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.: Moth3r's PAL DVD project :. — Page 5

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Moth3r - congrats on this transfer!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

“My skill are no longer as Mad as the once were” RiK

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Moth3r - well in on your set m8. Have had a look at your comparison site and was really impressed.

Us UK'ers and our Euro and Aus friends'll be well chuffed with this


Metallaxis - nice covers too m8 - they remind of the UK based VHS covers from many years ago (or is my mind playing tricks?)

A little patience goes a long way on this old-school Rebel base. If you are having issues finding what you are looking for, these will be of some help…

Welcome to the OriginalTrilogy.com | Introduce yourself in here | Useful info within : About : Help : Site Rules : Fan Project Rules : Announcements
‘How do I do this?’ on the OriginalTrilogy.com; some info & answers + FAQs - includes info on how to search for projects and threads on the OT•com

A Project Index for Star Wars Preservations (Harmy’s Despecialized & 4K77/80/83 etc) : A Project Index for Star Wars Fan Edits (adywan & Hal 9000 etc)

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Thank you
No, your mind is not playing tricks on you, the instructions Moth3r gave me were based on these covers you remember (hence the bbfc movie rating "U" symbol).
And now, for your feature presentation:
The Classic Re-re-re-release of Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back.
In this version the word "WOOKIE" has been changed to "HAIR CHALLENGED ANIMAL" and the entire cast has been digitally replaced by Ewoks.
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@Rik: Thanks, I'm pleased it looked good on compatible NTSC equipment.

The covers Metallaxis did for me are a hybrid of the UK VHS covers (back) and the French Laserdisc sleeves (front).

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Can Zion or Jay pin this to the top of the thread?, like the others' releases, reallly don't want to lose info on such a great project.

A little patience goes a long way on this old-school Rebel base. If you are having issues finding what you are looking for, these will be of some help…

Welcome to the OriginalTrilogy.com | Introduce yourself in here | Useful info within : About : Help : Site Rules : Fan Project Rules : Announcements
‘How do I do this?’ on the OriginalTrilogy.com; some info & answers + FAQs - includes info on how to search for projects and threads on the OT•com

A Project Index for Star Wars Preservations (Harmy’s Despecialized & 4K77/80/83 etc) : A Project Index for Star Wars Fan Edits (adywan & Hal 9000 etc)

… and take your time to look around this site before posting - to get a feel for this place. Don’t just lazily make yet another thread asking for projects.

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Originally posted by: oojason
Can Zion or Jay pin this to the top of the thread?, like the others' releases, reallly don't want to lose info on such a great project.
I see this as more of a "project discussion" thread, not an "info and feedback" thread. I'd prefer to create a new thread when all 3 discs are finished, and have that stickied instead.

:: Edit - Zion/Jay, we do however need a sticky for the EditDroid set I feel.

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Moth3r,

At what resolution did you do your raw capture of the 4:3 letterboxed LD?
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720x576.

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Cool thats what I thought...

I'm still playing around with your capture if you don't mind. Since the real resolution of PAL laserdiscs were/are 528 X 576 for 4:3, the real starting resolution of 16:9 slice you're using is 528 x 405. So what I plan on doing is first downsample your disc to 554 x 425 (which is just 105% * 528 x 405 to allow some fudging since it was analogue signal). Do just a little bit of noise reduction, etc and then upsample to 720 x 480 since I'm NTSC. From the samples I've done I think my 480 version looks just as detailed as your 576, but just a little more smoother and natural (no jaggies and less noise).

I got some flack from people when I said I was converting your disc from PAL to NTSC, becase I would loose "detail" since I was going from 720x576 to 720x480, but they failed to realize that we're starting from a source that has less resolution than either. If you go from 405->480 or 405->576 you're going get the same amount of real detail. The quality of the "added detail" from upscaling is dependent on your upscaling algorithms.
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I don't understand what you mean by "real" resolution.

