team negative1 - star wars 1977 - 35mm theatrical version (Released) — Page 113

I never spliced in porno frames, but did have to recreate cue-dots a few times over the years.

Part of me wonders if there’s 35s out there of the Greedo scene without hardsubs. </random>

Spoon said:

Guys/gals,

I’ve been a lurker here for a while. Silently watching from the shadows of Internet anonymity. Leaching the content. Failing to contribute. Consuming without so much as a “thank you” or a “great job!”

No more.

TN1, your efforts are incredible. As a child of the (late) '80s, I had to settle for grainy 4:3 VHS tapes, Special Editions, and subpar DVDs. I never had the chance to see the Original Trilogy in theaters, but you’ve given me the joy of that experience. The grain, the matte lines, the imperfections-- I LOVE IT. I have 4TB of movies sitting on this hard drive, all ripped from DVDs and Blurays that sit in plastic tubs in my garage… and all of them converted to MP4V, and stripped of extra features.

Except for this. This stays exactly as-is.

Harmy (since I know you’re around right now,) the same goes for you. Whereas TN1 started with something vintage, and worked their way up, you started with something modern, and worked your way back. Between the two of you, you have managed to arrive at similar (yet subtly different) results, and both are astounding to me.

With efforts like these (and others, which may or may not see the light of day,) I’m confident that the Original Trilogy will be properly preserved for my children and grandchildren. A series that meant so much to me as a kid will be preserved for them, and that genuinely makes me emotional to think about.

You are all doing an incredible job. Thank you. A million times. THANK YOU.

I second that. There’s some moments in this version that confirms bits in the Despecialized Edition that I wasn’t sure were actually in the original version.

I was wrong. R2-D2 indeed is underneath a blue gel when he enters the pod. And the model Y wings do disappear on screen when lowering to the Death Star surface. Things I don’t remember growing up with a choice of laserdisc or VHS for Star Wars.

Williarob said:

RU.08 said:

But in terms of x264 - quality is set by the CRF value. CRF-19 will always produce the same quality (roughly speaking). With slower values (the so-called right values) it will produce the same quality as the “fastest” preset but at a (slightly) lower bitrate. You can’t feed settings into x264 that will magically make CRF-19 look like CRF-16.

^ This is absolutely true, You can’t feed settings into x264 that will magically make CRF-19 look like CRF-16. However, you can choose to do a multi-pass VBR encode INSTEAD of using a CRF value. If we choose the exact same average bit-rate as CRF-16, the file size will of course be the same, and the quality (according to the documentation) will probably not be visibly or measurable better. But, if CRF 17 produces a 21 GB file and CRF 16 produces a 25 GB file, then a 2 Pass encode could be targeted to produce a 23 GB file which would still fit on a single layer disc, but would be slightly higher quality than CRF 17 - call it CRF 16.5. Also, there are many other x264 options that can be adjusted from the defaults which may improve picture quality at the same file size. If anyone knows what they might be, we’re open to suggestions. Jan, I’m testing your suggestion out right now.

I will test as many options as I can (and more than one encoder) on a short section of the film, including what it might look like if it was a full BD-50 (not that we are likely to go that route - unless the 25 GB vs 50 GB comparison is like night and day), and post the results somewhere.

Yes you’re absolutely right, you can use 2-pass to target BD-R size if desired. You can also “hack” the rate by doing two tests on what you think is an “average” section of the movie and extrapolating the data to work out the CRF that will produce the required bitrate/file-size.

That’s fine to do that, all I’m hoping for is that for version 1.5 we get a .mkv with an unrestricted filesize using CRF-16, in addition to the BD25 version. 😃 They can both exist!

Chouonsoku said:

The settings used on the current 1080p essentially neuter the release. Even scene groups are required to use better quality presets these days. The motion estimation settings alone cause a huge amount of grain shift from frame to frame. There is so much more to x264 encoding than CRF values and bit rate. I already contacted TM-1 with baseline settings that would dramatically improve their video quality. I just hope they use them.

I wouldn’t say it “neuters” the release. You are right about the per-frame grain using their settings. And that’s not as important with a HDTV source that’s mostly devoid of gain because the quality difference between key frames and others is less obvious, which probably isn’t what you meant with “scene releases” though. I agree with you that you do want each individual frame to look more consistent in quality with its neighbours than the v1.0 release.

Chewtobacca said:

Molly said:

Part of me wonders if there’s 35s out there of the Greedo scene without hardsubs. </random>

The JSC doesn’t have the Greedo subs. Obviously, that was made for home video, and it’s a different situation, but I suppose that there’s a very slim chance that there might be a print out there that doesn’t have them. I doubt it though.

nod. I think most WS laserdiscs prolly had any Greedo subtitles in the letterbox. Of course, 272i isn’t a very good solution for patching 1080p 😉 (but that said, if I were to go through with my plan to, after acquiring the necessary sources, do my own despecialization I wouldn’t have to worry about it).

Perhaps there was a language or two into which subtitling was not preferred, and they dubbed or overdubbed Greedo instead - just a thought 😉.

Laserschwert said:

Molly said:
Of course, 272i isn’t a very good solution for patching 1080p 😉

You can always use the Blu-rays to paint out the subs.

Yeah, hence my “despecialization” comment. Not sure that I could come up with good results working in the opposite direction, to try to make the BD footage look like 35…

slumberdore said:

I was watching the silver screen edition and paused on this frame: http://i.imgur.com/nd4LBgO.png
Is this an encoding glitch? I don’t know what the frame number is but it happens right after wedge pulls out during the final trench run.

It could be, or it could be an artifact introduced during the clean up phase. Either way, it is something we should be able to fix.

Williarob said:

slumberdore said:

I was watching the silver screen edition and paused on this frame: http://i.imgur.com/nd4LBgO.png
Is this an encoding glitch? I don’t know what the frame number is but it happens right after wedge pulls out during the final trench run.

It could be, or it could be an artifact introduced during the clean up phase. Either way, it is something we should be able to fix.

Where’s the glitch? Where am I looking?

Wazzles said:

Molly said:

Part of me wonders if there’s 35s out there of the Greedo scene without hardsubs. </random>

I seriously doubt it. I can’t think of any reason why they would ever leave it out.

It is possible actually. The international master would have had no subs, so that it could be changed for the localised 35mm releases.
The Derran Super8 comes from a master that had no Greedo subs in place, so there was one at some point, but it would have resided with a mastering house, and it is possible that it ended up in private hands.

FrankT said:

Williarob said:

slumberdore said:

I was watching the silver screen edition and paused on this frame: http://i.imgur.com/nd4LBgO.png
Is this an encoding glitch? I don’t know what the frame number is but it happens right after wedge pulls out during the final trench run.

It could be, or it could be an artifact introduced during the clean up phase. Either way, it is something we should be able to fix.

Where’s the glitch? Where am I looking?

Left side of the image, towards the bottom. There are two squares of odd looking pixels. They look too big to be the blocky compression artifacts we are used to seeing, but at the same time, our clean up tools don’t fix in squares or rectangles either.

Fortunately, played back at 23.976 fps you won’t see it at all.