Please don't give up hope. Having your website has been a great inspiration to me. I'm not buying the Sept. set as it stands now nor am I seeing Episode III. I hated Episodes I and II anyway, so not seeing III is no loss. I will see Episode III only if the Original Versions come to DVD before it comes out.
I too have DVD's of the Original Versions. I just finished making them from the Definitive Collection LD's late last month. I worked very hard on them from Thanksgiving until the end of January. They aren't perfect, but they are better than the Special Editions. I plan to make better versions once the technology improves. To keep the bitrates high, I split each film onto two DVD-R's. I converted them to 16:9, cropped the LD black bars, and added my own pure black bars. This made them look better because the LD black bars are too light and are not pure black. Since I did this, I had to recreate the subtitles for Greedo in Hope and Jabba in Jedi. I'm not trying to toot my own horn, but my subtitles look better than the LD's because they are yellow and easy to read. They are also in the film image as they were originally instead of in the bottom black bar.
The disc that took the longest was the extras. I encoded each interview separately. I also took all of the still images and made slideshows instead of having them setup like they were on the LD where you had to keep pressing the >> button. Basically the disc flows like this: Main menu pictures of each of the original posters (one for each film) that you click on to go to a submenu. Each of these submenus lists all of the extras for that film. The hardest part was making a play all button option where you could choose to play all of the interviews or slideshows for that particular film.
Here are pictures of my menus for the extras disc. I know they are cheesy, but I feel pretty good about them.
Anyway, my plan is to buy a 250 Gb hard drive and capture all 3 of the films to it (I didn't have the space to keep the captures, only the encoded MPEG-2 files I made) and one of those new DVD burners that can make dual layered DVD's. That way I can fix a couple little trouble spots with my encodes and have each film on one disc. I worked too hard on creating my own DVD's to buy Lucas' garbage SE's.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not against his artistic vision. I don't expect him to drop his SE's. I just want hime to include the Original Versions along side those. I guess that's too much for him to handle though.
I also hear you about all of the sheep who are going to flock to buy the Sept. release. I don't care what it is. I won't buy any DVD unless it is absolutely what I want. I held off on many releases until better versions came along because of being burned so many times by subpar releases.
I hope you don't mind, but here are the pictures from my extra disc menus. They are nothing fancy, but I kind of like them. I didn't put any motion menus or any background music on any of the discs I made. I wanted to save as much space as I could for the audio and video quality. I also hope the pictures don't violate the file size limits of the forum.
Take care.
Patrick
