Star Wars 1997 DTS CD-ROMs (Released) — Page 6

SilverWook said:

Congrats on finally getting ESB.

 Thanks....it was worth the patience.

They are all ISO'd up.  I've just got to get them uploaded and get links sent out to all who need them.

Yeehaw!!!! 

msycamore said:

russs15 said:

There has been far too much Original Trilogy nonsense around here lately...

Should this comment of yours be taken seriously or was it a joke?

Personally I don't care for the SE, IMO it's a true bastardization that only degrades the original film, but I sympathize with those of you who would like it to be preserved. I first downloaded it in order to help cataloguing all the changes that's been done for 005's thread, and then thought what the heck I might even try to make a corrected version out of it when I'm at it. It's not like I've done anything special no one else can do for themselves, the broadcasts are out there and torrented, I just converted it to NTSC, fixed the AR and restored the missing frames, so far no one has contacted me about this, maybe someone more invested in this than me that have the skills with audio will do what I don't.

Sorry for bringing this into your thread, borisanddoris. I think it's really fantastic that you guys have obtained these discs and working on getting these mixes preserved.

I would be interested ..... I've been so pre-occupied with this audio preservation and home stuff that I haven't been looking at much else.  Drop me a pm.  My download speed stinks but if you'd consider sending me copies I'd love to have them for when this audio is finished. 

We've provided the source material on other available avenues for others who might want to work on them with other projects.

:) 

msycamore said:

russs15 said:

it was my attempt to show my quirky British sense of humour as well as well as to see if there was any other interest in an SE standard.

Sorry, I should've understood that it was said in jest.

Jetrell Fo, I've decided to post my files to usenet.

That's cool....I'll have to wait until they show up on myspleen. 

:)

This thread is starting to stray....we need to make a new one for this so it doesn't get lost.

Please use this link http://originaltrilogy.com/forum/topic.cfm/The-1997-Star-Wars-Special-Edition-Trilogy-Preservation-Standards-Thread-Work-In-Progress/topic/14647/

Back on topic.....

I have not received any word yet on how far along ANH & ROTJ are in the audio processing chain or when they'll be available.  I've sent out pm's but haven't gotten any word as of yet.

I know boris and El have busy schedules and I did offer my assistance but at this point things are still quiet.  Hopefully one of them will drop in when they have time to let us know how things are going.

Cheers!!!!

Jetrell Fo said:

I have not received any word yet on how far along ANH & ROTJ are in the audio processing chain or when they'll be available.  I've sent out pm's but haven't gotten any word as of yet.

Haven't had time to comment on this thread in awhile, but I'm glad that the audio discs are in good hands. Hopefully, once preserved they could be synced to something like msycamore's NTSC DVDs, which he mentioned in this thread. That would be a fantastic '97 preservation.

The Aluminum Falcon said:

Jetrell Fo said:

I have not received any word yet on how far along ANH & ROTJ are in the audio processing chain or when they'll be available.  I've sent out pm's but haven't gotten any word as of yet.

Haven't had time to comment on this thread in awhile, but I'm glad that the audio discs are in good hands. Hopefully, once preserved they could be synced to something like msycamore's NTSC DVDs, which he mentioned in this thread. That would be a fantastic '97 preservation.

We are currently looking at an array of options for these.  msycamore has come to the other thread with possibilities.  I am excited at all that might be accomplished once these are fully available.

:)

Okay....I want to get this posted for all of you who've downloaded the ISO's and now don't know what to do with them...Forum member CapableMetal has kindly sent me a tutorial to describe what he has done with these files for use. I'm going to post it here as a tied-you-over if you want to try somethings while we await the work borisanddoris and Eldonante are working on. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

You need the in_APTX.dll plugin for Winamp and Winamp 2.91 (the later versions don't recognise the plugin so cannot work). You then need to configure the output in Winamp from the DirectSound module to the Disk Writer. You then need to load the AUD file you're copying for the reel into the playlist, select mono track mode and just press play (important: only once!).

