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Classic Edition: Return of the Jedi by Ocpmovie (Released) — Page 10

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OCPMovie: Have you tried burning the discs at a slower speed? Sometime that produces better quality.

Dr. M

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Got mine Saturday. Looks great. The shift to the laser material is as good as can be expected. Shame that Lucas' editors had to hack it up so much. Still it's the only version I'll probably ever watch again.

Great work.
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Got my friday. Wonderful. Love it, love it, love it.

Also, during the ending celebration the whole scene looks a little hot in the orange and red spectrum. I don't know if that is because of the laserdisc footage or DVD footage, but it looks a little over saturated to me. Am I the only one who sees this?

And, yay! Winking Luke is back! Take that, Lucasfilm film butchers! You and your pink lightsabers and your - your mat-box tiefighers, you!
"I am altering the movies. Pray I don't alter them any further." -Darth Lucas
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It's a little hot in the red spectrum because of both the DVD and laserdisc footage - they both look like that.

I had to match the laserdisc footage to look just like the DVD footage - a very difficult piece of color correcting. And then match the DVD footage to have the aspect ratio and look of the laserdisc footage ..

If it looks a bit orange, well, that's the way Lucas made it. =)
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I thought maybe you were a bit biased towards the color orange.

<span class=“Italics”>MeBeJedi: Sadly, I believe the prequels are beyond repair.
<span class=“Bold”>JediRandy: They’re certainly beyond any repair you’re capable of making.</span></span>

<span class=“Italics”>MeBeJedi: You aren’t one of us.
<span class=“Bold”>Go-Mer-Tonic: I can’t say I find that very disappointing.</span></span>

<span class=“Italics”>JediRandy: I won’t suck as much as a fan edit.</span>

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Originally posted by: MeBeJedi





(Before anyone bugs me - the "DVD project" is not the X0 project. )


DARN lol
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>>I thought maybe you were a bit biased towards the color orange.

You better believe it.
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I got my copy of this today, and it was great! Glad to have the entire Classic Edition Trilogy together at last. Good job, OCPmovie!
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Got mine! I love it. Sorry if this should be covered elsewhere, but when using Final cut pro and capturing from laserdisc, what settings do you use for capturing and exporting? Thanks a lot.
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I like to use Photo-JPEG codec, but I've never captured directly from laserdisc myself.
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I received my Classic Edition Trilogy set yesterday, gave it a quick scan to watch the former SE scenes and all I can say is you did an absolutely AMAZING job with these discs. I can't wait to sit down and watch these discs properly later this week and this weekend. Well done man, well done.
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Anyone actually ever consider creating an alternate title scroll for "revenge of the jedi"

“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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Originally posted by: skyjedi2005
Anyone actually ever consider creating an alternate title scroll for "revenge of the jedi"


Myabe that's an easter egg on this DVD.
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Read the thread.





I sent out a bunch more packages on friday - look for them soon. Due to work, I still haven't been able to work on the more complicated orders much - but I'm working on it. I've got a huge amount of orders to tend to here, and no time to do it, so patience ...
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HOW I DID IT


By Victor Von Frankenstein




Okay, let's make a Classic Edition DVD together. I'm using Mac OSX.


Your first step is to rip the official 2004 DVDs to your hard drive, removing Macrovision copy protection and region coding.

I use Mactheripper for this.

Then, you need to demux the video from the official 2004 DVDs into M2V video and AC3 (or AIF) audio.

There are a lot of different programs you can use for this. I tend to use an old OS9 program called DVDextractor. The OSX Extractor, FFmpegX and many other programs will do this as well, but they tend to do it directly from the VOB files, whereas DVDextractor is a little bit smarter, reading the VOB files to note the different tracks and chapters, so you can demux just what you want.

So, if we're not just demuxing the VOBS directly, do we extract the entire film as one big file, or do we extract the individual chapters?

Your choice. The sound will need to be extracted as one big file anyway, so I usually do that - if we have the individual chapters it will be easier to edit later, but we tend to lose frames (one or two or six) on the chapter marks in DVDExtractor - usually not visible, but sometimes visible (it was in Classic Empire).

Actually, just demuxing the VOBs is starting to sound like a good idea. =)

You'll need DVDextractor to extract all the menus separately - every single menu, and there will be a lot of them - will come in handy as you'll be using them for your own menus!

You'll have several AC3 soundtracks for the film itself. You're interested in the English stereo one, which will probably be the first one.

Convert this AC3 sound file (and a few of the opening menus, later) to AIF sound. (Stereo, 16bit, 48 KHz.) I use MacAC3 decoder, another Os9 program.

There is also an English 5.1 mix file - 5.1 mixes are not worth messing for an old film like Star Wars which was properly mixed in stereo. But you can rip all 5 channels using A.Pack, which comes with DVD Studio Pro.

