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The Phantom Menace: Japanese Laserdisc Preservation - MKV Available now (Released) — Page 2

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Moth3r said:

none said:

pittrek wrote: BTW there was a shot where they added a CGI bridge for the DVD/BD. Does anybody remember in which scene it was so that I can check it ?

It's the establishing shot of GTF occupied Naboo after the heroes begin their return from Coruscant.  ~1:35:00.  It's a few shots after Jar-Jar says: "Weesa going home!"  The shot after the CGI modified bridge is Sidious (hologram) talking to Gunray. 

pics of the shot in this post:

http://originaltrilogy.com/forum/topic.cfm/Prequel-Bootlegs/post/611716/#TopicPost611716

Looks like Adywan missed that one in his theatrical reconstruction (the bridge is there). Also, this change is not mentioned in this dvdactive article.

Yep.  My Deleted, Altered, and Alternate project relied on Adywan's reconstruction for all shots except that one, where before I had to rely on my widescreen VHS.  Now I can use the Japanese Laserdisc, with much prettier results :)

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Video Collector said:

I'm not sure which decoder my system uses, but I haven't had any problems before.

Intel display adapter? Mine causes these decoding defects in a lot of videos. If you turn off DXVA and use software decoding they should go away.

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From a quick scan of this it looks very nice.

I've heard that the TPM laserdisc is one of the best ever made (it was towards the end of the format's life), and the CLD-HF9G is the Japanese equivalent of the CLD-99 (one of the best US laserdisc players).

I spotted just a little haloing in some scenes that shows it's from an analogue source, but laserdisc can't get much better than this!

Has anyone compared this to the version that came from a DVB broadcast?

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Moth3r said:

Looks like Adywan missed that one in his theatrical reconstruction (the bridge is there). Also, this change is not mentioned in this dvdactive article.

Do we know if Adywan missed anything else in his theatrical TPM reconstruction?

A picture is worth a thousand words. Post 102 is worth more.

I’m late to the party, but I think this is the best song. Enjoy!

—Teams Jetrell Fo 1, Jetrell Fo 2, and Jetrell Fo 3

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darth_ender said:

That's the only other change I've noticed.

In that case, then we might be able to fix it without re-encoding.

We'd need to:

1  crop/resize the shot from althor1138's preservation to match adywan's reconstruction
2  color match
3  (other post-processing)
4  match grain
5  encode to MPEG2, matching the bitrate of adywan's reconstruction as closely as possible
6  splice it in using something like Cutteraman

A picture is worth a thousand words. Post 102 is worth more.

I’m late to the party, but I think this is the best song. Enjoy!

—Teams Jetrell Fo 1, Jetrell Fo 2, and Jetrell Fo 3

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BTW, I'm planning on putting all of the raw files to my captures up on the newsgroup so that everybody will have access to them.

Luke threw twice…maybe.

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althor1138 said:

BTW, I'm planning on putting all of the raw files to my captures up on the newsgroup so that everybody will have access to them.

That's fantastic news! Thanks!!!

A picture is worth a thousand words. Post 102 is worth more.

I’m late to the party, but I think this is the best song. Enjoy!

—Teams Jetrell Fo 1, Jetrell Fo 2, and Jetrell Fo 3

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So I just downloaded this laserdisc preservation, and I'm liking what I've seen so far. The colors alone make it worth it. Whether they're accurate to the theater or not, they're what I remember from my VHS tape as a kid, but with more detail. Unfortunately, the lack of alien subtitles is making me hold off from burning it to a DVD just yet. Has anybody made a subtitle file to go with this, or does anybody know what changes to the time code would need to be made to get subtitles meant for a DVD rip to line up with the right parts of this one? It's pretty obvious that an .srt or .ass file meant for the DVD wouldn't work without tweaking, since the Pioneer logo and everything is part of the file. Not to mention changes like the extended pod race scene further screwing up the timing -- if it were just adding the time for the logos, I'd have done it already and probably linked an upload here for anyone in my shoes.

 

Alternatively, is Adywan's reconstruction still floating around out there? I've looked, but for the life of me I can't find it. Not the DVD ready version, anyway. I found the AVCHD version on a torrent site, but there aren't any seeders and I'd have to convert it, anyway, potentially mucking up the audio if it's at a higher bitrate than 448k. Myspleen is missing pretty much all of his edits, for some reason. I'm kind of interested in that disc anyway because it has some nice special features and because DVD encoding and authoring is a major PITA on a dual core machine.

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AntcuFaalb said:

1  crop/resize the shot from althor1138's preservation to match adywan's reconstruction

 I thought Adywan was using an HDTV capture for the theatrical edits?

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is the cropping on the HDTV source similar to the DVD.  The blu ray won't match up it has more picture information.  Conforms to the theatrical release except for the added non theatrical scenes.

How would one fix the blu ray add fake grain and cut out those added scenes? Re add puppet yoda?

“Always loved Vader’s wordless self sacrifice. Another shitty, clueless, revision like Greedo and young Anakin’s ghost. What a fucking shame.” -Simon Pegg.

