Info: a Smear-free '93 ? — Page 5

You probably know this already Mallwalker, but going through this LD I can confirm that it doesn't lack any frames seen in the GOUT. The only difference to the NTSC GOUT is that this frame seen in the PAL GOUT:

is also on this transfer, the only other difference is that GOUT have 16 more frames of solid black occurring in the fade to C-3PO's oil bath. So getting various GOUT-synced audio tracks to fit with this one will be very easy.

The DVD recorder I captured this on seemed to have a pretty lousy combfilter afterall, it did almost get rid of all the dotcrawl but at the same time it caused other artifacts like color smear, desaturated colors and loss of detail. Didn't think that was even possible, but this machine did it (a pretty recent Panasonic model). So I went with a capture letting the LD player do the combfiltering. The median script proved to be better than an average for this one. (dot-crawling was about the same)

Anyway, when I find the time to upload this for you, do you want to have it color corrected or do you just want me to release it as it is, along with a bright canyon where R2 get captured? Even though this transfer overall have pretty nice colors, it also have its own set of minor color issues:

A few frames in this scene have some very bad artifacts:

I do know that some people enjoy to just have the transfers preserved as is, so I was just wondering.

If I should try to describe the overall quality of the transfer- take the Faces release, remove the DVNR and blown out whites, reframe it by cropping the sides of the image, add some saturation and you basically have this LD. A few more samples, so you know what to expect from it. It seems like I managed to get rid of all those "crosstalk-artifacts".

Look sir, droids: http://www.sendspace.com/file/kbfln8

Binary sunset: http://www.sendspace.com/file/orcl3q

Destruction of Alderaan: http://www.megaupload.com/?d=0WY6SBNA

as you can see it is very dirty, instead of using DVNR back in '93 they should've made a new IP instead. IMO, this look better and worse than GOUT at the same time, it have the same bad aliasing as seen in the THX/GOUT transfer, it's basically GOUT before it was DVNR'ed but it will never come close to that quality even though it is smearfree, in the end it will be just another LD-transfer, but I think some of you will appreciate to have this smearfree alternative anyway, I know that I will. I could of course apply some anti-aliasing, filter out the dot-crawl and rainbowing, but I think it will hurt more than it will help. Now on to THX before I get SW-insane. ;)

In some ways it does look better than the V8: the colors don't smear, and there's more of them.

I'm confused, though. I've heard some mention that this "smear free 93" is not just Ep IV, but all three films? Confirm/deny?

The Aluminum Falcon said:

 

This definitely has a certain nostalgia to it and I would have just a capture, IVTC'ed if you have time. This release has never been transferred and it would be fantastic to see even a rudimentary '04 bootleg style transfer of it; if your samples are any indication, this will be well-received.

It's already IVTC'd, basically just encoding left if I decided to just upload it as it is. I'm not sure I get what you mean by a "rudimentary '04 bootleg style transfer"?

lurker77 said:

I love the white levels.

This disc has a very "real" look to it, IMO.

Yeah, I agree. Some details are blown out in this transfer as well, (see garage lights) but for the most part the levels aren't clipped and look very nice. The levels in my samples can of course be improved and aren't final.

The transfer do have an overall yellow tint and a few other issues like in the screen-caps I posted and the Laserdisc itself have unfortunately some of the worst rainbowing I have seen on any of my Laserdiscs, if you try to filter that out in avisynth you often end up with desaturated colors in my experience, small objects like blinking lights and lasers gets desaturated or completely colorless. I've seen it in other SW-transfers. Apparently it is most effective to apply such a filter before you IVTC but I have never seen it done completely succesfully without destroying other parts of the picture. So, I'm leaning towards just leaving it as it is. IVTC'd and resized from a 5-cap median.

Asaki said:

I'm confused, though. I've heard some mention that this "smear free 93" is not just Ep IV, but all three films? Confirm/deny?

The LD I have captured is just the corrected ANH, there are Technidisc-pressings of the other films in the trilogy as well, how they fare in comparison to the other SWE LD's I don't know.

After watching these a ton more times, I must say, I like them a lot more than I expected to. It is a bit softer than the JSC, but somehow it feels...different. More of a natural softness whereas the softness in the JSC feels more distorted (maybe due to the color smearing?).

I'm excited for this, though it still leaves us longing for a comparative transfer of Empire and Jedi.

The Aluminum Falcon said:

Oh sorry by rudimentary '04 style bootleg; I meant that I would be happy even with a quality similar to the low quality transfers that used to appear on eBay... 

  I figured you meant the 2006 discs.

