Zion

I already posted about the money stuff and Laserman in this thread a year or two ago. I guess nobody remembers.

We've kind of been asking each other the last couple years what we should do, and really since nothing has happened I think the best thing to do might just to release what we have. I'll try to get the black magic shots up in the next couple of days. My personal site is down at the moment though so I'll have to use MegaUpload or something.

The XØ Team doesn't really exist anymore and hasn't for some time. No one has heard from Laserman in I don't know how many years. (The guy had cancer, use your imagination.)

The money we received very early on was used for shipping expenses, a hard drive or two and a monitor calibration device. The rest was spent on hosting fees for the x0project.com site (which no longer exists) and then a huge batch of t-shirts and hats just before we lost contact with Laserman for good and everything went to crap.

That's where the money is, guys. In a $500 box full of X0 merchandise nobody will ever want because the project is never going to be completed. At least not until some sort of black magic-like software comes available that will allow us to combine the LD captures together (XØ and Japanese DefCol) that I spent hours pouring over, manually IVTCing, matching up frame for frame, and noting where any and all frame differences occured.

I have no idea how far MeBe ever got on cleaning up the footage, so you'll have to ask him about that.

I do have a couple of things I can share though. One would be a beta video of the kick-ass DVD menu I created. The other would be the two shots Laserman was able to output from the black magic workstation. The first is the "Look sir, droids!" shot, and the other is the panning shot of Luke's speeder as it enters Mos Eisley. Both were sent to me as targa image sequences, so I'll have to make them into uncompressed avi's and try to post them. I know where the first one is on my old drive, but the second one might take a little more work to locate.

Aside from that, the original X0 captures are still in existance save for one side of one of the ROTJ LDs, which I don't know that we ever got from Laserman (it was missing when he originally sent us the discs). Mebe may have gotten it from him but I don't know for sure.

Well, a September release makes it "the perfect Christmas gift for the Star Wars fan on your list" and it also serves as a good primer for the release of TPM in 3D in February 2012.

Bossk on a Segway - mc chris

I was thinking the same thing, adywan. It would be awesome if they restored all the deleted scenes to HD, including all the shots from the OT that had been removed/replaced, much like they finished and released all the deleted scenes on the prequel DVDs.

cold.like.ice

henryperu77 said:

Are you using Avisynth MT i guess :P

Be careful with FF3dfilter dont abuse it or the image will be full of jaggies.  Second QTMC convert it to 59.976 fps , are you using SelectEven / SelectOdd to put it to 29.976 progressive?  This video is pure interlaced so it will never be very smooth like the original source if you deinterlace it.

Is better if you use

separatefields()
selectevery(4,0,3)
weave()

This come at the end of the script to convert it again to 29.976 interlaced.
Always work in Avi without compression i recommend you Lagarith.

I'm using Avisynth MT, yes, though it doesn't seem to like having both QTGMC and SSSharp in the same script and keeps crashing. For now, I'm not using any of the MT stuff.

Using the combination of QTGMC, FFT3DFilter, and SSSharp has resulted in zero jaggies as far as I can tell, which is a relief. And yes, I am using SelectEven to revert back to 29.97fps. Reinterlacing at the end is probably the best way to go unless the filters don't require progressive video.

What I'll probably end up doing is splitting my master script into two separate ones, outputting the first half to a lossless codec (I've always used HuffYUV), then running that through the second half and outputting once more. Then I can run that into Premiere for the color correction.

I haven't had a chance to work on this since I posted the screens, but hopefully I'll have some time in the next week or two.

I don't think the blackness at the beginning is really a big issue. It would be pretty easy to use the other DVD for that part, or just take the entire audio track and match it up with the other DVD.

The convention is in April, so I'd really love to get my hands on it sometime in the next month or two so I can figure out how I want to show it.  I'll PM you my details.

Sluggo said:

Is that person  fan of Digital sound?

I would say this person has a certain, uh,  affinity for Digital Theater Systems, yes.

(The funny thing is, I don't think I ever posted in that DTS thread.)

I'm only being ignored by one person. You'll never guess who it is.

A lot of those rules are in place because of the site owners, and have little to do with those of us who have to enforce the rules.

But yeah, the list itself is pretty comical.

