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.: Citizen's NTSC DVD / PAL DVD / XviD project :. (Released)

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This is my tri-project thread, I’m going to be creating NTSC DVDs, PAL DVDs and high resolution/high bitrate XviD avis for viewing on my projector.

If you wish to comment on the final output(s) of my project then please do so in this thread:
Citizen’s NTSC DVD/PAL DVD/XviD Info and Feedback Thread

I currently have the definitive NTSC laserdisc set and the German THX PAL laserdisc set, a Pioneer CLD-D515 LD player, a Canopus ADVC-100 analogue to/from DV box, a P4 2.4ghz with 300gb hd space (I think I need more, I’ve only got about 80gb free) and the want for my own decent transfer for viewing on my homemade projector (see LumenLab.com)

Going to be using the audio from the definitive set and the video from the German THX set, with sections of video from the definitive set because the German set has burnt-in subtitles over the video and the intro text is in German. I’m intending to create PAL DVDs for viewing on my 28" widescreen when I don’t want to use my projector, and 4gb 23.976fps XviD files at 1024x436 for displaying on my projector without them being rescaled during playback so all scaling/sharpening is pre-done.

During testing of cleaning/converting captured video I discovered if I capture the same piece of video 5 times then read in all 5 captures at once and spit out an average, I don’t need to do any temporal smoothing because the resulting average file has much less noise than a single capture, meaning any temporal blurring present is what’s on the LD in the first place.

http://www.haku.co.uk/pics/LukeCruise.gif http://www.haku.co.uk/pics/dontcare.gif
***Citizen's NTSC DVD/PAL DVD/XviD Info and Feedback Thread***
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Citizen, I'm really curious what you think of your projector, but I don't want to hijack your project thread with projector talk.

Can you send me a PM?
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What dvds are you going to use, dual layer or single layer? Are you going for ultimate quality, I mean one soundtrack and a video bitrate as high as possible?
Fez: I am so excited about Star Whores.
Hyde: Fezzy, man, it's Star Wars.
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I'll probably eventually end up forking out the hideous prices for dual layer discs to get the best picture quality (over 10x the price of single layer discs! damnit why can't the prices come down to £1/disc at least), in the meantime I'll do some tests with encoding footage to quality suitable for single layer and dual layer discs to see if there really is any noticable difference.
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***Citizen's NTSC DVD/PAL DVD/XviD Info and Feedback Thread***
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I've just burnt a 2 minute test clip to DVD-RW and I'm extremely pleased with the results I'm getting on my 28" widescreen, the DVD player is connected via RGB. A few example images:

http://www.haku.co.uk/pics/CitizenWars01.jpg
http://www.haku.co.uk/pics/CitizenWars02.jpg
http://www.haku.co.uk/pics/CitizenWars03.jpg

I haven't had to do any temporal smoothing at all which is great, what I did for the 2 minute clip is digitise it in 5 times then using AviSynth I merged them together to produce an average output of the 5 clips, finally processing it with VirtualDub.
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***Citizen's NTSC DVD/PAL DVD/XviD Info and Feedback Thread***
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Nice sample images, looks like a great start Citizen. Be very interested to see how your transfer compares to Moth3r's.
I'm all for seeing more PAL transfers, and in seeing how much difference your 5 file averaging technique makes to video transfers in general.

I'm also curious if there's much difference between upscaling the image before the 5 file averaging compared to upscaling after the file averaging.
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There will be a difference between averaging the 5 avis before and after upscaling, averaging after upscaling will mean 5x a render time which is a bit serious when you're looking at 24hours computing to clean up 2 hours of footage prior to encoding to mpeg2, I won't do tests because I don't think there'll be any real quality difference between the two.

One interesting thing is without doing any extra filtering (sharpening & 2d/3d filters) a screengrab an unaltered single capture saved as a PNG is 455kb, whilst a screengrab of the same frame from 5 merged captures saved as a PNG is 416kb.
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***Citizen's NTSC DVD/PAL DVD/XviD Info and Feedback Thread***
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Whereas my version is red-shifted, your colour looks more natural (although maybe slightly yellow?)