The actual image resolution before scaling was 704 x 324 - because I trimmed 16 (mostly black) pixels from the left hand side. This image was upsampled vertically to 324 x (16/9 ÷ 4/3) = 432. To convert to NTSC, you need to downsample vertically to 432 / (576 ÷ 480) = 360.

Unless you're talking about the "analogue" horizontal resolution of laserdiscs which isn't really relevant when talking about pixels. Even then, the vertical resolution or number of lines is fixed at 576 (324 for the actual image).

Scaling down then back up is just an extreme form of noise reduction!

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"Real" is actually a loose term.... it just means meaningful data from your capture card, and not noise or interpolated data. And I totally agree that digital pixel to analogue comparison can be tricky (thats why I had the fudge factor 105%). But even so when digitizing an analogue signal you do reach a point when you're capturing noise rather than any meaningful data. This is heavily dependant on how clean you analogue source is (type of LD and LD player in our case) and capture device.

//Snip from videohelp:
Laserdisc resolution is 528 X 576/480, but many titles in US, after 1990, are using the 544 X 480 resolution.
In Europe, the success of Laserdisc was minimal, so the few released PAL titles, continue to use the official resolution for PAL (528 X 576). In theory, there is a 544 X 576, but I never saw a Pal laserdisc using this resolution.
//End snip

So I think at the resolution of your raw cpature you are introducing some interpolated and noisy data from your analogue source. Now this is good because you always want to oversample for any A/D conversion because you can filter out the data you want. Now what I'm doing is like you said, is some noise and interpolated data reduction by downsampling. When I upsample back, I believe I have more contol than your capture card via algorithm choice and configurabilty.


Did this in anyway help clarify and answer your questions from above?
I'll be honest I'm not a video capture expert, but I do have a pretty good background in electrical engineering and deal daily with various analogue sources that we have digitize to take readings from. But any A/D conversion is pretty much the same, its just how you process and display the data. For video its a time-dependant, color coded 2D matrix. Look out nerdspeak!

BTW I still can't wait to see your Empire and Jedi...keep up the awesome work
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Originally posted by: dumb_kid
...
//Snip from videohelp:
Laserdisc resolution is 528 X 576/480, but many titles in US, after 1990, are using the 544 X 480 resolution.
In Europe, the success of Laserdisc was minimal, so the few released PAL titles, continue to use the official resolution for PAL (528 X 576). In theory, there is a 544 X 576, but I never saw a Pal laserdisc using this resolution.
//End snip
This is very misleading. (I would say complete bollocks but I can actually see where he's coming from.)

I'm no video expert either, but I'll try and explain my simple view of things:

The specs on the D925 give a resolution of 440 lines (in the horizontal direction) for PAL playback. This is an analogue resolution, and represents the maximum frequency, or bandwidth, of a waveform stored on that analogue format, for laserdisc it's about 5.8MHz.

(There will always be 576 lines in the vertical direction, because that's the PAL standard).

When you capture a video signal, the waveform is digitised. Formulas (e.g. Nyquist) are supposed to give how many pixels you need to sample to ensure all the horizontal detail is captured, and I believe that's where this guy got the 528 and 544 from. (Depending on how you calculate the sample rate, I've seen this figure quoted as 600 for laserdisc, see section 3.5 of the Doom9 capture guide.)

But this is all academic when you're capturing to make a DVD. Since the final desired resolution is 720, you should alway capture at 720 to avoid having to resize later. (I know I cropped some blank pixels down to 704 for my DVD, but I didn't resize, I just added in an 8-pixel wide border either side.)

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I love the looks of your set Moth3r ... would you be so kind as to check your PMs?
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Originally posted by: Moth3r
When you capture a video signal, the waveform is digitised. Formulas (e.g. Nyquist) are supposed to give how many pixels you need to sample to ensure all the horizontal detail is captured, and I believe that's where this guy got the 528 and 544 from. (Depending on how you calculate the sample rate, I've seen this figure quoted as 600 for laserdisc, see section 3.5 of the Doom9 capture guide.)

