The UsoVision Edition [was DC Lazor DOES HAVE ... Attempting a new rip]

Yeah, yeah, I know.

A friend of mine and occasional OT poster bought me a Definitive Collection laserdisc box, and I'm attempting a rip with my settop. I highly doubt it'll be XØ quality but I don't really care, I still think it'll be better than GOUT. I'm ripping it now to DVD-Rs.

EDIT: I have uploaded a 50 MB VOB containing a quickie test encode of the Greedo scene, IVTC'd, anamorphic'd, with a light temporal cleaner and brightness/contrast adjustment based on the brightness of the subtitles. I don't know if it's better than the GOUT, which is what I hope for, but eh. I'm mainly doing this for myself, but I like to share.

UPDATE: ANH can be found on the usotsuki.info:6969 tracker and mininova as "Star Wars Usovision"

It's looking good so far.  I snapped a shot and tried to match it as close ot the one in the screenshots thread, for those of you who are too lazy to download (like I usually am)

I've got ANH and ESB captured.  These won't make good XPxx source as-is but could be massaged into such.  For now I'll just do straight upconversions and label them the "UsoVision" edition.

I am making aspect-corrected screenshots with avidemux and imagemagick as I encode ANH.  I decided not to try color-correction as I'll almost certainly flunk it (and because honestly I forgot to!)

The shots are numbered according to the 36 shots on the screenshot thread.

I am uploading a barebones iso to my friend's server to torrent on my tracker.

It has only the main feature, reserving some room for someone else to make menus and chapter stops.  The data takes about 4299 MB so there should be about 150 MB for someone to add menus.

ANH can be found on the usotsuki.info:6969 tracker and mininova as "Star Wars Usovision"

Updated the screenshots to include all 36.

As one of the few still interested in LD captures, I would have liked to have seen more info in this thread. Anyway, I found this .txt file included with the release:

STAR WARS USOVISION
===================

  Movie: STAR WARS (imdb: tt0076759)
  Release: 1977/05/25
           1981/04/10 (with this rollup)
           1993/09/15 (with this audio mix)
  "Written and directed by George Lucas. Produced by Gary Kurtz"
 
  This is the edition of 1993, from the Definitive Collection.
  It differs very little from the 2006 bonus disc
    (same master except for the rollup)
  But the audio is ripped at a higher bitrate (256 vs 192)
  The video was ripped higher prior to downcode, and made anamorphic.
  The laserdisc rip was lightly cleaned (IVTC/temporal denoiser only).
 
  Hardware: Pioneer CLD-M301 laserdisc player
            normal quality audio cables
            gold-tip braided video cable
            Funai SV2000 WV10D6 DVD recorder
  Software: MPlayer SVN
            Avidemux 2.3
            TMPGENC DVD Author 1.6
  Format: VIDEO_TS folder
          MPEG-2 720x480x23.976 ANAMORPHIC Aspect Ratio 2.35 with Letterbox
                 ABR approx. 4500 kbps, 2-pass encode with Avidemux
                 (mpeg2enc codec)
          AC3 256 kbps stereo, hardware encoded
 
  There are no menus, softsubs or alternate audio tracks.
  This is a BAREBONES release.
  This is NOT the XP77.

Will have a closer look later , but contrast seems to be set a little too high (as shown by the loss of highlights in white areas of shot 6).

Moth3r said:

As one of the few still interested in LD captures,

Credit to anyone still out there who is trying to preserve any of the Star Wars films (even the last 3!!) to the way they were as originally released using whatever source(s) available.

I would rather watch the Spider release (can anyone remember that one??) than just about any of the "Special no Ewoks/Jar Jar/bad Jake-Anakin lines/didn't like the plot Editions" that are out there. We need to see more work like this and get back to what the site is really all about.

Having said that, everyone is entitled to their opinions and I respect that.

I will be checking this one out shortly.........

Molly said:

...

EDIT: I have uploaded a 50 MB VOB containing a quickie test encode of the Greedo scene, IVTC'd, anamorphic'd, with a light temporal cleaner and brightness/contrast adjustment based on the brightness of the subtitles. I don't know if it's better than the GOUT, which is what I hope for, but eh. I'm mainly doing this for myself, but I like to share.

I checked out the sample. Is it worth me making any suggestions for improvement, seeing as you've already uploaded a torrent?

There's really nothing I can improve cap-wise, but if there's encoding things I can improve, I can improve them for ESB/ROTJ.

Firstly, with the IVTC - although it seems to have been successful for the most part, I noticed some flickering artefacts on the near-horizontal lines behind Han in the cantina. I'm guessing that the IVTC includes an element of post-processing that is incorrectly identifying these lines on certain frames as combing artefacts, and blurring them.

Secondly, the "light temporal cleaner" is probably a bit too strong, especially since the image already suffers from the DVNR-from-hell that was part of the THX laserdisc mastering process. The pan across the cantina is even more of a blurry mess than it was before.

And if you could back off the contrast a little, if possible, that would avoid the loss of detail I pointed out in Post 8 above.

I can down it in avidemux, but the settop I cap from has, unfortunately, hardwired settings :(

Yeah, the IVTC I use has a postprocessor... I could turn it off, I suppose, though I dunno if it would cause a further mess (I'm not a filters expert and usually use none).