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STAR WARS V8 - A Final Attempt (Released)

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http://img55.imageshack.us/img55/5389/starwarsv8bo3.th.jpg

I didn’t really like the GOUT for only one reason, the DVNR smearing. And since I watched the GOUT on a Full HD-TV I’m sure it is unwatchable.

So I teamed up with fffffff and bought:

  • The Pioneer LD-V800
  • The Japanese 1986 Special Collection LaserDiscs
  • A capture card (Philips 7135 chipset)

The only thing left to do is capture the LDs, IVTC, resize to anamorphic, encode to mpeg2 and author the DVDs. Sounds easy enough but will probably take some time.

So for the moment I won’t be in the off topic section talking crap about religion or politics, I will be in the “Star Wars Fan Edits and Preservation Efforts” section for the reason I came to this site.

Fez: I am so excited about Star Whores.
Hyde: Fezzy, man, it's Star Wars.
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F.. me that's a big image. Could you please post it as a thumbnail?

The GOUT's DVNR smearing bugs the hell out of me, too (as well as the aliasing).

I'll be very interested to see some screenshots of your capture, to see how the Japanese LD compares with the US pre-THX laserdisc I have.

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right now i have:

original fox fullscreen- pre THX NTSC laserdisc trilogy [clv]
fox widescreen - pre THX NTSC laserdisc trilogy [cav]
faces widescreen - THX NTSC laserdisc trilogy
definitive collection - THX NTSC laserdisc trilogy [cav]
se collection - THX NTSC laserdisc trilogy

and should be getting
--------------------------------------------
japanese 4 disc boxed set trilogy
original japanese trilogy widescreen(2 differernt ANH)

and possibly faces japanese trilogy (is this worth it?)

maybe i should do a comparison of all the versions,
screenshots,etc...

later
-1

[no GOUT in CED?-> GOUT CED]

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Thanks for amending the image Arnie.

This might be a dumb question, but what does the V8 signify? (It's a brand of vegetable juice over here!)

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When I was talking to fffffff we first said LD-V8000, which became LD-V800 (Japanese version) and that turned into V800 and finally fffffff referred to it as V8 only.
Fez: I am so excited about Star Whores.
Hyde: Fezzy, man, it's Star Wars.
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So, you could call this the V8 Project?
:-D

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this project sounds a lot like dark jedi's unreleased japan special collection project that would be free of the subtitles.

I have his v1 with the subs intact, the darkcassidy one.

Still interested in your attempt though and the results.

up until the definitive collection boxset the return of the jedi jsc release was the only CAV version. Star Wars and Empire Strikes Back both got CAV versions in pan and scan in analog sound only. in the us, not only that but the first issue rotj was time compressed or some such and the only release that was not was the ced 2 disc caddy version.

I know it sounds a bit pathetic but i wish Jedi got a CAV full frame version as well, to finish the set.

Also the pre thx return of the jedi letterbox was not centered into frame correctly the 1993 dc and the 1995 faces were the first time this was corrected.

“Always loved Vader’s wordless self sacrifice. Another shitty, clueless, revision like Greedo and young Anakin’s ghost. What a fucking shame.” -Simon Pegg.

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Sounds like you have alot of work ahead of you Arnie.d. Hope this turns out well for you. I would like to see screen captures of the progress aswell. Best of luck!

Venerable member of the “Red Eye” Knights

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I'm pretty sure the full frame domestic disc of Jedi is not time compressed. It's spread out over three sides!

The V8000 is supposed to be a pretty good industrial machine. I have a V4400 myself, it's built like a tank!
Forum Moderator

Where were you in '77?

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Great project.
Are you planning on transferring the discs that negative1 mentioned or just stick to the SC? Are you planning on doing any colour correction or filtering the image in any way to reduce noise etc?

Any idea how the Philips 7135 card compares with the older PDI cards that were used by other members? Are you going to modify the 7135 card and fit a BNC connector?

This sounds like a very interesting project to keep an eye on. Good luck with it dudes.
Can't wait to see some screen shots.

If television is chewing gum for the mind, then the prequels are the worlds first visual laxative.

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@Moth3r
But .:The V8 Project:. sounds a bit too much like the other project. :)

@skyjedi2005
That's what it's meant to be.
I also have his v1 (but I think it's called Dark/Sega).