There are also less "artefacts" at colour boundaries; I assume this is because the comb filter inside the Canopus is better than the 3-line digital comb filter in the D925.

My version is however a lot sharper, but I can't tell how much is real detail and how much is "perceived" sharpness.

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Yeah I noticed the colour was a little green in those shots so tried a whitebalance filter and things are looking better, I used a chroma smoother because the source is DV and shifted it left and down slightly to align it properly.

I need to get hold of some versions other people have done (MySpleen? or contact people direct) so I can do some better comparisons than just using still shots, I only have the Dr_Gonzo versions so far and the detail is blurred out on those. In my above test pictures I used a 2d smoother which may be the cause of less detail than yours, also the 2x resize that the edgeresample filter may be contributing, I'll try some tests without that filter.

Currently (from memory, I'm not at home right now) my VirtualDub filters are; chromasmoother,2d cleaner,2x edgeresize,xsharp sharpen,lanczos3 resize to anamorphic PAL. I want the last filter in the list to be the scaling down to PAL so if when shown on a PC (or my friend's plasma which doesn't have a native PAL or NTSC resolution) any resizing by the player/screen doesn't resize any artefacts from a sharpen or other similar filter.
When I'm back home I'll post a couple of links to PNG images of the 5-averaged avi's so you can see what I'm working with before any VirtualDub filtering.
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***Citizen's NTSC DVD/PAL DVD/XviD Info and Feedback Thread***
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I'm on my 6th revision of the final set of filters I'm going to use to cleanup the captured LD footage and things are I think looking very good, here's a 1 minute test clip from ROTJ encoded to DVD level & PC XviD, I've not used any filters that do temporal smoothing to the captured footage at all:

Citizen-rev6-test.avi - 23.6mb, XviD, 23.976fps, 1024x436 res which is designed for viewing on a 1024x768 res screen.
Citizen-rev6-test.mpg -23.2mb, anamorphic 25fps PAL, mpeg2, AC3 audio.

Both clips are slightly more compressed than the final outputs because of webspace constraints, the avi XviD setting are normal with constant picture quality at 90%, the final version is 99%. The mpeg is VBR 3000kbps whilst the final will be VBR 4800kbps if I go single-layer or near 9000kbps if I go dual layer to add extras in and upmix the audio to 5.1

If anyone downloads the clips I'd appreciate any comments (good or bad) on them.
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***Citizen's NTSC DVD/PAL DVD/XviD Info and Feedback Thread***
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I downloaded the MPEG. The starfields look nice, better than any of the DVDs made from the NTSC laserdiscs.

Altough I haven't done ROTJ yet, I can make some general comparisons: altough your version has more picture noise and is less sharp, it looks more natural, i.e. perhaps I was a little heavy on the processing for my versions.

So - well done!

(That scene on Dr Gonzo's DVD is when I first realised how bad 3:2 pulldown can be in terms of motion judder).

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Thanks the slightly more grainy but more natural image is what I've been aiming for

I've discovered I can merge the 5 captured avis of a single side into a 7gb huffy file, repeat for the other 3 sides so then I'll have a 'core' capture avi to work with to then encode to XviD & DVD, which is great as this makes things a lot more easier because I thought I might have to encode the final outputs a half hour (side) at a time because of space constraints.

Just testing capturing the intro from my definitive set to then colour/brightness/contrast match to the German THX set to replace the German titles, a few things that I've noticed are the framing of the two sets, the German set is zoomed in slightly more during the opening shot, also how detailed and not-overly bright the German THX set is compared to the definitive set, lastly the definitive set seems to have less temporal smoothing applied to it than the German THX set.
But overall I prefer the higher detail level of the German THX set to the definitive set, just a shame it's almost totally in German and have to use definitive set clips, thinking about getting the French THX set for the original English titles & subtitles... ! (as if I haven't already spent enough money getting to where I am now)
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***Citizen's NTSC DVD/PAL DVD/XviD Info and Feedback Thread***
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Ok, I won bidding on a French THX laserdisc set I'm still continuing to capture ANH a side at a time (merging the 5 captures to get a cleaner picture) so when I get the French set I can put in the English text scenes (opening logo/craw & alien subtitles). Half wondering if footage from the French set can be merged with the German set to reduce grain even further or if that's overkill
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***Citizen's NTSC DVD/PAL DVD/XviD Info and Feedback Thread***
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The French and German versions don't quite line up right. I think the French one is a few pixels left and one or two up from where the German one sits. The saturation's a bit different, too (the French is more saturated). Not too difficult to fix with AviSynth, but if you're just doing it for noise, I guess you'd have to consider the tradeoff against having to move stuff around.

