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Info: OT Bootleg DVDs — Page 23

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I've fixed the text files and the inserts. Thank you for spell checking it oojason. I don't have Microsoft Word right now, so I had to use Notepad(hence the errors). It took me about 3 hours to make the chapter names because I had to go chapter-to-chapter and figure out what to call each scene(plus I got caught up in watching the movies!).

http://www.centreforcinemastudies.com/images/top_movie_donnie_darko.jpg

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Is there a way to get all of the video noise? I got a copy about 6 months ago and it looks fine on my 31" but on a 57'" it doesn't look so good.? Also is there a way to change my username? I messed up somehow.
My name is Troy. I have been reading the boards for a long time

looking for HDTV of the  Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith.  Also HDTV of The Lord of the Rings trilogy

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Oops. I had my private messages turned off as well. Sorry about that.

I'm going to compare the Torrent ANH with the one I made. As far as I can tell, the picture quality is about the same. Mine are 16x9 as well. I just don't know if my colors are as nice, but I'll do some sort of comparison to find out.

My LD's are not missing the 17 seconds of Leia welding, so I may try to piece that part into the Torrent download and see if I can match it up. It isn't impossible to do, but it is a pain nonetheless.

Patrick
"When you have to shoot, shoot. Don't talk." - Tuco from The Good, The Bad And The Ugly
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Rikter-

Is that yahoo email you have mentioned, working? My mail to you is returned saying - user has no yahoo account.

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I do not know if this was answered already but, Are the Torrent Files of the OT Films Laserdisc on "P2P"?? Just Wondering.


Thanks for any Info.
§ JxF §
http://i88.photobucket.com/albums/k200/Jediii_2006/box/blu-sw.jpg

http://i88.photobucket.com/albums/k200/Jediii_2006/box/starwars_ani.gif
http://img118.imageshack.us/img118/489/bluraydisc2lk9.jpg
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I sent you an e-mail ubow to the address you PM'd me , so I dunno what's going on, I'll try a PM, and an e-mail again.

DFNYC, I already have a dual layer burner at work (sony gave us one) , and yup that was pretty much my plan, also will be coming in from the LD via RGB to a lossless 4:4:4 capture system, so I am hoping to get a better capture.

The trouble is that the LD version is 'slightly foggy', so my main aim is to de-SE the DVD set when it is released, and then colour match and re-add in the footage from the LD set where required.
I expect the transfer on the DVDs to be considerably better (especially in colour fidelity) than the LD version.

It will give me something to do on the night shift while waiting for renders anyway.
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Originally posted by: Laserman
DFNYC, I already have a dual layer burner at work (sony gave us one) , and yup that was pretty much my plan, also will be coming in from the LD via RGB to a lossless 4:4:4 capture system, so I am hoping to get a better capture.


Man, I would love to see an RGB to a lossless 4:4:4 transfer burned to dual-layer.
Hey Laserman, do you plan on converting these to anamorphic? That's my question about the current anamorphic ones. Does anybody know how these were done? I know to convert them you can just delete the "black bars", but these look better than to have just done that. I read once somewhere that the only real best way to convert to anamorphic is to go from non-anamorphic PAL to anamorphic NTSC. It has somehting to do with the better progressive scan of PAL. Does anyone know if that's true? If so, are there PAL laserdiscs out there somewhere? I've only seen NTSC. Anyway, definitely keep us updated Laserman...
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Pal will give you extra resolution but then the picture and sound will be sped up and you'd have to slow it down for NTSC creating unwanted streaking and artifacts.

Not a good solution.
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IIRC there is usually a 4% time difference in total length of a film being shown between PAL and NTSC - deosn't seem a great deal to me - tho I havn't got the eye or ear for noticing such things.

