Grinder's PAL first issues transfer (* unfinished project *)

I finally got around to transfering this unique LD set. I’ve never seen a transfer of it, and it certainly deserves it to be preserved. The ANH LD is from '82, TESB from '85 and ROTJ from '86. The image is so clear, sharp, and has such an authentic look to it, it’s my favorite SW LD set. It looks very “unprocessed”, probably because it is just that. And on top of that they rival the official (widescreen) DVD release in detail. Certainly the detail in near-dark sequences. The only drawback: it’s P&S. Except for the entire crawl-shots of ANH and ROTJ, which are enhanced anamorphic widescreen. I say enhanced, because there are no black bars present, so you’d actually have to scale it down to fit it in the normal aspect ratio if you were making a widescreen SW DVD.

ANH has got some noticeable laserrot though. So when I got that disc, and was stunned by its appearance, I started looking for two additional discs so I could use TooT. I would have done that, but on one of the discs the rot is so bad that a particular 5 minute sequence can’t actually be read anymore by both of my players! The only way I could get around that would be to accept the rot in that sequence, and let TooT filter out all the other rot. I may still do that, but not for now, with the september release coming up and the faded interest in preservation efforts. Though I expect these transfers to even have advantage over the official OT releases. But let’s cut all the speculations on that, and hope to be pleasantly surprised on that 11th of september. TESB and ROTJ are rot free by the way.

I am doing a complete preservation, capturing all the footage on the LD, including copyright warnings and such. ROTJ even has a trailer for another movie before the feature starts! I was thinking about leaving the side breaks too, because of the “side 2” screen, but I decided to leave that out. Apart from that I’m doing nothing more than encoding to MPEG-2 and AC3 to fot on a DVD5. I will be using the Pioneer DVL-909 again: still haven’t got that 2950 looked at. It gives a slightly sharper and cleaner image, except for the extensive amount of chroma noise. Does anyone know what causes that by the way? Anyway, the 909 is one of the best PAL machines too, so you’re talking about 1% differences here.

ANH will be up on a.b.starwars by the end of the week, it will include English and Dutch subtitles, as with my previous transfers.