Info Wanted: What is the best Fan preservation of the Original Star Wars available? — Page 2

Is Team Negative 1 not better than Puggo? And what if I want a PAL Transfer? Most SD-Quality transfers here are in NTSC, but I think PAL would have a better color.

PAL would play at the wrong speed, and Team Negative1 hasn't released anything yet.

Erik Pancakes said:

PAL would play at the wrong speed...

For me NTSC is the wrong speed, because in cinema it has originally 24FPS, and the 25FPS from PAL are more close to it, than the 29,97FPS from NTSC, also PAL has a bigger resolution from 720x576, but NTSC just 720x480. Also PAL uses a better Color-System than NTSC.

Wikipedia says: "[...] PAL usually has 576 visible lines compared with 480 lines with NTSC, meaning that PAL has a 20% higher resolution. [...] PAL has a closer frame rate to that of film and is less likely to suffer from issues caused during frame rate conversion. [...] NTSC receivers have a tint control to perform colour correction manually. If this is not adjusted correctly, the colours may be faulty. The PAL standard automatically cancels hue errors by phase reversal, so a tint control is unnecessary. Chrominance phase errors in the PAL system are cancelled out using a 1H delay line resulting in lower saturation, which is much less noticeable to the eye than NTSC hue errors. [...]"

But maybe it's just because I'm from Europe and you have to slow down any European language audio to fit to NTSC. Maybe you can give me a reason why NTSC is better, but I don't think so.

Erik Pancakes said:

kk650 said:

Agreed. Not only the quality varies widely from shot to shot though, the colours do too. I am too sensitive to sudden changes in colour during films to watch a release with colours constantly changing from shot to shot.

Really? The colors are the best thing about Harmy's releases if you ask me. I didn't notice any variation at all in SW 2.5 or ESB 2.0, at least nothing that took me out of the movies.

Though I can't fault Dark_Jedi's GOUT V3 in any way. It's a fantastic set.

I don't notice any color inconsistencies throughout Empire, or Jedi for that matter, but Star Wars 2.5 has drastically different colors from shot to shot at times, most noticeably in the cantina. It doesn't stop me from watching it, but it is there. I think it came from the color correction in 2.1 because if I remember right the v 2 colors looked pretty spot on with the colors you'd see on pre-2004 releases of the film. The 2.5 colors are infinitely better than what's currently available though.

As for the Despecialized Editions themselves, I'd say they're the highest quality OOT we can get until it's officially released. The only noticeably lesser quality shots are ones from the GOUT, which is to be expected.

NTSC for film based sources is 23.98, not 29.97, so it's closer to the original than PAL.

skywalker89 said:

Erik Pancakes said:

PAL would play at the wrong speed...

For me NTSC is the wrong speed, because in cinema it has originally 24FPS, and the 25FPS from PAL are more close to it, than the 29,97FPS from NTSC, also PAL has a bigger resolution from 720x576, but NTSC just 720x480. Also PAL uses a better Color-System than NTSC.

...

But maybe it's just because I'm from Europe and you have to slow down any European language audio to fit to NTSC. Maybe you can give me a reason why NTSC is better, but I don't think so.

Well, movies aren't sped up to reach NTSC's 29.97fps. They're put through a 3:2 pulldown process that preserves the speed of the film. This can cause judder, sure, but as someone from an NTSC country, I don't notice it at all.

Plus, most movies on DVD are encoded in such a way that preserves the 24fps (well, 23.976fps) speed of film - they're on the disc at 24fps, but a flag is set so the 3:2 pulldown is performed by the player. In fact, many Blu-Ray players nowadays can play an NTSC DVD at 24fps exactly, bypassing the 3:2 pulldown altogether.

PAL, on the other hand, speeds everything up by 4% to get to 25fps, making everyone's movements slightly too fast and unnatural, and raising the pitch 4% as well, making the music unbearable to listen to and causing everyone to sound like they took a shot of helium before doing their lines.

So no, PAL's 25fps is NOT closer to the 24fps film standard than NTSC, because even though NTSC is 29.97fps, the 3:2 pulldown applied to get there preserves the speed of the film, which you can't do with acceptable quality in PAL. (I've seen 24>25fps done through pulldown, preserving speed, and it looks terrible.)