A little patience goes a long way on this old-school Rebel base. If you are having issues finding what you are looking for, these will be of some help…

Welcome to the OriginalTrilogy.com | Introduce yourself in here | Useful info within : About : Help : Site Rules : Fan Project Rules : Announcements
How do I do this?’ on the OriginalTrilogy.com; some info & answers + FAQs - includes info on how to search for projects and threads on the OT•com

A Project Index for Star Wars Preservations (Harmy’s Despecialized & 4K77/80/83 etc) : A Project Index for Star Wars Fan Edits (adywan & Hal 9000 etc)

… and take your time to look around this site before posting - to get a feel for this place. Don’t just lazily make yet another thread asking for projects.

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Originally posted by: oojason
IIRC there is usually a 4% time difference in total length of a film being shown between PAL and NTSC - deosn't seem a great deal to me - tho I havn't got the eye or ear for noticing such things.


You are correct...a 4% difference. But that is not the only problem you will have in displaying it if you have an NTSC TV. There has to be an internal conversion of the signal which results in other problems.

For me, the 4% can be very annoying unless you tune it out which can be hard. Sometimes you don't have a choice.

With these, I'd much rather use an NTSC source especially with Star Wars, which I know word for word, note for note.
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Originally posted by: Jashun44
Originally posted by: Laserman

Hey Laserman, do you plan on converting these to anamorphic? That's my question about the current anamorphic ones. Does anybody know how these were done? I know to convert them you can just delete the "black bars", but these look better than to have just done that.


It's a little more complicated than just cutting off the black bars. Your encoder has to support 16:9 conversion. What I do with mine is tell my encoder (TMPNGEnc Plus) my original source is 4:3 525 Line (NTSC 704x480) and that it is interlaced. Next, I set the Video Arrange Method to Full Screen (Keep Aspect Ratio). The video arrange method tells how the video should be displayed. The setting I use tells it to Maximize the window and keep the aspect ratio. Next I use a filter called Clip Frame to crop the black bars. The image size is 720x approximately 276 (this varies depending on how thick the bars are). Finally, I go to another tab where you specify output. I tell my encoder to convert the video to 16:9 and tell it to output the size to 720 x 480. All of that together stretches the image and adds new black bars which look better than the LD's original black bars. The picture still looks correct because of the Video Arrange Method setting telling it to keep the aspect ratio. In addition, the color of the new bars is also set by the user. I don't know why anyone would want to, but you could have purple bars if you choose to.

The torrent file choose a method similar to this because the subtitles for Greedo are on the video image instead of in the bottom black bar like they are on the LD. My subtitles are also overlayed on the video image. I say similar because I don't know what encoder was used to convert from AVI or DV to MPEG-2. I guess you could have the subtitles in the bottom black bar if you have a script that says to generate subtitles after the resizing is done.

Finally, once encoded, there is a flag somewhere in the video that tells your DVD Player how to display the image. This flag is overridden by your DVD Player's setting. So, if your DVD Player is set to 4:3, it will convert the image to 4:3 by removing some of the vertical lines and the image will look correct on a 4:3 TV. This is undetectable by our eyes if done properly. Likewise, if your DVD Player is set to 16:9, it will take the read the flag from the video and correctly display it at 16:9 if you are playing it on a 16:9 TV.

I hope this information helps explain it a little. I didn't go into IVTC which is a process of making the video appear progressive instead of interlace by converting the framerate to that of film instead of video, but that is something for another time.


Patrick
"When you have to shoot, shoot. Don't talk." - Tuco from The Good, The Bad And The Ugly
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Originally posted by: Patrick R.


It's a little more complicated than just cutting off the black bars.


Yeah, I know that. I was just simplifying my question. Although I must say, this process does seem a bit more complicated on a Windows machine. I've done this type conversion on my Mac, and I don't have to go through that many steps. I've gotten some pretty good results. I bascially use Quicktime to re-adjust the picture and then apply some filters to clean it up. Sometimes, depending on the video's original aspect ratio, I do go through some other steps though.
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hmm, the thing about mixing and matching video edits is that, well, the parts that have changed (ie where the ld fills in the gap) will look noticably worse than the other parts. just saying. also, it would be nice to do a mix/match of the two, ie take parts where there's good cgi (ie the temple yavin scene where it's more a maya temple instead of a big blank wall) and so forth.
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I seriously doubt this will happen, but if the Originals are not included in the DVD release, it would be at least be nice if all of the original scenes that had been changed were included in the extras with cleaned up audio and digital. Then it would only be a matter of editing to once again have the Original versions.

