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.: The Zion DVD Project :. (Released) — Page 3

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My teacher's got the remote...hmm...I'll have to think about conning her into selling it...extremely doubtful that she will, but what the hell, right?

By the way, what does an Elite DVL-91 go for nowadays? If I ever do seriously consider getting a LD player other than the one my teacher has, that'd be the one I get...mainly for the component cables for the DVD, I'd just use it to replace my current DVD player...

I suppose it's too much to ask for a Laserdisc/DVD player that is multiregion with digital (including DTS) out and component outputs...
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Just was looking through eBay...and I found a DVL-909 which the site I linked to says doesn't play DTS DVD's...but the auction does, and the player has a DTS symbol on it...but it's 300 smackers. Right. Then again I'm broke...so I'll have to wait a while.
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i have a question about these set of dvds you are working on
first question:
(i am still learning here so bear with me)
with the anamorpic widescreen will the picture look stretched on a normal 4:5 tv
or will it have the black letter box bars?
the reason i ask is because the new trilogy dvds
the official ones
say that they are animorphic widescreen and they have to black bars on a 4:5 tv
but on my widescreen tv the bars are still there
even when i set the tv to 16:9
the only way that i can get the picture filled and not cut off a whole lot of the picture is by setting the tv to 4:5 zoom 1

two:
i love the idea
i have been looking all over the place for original versions of the movies on dvd with great picture
and screen captures on the websites of the people making them that satisfy me
i have finally found one that suits me
but my question is
will these dvds that you are working on
will they be as close in picture sound and widescreen as the official dvds
the reason why i ask is because i am working on a dvd project of my own
where i want to splice in the SE scenes that i like and think are apropriate for my own version of the movies
with the official dvds
this way i can watch my version, george's original version, and his newly created monster

three:
i love the cover art that you have
it is wonderful
and exactly how i would do them
except for the spine
i would personaly do the spines like on the offical dvds
like this
A New Hope
The Empire Strikes Back
Return of the Jedi
just the spines of the dvds
not the accutal artwork


besides those few concerns
i am overly pleased with your work
and all i can say now is
keep it up
you are doing a great job
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I have a DVL 909. It will play DTS LDs... but not DTS DVDs. Any LD with a digital output willplay DTS LDs.. but you need a DTS decoder to play DTS on DVDs.... confused?

aka nostromo777 on myspleen

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Hey Zion, It could be the captures... or maybe even the faces edition....but I noticed some cropping on your captures... On Dr Gonzo and the Official release., you can see the back of the Imerial Officer' neck. Also, on the right hand side, you can see more of the stormtrooper shoulder. BTW your transfers are awesome. It makes me want to throw my Dr GOnzo transfers in the garbage. I cant wait to get copies from you!

Offical
http://img79.exs.cx/img79/7410/Lucas_000.jpg

Zion
http://img85.exs.cx/img85/953/Zion_000.jpg

aka nostromo777 on myspleen

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lol, I was wondering how long it would take people to notice that. I actually goofed when I imported the video into premiere and as a result, it resized to 720, but cut off the sides. On my new test mpeg (which looks better btw) I have corrected the problem.



yourmother:

On a regular 4:3 tv, anamorphic looks exactly the way any widescreen movie looks - it has the big black bars on the top and bottom. Since the Star Wars Trilogy was shot with a 2.35:1 aspect ratio, it will still show bars on a widescreen tv because it is actually WIDER than 16:9. Those bars are normal, and yes mine will also do this.

My transfers will look as close to DVD quality as I can make them, but I'm not going to go out of my way to make them look like the DVD's. The official DVD's were transfered straight from the original negatives and employ color correction techniques that I cannot even fathom. There is no way to get such vivid color off of the LD transfers.

As for the cover art, I used Adobe Photoshop. Anyone could whip up a decent dvd sleeve with enough patience and know-how.

My Projects:
[Holiday Special Hybrid DVD v2]
[X0 Project]
[Backstroke of the West DVD]
[ROTS Theatrical DVD]

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I figgered it was a cap goof, and not aproblem with the actual transfers.

BTW, why do you need another set of faces LDs... something wrong with thte ones you got? Just curious.... (You should have my LDs tomorrow )

aka nostromo777 on myspleen

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Originally posted by: zion
lol, good luck trying to con her out of the remote. Those things are like gold. Anyway, I'll probably just try to get my universal remote to work with it.

According to ebay, a DVL-91 goes for about $200 with two days left. I bought mine on ebay for $39.99.


After doing some ressearch, I recently purchased a CLD-V2600 off of eBay for $50. It came with no remote so I began searching the net to find one and found that most places wanted around $50 just for the remote.

I decided I needed to be patient and finally I picked up a remote for the CLD-V2600 on eBay for $15. Oddly enough, I believe the remote was listed only with its model number and not the word "Pioneer" so anyone looking for the remote would have probably missed it.

