Taken from earlier in this thread
First, to clarify that there are two versions of "our" pre-ANH disc. The
first has a recreated crawl and three sound mixes: mono (from a VHS boot),
matrixed Dolby stereo (from the late 90's widescreen laserdisc), and the
Definitive Edition mix, which we believe to be a mixdown of the 1977
six-track 70mm mix. At the time we were unaware of Burtt's 1995 home video
remix, so we thought the widescreen LD track was identical to the 1977
stereo and labeled it as such. This first disc was encoded straight from
the Beta tapes using the multipass feature of the Sonic and thus retained
the not-quite-black letterbox bars w/ burned-in subtitles and did not enjoy
frame-by-frame cleanup of film and video artifacts. Whenever we encountered
a dropout on the tape, we'd have to re-transfer the affected portion from
the LD to another tape, lay down new timecode to match the master with the
error on it, and reencode that section. Quite a laborious process.
By the time we finished with the ESB and ROTJ discs, we had greatly
improved the process: an upgraded LD player and the uncompressed
digitization, by-hand cleanup and TMPGEnc encoding described earlier. We
therefore wanted to have another go at SW. This version retained the stereo
mix but left off the others in favor of an isolated score; including them
all was deemed too costly to the bit budget. This disc has a better picture
than the first, an improved crawl recreation with the ANH version as an
alternate stream, replaced subtitles and other goodies like the MacQuarrie
paintings and CD-ROM content. The only reason to watch the first version is
to enjoy switching back and forth between sound mixes to compare
them--otherwise, the second version (shown at the beginning of the "DVD
I've just acquired" thread and currently being torrented) is the one to
have.
first has a recreated crawl and three sound mixes: mono (from a VHS boot),
matrixed Dolby stereo (from the late 90's widescreen laserdisc), and the
Definitive Edition mix, which we believe to be a mixdown of the 1977
six-track 70mm mix. At the time we were unaware of Burtt's 1995 home video
remix, so we thought the widescreen LD track was identical to the 1977
stereo and labeled it as such. This first disc was encoded straight from
the Beta tapes using the multipass feature of the Sonic and thus retained
the not-quite-black letterbox bars w/ burned-in subtitles and did not enjoy
frame-by-frame cleanup of film and video artifacts. Whenever we encountered
a dropout on the tape, we'd have to re-transfer the affected portion from
the LD to another tape, lay down new timecode to match the master with the
error on it, and reencode that section. Quite a laborious process.
By the time we finished with the ESB and ROTJ discs, we had greatly
improved the process: an upgraded LD player and the uncompressed
digitization, by-hand cleanup and TMPGEnc encoding described earlier. We
therefore wanted to have another go at SW. This version retained the stereo
mix but left off the others in favor of an isolated score; including them
all was deemed too costly to the bit budget. This disc has a better picture
than the first, an improved crawl recreation with the ANH version as an
alternate stream, replaced subtitles and other goodies like the MacQuarrie
paintings and CD-ROM content. The only reason to watch the first version is
to enjoy switching back and forth between sound mixes to compare
them--otherwise, the second version (shown at the beginning of the "DVD
I've just acquired" thread and currently being torrented) is the one to
have.