Thanks Sluggo. There are a few things I'm not happy with, as I don't think I've yet found the right balance between denoising and sharpening, and I'm still running tests to try and find the best settings for each filter, but overall it's looking pretty good. I will say that a lot of these shots look even better in motion though.

Good point. I am planning both a DVD and an h.264 MKV for use on PCs. I guess I don't have to deinterlace at this stage, it would just add an extra step before encoding the mpeg4 video.

Alright, screenshot time.

To expand on what I've been working on, I've been experimenting with using a few avisynth filters I've previously never used, such as QTGMC for deinterlacing, GradFun2DBmod to remove color banding, and SSSharp for sharpening. The results so far are amazing.

For my v1 release, I used the unsharp mask filter in Premiere, which did a decent job, but unfortunately left unsightly jaggies everywhere. Also, I didn't use any noise filtering whatsoever (and it appears I forgot to deblock as well). Notice how much cleaner v2 is in comparison.

(Screens were taken using AvsPmod. First frame is the original interlaced source, the second is v1 taken from the DVD, the third is v2 without any color correction.)

Here is the workflow I'm using for v2:

- D2V source (Deblock, ColorMatrix)
- QTGMC (deinterlace)
- FFT3DFilter (denoise)
- GradFun2DBmod (remove color banding)
- SSSharp

Customized scripts will be created for the commercials and the animated segment. The output will then go into Premiere for color correction. The one thing I'm not really happy about at the moment is the ghosting, but I don't know of a good way to get rid of it.

Just a heads up that I've been playing around with some new avisynth filters the last few days and the WBBM video is looking better than ever. (It pays to check out the doom9 forums more than once every blue moon.) I'll post some screens tomorrow or Monday.

I don't think anyone here actually believes this was made by Lucasfilm.

So is the audio track something that you're looking to release in the near future, TheThirdGathers (or perhaps your friend)? Those of us who have already created our own versions of Backstroke of the West would love to add this audio track to our existing DVDs.

I actually screened Backstroke at a local sci-fi convention last April using the DVD I created and posted about in marioxb's thread. To my amazement, the theater I was showing it in was packed and we had to turn some people away because we were full.  I'm looking to show it again this year and this dubbed version would be perfect!

I don't think I have that channel in HD unfortunately.

I just wish someone had the balls to televise the Holiday Special again.

Do you think it could be a bit rate issue because of the number of audio tracks? Or do you think it's just a software problem? If it's the former, it might just need to be muxed into an MKV and released as a video file instead of a DVD.

Either way, I'd be happy to do a proper video enhancement if you want to send me the files.

MattMahdi said:

Inferring from general silence, in the community, I'm guessing that the KCCI, KCMO, and WMAR discs are are the only ones floating around in the wild.

I'd never looked closely at the WBBM files because I assumed they were only partial. They're not. Twelve parts, but all the material is there. And the quality's pretty good -- for something half the dimensions / quarter the area of a standard screen.

Anyone know where these files came from? I'm playing about with DVDStyler, just for fun, but it's always better to have an original than to downconvert and then upscale.

My "hybrid" release is actually the WBBM version with the commercials from the WMAR version added in.  I got the WBBM DVD from the guy at fuzzymemories.tv. I made a donation to his web site and he agreed in exchange to give me a copy of the master DVD he had, which looks to have been made using a standard DVD recorder rather than a computer.  The video quality suffers a little bit because of that, but overall it's very good quality because the source tape was only 2nd generation and in such good condition.

When I have the time, I'm going to be revisiting my hybrid release and making several improvements.  The top two items on my list are to include the higher-quality versions of the commercials (the ones posted on a.b.sw), and also to remove all the jaggies which I can't believe I forgot to address the first time around. If anyone has any other suggestions, I'd love to hear them.

Sluggo said:

Henryperu77, what codec do I need to view this clip?

It's XviD.

Wow, what were your source(s) for that? Is it a cleaned-up single source or did you combine multiples?

Eh, Encore comes free with my satellite package so I didn't pay anything extra for it. I thought it was a good doc, though maybe a lot of what they covered has already been seen on DVD special features. All the interviews were new though, and I did notice that some of the footage shown of the TPM pre-production meetings was new, or at least wasn't included on the TPM DVD.

It's on alt.binaries.starwars.

Again, thanks. I spent a heck of a lot of time on it. I'm looking forward to seeing yours when it's finished.