Good Points:
- The overall picture quality on this DVD is very good. IMO it is significantly better than DrGonzo's version, and also shows an improvement over the TR47 and EditDroid transfers. (At least until TR47's next release, or one of the versions derived from the X0 project, becomes available.)
- AFAIK it's the only PAL version that's been made available for download. I would be interested to know how this capture compares to those others who have made or attempted to make DVDs from the PAL laserdiscs (i.e. Karyudo, Grisan, Norinadd?)
Bad Points:
(Or, things I want to improve on for V2.0!)
- The capture card I used is one of the cheapest available. Also, the outdated comb filter inside the LD player (Pioneer CLD-D925) is used for Y/C seperation, so there is a small amount of dot-crawl. I have a feeling that an overall improvement could be obtained by using the unseperated composite output from a Pioneer CLD-2950 with something like a SweetSpot capture card (containing a more advanced 3D comb filter). This is something I would like to explore in the future.
- Halos to the left of dark objects in front of a light background. This is *not* a digital artefact caused by a sharpening filter, it's an analogue "sharpness" effect present in the source capture. It's not really noticeable on a normal CRT TV, but may annoy those with large LCD or Plasma displays. Again, I would hope that this could be reduced by using the combination of hardware descibed above.
- Occasional spots or lines caused by dust or scratches on the disc surface. I used a filter to remove the worst of the lines, but I was worried that trying to remove all defects would have unwanted side-effects, such as eating up the starfields in the space scenes. I should look into getting a proper cleaning solution and giving the discs a good polish. (Also keep in mind many of the defects you may notice are actually a result of the transfer from film to laserdisc).
- The audio is from an analogue source (VHS). The signal-to-noise ratio of VHS hi-fi audio is actually pretty good, but there will be some noise introduced nonetheless. Also I only used the line-in from my motherboard's onboard sound, not a high-end sound card. Some minor jitter in the tape playback meant that I had to remove the occasional 40ms to keep the sound in sync; I ran the audio through SoundForge to remove any clicks so hopefully even those with good ears won't notice this. (Ideally I would like to get a soundcard with SPDIF input and get a digital to digital copy of the audio from an English language laserdisc.)
- The side change from 1-2 is pretty abrupt; a screenwipe is missing. This is a problem with the French discs. Apparently the German LDs are from the same film transfer but with the side changes at different points, so I need to get hold of the German discs to fill in the missing frames (more expense!) Side change 2-3 is fine, change 3-4 is I think only missing about 7 frames.
- I've noticed some minor interlacing artefacts in a couple of shots; this seems to be a problem with some sort of phase shift in the disc in places. However, you only notice this when viewing frame-by-frame in VirtualDub.
- Variations in colour saturation seem to occur occasionally. I've got no idea what caused this.
- Some dark scenes have what look like MPEG compression artefacts (macro-blocks) in the picture. This is not caused by bitrate starvation of the encode, it's actually a side-effect of the filter used for noise reduction. Again it's probably only those with digital displays who will notice this.
- Subtitles are hard-encoded into the picture. Yeah, I know it's not the ideal method, but it was quick and simple.
- Chapter points don't always exactly match the chapter points of the laserdisc with frame-accuracy (because I didn't tell the encoder where the 'I' frames should be).
- No menus or extras whatsoever. Personally I like to put a disc in and have it play from the start without a menu appearing, I feel it stays more true to the laserdisc this way. However, in a future version I'd certainly like to put in alternative audio tracks (mono, original dolby surround); it would then make sense to have a simple audio selection menu.
Other ideas I'm considering for the future:
- An NTSC 16:9 version created from the PAL laserdiscs. (Just curious how they would compare with the NTSC captures off the X0.)
- A multi-lingual version.
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My immediate plan is to do ESB and ROTJ using the same hardware and process as this version, to complete the set. Then I'll have a bit of a break, do some other stuff that's been on the back burner for a while, hopefully get into the wife's good books so when I mention spending £100's on a new capture card and *another* laserdisc player I won't get killed.