Delete the complete 2004 DVD from your hard drive at this point. Keep the demuxed versions.

You'll need a good laserdisc version of the film. I used a combination of Moth3r PAL transfer and the Cowclops version 2, along with a good transfer of the Special Editions from digital satellite broadcast - The TB set (also PAL). Demux the audio and video straight from the DVD (as it won't be copy protected). To save disc space, you may want to only copy the chapters you need.

You'll need the Cowclops V2 for sound, the entire film (AC3 converted to AIF). You'll only need a couple of shots from the Special Editions, so be selective with your demuxing. For pictures, you'll need the Moth3r, and the Cowclops for backup.

Open up Final Cut Pro. Change your Audio/Video settings until you're editing with the PhotoJPEG codec, 24 frames per second, in Anamorphic 16X9, 720 x 480 frame size.

Import all your files. It'll take a while, and the AC3 files will not import. Which is why we converted them to AIF.

Place the entire 2004 version of the film on the timeline. Final Cut Pro can read M2V fine, as long as it isn't interlaced (as it is resizing the entire frame slightly). You'll need to make sure that the picture is resized to the size and aspect ratio you want it. After some experimentation, on Jedi I found out a setting which matched the official 2004 DVDs pretty much exactly. But I won't list it here, as I can't remember it. (More on this later.)

To match the '04 DVDs, it was also necessary to add a color correction - taking the saturation down very slightly and raising the brightness of either the darks of the middles ever so slightly. I also added a slight Sharpen filter, of about 8.

Thief and the Cobbler was interlaced (instead of 24 progressive frames per second, we get 30 interlaced frames), so I am converting it to PhotoJPEG BEFORE editing, using MPEG Streamclip, and then Inverse Telecine-ing it in Cinema Tools.

But this would also be a good way to do a Classic Edition or other edit - convert it to PhotoJPEG 24p first. This way, there won't be any long involved rendering later, I won't have to muck around with the M2V files, I can just edit lovingly, directly from the files. When you edit M2Vs, you can't really see what you're doing, as you're rendering it all later, slowly. If you need to do a lot of crazy editing, like in a Deleted Magic, you might want to consider converting it to PhotoJPEG in MPEG Streamclip first. This may also result in better quality in the end.

It will require more hard drive space, but if you do this chapter by chapter you can just delete from your hard drive the chapters you don't need.

For a Classic Edition like Empire or Jedi, we are NOT reediting the entire film. We are ONLY reediting the scenes which need to be reedited ... and a few frames before and after them. These will be encoded as M2V and dropped into the timeline later.

Okay, let's do something I didn't actually do for Empire or Jedi, but which needs to be done.

Your Moth3r laserdisc transfer is running too fast - 25 frames per second instead of 24.

Convert it somehow.

There are probably PC programs which can do this easily. Offhand, I think what could work would be to export the "original" scenes you need as an image sequence (probably using Quicktime Pro). Then put that image sequence into Final Cut Pro, ina 24p timeline.

Maybe not, though. How about we set Final Cut Pro into PhotoJPEG at a higher PROGRESSIVE frame rate (say, 30 or 60 progressive) and then slow the Moth3r clips we want down to 96% .... we export that as a Quicktime file, and then load it into our timeline.

Something like that. This also applies to the "TB set" PAL Special Edition material.

I never did anything like this when I did Empire or Jedi, so you'll see a few "dropped frames" during the Moth3r sequences. One per second.

Okay, at this point you should have Final Cut Pro open in a 24p PhotoJPEG anamorphic widescreen timeline. You've got the entire film laid out from the 2004 version.

Now, let's delete all the sequences that are unchanged in the special edition. Only keep the ones you need to change. Leave a few seconds before and after too.

You'll now have a timeline with a bunch of short sequences and lots of wide gaps in it.

Now, tackle and restore each of these segments one by one.

You'll use the Moth3r segments for the most part. Many times you'll just be dropping in an old shot into the sequence, and color correcting it to taste. When you get better at this, you'll want to get fancy and crop the image (with a feather, or still image matte) so that you're using part of the old image and part of the 2004 image at the same time. This becomes difficult, advanced stuff, but just be creative with it and have fun.

For example --

The opening logos.

I use the 20th Century Fox logo from the Moth3r version, color corrected to my tastes. The Lucasfilm logo is a still frame taken from the Moth3r DVD, which I then took into Photoshop and improved. I added a fuzzy "halo" to it to make it look more special, and big screen like (imitating the "haloing" effects of film projection).

"A Long Time Ago in a Galaxy Far, Far Away" is from the 2004 DVD, color corrected to my taste. It's also a still frame.

The music is from the soundtrack CD, to get a cleaner sound, but you can use audio from anywhere of course.

WE ARE STILL NOT WORRYING ABOUT SOUND AT THIS POINT.