But this is all academic when you're capturing to make a DVD. Since the final desired resolution is 720, you should alway capture at 720 to avoid having to resize later. (I know I cropped some blank pixels down to 704 for my DVD, but I didn't resize, I just added in an 8-pixel wide border either side.)


We're on the same page when it comes to the more samples the better, in order to properly capture a waveform. The 720 horizontal you captured at is more than adequate given the source material. I think the only place where we have slighty differing opinions is where you state you should "avoid having to resize later". I think that you can eek out a little better picture quality (like lower noise levels without detail loss) by the downsampling and upsampling through some clever algorithm choices. But again that "quality increase" is very subjective and most likely not observable unless the picture is blown up a whole lot say with a projector... hence thats why I've been playing around with this.
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@wannabegeorge: check this thread, TESB will be announced in a few weeks. You've missed ANH; maybe it'll get reposted or maybe someone will torrent it if there's enough demand.

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I missed it??? Damn. Where are your releases announced? Can someone please torrent it? Please please please????
Fez: I am so excited about Star Whores.
Hyde: Fezzy, man, it's Star Wars.
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wannabe and arnie if you live in the US I could probably send you a copy. PM me

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I'd also be very interested in Moth3r's set being torrented, or some kind member offering to send it to me.
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I like the way the cover uses John Alvin's 1995 VHS cover.
"A Jedi can feel the force flow through him".
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I'm a newbie to the site, and it's way to late (early),
[downloaded/watched a certain SW movie torrent,
which me got to thinking about the original trilogy,
found this site, and jeez now the sun is coming up!]
but I just have to comment on this PAL -> NTSC topic.

The thing I never see people consider is the following:

You have a 4:3 PAL image of a letterboxed picture.
You capture it at XXX x 576 lines.
You EXTRACT the middle 480 lines.

By doing this and displaying them on a 525 line system,
you have stretched the image vertically by 576/480=1.2

Since you wanted to maintain correct aspect ratio,
you need to stretch horizontally by the same factor.
Thus your display aspect ratio would need to be
(4/3) * 1.2 = 1.6 to see the extracted 'box' right.

Hmmm... Let's think about 16:9...

An anamorphic 16:9 DVD image is one where the 720 horizontal pixels
that would 'normally' fill the width of a 4:3 display are stretched (there
is that word again) by a factor of 1.333. You don't get a higher resolution,
but you do get (need) a display aspect ratio of (4/3) * (4/3) = 1.777

And here (extracting middle 480 from PAL image) we have a case
where we also want to stretch the pixels horizontally to get the
aspect ratio back to being correct. In this example, the horizontal
stretch is 1.2 vs 1.333, but the point is that so far I haven't touched
the data... No complex 2D mathematical resize operations on the
sampled data at all (which always introduces some artifacts / errors).

How does one tackle the 1.2 vs 1.333 = 10% DAR diff? Well, how
about not using the full width of the 16:9 display? A good portion of
that 10% differance is in the overscan area anyway, why not keep
ALL of the sampled data in the viewable portion of the 16:9 display?

For what it's worth, I've used a similar approach a few times in the
past when converting PAL SVCDs to NTSC DVDs, and it really makes
a difference in the quality of the result. Food for thought...

Anyway, I'm really amazed and excited at all the preservation projects
(past, present, and future) being discussed in this forum, and hope I
can contribute in some small way...
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Hooorah...

Soo, is there a way to still get this version of ANH? I live in Perth Australia and can't afford to get someone from overseas to ship it in. Noooo way!
VADER: Let me look on you with my own eyes...

LUKE: Dad, where are your eyebrows?

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=WO_S6UgkQk0
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I could torrent it. Fact is though, that my bandwidth isn't nearly enough to cover the demand. So, if there are people willing to help seeding, and with moth3r's permission of course, I could upload the torrent.
And now, for your feature presentation:
The Classic Re-re-re-release of Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back.
In this version the word "WOOKIE" has been changed to "HAIR CHALLENGED ANIMAL" and the entire cast has been digitally replaced by Ewoks.