@AuggieBenDoggie
Yeah, lot of work. I already noticed the IVTC is going to be real time consuming. I'm going to IVTC manually and the settings change at almost every scene in the first 15 minutes...

@Orinoco_Womble
I'm only going to do the JSC. I don't want to do much filtering. Maybe just apply NNEDI but no noisefiltering, I want to keep this one entirely DVNR free :). I did test capture Side 1 and the image is much brighter and has less color than DJ's transfer. I don't really know what's causing this but it could have something to do with the fact that these are Japanese disc so calibrated at a different IRE. DJ used an American player, I use a Japanese player. Also DJ used a canopus 110? I have a canopus with the same chipset and in test captures I noticed it darkens the image and causes a colorshift sometimes. And I don't know what luminance level DJ set his mpeg2 encoder to when he encoded the video. But I'm pretty sure the colors on DJ's set are not as they are on the laserdisc. But I like his colors and I'm not sure I can do any better myself. In the end it's just a matter of taste I guess.

I don't know how the 7135 compares to older PDI cards. I only know it is much better than my canopus device. I test captured a dvd and compared the capture to the ripped vob and I have to say I was pretty good. There was some dotcrawl introduced but the colors, sharpness and detail were captured pretty good.

I'm not going to fit the capture card with a BNC connector. I fitted the player with a BNC to RCA adapter.


Little bummer btw, I melted my voltage convertor. I guess it's not the most clever thing to do to use a voltage convertor of 100W max when the player is also 100W. I ordered a new one, 1600W. That ought to do it!
Fez: I am so excited about Star Whores.
Hyde: Fezzy, man, it's Star Wars.
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Arnie.d said:

I don't want to do much filtering. Maybe just apply NNEDI but no noisefiltering, I want to keep this one entirely DVNR free :).

What's the intention for NNEDI? Is it for the upscaling, with something like spline16resize to downscale to anamorphic dimensions? I can see the benefit of using Edge Directed Interpolation when upscaling from SD to HD resolutions, but a single lanczosresize may produce equally good results if just going from lb 4:3 to anamorphic 16:9. But - try both methods and see what works best.

Agree with your premise of avoiding noise reduction, but have you considered multiple capture averaging at all? Potentially it would let you to keep the real detail (and film grain) present on the laserdiscs, but reduce the analogue video noise introduced in the player and cables.

I did test capture Side 1 and the image is much brighter and has less color than DJ's transfer. I don't really know what's causing this but it could have something to do with the fact that these are Japanese disc so calibrated at a different IRE.

Are there any options for video format in your capture settings? I'm sure my card has separate options for 'NTSC' and 'NTSC-J'. Also can you adjust brightness, contrast, hue and saturation at all?

I don't know how the 7135 compares to older PDI cards. I only know it is much better than my canopus device.

Well the specs for the chip itself mention both an adaptive 3D comb filter and an adaptive 4-line (2D) comb filter. I suppose it depends on the actual card how this is implemented. The PDI uses the older Philips chip (SAA7118) and a Conexant BT878A chip as well.

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I did a test upscaling with lanczos4resize only and nnedi+lanczos4resize. With nnedi there are slightly less jaggies on a full hd-tv. But there are less jaggies compared to the GOUT anyway.

I haven't considered averaging yet. But I can do a test, see if it helps at all.

There's a long list of video format settings but I use the NTSC_M_J setting (I thought it would be better than the NTSC_M setting). These are the other optional settings but for now I just used the default settings:

http://img518.imageshack.us/img518/909/clipboard01pl8.jpg
Fez: I am so excited about Star Whores.
Hyde: Fezzy, man, it's Star Wars.
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It's nice to see people are still interested in laserdisc transfers, I am especially interested in seeing a good transfer of these pre THX discs.

I have to second Moth3r's suggestion of averaging out multiple captures, it is the only way to reduce analogue noise without adversely affecting the image you are trying to preserve, keep in mind that this is one of the factors that makes the X0 player so good, except in that case it is done internally averaging the result from 5 separate NTSC decoders, I would suggest doing 5 captures of each side of the disc (preferably using a lossless codec) and averaging out the results before any other filtering/resizing. Obviously this will take a lot of time and hard drive space but it should be worth it.