Patrick
"When you have to shoot, shoot. Don't talk." - Tuco from The Good, The Bad And The Ugly
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I am in two minds about converting to Anamorphic.
The only real advantage to Anamorphic is when it is shot in Anamorph as you get more resolution on screen.
By converting a non-anamorphic source to anamorphic, you are not increasing the resolution, in fact you are adding a level of processing that can only degrade the image, so I will do some testing, but I can't see an adavantage to it at this stage.

Re mixing the different video and matching it, that is what I do for a living with film, so I am not too worried about getting it right.
I have the tools and the skills to pretty much match anything to anything else, down to matching specific film grains from specific manufacturers, so it should be OK.

Obviously the best point to do it is on scene changes, as otherwise you are asking for trouble.

At this stage I am thinking of 2 versions (maybe 3). All will be DVD-9, and there will be an uncompressed version.

1) As original as possible - Basically a transfer from the LD version with a colour grading to the SE version to match it's colour balance.

The original LD transfer was unfortunately done in a way that muted the colours and reduced the ANSI contrast ratio. I intend tweaking only to grade it to as close to an original film master as possible. As a second pass may try ripping the audio track from the SE to get a dolby digital track, and editing in areas where it is different. Not sure if that will be worth the effort though re the audio, the laserdisc stereo track is very good.

2) The improved edition. Basically as suggested by some here. A hybrid based mostly on the SE leaving in 'error corrections' and maybe some of the less offensive enhancements. (background extensions, matte cleanups etc.) with the dolby digital soundtrack, but getting rid of the horror show like the cantina musical number and so on.

Also thinking about allowing angle selection on changed scenes up to a point.
Wadda y'all think? It will all be for my own personal use of course.
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Just came out of lurking.
Suggestion no.2 really sounds like a brilliant idea if it can be pulled off.

Peter




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Originally posted by: Laserman
I am in two minds about converting to Anamorphic.
The only real advantage to Anamorphic is when it is shot in Anamorph as you get more resolution on screen.
By converting a non-anamorphic source to anamorphic, you are not increasing the resolution, in fact you are adding a level of processing that can only degrade the image, so I will do some testing, but I can't see an adavantage to it at this stage.


I didn't notice any quality degradation when I did test comparing 4:3 to 16:9 encodes. There may be a slight loss of quality, but it wasn't enough for me to notice. The advantage to doing 16:9 is that the image will be displayed properly on a 16:9 TV. Some 16:9 TV's are better than others at doing the image conversion. My menus are 4:3 on my current discs because there was no way I knew of to make a 16:9 menu that would display correctly on my 4:3 TV. I went to a couple of stores and tried out my disc on a few 16:9 TV's. The image of the video was displayed correctly on all three since my video was encoded 16:9. However, only one TV displayed my menu automatically without bars on the sides and without stretching it out of proportion. One showed the menu with bars on the sides and the last one stretched the image out of proportion.

Check out the huge Star Wars thread at DVDrHelp. Just about everyone there is doing 16:9. There was a huge discussion and debate going on at one time which was better. Those who had 16:9 TV's were not happy with the way their 4:3 encodes turned out, but they were happy when they went back and redid them in 16:9.

Notice I didn't say Anamorphic. I sometimes refer to 16:9 as Anamorphic, but we are not doing true Anamorphic here since we do not have the equipment to do that with. You are right that you do not gain vertical resolution, but I believe the degradation is also so tiny because you are not blowing up the image that much.