I had the Disk Writer output the WAV file to the desktop of my old laptop (its running XP, so I used it to ensure i didn't get compatibility errors, but as long as Winamp 2.91 works in later versions of Windows it should all work perfectly) and renamed the file so I knew which part it was (anh_r1_fR.wav, for ANH Reel 1 Front Right, for example) and kept doing it until I had ripped all channels of all reels separately. Then I opened up Sound Forge 10 (although any WAV editor that can handle 5.1 should work; I use Sound Forge and Adobe Audition as I have actually had training as a performance sound engineer for live theatre) and dragged each channel into place.

This is where I realised that the channels output by the AptX plugin were all wrong, I noted the correct mapping for ANH and am guessing for the rest of the trilogy, as they're mastered by the same studio.

This is how I label the channels for the sake of quicker reference: Front Left (fL), Front Right (fR), Center (C), Surround Left (sL), Surround Right (sR) fL = fL fR = sL C = C sL = sR sR = fR The values left of = are what the AptX plugin thinks they are and the right is where the channels actually belong.

When you create a 5.1 file in Sound Forge they are listed in the order of 1=fL, 2=fR, 3=C, 4=LFE, 5=sL, 6=sR, so you just mix them together putting the correct WAV to the correct channel. At this point I copied and pasted the sL and sR into a new 2.0 WAV and performed a low pass filter cutting all frequencies above 80Hz, and performed a channel conversion down to mono.

Then I copied and pasted the mono file to channel 4 (LFE) in the 5.1 file. Next, save all your files to a format that supports 5.1 (WAV's can be saved as 5.1 but can be awkward for compatibility; I saved mine as Sony w64 files but FLAC or any lossless format supported by Audition CS6 would suffice), and open them into an Audition CS6 5.1 mix.

At this point you need a Sync source video saved to a compatible format, like a MOV or uncompressed; Audition seems to hate x264's AVC video and won't open MKV files, so I saved my capture with the Lagarith Lossless RGB codec to AVI, which are BIG files, but if you shrink your video to something like 640x288 it will play nicely and be smaller. Using the 2.0 audio from my laser disc, I slid each reel into place and matched the peaks at the END of each reel, as close to the end that I could find matching waveforms and zoomed in to align them as closely as possible.

I then had to rate-stretch them to the right length so they matched up at the start. I did this for all reels, cropping the end and beginning "beeps" from each one and rendered them under stretch properties as Rendered (High Quality), Polyphonic to preserve pitch.

After many hours of it 'Rendering', you will be able to mixdown to a 5.1, I choose FLAC. I must point out at this point that converting these files to any DTS format would likely be overkill. DTS-HD MA has a large size and will be hundreds of megs larger than a FLAC file. FLAC will happily encode to 16-bit, 44KHz, as the DTS discs seem to be, encoding to normal DTS will slightly compress them again, and encoding to DTS-HD will offer no performance gains. It would probably need to be upsampled to 24-bit, 48KHz (at least), which cannot serve to make it sound better but probably only worse.

I read the Wiki page for theater DTS, and it mentions the 24-bit timecode, which has nothing to do with the actual audio bit-rate (same way video uses the SMPTE time code, which is 80-bits, whereas the video is likely around 10-bits). I'm fairly convinced, due to the age of the discs, that 16-bit 44KHz is their format and it would be best to keep it that way.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

PLZ, read this carefully as it explains something I read & posted about briefly in regards to the Winamp plugin not mapping the channels properly. CapableMetal will be on vacation for a bit so he probably won't be doing any further work until mid October. He has said the he's done versions of ANH & ROTJ from the ISO's he downloaded. Folks are waiting for me to get TESB up....it will be up soon. I will shoot for end of the week. Cheers!!!! :) :)

I'm still here for the moment, I'm not off on holiday until next Wednesday so I'm working on this still. I'm trying to compile a frame-perfect 97se video source to sync the DTS discs to, and have re-synced ANH several times; starting from scratch each time so it doesn't ruin the quality from constant stretching of the audio. The good news is that its taking such a short amount of time that I hope to have made myself a sync source and, hopefully, sync'd it before I go to sleep tonight! I'll then see what I can do about getting it uploaded ASAP for people to have a listen, and give some feedback on the mix.

bilditup1 said:

newsgroups, right?

