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schorman's HDTV Star Wars Saga Preservation (Released) — Page 5

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I’m a bit confused about these releases. Are they being synced to the DVD soundtracks or the Blu-Ray soundtracks? If no on Blu-Ray, any possibility of creating a version that can be muxed with the DTS-HD tracks? Your release of Attack of the Clones interests me the most, with all your extensive fixes and all.

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Do you have any sort of ETA for version 2 of this project? Or at least Episodes II and III. As you can see here: http://originaltrilogy.com/topic/TFA-A-Gentle-Restructure/id/50117/page/5

I am facing an issue that will require me, if we can solve that problem, reissue my prequel edits once again. Assuming the problem is solvable, I figure I may as well use your updated source if it’ll be ready soon-ish-ish. As long as it’s on the horizon, it’ll probably be worth waiting on even if someone solves my technical problem overnight. At least that way I won’t feel like it will be more worthwhile since I’ll have to reissue them all anyway.

My stance on revising fan edits.

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Is Episode III Theatrical being lumped in with the new lineup of Team Blu? If not, any updates on that front?

she/her
mwah

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Sorry to hear that, Hal. Well if there’s any errors you spotted too late, I guess those can also be fixed.

Maybe we can talk about how to get your video streams to be properly blu-ray compliant in the new release as well. Even the quick and dirty muxing fix we’ve been doing isn’t a real solution, as discs don’t work in some players, including PS4s.

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These are over 30 GB, so I assume they’re meant to be burned to dual layer Blu Ray discs. However, after muxing the MKV to a Blu Ray folder with tsMuxer and burning the BDMV to a dual layer disc, it didn’t work. Any idea how to do it?

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jmoral14 said:

These are over 30 GB, so I assume they’re meant to be burned to dual layer Blu Ray discs. However, after muxing the MKV to a Blu Ray folder with tsMuxer and burning the BDMV to a dual layer disc, it didn’t work. Any idea how to do it?

Worked for me doing what you describe. I don’t recall any additional steps being required.

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Which version of TSmuxwr are you using and what’s your bluray player model?

Preferred Saga:
1/2: Hal9000
3: L8wrtr
4/5: Adywan
6-9: Hal9000

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I have tsMuxer GUI 2.6.11 and we have a bunch of Sony and Samsung BD players, all of which the burned discs didn’t work in.

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Look for TSMuxer 1.10.6 - Newer versions are less reliable for making compliant discs. Even if a player won’t read dual layer BD-Rs, the first layer should play just fine - since you’ve tried multiple, it’s more likely the disc/TSMuxer issue than a player issue.

Preferred Saga:
1/2: Hal9000
3: L8wrtr
4/5: Adywan
6-9: Hal9000

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 (Edited)

nightstalkerpoet said:

Look for TSMuxer 1.10.6 - Newer versions are less reliable for making compliant discs.

Really? It’s been long enough since tsmuxer was abandoned, I wouldn’t have thought an even older version could be better. Do you know what changed/broke?

But even so, the newest has worked for me with many discs, so I’m kind of skeptical that some degree of imperfect compliancy is the issue if he is trying it on multiple players.

Are there discs that have worked? Something that was in ISO form, perhaps, where there’s not much room for user error? What brand of discs are they?

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I can vouch for the fact that the older TSmuxers are better for this purpose. I’ve had success with v1.12.

If I had some gum, I’d chew a hole into the sun…

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I’ve been using Verbatim discs, and I just tried it with that older version of tsMuxer with no luck. tsMuxer usually works for me when I use it for the Despecialized releases (which are single layer) but still no luck with these for dual layer discs. Is there maybe some way that I need to indicate when making the BDMV that it’s for a dual layer disc, or perhaps I need to indicate a layer break from one of the chapter marks, like I would for authoring a dual layer DVD in DVD Studio Pro?

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I don’t do anything different with tsmuxer. What software are you using to burn the BDMV?

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 (Edited)

I wanted to announce that I’ve nearly completed upgraded versions of my HDTV preservations. All that is left to do at this point is to run final encodes of the video tracks. Here is a brief summary of the issues/improvents that it will provide.

