Karyudo and I discussed the SEs in the past and came to the same conclusion - there is no point in playing with the SE on laserdisc as the HDTV broadcasts are ridiculously better quality wise, and are our best bet at a DVD deconstruction as at least the resolution is comparable. And as he has them (somewhere in his vast collection of stuff) it seemed pointless to waste time on doing SE captures.
I still believe a PAL capture would give us the best available image from laserdisc, if only we could get it right...
If anyone wants to help *fund* or help in some other way with a PAL capture, let me know, I would need the following.
1. Access to the best PAL version of the laserdiscs for about a week.
2. A bit of financial help (I am currently maxxed out with my spend on the X0 setup, and some film transfer I'm doing for another OT'er)
3. Some storage, I have nearly a terrabyte of drives, but not enough space to do yet another capture.
I have purchased a CLD-2950 to do the capture with - the advantage over the 925 is that it doesn't have a digital store, so access to the 'raw' composite signal is much easier. Too quote from a review of the 925 that talks about the 'torturous path' of the video...
"The composite signal retrieved from disc enters the digital domain, goes through the frame-store stage, gets filtered into RGB, and is then converted into separate luma and chroma for the S-Video output. The composite video output is simply the separated chroma and luma of the S-Video output combined."
It truly amazes me that the picture is so good after all that (Now if you could tap the digital stream from the store, that would be interesting) Also, it would be possible to tap the RGB signal, which would in theory give a cleaner image than the 925 composite out.
I am hopeful that with the 2950 I could get a relatively tamper free composite video signal, and then use todays better capture systems to get a comb free picture. I can tap the signal very early, and run balanced mini coax straight out to a 75Ohm BNC connector and get that into my broadcast gear. The problem is I have to pay for the time in the edit suite, and I am just simply outta cash.
Alternatively I can spend some money and mod the 2950 for RGB out and capture to the RGB inputs on the PDI card - but once again it is a spend without any guarantee of a result, something I can't afford at this point in time.
And of course, there is the possibilty that we won't be able to get a noise free/comb free capture even after all or any of that - but there is only one way to find out, and if nothing else, we would probably end up with the best capture possible with todays equipment.
The card we have been using for the X0 is a PDI Deluxe card, unfortunately I couldn't transport my broadcast gear to where the X0 lives, (About 12,000km away) so I had to make do with a PC solution, and the PDI was the best I could find on short notice (and under $1000) to use with the X0.