Yes

I want to thank CapableMetal for the assistance and knowledge he's brought to the table and shared.  The audio stuff can be just as complicated as the video end of things and when we get folks who have experience they share, our anxiety over projects can sometimes blind us (unintentionally), to what it's taken to get all of these projects moving and finished.

Cheers

satanika said:

Thank you CapableMetal for all that info, especially confirming the plugin marks the channels wrong.

However, one point in your methodology I disagree with -- the stretching part. I believe the more elegant solution would be to first change the samplerate to 44056 without resampling (= playing the soundtrack 0.1% slower), and THEN resample to 48000 with your favorite SRC (iZotope probably). The difference might be negligible, but should avoid any possible artifacts resulting from stretching.

Interesting point, and certainly worth a try. The stretching is certainly done at 0.1% to match 23.976fps but seems to need very fine tuning as it (thus far) hasn't quite seemed to line up properly. I'm unsure whether this is due to the fact that the time code from the film print is missing for 'perfect sync' or whether its just a case of me being too fussy (probably the latter). The quality of the rendered stretch in audition is actually very high, I haven't heard any artifacts on my test mixdown, and it preserves exact pitch too, although thats probably a silly thing to be worrying about as it'll only be 0.2 semitones out.

I'll give your suggestion a go now and see how it lines up with the video, although there now seems to be a more glaring problem in that there is one point where the sound in the front-right channel cuts out noticeably (twice) during the Tantive explosion. Re-ripping the channel makes no difference (even in RAW) so it might need some patching up.

Darth Mallwalker said:

I've been using SoX for SRC. By many accounts it's the best freeware solution, and second only to iZotope in the non-free category.

I've gone 44100 --> 48048 with SoX. Then using a hex editor, change 48048 to 48000 into the WAV header so it plays at the right speed.

[My reasoning 48048 is an integer, while "44056" is rounded from 44055.9440559...]

I'll be interested to hear your results. The difference may only be marginal, but if it provides a perfect sync then its certainly worth a go.

Last night I did change the sample rate to 44056 with a SRC to 48000 using iZotope, and it did sync up to the source video nicely (provided the first frame of the "Star Wars" title card is at frame 711, as has been mentioned in the standards thread). Listening back I've heard what sounded at first like artifacts resulting from part of the processing, but actually turned out to be in the original files, which makes me wonder whether they are a result of the Winamp plugin, the Apt-X compression or something else.

Anyway, my sync is done. I ended up with a 24-bit FLAC file (I was against bit depth conversion at first, but Audition forces anything that has been processed to 32-bit. Trimming and cropping is fine, but mixing the overlap counts as processing...). I'll upload the results to MySpleen later, as its now a 1.4GB Flac file ;)

CapableMetal said:

Darth Mallwalker said:

I've been using SoX for SRC. By many accounts it's the best freeware solution, and second only to iZotope in the non-free category.

I've gone 44100 --> 48048 with SoX. Then using a hex editor, change 48048 to 48000 into the WAV header so it plays at the right speed.

[My reasoning 48048 is an integer, while "44056" is rounded from 44055.9440559...]

I'll be interested to hear your results. The difference may only be marginal, but if it provides a perfect sync then its certainly worth a go.

Last night I did change the sample rate to 44056 with a SRC to 48000 using iZotope, and it did sync up to the source video nicely (provided the first frame of the "Star Wars" title card is at frame 711, as has been mentioned in the standards thread). Listening back I've heard what sounded at first like artifacts resulting from part of the processing, but actually turned out to be in the original files, which makes me wonder whether they are a result of the Winamp plugin, the Apt-X compression or something else.