So let's first worry about the opening crawl. The opening crawl is presented in multiangle format on the 2004 DVDs. It's very possible that even if you demux the opening crawl selecting "ignore multiangle," when you look at the demuxed crawl you're just gonna get a mess that jumps randomly from English to Spanish to French. Your sound will do the same. Unusable.

For the previous two films I WAS able to get the crawl demuxed properly, eventually. But for Return of the Jedi, I couldn't do I came up with the solution of capturing it analog. Which is fine as it's just text that you'll be applying an effect to anyway.

To do this, open up Premiere. Feed your DVD player into your camcorder. On your DVD player settings, say that you're outputting to a 16X9 TV. Your camcorder will get a 16x9 screen on it, capturing a larger image. Connect your camcorder with firewire to your computer. Now capture the DV in Premiere - the entire first shot.

(Note - you won't be able to copy this to your camcorder tape, as it will be copy protected. But Premiere will have no problems capturing it.)

Now you have a 16x9 version of the crawl - not great quality but that's okay for our purposes.

Use Cinema Tools to Inverse Telecine it. Cinema Tools has five reverse telecine settings - AA, BB, BC, CD, and DD. Try them all until it works. (This may take a while.)

When it works, you'll see a version of the crawl that isn't interlaced on any frame - that just looks right.

Take it into Final Cut Pro. Resize it the same way as your 2004 DVD footage.

Apply a "luma key" effect, removing the darker parts of the image. Apply color correction until it's the shade of yellow you want. (I go for a darker more colorful yellow.)

Let's put in some brighter stars.

Find a frame toward the end of the 2004 DVD version of the crawl (NOT your crappy analog capture of it) that shows the entire starfield without any text on it. Right before the camera pans down. Take a still frame of this, using Final Cut Pro's freeze framing.

Apply color correction (brighter whites and midtones) until this frame has the brighter stars you want.

Use this still as the background for your crawl. Put it below the analog capture - you've lumakeyed the capture, so the stars will show through. You'll need to lengthen and then repeat this still frame a few times.

Then you can gradually make the lighter stars get darker until they match the 2004 again - I like to do this during the pan down.

For the rest of the opening shot, you can't really use your crappy DV capture of the crawl - unless you have to. Try to get it from the 2004 DVD - you may get a mess of frames, but you can then edit those frames together until the opening shot is restored. I had to do this for Jedi. Cross dissolves cover any discrepancy in brightness.

Anyway.

WE ARE STILL NOT WORRYING ABOUT SOUND AT THIS POINT.

Start editing together your other sequences! Combine the original and 2004 DVDs - you can just drop in the shots you need, or get more creative by combining them.

For Jedi, in many shots you see a 2004 DVD shot dissolve into a 1983 shot and back again.

To do this, you need to match the placement and aspect ratio of both shots.

It's usually easier to match your 2004 DVD to your laserdisc rather than the other way round. For one thing, the Moth3r laserdisc is heavily cropped compared to the 2004 and cowclops versions. You're missing information on the edges of the frame.

In Empire, I used the Cowclops to add that information back. And if the edges of the frame don't move much you can often get away with putting part of the Moth3r over the 2004.

But for Jedi, I usually just enlarged and cropped the 2004 DVD to make it look like the Moth3r. Place one over the other, and put the top one at 50% visibility, so you can see both at once. Play with your size and aspect ratio (under Distort) settings until they match - and play with the visibility knob to see how well you're doing - moving it from 0 to 100%, you'll see the Moth3r then the 2004. When they match, you've got it.

Then crop whichever one's on top, so that you see half of one image and half of the other.

Color correct the Moth3r until it matches the 2004 DVD. This will be a difficult process. But when you get it right, the results will be amazing.

When both your size and color correction are perfect, you can cross dissolve from one to the other and it will look seamless.

When you're done with a sequence, export it as an M2V video file.

But not until you've found out with frame to start and end it on.

Let's open up DVD Studio Pro.

Import the entire 2004 DVD that you demuxed - the M2V video most of all. It will take a while for the program to "parse" the information - you'll see little green lights light up next to the listings when it's done.

What you need to do is drop all the 2004 DVD M2v video into a timeline, and then "edit" it (by dragging the start and end points of each clip - not really editing, but close enough) until you've left gaps in the sequence just the right size to place your "fixed" segments into.

Try to include as many frames as you can, stopping right before the special edition material starts. You can only "edit" once every half second, so this won't be an exact science - you can stop every 12 frames or so. (If you can stop very near or exactly on when a shot cuts, that's best - or when the camera is moving quickly and will hide the seams of what you're doing. If the camera is very still and you cut in the middle of a shot, it will stand out later.)

Have Final Cut Pro open at the same time. Or, have Grab open to take screen grabs. Because you need to look at the stopping and starting frames of each segment in your DVD Studio Pro timeline, and make sure that your Final Cut Pro segments start at the very next (or previous) frame.