If you do a test for the averaging be sure to boost the saturation as this should really highlight the noise as shown by the X0 guys here

also does the V800 allow you to get a composite output before separation to s-video?
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Max_Rebo said:

It's nice to see people are still interested in laserdisc transfers, I am especially interested in seeing a good transfer of these pre THX discs.

I have to second Moth3r's suggestion of averaging out multiple captures, it is the only way to reduce analogue noise without adversely affecting the image you are trying to preserve, keep in mind that this is one of the factors that makes the X0 player so good, except in that case it is done internally averaging the result from 5 separate NTSC decoders, I would suggest doing 5 captures of each side of the disc (preferably using a lossless codec) and averaging out the results before any other filtering/resizing. Obviously this will take a lot of time and hard drive space but it should be worth it.

If you do a test for the averaging be sure to boost the saturation as this should really highlight the noise as shown by the X0 guys here

also does the V800 allow you to get a composite output before separation to s-video?


Capturing 5 times?!?! I'll have to think about that one. But it will be lossless, I capture uncompressed which makes one 120 min. movie about 250GB.

The V800 only has composite out, no s-video out.


I can average 5 captures BEFORE IVTC, right?
Fez: I am so excited about Star Whores.
Hyde: Fezzy, man, it's Star Wars.
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Five captures was just a suggestion. It depends on how clean the signal is to begin with; you may get acceptable results taking the average of just two or three caps.

Doesn't really matter whether it's before or after IVTC, as long as the frames to be averaged are the same and no other filtering has taken place.

I don't know why are you capturing uncompressed, when a lossless codec would reduce the size of your capture file significantly (I'm guessing about a third of the size you quote).

"NTSC_M_J" sounds correct, and the Proc Amp dialogue is exactly the same as I have with my card. You need to tweak it, because all video sources are slightly different voltages. Make sure the brightness is high enough so that your blacks aren't crunched, and the contrast is low enough so that your whites aren't clipped. The waveform monitor in the colortools VDub plugin is excellent for checking this.

You can also boost the saturation as well if you wish; find a spot with pure red and ensure there is no clipping by using the colortools vectorscope. Leave the hue alone; I messed with it for my original laserdisc capture which unfortunately led to some of the colours getting washed out.

I also put the sharpness right to the top; this is what caused the halos you can see in my LD capture.

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Good luck Arnie! It sounds like a bit of work but really really promising.
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Yeah 5 captures was only a suggestion but personally I wouldn't go less than 3 just to be sure, and as long as you are using good quality cables you might not notice the difference between 3 and 5.

also remember that you don't need to have 5 captures of the whole film on your hard drive all at the same time, take 5 captures of side one, average them out and save it as a lossless avi and then delete the raw captures as they will no longer be of any use. Then do the same for side two....

ThrowgnCpr said:

http://i129.photobucket.com/albums/p203/ThrowgnCpr/SW_V8_small.png


I like!
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Wow! I'm really excited about this Arnie.d!

As for the averaging of the captures, it would be even better to do a median filter on 3 captures.

so given a row of pixels from three different captures:

(n1),(x2),(x3)

(x1),(n2),(x3)

(x1),(x2),(n3)

where x is a good pixel, and n is a noisy pixel, averaging would give you:

2/3*x1 + 1/3*n1 , 2/3*x2 + 1/3*n2 , 2/3*x3 + 1/3*n3

whereas a median filter would give:

(x1),(x2),(x3)

Even better to use 3 captures from 3 different laserdiscs to remove laser rot, but that I suspect is out of reach. I would love to help with the Avisynth scripting if you would like.

Do you plan on de-interlacing also?

-G
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ThrowingCpr, that logo pwnz.

"Right now the coffees are doing their final work." (Airi, Masked Rider Den-o episode 1)

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ThrowgnCpr said:

http://i129.photobucket.com/albums/p203/ThrowgnCpr/SW_V8_small.png


I like it too. It looks cool, and distinct. Mostly I'm just following this thread in the hopes of learning something...but good luck to you guys!
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We could've had a V8 release!

Looks nice, can't wait to see how this ends up.

A Goon in a Gaggle of 'em