For me, preserving the film's speed is more important than a few extra lines of resolution and this "better color" that my eyes will never be able to discern.

Erik Pancakes said:

skywalker89 said:

Erik Pancakes said:

PAL would play at the wrong speed...

For me NTSC is the wrong speed, because in cinema it has originally 24FPS, and the 25FPS from PAL are more close to it, than the 29,97FPS from NTSC, also PAL has a bigger resolution from 720x576, but NTSC just 720x480. Also PAL uses a better Color-System than NTSC.

...

But maybe it's just because I'm from Europe and you have to slow down any European language audio to fit to NTSC. Maybe you can give me a reason why NTSC is better, but I don't think so.

 

Well, movies aren't sped up to reach NTSC's 29.97fps. They're put through a 3:2 pulldown process that preserves the speed of the film. This can cause judder, sure, but as someone from an NTSC country, I don't notice it at all.

Plus, most movies on DVD are encoded in such a way that preserves the 24fps (well, 23.976fps) speed of film - they're on the disc at 24fps, but a flag is set so the 3:2 pulldown is performed by the player. In fact, many Blu-Ray players nowadays can play an NTSC DVD at 24fps exactly, bypassing the 3:2 pulldown altogether.

PAL, on the other hand, speeds everything up by 4% to get to 25fps, making everyone's movements slightly too fast and unnatural, and raising the pitch 4% as well, making the music unbearable to listen to and causing everyone to sound like they took a shot of helium before doing their lines.

So no, PAL's 25fps is NOT closer to the 24fps film standard than NTSC, because even though NTSC is 29.97fps, the 3:2 pulldown applied to get there preserves the speed of the film, which you can't do with acceptable quality in PAL. (I've seen 24>25fps done through pulldown, preserving speed, and it looks terrible.)

For me, preserving the film's speed is more important than a few extra lines of resolution and this "better color" that my eyes will never be able to discern.

 What about PAL video converted to NTSC? Any problems there?

AntcuFaalb said:

FWIW, the colors in the original films are absurdly inconsistent shot-to-shot as well. This is especially true for Star Wars.

Sure, but to be honest I'm less concerned about theatrical reconstruction but rather with pre-1997 home video version reconstruction. I'd honestly prefer to have the Ep. IV crawl in Star Wars when Disney releases the OUT along with the colors from before 2004 (I don't think they were changed in '97). That's not to say that I don't want to have the crawl branched with the original; I absolutely want the original crawl to be included in an OUT release, but it's not the way I'm used to watching it. I'd never hold anything against Harmy for not including the Ep. IV crawl, or non-theatrical colors for that matter, because that's not the point of that project.

 What about PAL video converted to NTSC? Any problems there?

Depends. It's much easier to go from 25p to 60i through pulldown without affecting speed, but then you're losing resolution (576 down to 480 lines). You could slow down from 25p to 24p, but then you have the inverse problem of 24>25 conversion - you slow the film down by 4%, lowering the pitch in the process, too.

This does present a slight issue for Blu-Ray, even in PAL countries. First, Blu-Ray doesn't allow for 25p, so all PAL-speed BRs are 50i. For an NTSC country release, you either have to slow down to 24p, or do the same 25p>60i pulldown conversion I was talking about earlier. Which is fine, but again, it's interlaced.

So for 25fps stuff on Blu-Ray, it's going to be 1080i unless you slow it down to 24fps. This is why stuff like Planet Earth and Life is 1080i on all releases, and why some recent US Doctor Who releases (like Sperhead from Space) on Blu-Ray are slowed down to 24p (the UK release is 50i).

Really, I don't understand why 25p isn't in the Blu-Ray spec, even in NTSC territories. It's digital video, it's not hard to show 25p on any modern HDTV (50Hz or 60Hz). Maybe with the 4K spec revision that's supposedly coming, they'll add support for 25p (and 48p for that matter - I really want The Hobbit in 3D 48p at home, that was an awesome experience in the theater).

skywalker89 said:

Is Team Negative 1 not better than Puggo?

 Have you seen how these two guys post?  Puggo is the winner, hands down.

Puggo Grande' Rocks