Harmy's STAR WARS Despecialized Edition HD - V2.7 - MKV (Released) — Page 338

Harmy, transferring between two internal drives over SATA is the optimal approach, but barring that being available to you, USB3.0 (if connected to a 3.0 port) is up there in speed with eSATA (also a good option, if available), so working between system drive and USB3.0 drive should be adequate.  Where the most disk I/O is occurring is what you'll want to have the quickest access to, assuming most of the work being done is processing on the source files and the destination is mostly for outputting the result, then you'll want the source files on your local system drive, and let the output go straight to the external disc (and its far better than processing files and writing the output within just a single disk drive, the seek time would get crazy and you'd frag your disk much more than necessary).  Location of the exe, .bat and .avs probably don't matter a whole lot, either, as they'll probably be running mostly from RAM anyway.

Thanks Mavimao.  Also I found this http://savestarwars.com/specialeditionfail.html which covers the audio issues to a reasonable extent, and is an overall good summary/rant of most of what is wrong with everything since the '97 SE.

Good informative article (I think this is Zombie's site):

http://savestarwars.com/theatricalaudioresources.html

yoda-sama said:

I keep seeing people ask if Hairy's 5.1 reconstruction is 'better' than the Blu-ray audio, to which the response is always that it blows it out of the water.  What I'm wondering is in what aspects exactly does it best it?

The best way to truly understand is a direct comparison. Listen with headphones or good speakers for the best effect!

Here is a direct comparison of the Bluray and the one used in 2.1 (Hairy_Hen posted this awhile back, but the link went down). The differences are very noticeable. The bluray has added effects, a flat droning bass sound and is first in the comparison. If you listen, you will notice that the Bluray is very muddy (lacking much of the treble sound) and lacks any dynamic range. The sound levels are noticeably clipped and distorted when the death star blows up

http://www.mediafire.com/?avv1d8izol8hy3t

Here is also a description of what is precisely wrong with the "official" mix: http://originaltrilogy.com/forum/topic.cfm/Star-Wars-1977-70mm-sound-mix-recreation-stereo-and-51-versions-now-available/post/548812/#TopicPost548812

Hmm, I don't think it's so cut and dry. In comparison.mp3, some scenes are better in the first version, some scenes are better in the second version... All of the second versions of the scenes have a TON of clipping, much more than the first versions, but that could just be an artifact of the conversion from AC3 to MP3. The "I find your lack of faith disturbing" scene stands out as being enormously better in the first version to the point where the second version is so muffled and lacking in treble that it sounds broken...

Assuming that the terrible clipping isn't inherent to the soundtrack itself, I think the second version is better in the larger number of cases, except for that one scene I mentioned.

New member here.

First of all, I would like to start with my history with Star Wars. Throughout my early childhood I was aware of SW and remember every now and then they would broadcast the movies on TV, but I never really paid attention to them, until a fateful day early in 1997 (prior to the release of the special editions) in Mexico, when I saw an announcement in which there would be a Star Wars marathon, all three movies in one sitting, it was a Saturday, around that time I was hooked on the N64 game Shadows Of The Empire game, which drew heavily upon the movies, so i decided to give the trilogy a shot. Suffice to say, when I was done watching all 3 movies, that Saturday night I became a massive SW fan, being completely unaware at the time that it would be the only time i would be able to watch the trilogy in its original unaltered form. When the special editions came out i enjoyed them fondly, thinking to myself that this is what George Lucas had in mind when first making the movies but could not add due to the limitations of the time, also thinking he would leave it at that and have both the original cuts and special editions for everyone to enjoy. Seven years later the original trilogy was finally released on DVD and much to my annoyance I found out Hayden Christensen would be replacing Sebastian Shaw for the final scene in Return Of The Jedi, and with the special editions being the only ones Lucas will authorise for TV broadcast and the only ones I watched frequently, my memories of that saturday afternoon were starting to fade away, and that is the point in which I started to long for the unaltered editions. Finally, the Star Wars saga was announced on blu-ray, and the stupid NOOOOO added to ROTJ transformed my longing into an intense and desperate hunger to watch the first 3 Star Wars movies as they were originally released theatrically, so I decided to get the laser-disc transfers just to remember what I saw on that Saturday 1997 that made me fall in love with Star Wars in the first place, but I was still not satisfied, as the poor quality of the image was evident, since this was transferred from deteriorated film prints and with a screen resolution well below that of current PC monitors, making me wish I had a time machine so I could sneak on the original screenings. About 5 months ago, during one of my web drifts I came across a commentary section that mentioned something called Despecialized editions, that comment piqued my interest so I googled the key words and voila, I find this very forum and follow this very thread and waited patiently until last week. Even though I grew up with the screwed-up color timing of the special editions, something about they way you rearranged the color timing to match the fade-free Technicolor film prints feels right, the greenish-bluish interiors of the Death Star, the sepia toned Tatooine, the warm orange hue of Obi-Wan rescuing Luke from sand people, the Vaseline used to obscure the landspeeder wheels, the matte paintings restored to the best of your ability, everything looks the way it was prior to incessant tampering, Star Wars has been restored to all of its flawed beauty, and honestly I can't wait for TESB and ROTJ. (End of story)