I also wouldn't be doing 16:9 if I hadn't already tried doing 4:3 and comparing the two to see which I liked better. I noticed no difference between the two on my 4:3 TV, so I'm sticking with 16:9 since I will eventually own a 16:9 TV.

Finally, if you are seriously considering taking footage from the upcoming DVD's, they are 16:9.

Patrick
"When you have to shoot, shoot. Don't talk." - Tuco from The Good, The Bad And The Ugly
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Just chiming in to say I'm finally finishing my ANH DVD. I'm using the "Faces" set for the video and audio, and the Def. Col. for the commentary.

I have a Pioneer 701, which I connected to my Sony DCR-TRV33 digital camcorder, using the analog/digital pass-through to capture and transfer the footage to my computer. I used Sony Vegas for the capture/manipulation, as well as to create a 5.1 soundtrack (I software-decoded the PCM sountrack with Pro-Logic II, created 5 mono .wav's, and then combined them into an .ac3 file.)

I used DVD-Lab Pro for authoring, so that I could get the commentary track on as well. In a few minutes, I'll see how it finally looks (after days of trouble-shooting various menu glitches.)

I'm curious to know why people are choosing to use the Def. Col. transfer over the "Faces" set, which was cleaned up the most. The CAV feature of the Def. Col. only aides in still shots, does it not?

<span class=“Italics”>MeBeJedi: Sadly, I believe the prequels are beyond repair.
<span class=“Bold”>JediRandy: They’re certainly beyond any repair you’re capable of making.</span></span>

<span class=“Italics”>MeBeJedi: You aren’t one of us.
<span class=“Bold”>Go-Mer-Tonic: I can’t say I find that very disappointing.</span></span>

<span class=“Italics”>JediRandy: I won’t suck as much as a fan edit.</span>

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Why oh WHY do people create 5.1 tracks. THERE IS NO 5.1 TRACK!!!!!!!!!!! LEAVE IT ALONE!!!!!!!

The Def. Collection is the same transfer as the faces laserdisc. *sigh* Do you know what you're doing?
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Originally posted by: digitalfreaknyc
Why oh WHY do people create 5.1 tracks. THERE IS NO 5.1 TRACK!!!!!!!!!!! LEAVE IT ALONE!!!!!!!


They could use that "holophonics" technic to create 4 audio channels based on a stereo track.
“Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.” — Nazi Reich Marshal Hermann Goering
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"Why oh WHY do people create 5.1 tracks. THERE IS NO 5.1 TRACK!!!!!!!!!!! LEAVE IT ALONE!!!!!!!"

Hey Dude...chill out. It gives me a Pro-logic II soundtrack without needing a Pro-logic II outboard decoder (which I don't have), and the .ac3 file takes up far less space than the PCM file. If you knew what you were doing, you'd see the obvious benefits here.

If you also knew what you were doing, you'd know this is exactly how LFL derived their 5.1 soundtrack for the SE's, rather than from the 6-track masters. As for me, I've been doing months of research and spent hundreds of dollars for this project, and now I have a great looking AND SOUNDING SW DVD of the O-OT.

"The Def. Collection is the same transfer as the faces laserdisc. *sigh* Do you know what you're doing?"

Which is precisely why I asked my question. *sigh* Do you comprehend what you are reading?

<span class=“Italics”>MeBeJedi: Sadly, I believe the prequels are beyond repair.
<span class=“Bold”>JediRandy: They’re certainly beyond any repair you’re capable of making.</span></span>

<span class=“Italics”>MeBeJedi: You aren’t one of us.
<span class=“Bold”>Go-Mer-Tonic: I can’t say I find that very disappointing.</span></span>

<span class=“Italics”>JediRandy: I won’t suck as much as a fan edit.</span>

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Originally posted by: MeBeJedi
"Why oh WHY do people create 5.1 tracks. THERE IS NO 5.1 TRACK!!!!!!!!!!! LEAVE IT ALONE!!!!!!!"

