So, little update: even though my hard drive is still kaput, I managed to capture the opening sequences from the 3 vhs tapes with a laptop and a usb stick. At least I know I won't have to do that later. I captured them in uncompressed Yuv2 and they look fine.
What prompted me to do it, was an idea that popped into my head the other day.
You're familiar with how a flatbed scanner works, right?
Well, I applied the same concept to the Star Wars crawl. It's already moving, so if we just sample one row of pixels, and add them all up, we'll have "scanned" the whole image, right?
So, I opened my crawl in Virtualdub. First thing, since it's PAL, 25fps interlaced, I used the bob filter to double up the frames, this way it's no longer interlaced. I have to do it because otherwise the next steps will retain scanline artifacts, I've tried it.
By the way, if you're using NTSC I'd recommend an inverse telecine, but keep in mind I haven't tried that.
Now, let's add the "null transform" filter so we can crop the picture. In my case, the original video was 720*576. [Methinks I should add screenshots to better illustrate the whole process]
Crop the picture close to the bottom, so you'll get the most resolution out of it. Set the crop boundaries so that the slit will be at a point in the crawl where the text won't be cut at the sides. Now the frame should be your horizontal resolution*1, in my case it's 720*1.
Cut everything else from the timeline, so you'll only have the crawl.
Export as an image sequence. I used pngs'.
You should now have a folder full of thousands of 720*1 pngs', and most of them look like black and yellow barcodes. Open Gimp, and open the image sequence as layers. Invert the layer order, because we want the first frame on top.
Now, the last step involves a 3rd party script you have to download. Basically, it was designed to make animations for Minecraft textures, and what it does, is it takes all the levels and stacks them on top of one another.
So, this is the end result:
Pretty nifty, huh?
Just be sure and avoid pan and scan tapes, my Return Of The Jedi was pretty bad in that regard:
Yes, it really is that cropped!