Having just found this thread, I'm kicking myself for not having found it sooner.
But I was also quite thrilled to find out that there other people who are thinking exactly the same as me!
You see, although I have DrGonzo's versions, I too want to have the original trilogy in PAL format (I live in the UK) for 2 reasons:
- better picture definition (because PAL has an increased resolution)
- no "motion judder" from 3:2 pulldown (see the scene in Jedi where the rebel fleet is preparing for the attack on the Death Star; some of the fast horizontal movement looks awful to my eyes)
I decided a while ago that my VHS versions wouldn't give me the quality I wanted, so I bought a 2nd hand CLD-D925, and I've also managed to get LDs of Empire and Jedi (in French - the versions with the original soundtrack on eBay go way too expensive for me). I've probably been bidding against one of you lot for A New Hope! The VHS versions I have are the THX ones (from 1995?) and have the same artwork as the LDs, so I would think that the audio will be compatible.
I know a fair bit about analogue capture (I actually contributed in a very small part to the guide you will find at Doom9.org) so I'm looking forward to doing this.
Here's my "plan of action":
- Set up correct contrast and brightness on the PC monitor using screengrabs from the THX optimiser included on my Indiana Jones DVDs.
- Now run the same disc on a DVD player connected via s-video to the capture card - use the options in the drivers to make sure that the analogue capture is optimal quality.
- Make a capture of my VHS tapes, for the analogue Dolby Surround English audio only, but keeping the video for frame-by-frame reference for synching later on.
- Cap the laserdiscs - I have a digital input that could record the digital stereo French soundtrack.
- Process the video with AVISynth, clean with minimal temporal/spatial noise filtering (probably PixieDust), then do a Lanczos resize to make it anamorphic without blurring the edges too much.
- Encode the video using CCE 3 or 4-pass VBR (this will tie up my poor old XP2700+ for some time!)
- Encode the audio streams to AC-3 (making sure the Dolby Surround flag is set for the English track - unlike DrGonzo's version). Also for A New Hope I may be able to find the original mono soundtrack off a VHS tape somewhere - this would be an interesting addition if I can manage to sync it, for those who have never heard the "close the blast door" line and other differences.
- Do the subtitles in English (for Jabba/Greedo) and French (Jabba/Greedo and the opening scrawl)
- I wasn't going to bother with menus or extras because those sorts of thing are not IMO as important.
So, a hell of a lot to do and I need to do some further reading on audio encoding, subtitles and DVD authoring (was going to make the chapter points the same as the LDs).
I'd be interested to hear any comments on my plan!