Hey Dude...chill out. It gives me a Pro-logic II soundtrack without needing a Pro-logic II outboard decoder (which I don't have), and the .ac3 file takes up far less space than the PCM file. If you knew what you were doing, you'd see the obvious benefits here.

If you also knew what you were doing, you'd know this is exactly how LFL derived their 5.1 soundtrack for the SE's, rather than from the 6-track masters. As for me, I've been doing months of research and spent hundreds of dollars for this project, and now I have a great looking AND SOUNDING SW DVD of the O-OT.

"The Def. Collection is the same transfer as the faces laserdisc. *sigh* Do you know what you're doing?"

Which is precisely why I asked my question. *sigh* Do you comprehend what you are reading?


Part of the problem with EVERY bootleg that has come out is precisely what you're doing. There's NO reason to remix to 5.1 because it never sounds good. And i completely challenge your statement that what LFL did with the SE's was to remix the regular track to 5.1 like your doing. Completely not the case. They did a complete overhaul of the films soundtrack.

And if you had a great sounding set, they would be in uncompressed PCM instead of your compressed Dolby Digital.

Yes, I comprehend what I'm reading. But obviously someone who has done months of research and spent hundereds of dollars on equipment should know what the hell they're transferring before they do it, no? Or am I just ASSuming something.

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"Part of the problem with EVERY bootleg that has come out is precisely what you're doing. There's NO reason to remix to 5.1 because it never sounds good."

All I am doing is hard-coding the Pro-logic II soundtrack that you would normally get from a Pro-Logic II receiver, and storing it in compressed form. Is this really so difficult for you to understand? It's a tedious process, but it sounds incredible. I would imagine many of the so-called "5.1" mixes you've heard (if any) weren't done correctly, since the method used was very difficult to locate and fine-tune.

It's not like my soundtrack is causing you physical harm, right? Quit making this into a pissing contest.

<span class=“Italics”>MeBeJedi: Sadly, I believe the prequels are beyond repair.
<span class=“Bold”>JediRandy: They’re certainly beyond any repair you’re capable of making.</span></span>

<span class=“Italics”>MeBeJedi: You aren’t one of us.
<span class=“Bold”>Go-Mer-Tonic: I can’t say I find that very disappointing.</span></span>

<span class=“Italics”>JediRandy: I won’t suck as much as a fan edit.</span>

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I personally wasn't interested in a 16:9 version as I use a CRT projector stack and project onto a 12 foot wide screen.
CRT projectors areinherently 4:3 devices, so that is where my bias comes in. Also on a screen that size you do see the quality drop in the conversion to 16:9, small as it is.

So you are saying that most widescreen sets don't correctly handle letterboxed material? I wasn't aware of that, the only widescreen sets we have at work are all hidef broadcast units, and they don't have a problem.

In that case, I will do a letterbox and a 16:9 version for all you widescreeners out there.

I know the new trilogy is 16:9, so option 1. 'Original as possible' will be letterbox - retaining the LD ratio, and option 2 will be 16:9 for the 'corrected version'

To the guys that are using there digicams to digitise the footage, it is a nice and easy method, but they are not the best quality wise, and you are also throwing away a lot of chroma resolution by downsampling to 4:1:1 before then re-transcoding it AGAIN to DVD.
Ideally You really want to come in to an uncompressed stream, that retains full chroma resolution. (4:4:4)

In practice for most of you, Digital Betacam or DVCPRO 50 are probably the most accessible ways to do this. They at least leave you with 4:2:2 (For a bit of an explanation of Chroma sampling check out http://www.cs.sfu.ca/CourseCentral/365/li/material/notes/Chap3/Chap3.4/Chap3.4.html )
As for the soundtrack, from my reading, the SE versions have had a full remix done from the original multitude of mono and stereo tracks, but I will wait and see what the sound is like. From memory at the cinema, it was very good.
For my 'original' version, I will probably be keeping the stereo track from the laserdisc, it is very good.