I’m working on a preservation of the 1993 widescreen LD of Star Wars (Technidisc). Video processing is done by two passes of Avisynth and one round in After Effects. The Avisynth part is basically done, as is some of the AE work, and I’d need someone to check the video for bad frames, IVTC errors and such. Below is a link to a preview in final candidate state. Anyone who is interested in the ‘beta test’ please drop me a pm.
I’m expecting the final release by the end of June, via spleen.
Thanks!
https://www.dropbox.com/s/pzqgp6sbj9d6m8p/sw-preview.mkv
Some technical details:
LD player: Pioneer CLD-2950, connected via s-video
TV tuner: Hauppauge WinTV HVR-1250
5 captures were made using the Lagarith codec. In the first Avisynth pass, the captures were averaged, and the following were applied to the whole material:
- dot crawl reduction
- inverse telecine
- fixing bad frames (like frames consisting of a single field, etc)
- rainbow reduction
- global stabilization
- basic color correction (correcting the disc’s SMPTE pattern to the standard)
The second phase consisted of filters with different setting for different parts of the film:
- reducing of vibration in bright parts of the image
- reducing streaking in hot red parts
- reducing grain
- anti-aliasing
- aspect ratio correction
- re-applying fine noise (tamed)
- starfield enhancement
- spot removal
In the final phase, I’m doing scene-specific color tweaks and manual cleanup and damage removal in After Effects.
Some parts of the Avisynth scripts were inspired by G-force’s GOUT scripts. Also, I used Msycamore’s observations about the changing aspect ratio.
For audio, I’ll use the theatrical stereo from the Japanese P&S LD (from Schorman’s LD Audio Archive)