source than the 1993 DC laserdisc master tape.

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The PAL and NTSC GOUT are definitely from the same masters (the 1993 NTSC telecine), but aside from the NTSC to PAL resize and slightly different cropping, it seems the PAL ROTJ was processed differently and had less (or none) vertical blur filter applied, there's clearly more vertical detail visible.

 

 

The NTSC ROTJ also has more  'ringing' artifacts like extra 'lines' around horizontal lines and contours, probably a result of to much vertical sharpening.

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With those shots, the differences are much clearer.  I was wrong: the PAL is better. 

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Good screencaps. I don't see hard evidence one way or the other for what size the video was before it was put on DVD, however I still disagree about the same 1993 "DC" master being used on the GOUT. They should have the same framing, but they don't. I don't think the source had to have been PAL to obtain the fidelity we can see. They may have used the digital ntsc tapes produced by the scanning process, rather than the completed master. But that doesn't explain why the picture is cropped on the bottom on the GOUT.

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They should have the same framing, but they don't.


Left/right cropping differences can be explained by the vagaries of analogue video capture (by which I mean the laserdisc rips being used for comparison).

The picture would have been vertically cropped in some way before encoding to DVD, if only to make the bars truly black, as opposed to slightly fuzzy dark grey. At this point it's anyone's guess why they cropped to 326 pixels - although 326 is the closest aspect ratio to 2.35:1 for PAL (though by this logic the NTSC GOUT should be 272 pixels, not 274).

Or maybe there were technical or other reasons why they made each of the GOUT the same/similar height(s).

DE

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272-276 lines (pixels) seems to be a common size for a letterboxed NTSC source and would be defined in the telecine process. And for a LB PAL source it would be 326 lines (pixels). And these numbers should remain the same even if the source was transfered to another format, without any vertical resizing of course.  

Comparing with the ROTJ Faces LD it seems both the PAL and NTSC GOUT have been vertically resized and cropped. The LD is 276 lines high, the NTSC GOUT is 274 and shows less information both top and bottom more less than the 2 lines difference. The PAL GOUT is 326 lines high and shows the same amount of info at the top as the LD but is cropped 7-8 lines more at the bottom.

Only LFL knows why it was done this way, there's really no technical reason for it. Making the PAL GOUT from the NTSC source only require a simple vertical resize from 276 to 326 lines and adjusting the black bars to fill up the 576 lines of a PAL DVD picture.

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Darth Editous said:

They should have the same framing, but they don't.

Left/right cropping differences can be explained by the vagaries of analogue video capture (by which I mean the laserdisc rips being used for comparison).

Going by the fact that the cropping is exactly the same on SW and ESB and is only different in ROTJ makes me conclude they did something different for ROTJ. The video would have been an ntsc telecine as soon as the film was scanned - convention back in those days used a scanning process that directly produced a telecine by scanning odd and even lines in sequence (each frame is scanned twice, with the scanner picking up first the odd lines for the telecine, then the even lines).

Furthermore they probably fine-tuned their scanning scene-by-scene, and then edited the telecine so I would be very surprised if the master tape contains an uninterrupted 2:3 pull-down pattern... so conversion to PAL would have been very low quality (29.97fps --> 25fps). It's my guess that George Lucas Jr didn't care about the theatrical trilogy even in 1993 - and that this little exercise was more about how good the film looks and are they ready to do a 2K scan for the SE?

The video would not have been resized for Laserdisc after scanning since it was already an ntsc telecine. But I think Red5 may be right, because it does appear to be the same transfer in all other aspects (same colour, exactly the same top cropping, etc). For some reason they mastered it differently to the first two films, but from the 1993 THX ntsc telecine nonetheless.

Just 5 more hours to wait before the G-Force script completes on ROTJ (after that I still need to encode the XVID - but that'll take barely any time), I can't wait! Haven't watched the movie in like 3 years now.