Anyway, my sync is done. I ended up with a 24-bit FLAC file (I was against bit depth conversion at first, but Audition forces anything that has been processed to 32-bit. Trimming and cropping is fine, but mixing the overlap counts as processing...). I'll upload the results to MySpleen later, as its now a 1.4GB Flac file ;)

Capable, what is you first impression of this soundtrack as a whole, so far?  Does the DTS offer any improvements or is it average?  As for the artifacts...what is it that you're noticing?  More drop-outs?        

satanika said:

CapableMetal said:

Interesting point, and certainly worth a try. The stretching is certainly done at 0.1% to match 23.976fps but seems to need very fine tuning as it (thus far) hasn't quite seemed to line up properly.

There could be small frame differences from the theatrical compared to the source you're using.

The quality of the rendered stretch in audition is actually very high, I haven't heard any artifacts on my test mixdown, and it preserves exact pitch too, although thats probably a silly thing to be worrying about as it'll only be 0.2 semitones out.

I'm sure it's fine :) -- 'possible artifacts'
However, less processing is usually better & I believe the standard way of dealing with this is simply slowing the audio down.

I agree with you completely satanika, less processing is better. I used your suggestion and it works very well, syncs almost perfectly with the source I've used and was actually less hassle in the end. Whether it sounds better is subjective and whilst doing this I've come to the conclusion that source audio is less than perfect, but still very good. I'm hopeful that ROTJ will be better (I've yet to try it).

To make the source I layered and compared 5 or 6 different 1997 SE sources to find that all were missing a frame or two (or 15ish in the Reivax!) here and there, but in different places in the film and that together they added up to the exact number of frames in the 2004 release I matched it against, so I'm fairly confident its accurate now. My early attempts were against my NTSC laserdisc capture, but after IVTC a few frames were missing that shouldn't have been so that quickly came to end ;)

The reel changes were perfectly in line with the reel change points Darth Mallwalker posted in the standards thread which means it should should sync to the 2004 NTSC release and the 1997 video source msycamore has uploaded (which I haven't actually seen yet, but numbers correlate so should work).

Jetrell Fo said:

CapableMetal said:

Darth Mallwalker said:

I've been using SoX for SRC. By many accounts it's the best freeware solution, and second only to iZotope in the non-free category.

I've gone 44100 --> 48048 with SoX. Then using a hex editor, change 48048 to 48000 into the WAV header so it plays at the right speed.

[My reasoning 48048 is an integer, while "44056" is rounded from 44055.9440559...]

I'll be interested to hear your results. The difference may only be marginal, but if it provides a perfect sync then its certainly worth a go.

Last night I did change the sample rate to 44056 with a SRC to 48000 using iZotope, and it did sync up to the source video nicely (provided the first frame of the "Star Wars" title card is at frame 711, as has been mentioned in the standards thread). Listening back I've heard what sounded at first like artifacts resulting from part of the processing, but actually turned out to be in the original files, which makes me wonder whether they are a result of the Winamp plugin, the Apt-X compression or something else.

Anyway, my sync is done. I ended up with a 24-bit FLAC file (I was against bit depth conversion at first, but Audition forces anything that has been processed to 32-bit. Trimming and cropping is fine, but mixing the overlap counts as processing...). I'll upload the results to MySpleen later, as its now a 1.4GB Flac file ;)

Capable, what is you first impression of this soundtrack as a whole, so far?  Does the DTS offer any improvements or is it average?  As for the artifacts...what is it that you're noticing?  More drop-outs?        

Very occasional things, but I figure it was because I was hearing it through my headphones last night, and stupidly forgot to set my sound output back to 5.1 today. That said I think I was rather hasty in calling them 'artifacts'. It only ever happens on 1 track at a time, so I think its just the way its mixed in places, as most of the original sounds were recorded in the 70's. The one actually error I found, I repaired by mixing a few milliseconds of the opposite track to patch it and its now unnoticeable. After putting it through the 5.1 speakers properly this afternoon it actually sounds really quite good and its even amazing at times.

I've uploaded the torrent to the Spleen now for those who want to hear it. I don't have a very fast upload speed, so you may have to exercise some patience with download time. ;)