I would like to state the following: If George Lucas wants to transform the original trilogy into a weird CGI cartoon that matches the prequels he has every right to do so, but that doesn't me he should lock away the original movies that everybody fell in love with just because he hates them. Take Ridley Scott, he hates the theatrical cut of Blade Runner but still allows that one to be available for distribution. I also think it is insulting that a channel like TCM is forced to play the special editions instead of the original classics. I just hope Disney and 20th Century Fox reach an agreement and release the original cuts in high quality, but until that day comes, and it probably never will, these will have to do.

From me and a few others here in Venezuela: Thank you very much Harmy, we know it was hair-pulling and frustrating going through every single frame restoring these movies to their original magic. Like I said, if Disney and Fox ever decide to release a remastered version of the original unaltered movies, I suggest you send them a copy of your work, I'm pretty sure they would hire you immediately. 

Sorry for the wall of text, now I will wrap this up with a quote from the 1995 VHS trailer:

"For those who remember, for those who will never forget, and for a whole new generation who will experience it for the first time..."

YanniD said:

HD-DVD had a really great feature that allowed external subtitles and even soundtracks to be incorporated into the movie on the primary disc, without them having to be on the primary disc.  I really miss that flexibility with Bluray.

Blu-ray can do this as well, the Gundam Unicorn BD Live features had downloadable commentary audio+subitles, although they were only available for a limited time on each disc.

You can also do similar things with unofficial sources using MPC.

penguinofgreatness said:

yoda-sama said:

I keep seeing people ask if Hairy's 5.1 reconstruction is 'better' than the Blu-ray audio, to which the response is always that it blows it out of the water.  What I'm wondering is in what aspects exactly does it best it?

The best way to truly understand is a direct comparison. Listen with headphones or good speakers for the best effect!

Here is a direct comparison of the Bluray and the one used in 2.1 (Hairy_Hen posted this awhile back, but the link went down). The differences are very noticeable. The bluray has added effects, a flat droning bass sound and is first in the comparison. If you listen, you will notice that the Bluray is very muddy (lacking much of the treble sound) and lacks any dynamic range. The sound levels are noticeably clipped and distorted when the death star blows up

http://www.mediafire.com/?avv1d8izol8hy3t

Here is also a description of what is precisely wrong with the "official" mix: http://originaltrilogy.com/forum/topic.cfm/Star-Wars-1977-70mm-sound-mix-recreation-stereo-and-51-versions-now-available/post/548812/#TopicPost548812

Oh my god!

The blu-ray sounds so lifeless compared to the other mix! The blaster sounds have so much more dynamic range to them than the blu-ray mix.

I can't believe how bad it is in comparison. Just shows what you get used to hearing.

Harmy said:

So, anyway, I was wondering if some of you guys could give me a little advice about rendering (not quite there yet but just want the info) when I'm rendering using x264 and I have the system HDD in my laptop and 1 USB2 HDD and 1 USB3 HDD where should I put what to ensure as fast and smooth a rendering as possible?

You want to put your files on a different physical drive for each step of the process, so that no one step is ever reading and writing at the same time to the same drive (to prevent the wasteful head repositioning that occurs, even with different logical drives on the same physical drive), however it depends where the software puts the temporary files it creates as they will not all be in RAM.

For example, if the encoder creates elementary video, audio and subtitle files and then muxes them together in a later step, you want your source files on a different drive than the elementary files, but the final destination files could be back on the source drive as the final step is only writing and not reading.

I would say you could put your source files on the USB2 drive, since I doubt encoding will be fast enough to require data at greater than USB2 speeds.  Any temporary files could be stored on your system drive and then the final results output to the USB3 drive.

However, if by source files you mean different video and audio files where multiple files must be accessed in parallel, best speed will be from an SSD because no head repositioning is required to read from each file.

Hard drives are best for large files read/written in a linear fashion.