Harmy's STAR WARS Despecialized Edition HD - V2.7 - MKV (Released) — Page 369

ww12345 said:

I don't know - LD is not a great source anyway (IMHO, not high resolution enough) so I don't know how many people would be clamoring for an electron scan of all of the Star Wars LDs... I could be wrong, but that's just my guess.

~528x480 is enough for me. ^_^

I get more pissed-off by artifacts: aliasing, damaged/dirty print, etc.

ww12345 said:

Hahahaha!  :)

I don't mean LD is a bad source, it's just that at a certain point, the material exceeds its usefulness in time or expense - just like it would be foolish to have a 4k scan of an 8mm home movie...

Agreed, but I still believe that this community hasn't seen what can really be pulled from an LD.

Myself, poita, and a few others are working on that right now. :-)

ww12345 said:

Oh, I reserve my judgement then. :)

Don't. Admittedly, LD is a crap source.

I'm just saying that it's less crap than people think.

AntcuFaalb said:

Continued...

The closest to a "100% pure video signal" from an LD that I think we'll ever get is a TooT of 3 captures from 3 different copies of the same movie on LD (pressed by the same pressing factory, preferably) on an LD player with a >51dB signal-to-noise ratio that doesn't smear CLV LDs (if the LD in question is CLV, that is).

What a mouthful!

What player does all that exactly? Silly me would buy one of course. ;)

captainsolo said:

AntcuFaalb said:

Continued...

The closest to a "100% pure video signal" from an LD that I think we'll ever get is a TooT of 3 captures from 3 different copies of the same movie on LD (pressed by the same pressing factory, preferably) on an LD player with a >51dB signal-to-noise ratio that doesn't smear CLV LDs (if the LD in question is CLV, that is).

What a mouthful!

What player does all that exactly? Silly me would buy one of course. ;)

Plenty. The Panasonic LX-900 is one (affordable) example.

If you get one manufactured in late 1994 or 1995, then it won't suffer from the minor AGC issue that impacted the 1993-manufactured LX-900s.

I have two: a 1995-manufactured one for capturing and a 1993-manufactured one for parts.

yoda-sama said:

CLV smear shouldn't matter much to Star Wars projects, as the Definitive Edition is CAV (which'd be all around better anyway, what with every frame of the movie being present).

Definitive Collection = GOUT (2006 bonus DVDs)

There's no point in preserving that release IMHO.

The same goes for the THX "Faces" LDs.

ww12345 said:

Ah. I see. Here I was, thinking that you and Poita (plus some others) were on the trail to make an LD source come out 2k, and you crushed my dreams. lol

Unfortunately, no.

The best we can hope for is "indistinguishable from a pretty-good DVD release".

It'd still be worlds-better than GOUT, which is more than enough incentive for me to keep on working!

Harmy: I'm sorry for hijacking this thread... again.

nightstalkerpoet said:

Nice! Looks possible, but time consuming. And would take programming a new analysis program.

Considering the lengths people are willing to go to for star wars preservations, I wouldn't be surprised to see an "electron microscope laserdisc scanning and analysis to retrieve pure video signal" project pop up. (Fingers crossed).

But yes, a 3 source cross reference scan is more probable by far.

Either would be an awesome source for Harmy.

 

This was actually discussed by the guys back in the X0 project days, but the data is RF modulated analogue (kinda like FM radio), so not only would you have to get an SEM scan, you would have to write a program to extract the data and reconstruct the video signal. Not feasible on too many counts. If you were clever you could pickup the RF signal from the player before it is processed and digitise *that* to achieve nearly the same result, but would still have to write the reconstruction software, effectively doing in software what the player does in outdated software.

A more realistic goal is to pickup the composite video signal before it is amplified and before it goes through the overlay chips etc. and build a better video amp circuit with current components, bypassing the outdated and noisy LD circuitry. That is relatively simple to do and should result in a much cleaner signal. But anyway, we are derailing this thread again!

The Griff said:

SpiffyGriff said:

Hello, I'm Griff, a filmmaker. 

Hello, I'm THE Griff.

What's funny is we also have Biff on the forum, but it's been a while since I've seen that butthead.

Ok, my last piece on the laserdisc piece. in relation to software fm signal conversion, would this be helpful? im not a programmer or anything, but this guy seemed to be on the right path, if im understanding correctly.  

arachnoid.com/phase_locked_loop

nightstalkerpoet said:

Ok, my last piece on the laserdisc piece. in relation to software fm signal conversion, would this be helpful? im not a programmer or anything, but this guy seemed to be on the right path, if im understanding correctly.  

arachnoid.com/phase_locked_loop

Someone is already working on this: https://github.com/happycube/ld-decode

Unfortunately, the FM signal isn't "what's on the LD", so-to-speak. It's generated by the player, so you can think of the code above as a means to capture from an LD without using a comb filter and without all of the processing done by a capture card and its drivers.