To begin, please know that no negativity I may voice is in any way
directed towards yourself. I know from your posts that you have honored
our requests to "keep it in the family," as it were. I must say that I
am a little dismayed that the discs we asked people to keep under wraps
have now seemed to find their way out into the general community. I
understand how Star Wars fans are, and from the beginning I always felt
these DVDs would eventually leak out, but I am disappointed all the
same. Some have asked why we wouldn't want to share our creation with
the world, so I'll try to answer that.
First of all, we charged a nominal fee for the ones you and others got.
Not to make any money, or be compensated for the literally hundreds of
hours spent working on them, but just enough to cover costs of materials
and shipping. I didn't think it fair that the world should get for free
what a select few have paid for.
Second, I've been lurking on fora and newsgroups for some time now, and
there seem to be many out there making their own LD conversions, for the
sheer enjoyment of it, who are happy to share, and who are not in it for
any sort of glory. There also seem to be, in equal amounts, people who
do it for the sheer self-exaltation, seeking credit and some manner of
praise that theirs are "the best." To those who don't understand our
wishes to keep a lid on the distribution of our product, I say that it
is our desire to remain in a third camp, one that would like simply to
produce these discs for ourselves and our friends, and not worry about
quality control down the line, generational issues, Lucasfilm legal, etc.
But since it appears that these DVDs are going to be distributed, I
would like to at least give the complete details on them, and thus
eliminate needless speculation by others.
The entire creative process behind these discs basically took place in a
vacuum. Aside from a really horrible Asian bootleg, we had never seen
any Star Wars DVDs before, so all ideas for content and design were
entirely ours, based on what we thought we wanted to see in a DVD. It's
important to point out that all assets were generated by us alone; there
was no lifting of soundtracks or other material from other DVDs, and no
borrowing of anything.
The LDs were played back from a Pioneer player, which was the only weak
link in the chain. It had no Y/C separation circuit, so the dot crawl in
brightly colored areas was unavoidable. The discs were dubbed to Betacam
SP for use as masters, since the ability to use timecode to go back and
fix areas was important. All the video was assembled and edited
uncompressed on an Avid|DS system. There the 24p video was extracted,
and extensive restoration was performed. This restoration entailed the
removal of a great deal of film dirt and video dropout, and is where the
bulk of the labor was spent. Also in this system, the black letterbox
bars were replaced with pure black, which paid great dividends at the
encoding stage.
The "original" crawl was created in After Effects. Its timing and layout
was based on a pre-ANH VHS we obtained. This tape was also the basis for
the typeface and timing of Greedo's subtitles, which were DVD
subpictures and not encoded with the video. The same process was used
for the Jedi subtitles, particularly since the LD had spelling errors.
All of the soundtracks were mixed on an Avid Media Composer. The
soundtracks were from the Definitive Collection LDs, the Wide Screen
edition laserdiscs, and the aforementioned VHS tape was the source of
the mono mix. This process was extremely time-consuming because of the
isolated scores, whose sources were all the commercially available
soundtracks, as well as the promotional Lapti Nek 12" single (NO other
sources were used for the music. Period). This process gave us an
unswerving admiration for the job done by music editors on feature films.
The video was encoded using TMPGEnc, and all the assets were brought
together and authored in Sonic DVD Creator. Jacket pictures were
generated in Scenarist.
On the matter of some decisions:
- The color was extensively agonized over. Laserdisc is an inherently
noisy analog format. Because of this, it was decided not to boost the
chroma saturation beyond a small amount, since doing so also increases
the chroma noise. When it came to the MPEG encode, the problems the
noise would've created just weren't worth it.
- We also debated on whether to do an anamorphic encode. Based on years
of professional DVD experience, it was decided that vertically expanding
the picture to make a 16x9 video offered absolutely no advantages and
plenty of disadvantages. You simply don't expand video. It creates
unacceptable softening and makes the encoder work harder needlessly.