Original Project:
Video:
My original impetus for this project came from the fact that the best available HDTV rips of the six films came from a German broadcast, which had a very high bitrate, but used the German crawl, and German subtitles, an more importantly, suffered from numerous broken frames, encoding issues, and glitches for lack of a better description. AOTC and ROTJ are especially bad in this regard.

My original for the project has been to make versions of the films that are frame accurate to the English versions of the films, in 1080p, in the best possible quality. This required an alternate rip of the films from an English broadcast, for the purpose of replacing the German crawl/ALTA, any burned-in German subtitles, and for patching over any damaged frames from the German broadcast versions.

Unfortunately, the best I could do at the time of the original project, was to use rips from SKYTV UK, which had been cropped and re-encoded from the original captures. These were of noticeably worse quality compared with the German versions, but since I wanted to avoid using the blu rays, they were the best I could do. Notably, it wasn’t possible to use the Blu Rays at all for TPM or AOTC, due to TPM being an entirely new transfer and AOTC using a significantly different color grade. I did use the Blu Rays as an element in creating the Crawls for episodes 2-6, as the English HDTV versions were noticeably worse in quality than the rest of the films.

Audio:
I basically just used the 5.1 and stereo mixes of the films as-is from their DVD releases. Notably, the NTSC release of AOTC did not include a stereo mix, so I used the track from the Australian PAL DVD, speed corrected from 25fps to 23.976fps, for that mix. I also included the DVD commentary track and the Spanish and French dubs.

I don’t know how aware people are of this, but the original NTSC DVDs of the OT and PT films have a few sync issues when compared with the HDTV broadcasts, and the corresponding Blu Ray versions. Namely, ROTS is missing what should be frame #112670, ESB is missing frames #59815 and #123004, and TPM is missing #82926 and #150518. In my original versions, I just left those frames in the video, and this meant that the audio did not perfectly sync for those three films. You may notice or you might not, but I have come to be pretty sensitive to that kind of thing, and definitely notice it now.

Subtitles:
I originally included a custom English track as well as a Spanish track in idx/sub format.

Updates for v2:

Video:

I was finally able to track down the original SKY TV UK rips. These still have a lower bitrate than the German Premier versions, but are a much much closer match quality-wise. The level of detail is nearly identical and the colors match exactly, which was not true in the original version of this project. I have replaced all the original edits with these rips as a source. I am also able to use these as direct sources for the English crawls, and no-longer use the Blu Rays to enhance.

I have also used some compositing to eliminate the burned in subtitles for the four films that had them. Mostly this was accomplished by masking the German and English subs and then overlaying the two films. This did require a third source for any subs that had overlap between the german and english subtitle masks. Obviously this required third source for the film, which for SW and Jedi was the Blu Ray, as the masters for those films are largely identical to the DVD/HDTV versions. For TPM and AOTC, the Blu Rays are too different for the compositing to work. I was able to use the original DVDs upscaled with Super Resolution as the source for this. This was a much bigger factor for TPM, as most of the subs in AOTC didn’t overlap at all. It’s actually not noticeable at all and looks pretty much perfect.

Audio:
I have updated the audio tracks for each of the films that had sync issues. This was done losslessly, meaning without needing to re-encode the ac3 tracks, by splitting the AC3 tracks in the correct location, then encoding small patches that use the PAL DVDs as a source, and finally inserting those patches into the original ac3 stream. This fixes represent somewhere between 30 and 90 milliseconds of audio per film, but it’s very difficult to get this to work and make the patches fit seamlessly into the stream. I won’t go into the details, due to complexity, but it is seamless, and should fix all audio sync issues.

I will also include the correct 5.1 German dubs, as these were specifically requested last time.

Subtitles:
I will include a few additional tracks here, and will be using typical PGS/SUP format rathere than IDX/SUB. I’m going to include subs for the DVD commentary, which are sourced from the Blu Rays, as well as the correct English SDH tracks ripped from the DVDs.

Feedback:

My main question going forward is to gauge preferences for the alien subtitles before I encode. I can make these subtitle tracks, meaning I can just leave the video clean and have it be soft-subbed. For what it’s worth, that is how the DVD versions were originally. I can also hard sub and have them encoded on the video. Remember that the English HDTV versions of AOTC actually have the theatrical subs. This is not true for SW, Jedi, or TPM.

