.: The XØ Project - Laserdisc on Steroids :. (SEE FIRST POST FOR UPDATES) (* unfinished project *) — Page 95

And here is the same frame from the NTSC GOUT:

Rob said:

Harmy said:

Well, the aliasing and DVNR are inherent to the laserdisc master so it will always be there no matter what. I honestly can't imagine any laserdisc capture being better than the GOUT, based on the fact that the GOUT is encoded from the same master as the LDs, so it's the same (2nd) generation copy of the master as the LDs but made using newer technology. Any LD capture will be a 3rd generation copy. But I'd be happy to be proved wrong on that.

 Couldn't it make quite a difference being that it will be 16X9? The GOUT is letterboxed and unless you want to watch it fully framed with a foot of black on all sides, you have to use the wide zoom setting on the tv which makes it look extremely fuzzy. I'm hoping that letterboxed vs 16x9 will make a big difference, but maybe I'm just being queer about it. I better not be too queer though, it seems that Molly is a homophobe. That usually means that someone is gay themselves, or at least does quite a bit of scissoring.

Yeah, but as you can see, the captures are not 16x9, so they would have to be anamorphicized much the same way as many projects did with the GOUT and as the GOUT is probably higher quality to begin with, there's no point using a LD capture. A pristine capture of a LD other than the 1993DC may be a different matter because some scenes could be replaced by it where the DVNR is really bad on the GOUT but capturing the 1993DC doesn't seem to make a lot of sense to me.

So does Zion have the JSC captures too, (or whatever else they were sourcing) or is it only the '93?

Harmy said:

...but capturing the 1993DC doesn't seem to make a lot of sense to me.

It did make a lot of sense when Laserman captured these, GOUT wasn't available back then.

EDIT: I fear that the only thing this XØ transfer have that can be of some use, is one of the best representations out there of the 1981- A New Hope crawl/opening shot.

In fact, the banding I see in AviSynth's histogram("classic") view suggests to me that the raw files have already had some form of levels adjustment. MeBeJedi, did you do anything else with these files apart from the IVTC?

No, there's banding. There are other problems as well. If you have the scene of R2 going through the canyon, there's some definite problems there as well. I don't remember the technical term, but there's rolling interference in the scene. I remember comparing my capture from my V8000 to Laserman's, and it turned out that the X0 really highlighted the problems with the transfer. My transfer looked "cleaner", because a lot of the problematic details didn't show up. That's why I was spending so much time trying to get rid of missing pixels and "debris".

msycamore said:

Harmy said:

...but capturing the 1993DC doesn't seem to make a lot of sense to me.

It did make a lot of sense when Laserman captured these, GOUT wasn't available back then.

Well, yeah sure, I just don't see what's all the fuss about now, when we do have the GOUT (and it sucks but it probably sucks a tiny bit less than even the best possible LD transfer).

People seem to think of the X0 project as some kind of holy grail but on it's own, the capture is just another LD capture that is slightly inferior to the GOUT.

The black magic process seemed to be something worthwhile and for that it would have made sense to make really high quality captures of all the different LDs and then combining them into a better picture. People saw those pictures that were supposedly the results of the Black Magic and they seem to expect that kind of quality from the raw caps, I'm afraid they're gonna be disappointed.

I'm quite positive now, that we won't be getting anything we don't already have.

Harmy said:

msycamore said:

Harmy said:

...but capturing the 1993DC doesn't seem to make a lot of sense to me.

It did make a lot of sense when Laserman captured these, GOUT wasn't available back then.

 

Well, yeah sure, I just don't see what's all the fuss about now, when we do have the GOUT (and it sucks but it probably sucks a tiny bit less than even the best possible LD transfer).

 

Neither do I.

The "Fuss" was that it wasn't solely about the transfer, but also about how we were going to fix up the video afterwards. That's where Laserman's expertise came in.

If you want to try making those kinds of corrections with the MPEG of the GOUT, be my guest.

MeBeJedi said:

The "Fuss" was that it wasn't solely about the transfer, but also about how we were going to fix up the video afterwards. That's where Laserman's expertise came in. 

I think what Harmy meant is that some people are maybe expecting a miracle just from this raw capture when it isn't. You guys haven't stated that either but maybe what you describe above is what some didn't get.

msycamore said:

I think what Harmy meant is that some people are maybe expecting a miracle just from this raw capture when it isn't. 

Yeah, that's exactly what I meant.

Zion and MeBeJedi, I still think it looks all right - even if the GOUT looks better, I would be happy watching this. Thank you for sharing what you have; even if it's not the "holy grail" people were expecting, it's still closure on the project - for those who have been waiting and you guys, I hope.

corellian77 said:

...the images above appear to show noise in the GOUT that is absent from the X0 capture)

Well, the "noice" you're speaking about is only not visible in the X0 transfer because there is detail loss.

I'm not technically savvy when it comes to preservations, but MeBeJedi's recent comment would seem to indicate that, despite appearances, there is still more to milk out of the X0 LD rip than the GOUT.  If such is the case, I'm curious to know what this capture can allow one to do that the GOUT can't.

That. I also don't know much about the technical side of these things and would like to know what could be done with the LD transfers that couldn't be done with GOUT converted to lossless avi? I hope I don't come across sarcastic or anything, I'm seriously interested :-)

Don't worry, my sarcasm detector didn't go off.  ;)

Actually, between those two pics, the two biggest differences I see are different black levels and a vertical height difference of about a half-inch. (Not surprising since, if I remember correctly, all the official SW releases were altered to 16x9. It's been awhile since I've watched any of the SW films.)

And there was a lot of talk, both throughout this thread (if you don't mind going through the various posts) and in our private board about such topics as editing in RGB and wavelength analysis. A lot of the stuff was beyond my capabilities at the time. To quote Han Solo, "Laserman was the brains, sweetheart". My contribution was largely going to be the manual labor, cleaning up the obvious stuff, which meant frame-by-frame analysis in Combustion. I probably would have done more after that, but we lost contact with L just as we were starting to ramp all this stuff up to speed. His technical contributions really were the base of this whole operation.

The LD transfers needed a LOT of work, and while there's still a lot that could be done, I don't know if we could still, at this point, accomplish all that we had hoped without finding someone else of L's level of expertise.

Oh no Charlie Murphy, the milk's gone bad!

Asaki said:

So does Zion have the JSC captures too, (or whatever else they were sourcing) or is it only the '93?

We do have a very good quailty JSC capture of ANH captured with the PDI deluxe card, but it was not captured from the X0 LD player. It was not available to us at the time, unfortunately.

Well, remember, it wasn't just about the capture on the X0 machine. It was about getting captures from at least two different sets of each movie, then combining those captures to get the maximum detail.

Then taking that highly detailed captured video and restoring it as best as possible (color correction, anti-aliasing, maybe upscale to 16x9 DVD res, etc.), so the end result would be better than the raw capture of a single laserdisk set. I think that was the plan. And from the screen shot of Mos Eisley that was shown, it looked like it could beat the 2006 DVD set for detail after those things were done.