The Aluminum Falcon said:

Oh sorry by rudimentary '04 style bootleg; I meant that I would be happy even with a quality similar to the low quality transfers that used to appear on eBay; however, obviously, this is much better and the fact you did a 5-cap median and IVTC'ing is nothing sort of amazing for me. It's great that this laserdisc could be preserved.

To do 5 captures wasn't any problem for me as I let the buddy of mine do it. He wasn't happy about it ;) but I felt it was needed to get rid of the extreme level of noise on this LD, and the IVTC-process was incredibly easy on this one compared to THX.

When looking on those samples again, I think a little sharpening could make it look a little better, it is very soft. I don't know when I will upload it as of yet, it needs subtitles for Greedo which will not really be a problem for me, but I need to tweak my script due to the cropping in this transfer. I'm glad you guys are liking the samples.

Asaki said:

After watching these a ton more times, I must say, I like them a lot more than I expected to. It is a bit softer than the JSC, but somehow it feels...different. More of a natural softness whereas the softness in the JSC feels more distorted (maybe due to the color smearing?). 

I think this LD is in fact a little softer than the JSC, but player and capturing device combined with what filtering is used when authoring these discs is also a big factor. IMO it is a little too soft, but the risk of adding some sharpening is that you just create a fake sense of detail in some cases and the dot-crawl/noise will also be more visible.

ChainsawAsh said:

Is there a way we can get this captured with a higher-end LD player/capture card?

Not trying to belittle your efforts, msycamore, but the higher quality we can have this in, the better.

This is unfortunately the best I can do at the moment. This particular laserdisc isn't something impossible to get a hold of either if you had a higher-end player, it's up on e-bay every day.

dark_jedi said:

I agree with CA, I looked at 1 of your samples, it doesn't look, i don't know, to bad on the PC, but it surely will not look good an a large screen HDTV.

I don't think any laserdisc transfer will, that's why I saved my old CRT-tube when upgrading, it's nice to have when I feel the urge to watch standard-def or play retro games. But it do take up some valuable space. ;)

I've got a nice 20" sanyo that I use for old games and LD viewing. Will keep it until it dies.

I discovered that I had to get rid of these files to get HD-space in order to continue with THX, so this one are up on MySpleen now, look for "STAR WARS (Technidisc)".

As already seen in my samples it is pretty rough, the amount of dirt doesn't really bother me and I wanted this to be as unfiltered as possible anyway, but I wanted to at least apply anti-aliasing but doing so completely killed the starfields unfortunately, so I opted to go unfiltered. The other thing I don't like is the dotcrawl and rainbowing, (most of the rainbowing seems to have been introduced in the telecine stage) But again, I opted to go unfiltered except on the opening crawl and end titles as such filtering is rarely good enough to not hurting other parts of the image, motion blur, color smear and erasing fine detail. Maybe a better capture would've helped these things.

I didn't touch the colors by your requests, there is a yellow tint and the colors/contrast is a little wonky in a few scenes and on some composites/effects, but other than that I think it's pretty damn nice overall in its colors. Out of the three different widescreen transfers that was made of this film on NTSC Laserdisc, this is my preferred one.

Just the film presented on a dual layered DVD, no menus. It have hardcoded subs for Greedo and I synced the film frame wise to GOUT, (which means that I took out one frame which was absent on the GOUT) so that you easily can mux in your favorite mix if you would like to, this one have the 1985 home video digital remix with the added Threepio "tractor-beam line" which was first heard in the original Mono mix. I actually prefer the regular Stereo over this one, but I went with this one as this was the mix presented on this disc.

Enjoy.

The Aluminum Falcon said:

Yay! I'll download this film ASAP and I'll tell you my thoughts. Smear-free releases are quite intriguing and it sounds like you've done a lot with this.

Actually not much was done on it more than described, but the multi-cap median script did make a big difference in that it got rid of the random video noise/dropouts generated by the player. But I'm quite satisfied with the results.

Chewtobacca said:

Congratulations on releasing this, msycamore! :) Thanks for your consideration in respect of the audio mixes and the colors.

Thanks, I would've liked to darken the canyon with the Jawas and correcting a few color issues like the lightsaber and a few shots in the assault on the Death Star but I can understand the appreciation of just having a straight preservation of the LD as it is, so no problem.

I hope you're patient, my upload speed isn't that great. Oh, and thanks to Mallwalker for discovering this LD in the first place. Maybe I should've made a separate thread for this but I think this will do for the time being.

Awesome, can't wait to watch this (though I do have the '92 VHS from the same transfer).

Are you planning on doing the other two movies later? And which THX set are you doing, or do you mean THX 1138?