Zion, do you at least have a Universal Remote programmed to work the LD?
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Originally posted by: yourmother
i have a question about these set of dvds you are working on
first question:
(i am still learning here so bear with me)
with the anamorpic widescreen will the picture look stretched on a normal 4:5 tv
or will it have the black letter box bars?
the reason i ask is because the new trilogy dvds
the official ones
say that they are animorphic widescreen and they have to black bars on a 4:5 tv
but on my widescreen tv the bars are still there
even when i set the tv to 16:9
the only way that i can get the picture filled and not cut off a whole lot of the picture is by setting the tv to 4:5 zoom 1


2.35:1 movies will ALWAYS have black bars no matter what TV you're using, because there is no TV wider than 1.78:1 (16:9). And the picture doesn't look stretched on a 4:3 (1.33:1) TV is because the DVD player is set up correctly...if it isn't, then it will look stretched, which is wrong.

Any 1.85:1 movie still has bars but they are almost unnoticeable. I don't know what the hell they do with 1.66:1 ... maybe they put bars on the sides?

And those black bars on 2.35 movies like Star Wars are encoded in the stream, not player generated. Pop one into the computer and you'll notice, playing it back not at full-screen, that they have black bars. Since no TVs are wider than 16:9, why bother encoding it any wider than 16:9, right? That's why the black bars are there.

For more info, go here.
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Originally posted by: ChainsawAsh
Originally posted by: yourmother
... And those black bars on 2.35 movies like Star Wars are encoded in the stream, not player generated. Pop one into the computer and you'll notice, playing it back not at full-screen, that they have black bars. Since no TVs are wider than 16:9, why bother encoding it any wider than 16:9, right? That's why the black bars are there. ...

Zion, will your bars be encoded in the stream or player generated? That'd be really sweet if it was player generated like most movies nowadays. They still look kickass regardless.
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Zion is planning to make his transfer anamorphic which means that there will be no black bars encoded in the video. The only thing encoded will be the actual video stream. The DVD Player will handle outputting the video with or without bars as needed.
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Anamorphic or not, there WILL be black bars. Anamorphic video only takes the 16:9 squeeze into account... but DVD-players can't squeeze an image into 2.35:1 (which is sad, since it would add another degree of resolution here). Actually that's just what ChainsawAsh already described, and the other Ash didn't notice... I guess.

By the way, Zion, there are still several artifacts I notice on your screenshot. One being a slight "stairstep"-effect on diagonal lines. Did you deinterlace the source? Another thing being a slight ghosting effect... you can see this effect very good on the screenshot of Luke at the homestead watching the binary sunset. The ghosting shows as a slight dark shadow of the video itself, left of Luke's head. There's a good filter to fix that contained in TMPEG, so maybe you might want to take a look into that.

Furthermore, your image looks a bit fuzzy... I guess some sharpening would be appropriate here. Since you're using AviSynth inbetween, I would use the WarpSharp package for it, and add these commands to your script:

Lanczos4Resize(720 * 4, 480 * 4)
XSharpen
Lanczos4Resize(720, 480)


Maybe some noise reduction afterwards would be needed. The video size, of course, depends on what you work with, but I guess you're working at this resolution.

EDIT: Mmh... I guess the first thing should be the removal of the ghosting effect (it would only get worse when sharpening and filtering the image with the ghosting)... although I don't know if there's a VirtualDub-plugin for this. After all, you can't do it in TMPEG, since TMPEG is your last step.
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Unless Zion plans to use the entire 480 pixels of vertical resolution for the picture, he will have to encode some black bars into the stream. No black bars would mean a resized picture of approximately 1136x480 to achieve the proper aspect ratio! Some PAL 2.35:1 anamorphic dvds are close to this, but, then again, they have the original print to work from. In our case, this would be a bit ridiculous since nearly doubling the resolution of a ~720x272 source video picture probably wouldn't look good at all. NTSC 2.35:1 anamorphic dvds almost always have some black bars encoded into the streams, with actually only 360-416 pixels of the 480 vertical res being devoted to the picture.
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Originally posted by: Laserschwert
By the way, Zion, there are still several artifacts I notice on your screenshot. One being a slight "stairstep"-effect on diagonal lines. Did you deinterlace the source? Another thing being a slight ghosting effect... you can see this effect very good on the screenshot of Luke at the homestead watching the binary sunset. The ghosting shows as a slight dark shadow of the video itself, left of Luke's head. There's a good filter to fix that contained in TMPEG, so maybe you might want to take a look into that.

Furthermore, your image looks a bit fuzzy... I guess some sharpening would be appropriate here. Since you're using AviSynth inbetween, I would use the WarpSharp package for it, and add these commands to your script:

Lanczos4Resize(720 * 4, 480 * 4)
XSharpen
Lanczos4Resize(720, 480)


Maybe some noise reduction afterwards would be needed. The video size, of course, depends on what you work with, but I guess you're working at this resolution.

EDIT: Mmh... I guess the first thing should be the removal of the ghosting effect (it would only get worse when sharpening and filtering the image with the ghosting)... although I don't know if there's a VirtualDub-plugin for this. After all, you can't do it in TMPEG, since TMPEG is your last step.