I hope this helps provide some information about the process behind
these DVDs. If there's anything you think I missed, or if anyone has any
questions, please let me know and I'll be happy to answer. If I can't do
anything about these works being distributed, at least I can provide
taccurate information about them.
directed towards yourself. I know from your posts that you have honored
our requests to "keep it in the family," as it were. I must say that I
am a little dismayed that the discs we asked people to keep under wraps
have now seemed to find their way out into the general community. I
understand how Star Wars fans are, and from the beginning I always felt
these DVDs would eventually leak out, but I am disappointed all the
same. Some have asked why we wouldn't want to share our creation with
the world, so I'll try to answer that.
First of all, we charged a nominal fee for the ones you and others got.
Not to make any money, or be compensated for the literally hundreds of
hours spent working on them, but just enough to cover costs of materials
and shipping. I didn't think it fair that the world should get for free
what a select few have paid for.
Second, I've been lurking on fora and newsgroups for some time now, and
there seem to be many out there making their own LD conversions, for the
sheer enjoyment of it, who are happy to share, and who are not in it for
any sort of glory. There also seem to be, in equal amounts, people who
do it for the sheer self-exaltation, seeking credit and some manner of
praise that theirs are "the best." To those who don't understand our
wishes to keep a lid on the distribution of our product, I say that it
is our desire to remain in a third camp, one that would like simply to
produce these discs for ourselves and our friends, and not worry about
quality control down the line, generational issues, Lucasfilm legal, etc.
But since it appears that these DVDs are going to be distributed, I
would like to at least give the complete details on them, and thus
eliminate needless speculation by others.
The entire creative process behind these discs basically took place in a
vacuum. Aside from a really horrible Asian bootleg, we had never seen
any Star Wars DVDs before, so all ideas for content and design were
entirely ours, based on what we thought we wanted to see in a DVD. It's
important to point out that all assets were generated by us alone; there
was no lifting of soundtracks or other material from other DVDs, and no
borrowing of anything.
The LDs were played back from a Pioneer player, which was the only weak
link in the chain. It had no Y/C separation circuit, so the dot crawl in
brightly colored areas was unavoidable. The discs were dubbed to Betacam
SP for use as masters, since the ability to use timecode to go back and
fix areas was important. All the video was assembled and edited
uncompressed on an Avid|DS system. There the 24p video was extracted,
and extensive restoration was performed. This restoration entailed the
removal of a great deal of film dirt and video dropout, and is where the
bulk of the labor was spent. Also in this system, the black letterbox
bars were replaced with pure black, which paid great dividends at the
encoding stage.
The "original" crawl was created in After Effects. Its timing and layout
was based on a pre-ANH VHS we obtained. This tape was also the basis for
the typeface and timing of Greedo's subtitles, which were DVD
subpictures and not encoded with the video. The same process was used
for the Jedi subtitles, particularly since the LD had spelling errors.
All of the soundtracks were mixed on an Avid Media Composer. The
soundtracks were from the Definitive Collection LDs, the Wide Screen
edition laserdiscs, and the aforementioned VHS tape was the source of
the mono mix. This process was extremely time-consuming because of the
isolated scores, whose sources were all the commercially available
soundtracks, as well as the promotional Lapti Nek 12" single (NO other
sources were used for the music. Period). This process gave us an
unswerving admiration for the job done by music editors on feature films.
The video was encoded using TMPGEnc, and all the assets were brought
together and authored in Sonic DVD Creator. Jacket pictures were
generated in Scenarist.
On the matter of some decisions:
- The color was extensively agonized over. Laserdisc is an inherently
noisy analog format. Because of this, it was decided not to boost the
chroma saturation beyond a small amount, since doing so also increases
the chroma noise. When it came to the MPEG encode, the problems the
noise would've created just weren't worth it.
- We also debated on whether to do an anamorphic encode. Based on years
of professional DVD experience, it was decided that vertically expanding
the picture to make a 16x9 video offered absolutely no advantages and
plenty of disadvantages. You simply don't expand video. It creates
unacceptable softening and makes the encoder work harder needlessly.
I hope this helps provide some information about the process behind
these DVDs. If there's anything you think I missed, or if anyone has any
questions, please let me know and I'll be happy to answer. If I can't do
anything about these works being distributed, at least I can provide
taccurate information about them.
There you have it. Straight from the horse's mouth. Take it as you will.