When you plunk your new segments into DVD Studio Pro, they have to lead on directly from the last frame of the real 2004 DVD segments, and look seamless.

Okay, so let's try this out. Render your segments (this will take a while), then export your completed, edited Final Cut Pro segments as M2V files. You can do this directly from Final Cut Pro, but it can't export as 24 frames per second, only 30 frames per second. So the motion will look a little jerky. If you're okay with that - and I was when I did Empire and Jedi - you can export directly from Final Cut.

If you're NOT okay with that, and you want smooth as butter 24p motion (as I will probably do for Thief and the Cobbler) - export it from Final Cut Pro as a Quicktime PhotoJPEG, and then use MPEG Streamclip or Compressor or FFmpegX or whatever to convert it to a 24p M2V.

Now, let's see how well we've done.

WE ARE STILL NOT WORRYING ABOUT SOUND AT THIS POINT.

Take your completed, edited segment in M2V format and plunk it into your DVD Studio Pro timeline, in the appropriate place, alongside clips from the real 2004 DVD.

Watch it and see if anything really jumps out when it switches from the real thing to your segment. Usually you'll see a very slight change in frame size or aspect ratio, slight changes in color and brightness, and sharpness ...

Figure out exactly what the difference is, and fix it in Final Cut Pro, especially for the first and last shots of each segment.

THE GREEN FRAME THING.

If you're editing with M2V files in Final Cut Pro, sometimes it will render out wrong - you'll get the flash of a bright green frame. This just kinda happens. Just rerender that part of that shot. It may take a few tries but will render properly eventually.

Eventually, after a lot of work, you'll have an edit you're happy with.

WE ARE NOW WORRYING ABOUT SOUND.

Here's how I do the sound. Since we're only editing little segments in the finished movie, it's sometimes (always) hard to tell what the sound sync should be for the entire film. We could just go on guesswork, but it's better to be sure.

What I do is, I put another, not quite right soundtrack on the film in DVD Studio Pro - I use the AC3 soundtrack from the Cowclops version 2, but anything with sound will do. You just want to cover the whole film with AC3 sound.

Burn your edit of the film with this temp track to DVD. "Build" it in DVD Studio Pro, and burn it to a DVD in Toast.

** This is as good a place as any to mention that your edit will sometimes, at this point, already be larger than 4.4 GB, the size of a single layer disc. So you have to build it as a dual layer disc. I then use a program called DVD2OneX to shrink it down to single layer size. It will still look good. A single layer disc is all we want anyway, during this testing procedure.

Okay, so we now have a "test" DVD of the entire film. Put this in your DVD player, hook your DVD player up to your camcorder and your camcorder to your computer, as before -- in 16x9 mode.

This is a good chance to see how your edit looks on a TV screen. What works, what needs to be tweaked.

Open up Premiere, as before when we did the crawl. Play the film on your DVD player, and capture the entire film to your hard drive (You'll need about 30 gigs of hard drive space, or you could use some cruddy codec other than DV to capture with) .... capture it in segments of about 15 minutes or so - this is to make sure you don't drop frames as the film goes on.

Now, in Premiere, edit your captured version of the film together so it plays as a continuous piece (rather than the individual segments you recorded).

And make your soundtrack! This is the version of the film you want to edit your soundtrack to. This is because you know it will match how it actually plays in a DVD player.

I use the Cowclops V2 audio for the O-OT scenes, and anything I need the old audio for. I use the 2004 DVD audio when I can, as it's quite clear, but I usually have to make it a lot louder in the edit, especially for dialogue. I use the CD for the opening and end music. Do whatever you want, this is your edit, and you can have as much fun with it as you did with the picture edit. Throw in deleted lines. Use lines from rare mixes, like the Star Wars mono mix. Make the best sound mix you can.

Now convert it to AC3 using A.Pack .... 192 KBPS, and turn off Film Standard Compression! You want no compression presets. Save it as a stereo AC3.

It will take some time to convert. When it's done, put it into DVD Studio Pro, and move it around a few frames until it seems to be in sync with the movie.

Burn this DVD and watch it, to see if the sound is in sync, and good. Note down any problems .... if most of it is out of sync, you can capture short bits and pieces of it in Premiere and find out EXACTLY how many frames it's off by.

Repeat until it's in sync and perfect.


Good luck!
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Wow, that's quite an insane and runabout process. Kudos to you for putting in so much work to figure out how to do everything, the results speak for themselves.

I used to be very active on this forum. I’m not really anymore. Sometimes, people still want to get in touch with me about something, and that is great! If that describes you, please email me at [my username]ATgmailDOTcom.

Hi everybody. You’re all awesome. Keep up the good work.

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If there was any justice in the world, this kind of thing would impress the ladies.