AFAIK the vast majority of PAL movies are not pitch-corrected. Especially in the VHS/LD era this was really uncommon. I guess I need to gather more information about this and make a sound comparison first.

@msycamore

Thanks for the information. I wasn't aware of that.

@R2D2

It would be great if you could find your VHS-capture of the opening crawl and end credits. The sceenshots of these looked really nice.

Of course any preservation of the Laserdiscs I want to make will also include all the Logos etc.

I have checked the starwars hdd today. it's all still there. i will upload it to a.b.starwars. will take some time to sort it first.

r2d2

The UK had 2 VHS releases ( Pan&Scan and Widescreen) of the 1995 THX versions and also the Superclass ISD Executor Collectors Box. It is very likely all of these had the same audio.

In germany there was no Collectors Box but the also a Pan&Scan and Widescreen release. I watched these tapes all the time but I can't really tell if the pitch was different to the other tapes I previously had. It would make sense that these are pitch corrected like UK versions because the production process should have been the same.

I still have the german 1995 THX tapes, the Executor edition and a german VHS Box from 1992, so I will try to compare the audio.

Does anyone know a good tool for pitch comparision? 

This is getting complicated :-).

BTW the german untouched GOUT DVDs will be available on a.b.starwars soon.

Moth3r said:

Just use your ears; if you listen to the first few bars of the Star Wars theme music from each release it will be obvious if they are at different pitches. 

Hi Moth3r! I don't agree here. It's not about the music.

I think you have to distinguish between the music/effects audio track and the dialogue track, that is mixed together later for the end product.

When synchronizing a movie only the dialogue track gets replaced.

The dialogue track can be thought of a bunch of voices, piece for piece, played at a specific timestamp.

The 24fps version plays the music/effects audio track at original speed, while the 25fps version plays the music/effects audio track with 104% speed.

Both of them get the dialogs mixed in at the specified timestamps, but the dialog track is always played at original speed!

Compare the german audio of any movie dvd with its bluray edition. Music/effects play faster but the voices are at the same frequencies!

The actors of Star Wars on DVD sound the same as on the upcoming Blurays.

We can compare the english voices on the UK DVD and the US DVD to see if I am right.

What does that all mean us?

As we only have the end product of the audio track the solution can't be slowing down the audio. My experience is the voices are correct as they are now on all PAL releases. If you want to fix the speed of the music/effects, you would have to have access to the production audio tracks.

R2D2 said:

Moth3r said:

Just use your ears; if you listen to the first few bars of the Star Wars theme music from each release it will be obvious if they are at different pitches. 

The 24fps version plays the music/effects audio track at original speed, while the 25fps version plays the music/effects audio track with 104% speed.

Both of them get the dialogs mixed in at the specified timestamps, but the dialog track is always played at original speed!

Compare the german audio of any movie dvd with its bluray edition. Music/effects play faster but the voices are at the same frequencies!

This would only make sense if a new dubbed audio track is created specificly for a new PAL-based home video release (such as the 1995 THX release).

The normal case was to create a german dubbed audio track for a cinematic release that plays at 24fps. A few month/years later this track is used for a PAL video/DVD release and is usually just sped up to 25fps.

At least that is the way it used to be.

Nowadays, creating a pitch corrected audio track for a bluray or DVD release would be very easy, so this might actually be the case.

There also seems to be a lot of disagreement about the number of pitch corrected PAL DVDs. I found an older thread were people discuss this:

http://archive2.avsforum.com/avs-vb/archive/index.php/t-525742.html

The german Star Wars PAL DVDs are not pitch-corrected. Means, the sound is faster and the voices higher.

I know exactly, because I added the german GOUT soundfile to Harmys Despecialized Empire and had to slow it down for 24p. After that it had the right pitch and I probably heard the german voices the way they were heard at the cinemas for the first time.. (well, ok.. I watched the special editions in the cinema in 1997, so let's say for the second time ;)

In the last few days I tried to clean up the german theatrical opening crawl and sync it with the GOUT DVDs.

I made 5 captures of the opening from the 1993 Laserdisc and another 5 from a 1990 fullscreen VHS tape that has the crawl in squeezed format.

I used a great median filter by G-Force to eliminate all random dropouts from the different captures and resized and aligned the VHS and LD picture.

Then I averaged the VHS and LD picture into one clip, adjusted the brightness and overlayed the opening crawl over a starfield still taken from the GOUT.

Here is my current result. This is the german opening crawl edited into the GOUT and upscaled to anamorphic for PAL DVD.

http://www.multiupload.com/4LF6LUITTS

Comparison pictures:

All german star wars  releases prior to the 1995 THX versions had the theatrical crawl without the "Episode IV" headline as far as I know.

I remember that I was very confused about the episode number when I watched ESB for the first time on VHS. That was in 1989. Also the title "Neue Hoffnung" (translation of "A new hope") was never mentioned anywhere before 1995.

I just checked the 1995 THX LD of ANH. These contain the english Lucasfilm Logo, a good quality german opening text (a long long time ago ..), a horribly recreated opening crawl in german with the episode number and the title "Neue Hoffnung" and the english end credits.

The 1993 LD contains all of this in german, probably just like it was in the theatre (I was born in 1979 so I never watched the originals in a theatre until the special editions came out).

The captures may be a lttle too dark, but skyjedi2005 is right. It really looks like crap. The transfer is blurry and noisy as hell, there are scratches and dirt marks, the colors are washed out and some scenes have a blue-ish or red-ish tint.

These LDs also have lot of missing frames compared to the GOUT or even THX LDs.

The THX LDs also a few missing frames, but this version is really bad. It already amounts to about 2 seconds and the end of the first LD side.

Here is a 25 second comparison clip from the very beginning of the movie. The LD is in sync with GOUT when it starts but differs 4 frames at the end of the clip.

http://www.multiupload.com/H3F877O9W9

Honestly I don't know if this is really worth preserving at all. Quality is a lot worse than all the other Laserdisc transfers and because of the missing frames the audio is out of sync to the GOUT.

The only interesting parts are the opening crawl and the end credit.