Yeah, that "stairstep" effect bugs the hell out of me. I'm going to mess around and see if I can get rid of it tonight. I've never heard of the warpsharp package, but I'll take a look at it. I'm already employing a number of filters including noise reduction and sharpening. I'll post a few caps of my raw capture to show you how much better the finished product is looking.


As for the black bar issue, you guys pretty much already said it. They have to be encoded into the video.

My Projects:
[Holiday Special Hybrid DVD v2]
[X0 Project]
[Backstroke of the West DVD]
[ROTS Theatrical DVD]

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OK, I have done a few more tests using your screenshots (I guess using your original captures would yield better results). There are actually some VirtualDub-filters out there that can be used to remove the artifacts occuring in analog captures. I used the following:

Exorcist
flaXen's VHS toys
Brightness/Contrast UI-enhanced

The Exorcist-filter is used to remove the ghosting in the video signal, while the VHS-filter is used to handle some chroma shifting artifacts. Here's how it looks with and without the filters (note that my sample images look a little noisy, because they're 256-color GIFs):

http://www.scummbar.com/mi2/temp/anh1.gif

These are the settings used:
Exorcist (4 pixels left, 17% brightness)
VHS (only "chroma shifting" activated: horizontal 3 pixel, negative, "Shift Chroma I" activated)

Now, there's a visible boost in brightness, resulting from the way the Exorcist-filter works, which unfortunately causes the whites to blow out (notice the Stormtrooper-helmet in front of the ceiling light). You can avoid this, by darkening the image with the brightness/contrast-filter (the UI-enhanced version has an added "preview"-feature). It's important to put this filter IN FRONT OF the Excorcist- and VHS-filters, otherwise we would be just darkening the already blown-out image. Here's the result:

http://www.scummbar.com/mi2/temp/anh2.gif

Brightness +0% (unchanged), Contrast 87%

Note how these filters already take care of some of the noise (which was basically amplified by these artifacts). I hope this help a little bit.

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Originally posted by: drjimmy526
NTSC 2.35:1 anamorphic dvds almost always have some black bars encoded into the streams, with actually only 360-416 pixels of the 480 vertical res being devoted to the picture.


No almost about it, all NTSC 2.35:1 DVDs do. PLEASE read the guide I linked to in my previous post, it explains everyting.
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Laserschwert, I think in each case from your examples the "original" shots look 100% better. The filters you are using are just white washing the images. With the filters you are suggesting, the output video looks pretty much like Dr Gonzo's, TR47's or any of the other white washed and blurry transfers out there. I think Zion's original transfers look worlds better than any of the existing transfers.
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All these filters do is remove ERRORS in the frames... like the halos around high-contrast edges (artifacts that aren't supposed to be there and look just plain ugly). Notice the white shine left of Vader's silhouette? That's an error resulting from capturing the LD-signal via a SVHS-cable. If you'd watch the laserdiscs, those edges wouldn't be there, and it would look like my results. I work in the field of video-editing and animation for years now, so I know a bit about it. But of course, after all it's a question of taste.

EDIT: Getting back to this, you should note that the result isn't softer or blurrier than the "original" version, it just appears like that. Actually the halo thingy causes the same effect like a sharpening filter, which basically creates halos around strong contrast edges, to INCREASE the contrast at these edges. This makes the edges appear more pronounced. A very cheap trick, since the quality really suffers from this (though it sometimes is used on commercial DVDs... and it's always put on the "con"-side in reviews).
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I this case I have to say: Laserdisc is crap *g*

But seriously: The LD contained the error as well? Because this is obviously an analog error. On the other hand halos can be caused by the excessive use of sharpening filters (though this wouldn't result in halos as big as in your capture). But to my knowledge the composite signal is always inferior to a SVHS signal.

By the way, how are you resizing to achieve the anamorph image? There are some plugins out on Doom9 to add "artificial detail" when scaling up... although the Xsharpen-filter already helps alot here.

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The GuavaComb-filter for AviSynth handles dot-crawl very well... maybe you'll take a look at it.

Concerning the resizing, when using Lanczos use Lanczos4Resize (since version 2.5.5) which results are a little sharper. But there's an interesting method on Doom9, called Integrated Image Processor, which uses a combination of different resize-processes to avoid too much blur.

And for noise reduction check out the RemoveDirt-filter.

One more link regarding the removal of chroma-artifacts.

And I still think you should get rid of those halos. By the way, do you know why the stairsteps occure? ARE you deinterlacing? Or are those things already present in the raw capture?
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Laserschwert, thank you for dissecting my screencaps today and suggesting all of these filters. Seriously, it's great to have someone like you come along and tell me what I could be doing better, I appreciate it.

I'm going to play around with these filters you have mentioned. I've tried out guavacomb, but the rest of them are new to me. Hopefully I can correct the haloing problem. Even if it ups the brightness a bit, it's not that big of a deal since I can always adjust that when I color correct in Premiere.

More screencaps coming tomarrow...

My Projects:
[Holiday Special Hybrid DVD v2]
[X0 Project]
[Backstroke of the West DVD]
[ROTS Theatrical DVD]