Info: 1983 UK 'TVS' Star Wars premiere - anybody still have a recording? — Page 2

russs15 said:

This is pretty much the same for me. Of course, don't forget that this has the Monomix soundtrack with all the different audio dialogue differences that have now been so well documented.

To me, the retail releases of the 80's and 90's just were not right to my eyes and ears compared to what I was brought up with.

Yeah, agree. I remember that the recording I had in the 80's didn't include the first third of the film for some reason, started in Mos Eisley, but it didn't stop me from watching it repeatedly. :)

Don't know if this is the fault of your DVD-recorder Russ or if it's only in your compressed avi, but the whites are quite severely clipped. But some of the detail lost in the highlights can be restored, a few examples using avisynth:

Levels(0,1,255,0,235,false)

top: original avi below: corrected

This may be old news to you Jonno, but I just thought I would point it out just in case. I know that some DVD-recorders had the bad habit of capture video either too bright or too dark.

It could be anything from the original VHS, the VHS to DVD recorder process, the low quality setting on this particar version of the transfer, the DVD to AVI conversion process or any combination of the four things.

If the higher quality DVD file looks as bad - blame the VHS or DVD recorder!!! Either way, we are screwed.

Jonno really has his work cut out on this one.........

At over 30 years old, it is in a far better condition now than I am now compared to then.

I was a fresh faced 16 year old who had just started work and was hooked on The Young Ones which was on TV for the first time. Our VHS was rented from Visionhire and at that time, we only had one 1 hour tape!! We used to hire films from the local record store and we always had a housefull to watch them.

I remember this being shown but as we had no spare tape, I could not record the film. I had to wait a year or two for that.

russs15 said:

It could be anything from the original VHS, the VHS to DVD recorder process, the low quality setting on this particar version of the transfer, the DVD to AVI conversion process or any combination of the four things.

If the higher quality DVD file looks as bad - blame the VHS or DVD recorder!!! Either way, we are screwed.

Jonno really has his work cut out on this one.........

Hold on, we're definitely not screwed just because of this, on the contrary, this old recording is in much better shape than I thought and it looks fantastic for the most part, and like I just demonstrated much of the lost detail in the highlights can be restored. And I've only seen your compressed avi yet. It's a real gem IMO. :)

Are we back to normal?

All good here. This has made me realise that I need to get out more......

Time for a proper post. Hopefully the uncompressed higher quality DVD version is even better and those with the power can squeeze even more detail from it.

I wonder if it was my post above that locked the forum yesterday? Anyway, I made a quick look at your uncompressed recording, only got half of the transfer - disc 2, but the white levels were the same on that one. I guess it's the doings of the DVD recorder. But like I said, most of the blown out detail can be restored. My last example of the Yavin temples isn't the best example but I posted it to show it is prevalent throughout the transfer. I think it will be tough to restore the frames properly though.

I actually had this version as well with ads on VHS (with a bootleg of ROTJ afterwards on the same tape)

but it went to the dump years ago when i had to clear out my VHS collection

bigrob said:

 

I actually had this version as well with ads on VHS (with a bootleg of ROTJ afterwards on the same tape)

but it went to the dump years ago when i had to clear out my VHS collection

Unfortunately, this is probably the fate of most early recordings and bootlegs.

As probably happened to my Christmas Day 1990 Sky Movies premier which was probably the first time Star Wars was shown on UK TV in full without an ad break.

Yeah, lots of interesting stuff gets thrown out.  Not to get too off-topic, but I threw out an old tape of ROTJ that was recorded off US network TV in the late 80s/early 90s, and I SWEAR it was a slightly different cut of the movie.  The Luke/ghost Obi-Wan scene on Dagobah was comprised of different camera angles from any other version I've ever seen.  I started a thread on it a while ago but no one has any memory of this.  I wish I had that !@#$%^ tape!!!

Jonno: As you already know, this community usually prefers raw releases. If I were you, I'd release the pure preservation of the tape, if possible.

Is there a lot of horizontal jitter? If so, then I might be able to use my Panasonic DMR-ES10 to clean it up.

Up till recently, my vision was to simply see a straight off the tape version that mirrors what the tape would look like if played now. This is what many of us had as our Star Wars fix for many, many years and is what some people have nostalgia for.

However, seeing more and more unique differences from this tape makes me think that a further version with as much detail as possible squeezed out of it may also be appreciated.

Jonno said:

I've compared the raw MPEG-2 rips and, while the conversion to AVI hasn't helped the definition, the clipping is definitely a factor of the recorded DVDs.
While ADC technology in set-top DVD recorders does vary considerably in quality (not wanting to cast aspersions on Russ's AV kit!), it seems more likely that it was a limitation of the consumer-level VCR that created the tape in the first place.

 Yeah, it could be the original recording but I've actually seen this amount of blown out whites on LD-captures apparently caused by some DVD recorders. It sounds weird I know.

Jonno said:
Anyway, I'm presented with a bit of a quandary here - I certainly hadn't planned to make any revisionist alterations to the image (indeed my proposed editing workflow - as outlined earlier - is intended to obviate any transcoding at all).
I wonder what the best approach is - make my edit as a 'pure' preservation of this tape, then hand over to someone else to make improvements to the image as they see fit? I'd be glad to hear peoples' thoughts on this.

I think your original plan sounds good - pure preservation, then someone else may make further improvements on your work if needed.

danny_boy:

Russ:

Russ (white level tweak and de-interlaced):

frank678 said:

no offense to russs15 but it looks like danny_boys capture is a marginally richer resource based on the gold saturation of 3PO. For someone whos had chance to look at the two captures side by side is that true all the way through the captures?

I just took that screenshot from another thread where danny_boy had posted it, no idea how his copy compare to Russ', but based on that screenshot I agree that it does look to be a more solid capture.

frank678 said:

no offense to russs15

none taken!

The quality and condition of the discs explains why they have not been let out in 7 years. In fact, it is only you guys and a few others asking various questions about that broadcast that has made it plainly obvious that we have a unique version on our hands.

Like others, I am hoping that one of the other recordings can be seen for comparison purposes and that the best quality possible can finally be seen by all.

However, I agree with the other comments and that the initial release should be a straight version of the VHS circa 1982.

msycamore said:

Russ (white level tweak and de-interlaced):

You should not need to deinterlace - I think you can just swap the field order. See this post.