.: LeeThorogood's PAL LaserDisc Preservation Project :. - '97 SE Finished '95 THX Finished - '97 SE Uploaded '95 THX Uploaded to the newsgroup — Page 2

I agree, now that I have done these comparison shots I can see just how overly dark things were before, the latest filter settings are much better.

I'm going to leave it a few more days, but if no one speaks up about wanting the full English subtitles on the DVDs I am not going to bother which means I should have ROTJ finished by Sunday/Monday :D I'll post some snapshots from the final DVD encode when its done.

Cue 20th Century Fox Fanfare...

I have finally finished the ROTJ DVD. It's a dual layer DVD, using a VBR of 7.2Mbps with a 16:9 anamorphic main feature and 4:3 special feature segment. The Audio is 2 channel Stereo encoded as AC3 at 192Kbps. As previously mentioned other than the hard coded alien subtitles there are no subtitle tracks.

Here are the up to date inserts for all 3 films and the cutout for the outer box/shell.

[ IMAGES REMOVED ]

If anyone wants to do some DVD sized case artwork for this project be my guest, ideally it should be along the same lines as the LD/VHS '97 SE artwork & design.

Now as promised screenshots from the DVD encode of ROTJ.













I'm not sure how I am going to make this release available yet, if anyone is interested in helping me out in this area please PM me. 

It find it interesting that the color timing in this scene matches the 70mm cel i have at home fairly closely.  The Blue is almost magenta in mine though, almost purple being a willets designs cel. sort of like this scan that is not mine.

Interesting! It also confirms how my original colour correction was overly dark. Thanks to Moth3r for prompting me to go back and take a second look at the colour correction.

At one point I did think about making these as dual sided DVD-RAM discs simulating the LaserDisc experience. Ultimately I decided not to as I assumed most people would prefer a single sided dual layer DVD release.

Thanks to everyone who has shown an interest in this project, I hope to have all 3 films completely finished by the end of September! If anyone has any suggestions for improvements please voice them!

Darn. I only wish these were NTSC.

captainsolo said:

Darn. I only wish these were NTSC.

Finally a pal version of the 97 s.e. editions .Its looking good my son :-). Any thoughts on doing a preservation of the original trilogy laserdiscs  ?

irn-bru said:

Finally a pal version of the 97 s.e. editions .Its looking good my son :-). Any thoughts on doing a preservation of the original trilogy laserdiscs  ?

Ok I have an update on ROTJ. I know that I said it was done, and it was, but then when I watched it through I noticed a few things that bugged me mainly:

- The way I had cut the side changes, I have redone these and they are much better. I would mention that in my release you have a fade in to and then out from black where the side changes were lasting about a second its not ideal but its the best I can do.

- Chroma problems. Due to the way the Apple DV codec (which was used for initial capturing) works it doesn't smooth out the chroma and while the filter I was using was ok I found a new filter that does a much nicer job.

- Colour Correction, I have switched over to a Gamma Levels filter that lets me set the input and output level for blacks and have tweaked it to recognise the blacks were washed out in the initial capture. This filter does a better job of restoring/enhancing the blacks without affecting the rest of the picture.

- Noise Reduction, The biggest pain in the arse of this project. Too little and the image is still too noisy, too much and everything is overly smooth and blurry. I am once again using a different filter now which I find to give better results.

The time line is about 50-60% rendered (Initially it was reported it would take 48hrs and it seems it will hit that mark give or take a few hours, probably give)

Apologies for the delay, stay tuned for updates!

The LaserDiscs do fade to black and back again at the side changes.

For ANH however its a straight cut so it wont be noticed, for ROTJ the side changes occur where there would normally be fade transitions so the fade to black and back again doesn't stick out too much and is very brief. The side changes on ROTJ occur in two places first between the Rebel shuttle approaching Endor and the Shuttle Landing on Endor. Second between the Rebels first entering the bunker and Luke arriving on the Death Star with Vader.

The one that will stick out the most will be ESB. With ESB the side change occurs where there would normally be a diagonal wipe between the Falcon escaping from the space slug and Luke training on Degobah. The problem is the diagonal wipe is still in place however now it wipes to black and then back again.

I have already played with getting the ESB transition to look right, the results were less then successful, I will probably take another look when I get to ESB next week but I'm not optimistic.

Not to worry I most certainly am trimming the end / start of each side as much as possible! I agree to not edit out the side changes would look terrible!

The problem I am having is if you edit the video down to straight cuts from one side to the next, the audio also gets cut so that it ends / starts abruptly which doesn't sound very good. :(

So what I have done is trim off as much of the end/start of each side as I can without clipping the audio, the result is for ROTJ any way that the picture fades to black and then fades back to the next scene almost instantly, as I say the whole fade from one side to the next lasts for about a second.

ANH's side change occurs on a straight cut any way so that's not a problem.

ESB however will be a pain but I am thinking if I can create a gradient that matches the wipe on the LDs I should be able to use an Alpha transition to seem the two sides together. I will have to play around a bit and see what I can come up with.

I hope this better explains what I am doing, if I get a chance I will post a clip of going from one side to the next to show what I mean.

The problem is that on some laserdisc releases, they put a "fade to black" at the end side 1, then had a "fade in" at the start of side 2. You can't just cut at the start of the fade because you lose the end of the scene.

The French OT LDs did not have this - they just ended in a freeze frame - but I did have to deal with a fade on the Japanese Evil Dead disc. In that case it didn't pose too much of a problem.

I don't have the US '97 SE box set, so I can't compare the two.

Moth3r said:

The problem is that on some laserdisc releases, they put a "fade to black" at the end side 1, then had a "fade in" at the start of side 2. You can't just cut at the start of the fade because you lose the end of the scene.

Here is a clip of the transition between side 1 & 2 of ROTJ.

http://img832.imageshack.us/img832/7720/file13853.mp4

Please note the video quality is not indicative of the final product as I compressed it down to Youtube quality to keep the file size small.

ChainsawAsh thats easier said then done, its not just a simple case of cutting in the missing footage/transitions as it were. You have to adjust the GOUT colours to match the SE, you also have to adjust the quality of the GOUT picture to match that of the LD captures.

I have uploaded a new set of snapshots of the latest version of ROTJ with all the new filters I mentioned previously applied.























I've just noticed there is some slight jaggedness to these snapshots, I'm not sure why that is but its certainly not present in the actual video!

Let me know what you think overall, I would rather not re-render this time line again, but if it needs to be done then it needs to be done.

Sorry thats what I actually mean't, that the GOUT is superior quality so you would have to degrade it to match the LD captures. I'll stop watermarking the images from now on if they are bothering people ;)

Dark Jedi, as you have access to the TB/Gkar Digital Broadcast releases I don't suppose you could provide me with the few short scenes I need? If not thats not a problem I will give slotting the GOUT in a go :)