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So, I went ahead and made English soft subs for the alien dialog, editing the time code on a DVD or Blu-Ray timed .srt I grabbed from subscene.com. I'd like to spend some time tweaking it before I actually release it, but I was wondering what the best way to go about releasing it would be, or if there's even any interest. I've got a lot of stuff going on at home right now, so I can't guarantee I'll have it tweaked and out promptly, but worst case scenario I can put out what I've already got done, which is all 28 (according to the way my source file was split up) Huttese lines, just maybe off by a few hundred milliseconds here and there.

 

If anyone didn't know and was curious, the file format is just a .txt renamed to a .srt, with typed time codes showing when and how long a line of text should be on screen, which VLC and other video playback programs know what to do with. I edited it with Notepad ++, and at least in VLC, it's all clearly visible despite the Japanese hard subs without having to move it around or anything. Some of the Japanese may be rendered illegible though, if you speak the language and are reading along, but if you could do that, you wouldn't need these.

 

Also, I'm still interested in Adywan's reconstruction, if anyone can give me a tip :P

 

P.S.: In the process of doing this, I wound up watching the Tatooine scenes over and over again, and something struck me about the CGI -- specifically, how much more believable it is in this copy than in more modern versions. Not sure if it's the color timing or just the grainier video masking some of the weirdness, but there's something intangibly different about this version than the official DVD and Blu-Ray.

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Interesting project. ...I might figure out how to crop this to remove the subtitles, and may get silly and see what upscaling can do, but it's cool to see a good capture like this. Whether or not the movie is great, it's nice to see the preservation of the original cut in good form. Thanks!

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I'm done editing the subtitles, I'm just not sure how or where to upload them, or if anyone but me even wants them. I did it mainly for myself, but I figured I'd release it, since I'm probably not the only one who wants to watch this preservation but doesn't have the alien lines memorized.

Does anyone want it or have suggestions for what I should do with it?

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I expect that there would be some interest in your tweaked subtitles. Since SRT files are just text, the file size is small so it should be easy to upload to a hoster somewhere and post a link on the forum.

You could even just post the text, so people could copy and paste into Notepad and save their own SRT.

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Cool.

I wound up putting it up on Pastebin, because I can upload without an account and they theoretically won't ever delete it. When you download it, just re-name the .txt to a .srt.

The link is here:http://pastebin.com/RsJSBCPL

If anyone thinks they can improve the timings, feel free. The way I have it is functional, but the timing doesn't always line up exactly with the timing of the Japanese subs. It tends to line up pretty well with the spoken dialog, though.

 

Edit: In case that came off wrong, I'm not saying "this needs editing, finish it for me pl0x." I'm saying it's done by my standards, but it's easy enough to edit if you're not happy with it. I've already got it burned to a DVD, so I have no investment in it past this point. The DVD looks great, by the way -- I do most of my movie watching on a late model CRT, and this rip looks better on it than it did on my monitor by a long shot. Gives you an idea of how much of the weird artifacts you see on these laserdisc rips you wouldn't have seen on a period TV and player, and reinforces why the format was so amazing at the time.

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Thank you! I just downloaded this laserdisc preservation and I really like the quality.

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Just downloaded and watched some of this, and it was really good. My favourite part was that the Air Taxi Scene was taken out, as it should be. The CGI in that scene was just not good enough quality compared to the rest of the film.

Not enough people read the EU.

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althor1138 said:

BTW, I’m planning on putting all of the raw files to my captures up on the newsgroup so that everybody will have access to them.

Did this ever happen?

StraightOuttaHell said:

How can i download this?

Myspleen or newsgroups.

FE<3OT

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reave said:

althor1138 said:

BTW, I’m planning on putting all of the raw files to my captures up on the newsgroup so that everybody will have access to them.

Did this ever happen?

Yes. The files are 768 days old and it’s a 60GB DL. Search for “TPM HF9G”. One day in the future, I’m going to recap it and make a 720p mkv like i’m doing with all of the other star wars laserdiscs that I have. Currently, I’m wading through the French Laserdiscs but I can do this after them.

EDIT: BTW, the mkv on the spleen is probably just as good quality and is already ivtc’ed.

Luke threw twice…maybe.

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I’ve been meaning to preserve my laserdisc of TPM for myself, are the alien subs in English or Japanese I don’t remember also I read that they don’t appear on screen, are they below like the rest of the subs if they are couldn’t someone just make a custom sub track and place them where they belong ?

“I will call this one BOHIJ”
-Chris O’Neil

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-The Boys From Oneyplays

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Jp4195 said:

I’ve been meaning to preserve my laserdisc of TPM for myself, are the alien subs in English or Japanese I don’t remember also I read that they don’t appear on screen, are they below like the rest of the subs if they are couldn’t someone just make a custom sub track and place them where they belong ?

I think they’re in the letter boxing in Japanese. And yeah, it’s not to difficult to throw an SRT file together in about half an hour for those subs.

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The subs are in the letterbox area on that laser disc. About ten years ago I was working with Rikter on a laser disc to DVD version of this. I don’t know if that ever made it out into the world but we just cropped out the subs and created new ones for the aliens.

“You know, when you think about it, the Ewoks probably just crap over the sides of their tree-huts.”