Oh, and there are a few differences in the number of frames in each of the two versions. I think maybe one frame in ANH, a couple in RotJ, and I can't remember ESB. Again, easily fixed, but annoying to find.
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It was only a passing thought of seeing if the French & German sets can be merged to reduce grain, I'm getting excellent results by capturing the video 5x & merging anyway, thanks for letting me know about them not quite aligning.

The slight difference in saturation & missing frames I'm not too concerned about as they can be compensated for, but one thing I am curious about is wether the side breaks are at the same points, it would be nice if they weren't because the German set fades in/out at the beginning/end and I'd like to not have to remove the 6 or so faded brightness frames during the side changes by using the scenes from the French set.
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***Citizen's NTSC DVD/PAL DVD/XviD Info and Feedback Thread***
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There are no fades on the French discs.
The first change is the bad one, between the shot of Ben and Luke lifting the damaged Threepio and the borked image of Ben's hut.
The second is between the scenes "we've captured a freighter..." and the Death Star docking bay.
The third is between the shot of the Millenium Falcon escaping and "Are they away?"

BTW Citizen, how are you doing with the audio sync issue? Are you finding you have to trim small sections of the audio from the DC discs in order to maintain lip-sync?

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No fades? excellent stuff, now I'll be able to make a no-cuts/bad edits trilogy

So far I'm only concentrating on the video, when I've completed the raw capture of a film with all the English titles restored etc. & side changes added in then I'll capture the definitive LD of the film to nab the audio from, the 28min test clip I did with ROTJ I used audio from Dr_Gonzo's and synched that up, I found that Dr_Gonzo's was 6 frames short for that 28min clip so had to scan through & double some frames to get things in sync.

I'm thinking of producing an NTSC set too, shouldn't be any trouble at all because once I've got a final raw capture of a film I can just alter the VirtualDub filters slightly to spit out an anamorphic NTSC picture instead of anamorphic PAL, plus it'll be just as clean because before the final resize the image is 1280x544 res.
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***Citizen's NTSC DVD/PAL DVD/XviD Info and Feedback Thread***
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Do you have a screencap of this frame from the PAL set?

http://www.mudgee.net/ot/stars3.jpg

I'm interested in seeing how the starfield looks.
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Looks like this:

http://www3.telus.net/11811/forums/sw_logo_pal.png

That's French, unretouched. Pioneer CLD-D925.
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Interesting that the stars are inside the logo which is not the case in the English versions (learn sumpin every day)
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Originally posted by: Karyudo
Looks like this:

That's French, unretouched. Pioneer CLD-D925.


My mother warned me never to retouch the French...

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Laserman, assuming that shot is from the X0, is it correct to say that your capture doesn't suffer from the "lack of stars" problem that seems to plague all other NTSC-sourced transfers?

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Hi Citizen.

Just a quick question about you technical setup for this project. I'm loving your screen caps, they are looking amazing, and it's great to see you and Moth3r bouncing ideas between each other, you seem to be helping each other advance your techniques which is great, what this whole site is about, helping each other learn from your different processes. I'm also particaularly interested in seeing the best PAL transfer possible since I live in the UK

I noticed you stated at the top of this thread you were going to be using a Canopus ADVC-100 for capturing. Since this captures to lossy DV format and many of us have experienced the nasty ugly blocky things it does to bright blues and reds, aren't you worried (the same way CowClops had problems with his original transfer) that this is gonna mess up alot of your hard work in getting a beautiful transfer? Correct me if I'm wrong of course

thanks

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