The main benefit of hard subbing is that the TPM and AOTC actually use subtitles that fade-in and fade-out. This is not really possible to do using PGC/SUP subtitles (I mean, you can sorta do it, but it pretty much won’t work). If I hard sub, the TPM subs will look a little more authentic on playback. The other benefit is that it saves from having to include an additional subtitle track, which you’ll have to remember to turn on any time you play the movie.

The drawback is mainly that, though they look nearly perfect, they’re not technically authentic, in the cases of TPM, SW, and Jedi. I also kind of prefer to soft sub, as it leaves these versions more open to being used for other purposes.

I’m also curious if there would be anything else that anyone would like to include, within reason. I could theoretically include German and French subs if it’s desired.

Anyway, thanks for any feedback you may have. Once I decide on how to proceed with the subtitles, I should be able to share these within the week.
😃

If I had some gum, I’d chew a hole into the sun…

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Thank you so much Schorman, it sounds amazing.
If it is possible, I prefer soft subtitles!

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Wow what an unexpected surprise! I had just replaced the blu-ray for your v1 HDTV preservation for AOTC in my PT 4K regrading project due to the colors, so I’m very happy to see these updated!

Thank you for saving me a lot of work!

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Yeah, no problem! I meant to say before, that I’d like to upgrade the Spanish and French audio to 5.1. If anyone happens to have rips from the French and Spanish PAL DVDs, I could speed correct and include those. Unfortunately they are only in stereo on the NTSC discs.

If I had some gum, I’d chew a hole into the sun…

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I’m fine with either theatrical-approximate hardsubs for TPM or softsubs. As long as they’re not the garish hardsubs from the first HDTV preservation I’ll be happy, as I’ll probably do my own theatrical-approximate hardsubs for TPM anyway if you do softsubs.

ANH and ROTJ I’m indifferent on, just because I can’t really see myself downloading those anyway.

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 (Edited)

Very nice! I’ll have to re-source my ROTS edit I haven’t encoded yet.
I’ll have to debate whether to go back and remaster my edit of AOTC. It sounds like the majority of the film would be 100% identical, save for the bits and pieces that relied on the UK stream. How much of the movie would you say does so? Could you perhaps give an example of a scene that contains material from that source so I can take a sharp look and assess?
Congratulations on your hard work and delivering an update to this massive project!

My stance on revising fan edits.

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I’d assume any scene with subtitles at minimum, no? Since they’re hardsubs in AOTC.

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Of course, the subtitle scenes will be different, I would recommend looking at the scene with Anakin and Padme in the field on Naboo. There are lots of patches throughout that scene. The German HDTV had a lot of problems with any scenes with bright greens or bright reds, as well as with sudden flashes of white light, so basically all of AOTC. There are lots of patches throughout that scene.

I don’t want to over sell this update. The main work I’ve done is to upgrade the secondary source and minimized patches from the Blu Ray to nearly zero. Although I did use them in SW and Jedi to remove the subs. Besides the ALTA/Opening Crawls, there are no full scenes that were ever completely from the lower quality source. I could have done it that way, but it was always too easy to spot. Mostly we’re talking about 3-5 frame patches throughout to cover encoding glitches, or less frequently stream errors, which might be around 10-15 frames at a time, depending.

AOTC and Jedi have by far the most patching, because of how much red and green they have. It may not be completely visible when watching in motion, but there are just hundreds of 3-5 frame segments, where blocking artifacts that will cover significant parts of the screen. But, again, we’re talking about less than 15,000 frames for AOTC, in total that have been upgraded. That’s only like 7% of the film.

Anyway the other main upgrade will be the improved audio sync.

If I had some gum, I’d chew a hole into the sun…

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Thank you for clarifying that. If I may ask one more question about AOTC, is the video stream in the same sync as V1? It seems like the changes for sync have been applied to the audio rather than the video.

My stance on revising fan edits.

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Yes, no change was made in sync for any of the video tracks. Just the audio for ESB, TPM, and ROTS.

If I had some gum, I’d chew a hole into the sun…