Yesterday I finished my first "test capture day" of SET ruLes!
I tested the Pioneer LD-V4300D (unit #2, as in my first laserdisc capture comparison test, done more than a year ago, someone told me that the unit I used that time, #1, may have some problems); with and without both the DVD recorders (used simply as comb filters), and different connections (S-Video, RCA, BNC); I used the french and the german laserdiscs, captured small portion (2 minutes) of the same scene, then aligned temporally and spatially, then took the GKAR DVD and converted to AVI, for comparison - no other manipulation was made on the GKAR.
These are some of my conclusions:
- the 1997 SE has all the four sides cropped, compared to OT ... indeed, its picture is zoomed, too - as the image is 340pixels high, vs 324pixels of the OT THX laserdiscs...
- the LD-V4300D seems to have less details than the CLD-D925 (unit #1) I used for OUT, as I made direct comparisons between the same scenes captured with both the players (with 4300 yesterday, with 925 a year ago)...
- the BNC output seems slightly better than the RCA - maybe due to the better connections
- the colors are wrong - as many here have noted, white is often either blueish or pinkish, but wait... maybe I found where the problem lies, and a solution... follow me!
Well, my capture card internal comb filter is good, but not the best; the direct connection of the 4300 (as it was for the 925) is worst than the S-Video; as the 4300 has not a S-Video out, but only the composite out (RCA and BNC) and RGB (yes, maybe I have to test it too...) the only solution is to feed the composite laserdisc player output to an external comb filter, and here the two DVD recorders come in help!
The Panasonic DMR-ES15 has a better comb filter than my capture card, but no settings at all, so I take my Pioneer DVR-320S out of a dusty closet where it was sleeping for a long time, and, surprise! It has a lot of comb filter settings, that I forgot he had!
Between them, there is an interesting one: white AGC (stands for automatic gain control). I capture with the white AGC on, and the colors are wrong - as through the Panasonic and direct composite to capture card, BUT... if I turn it off, and set the white and black to the max... BAM, the colors are right - or, at least, better than with AGC on, and similar to OT. So the problem could lies in the white AGC, that maybe must be included in a lot of comb filters, like capture cards, TV sets etc.. or, because the Pioneer DVD recorder comb filter has so many settings, that set the white and black level at the max, it helps to recover the original colors (or most part of it)... I don't know, I'll leave this problem to the experts!
I managed to do the following comparison with avisynth and virtualdub: I took two different captures - french through the 320 S-video, AGC off, no color correction, and german through ES15, with saturation=0.8 - then overlaid the two (the alignment IS NOT perfect, because taken from two different A/D converter, so the two captures have different widths, but hey, this is just a test), then enhanched with the script I used for [OUT ruLes] - the one with the new denoiser; at the end, resized to match the GKAR height. GKAR, as written before, was only converted from MPEG2 to AVI using HuffYUV - as the laserdisc captures.
The wall on the left is white on SET, blue on GKAR; the light on right is white on SET, pink on GKAR.
Wall is white on SET, pink on GKAR, but Vader's buttons are less detailed, and...
what is that gibberish on GKAR's picture, bottom right?!?
OK, I admit SET lacks details also if its picture is enhanced, but, as explained before, it *could* be because the laserdisc player used for the captures is not the best OR the very unit I used is faulty; because the spatial alignment is not that perfect; because there are only two captures instead of three... I'm trying to find some other excuses, but maybe the missing details are due only to the fact that those laserdiscs could resolve about 544x340=184960pixels, where GKAR has 704x416=292864pixels... so GKAR DVD has about 50% more resolution than the SE laserdiscs... I'll find out the truth!
But, as you could see, no blockiness, no compression artifacts, better colors... hope to find a better capture method, to improve resolution.
Soon other capture tests...
CapableMetal said:
Does this mean you aren't going to finish capturing the OUT?
Absolutely not! It means that, as I worked A LOT with ANH for the [OUT ruLes] project, now I know its reel changes, missing frames etc. and my mind is "fresh" enough to work on another ANH, this time the 1997 SE... if I finish all the OUT and then begin the SET, I'll surely forget many many things...
After I've done the ANH SET, I'll go for TESB OUT, then TESB SET, then ROTJ OUT, then ROTJ SET... at the end, if I will be still alive (xx_), I'm thinking about TPM [ruLes] using the (second) best laserdisc ever made, and two different copies of the laserdisc.
Talking about it (the Pioneer HLD-X9), if someone would be so kind to provide me the OT Technidisc laserdiscs, I could capture them with it...
BTW, my DTS syncs are almost prepared for you, I'll PM you when they're available.
Perfect, thanks a lot! Your work is precious for my project, really!