NSP/JSC Trilogy - Althor's 5-AVG (with NSP Clean Up) + Schorman's GOUT Synched LD

I love the look of Althor’s JSC captures - I grew up on the Faces P/S VHS tapes and for some reason I find that these captures provide more nostalgia for me that any of the GOUT work I’ve seen.

This project is just a cleanup of the 5 average 720p release - I have done my best to remove analogue interference and rainbowing without overdoing DNR and removing film grain. I’ve also tried to match color and contrast discrepancies between the different LD sides. I’ve found that skin tones are inconsistent in the JSC and have tried to find a happy medium across the board. I have left frame damage in tact as well as a few red frames just to maintain the analog source feel.

Rather than use the attached audio, I grabbed Schorman’s LD Audio Archive and compared his different GOUT synched versions to find my preferred versions - difficult since they all sound stellar.

These will be Anamorphic 720x480 releases. I’ll release an x264 MP4 with 192 KBPS AAC first, wait for reviews, make any last minute tweaks, then release a AVCHD-9 with LPCM.

My first release will be Return of the Jedi since options for that tend to be scarcer and when I was little it’s the one I watched most.

Following I’ll probably do SW then ESB, then possibly TPM just to complete. If someone can get me high quality captures of the AotC and RotS widescreen VHS tapes, I’ll release those as a part of the set for a complete 6 film Analogue to Digital set.

11/12
RotJ MP4 should be hitting your spleen this afternoon.
This uses Schorman’s 1986 US Sources.

Sweet. I look forward to checking it out!

This has got my attention. I’ll have a look at it when the opportunity presents itself.

Alright, it’s available now. Please give feedback. This is pretty close to how I would like it, but is also kind of a “workprint” for my entire project.

Japanese subs are already cropped. Haven’t really worked with subtitles before but yes, will be including them in the final release and make them seperately available for the mp4 once completed - do people prefer forced or hard coded for a project like this?

As for AVCHD - unless I can get decent upscaling results, I’ll probably just release a VERY high quality SD version - with 1.5 GB going to audio, might as well. For anyone interested, I’m happy to compress this down as tight as possible losslessly and send it to get a proper upscale. I don’t own the SR plugin, and have always just made attempts with the demo.

The MP4 is CRF 14.

Looks like a few people have finished grabbing this - any thoughts?

I like the way it turned out. I see that you replaced the black missing frames with duplicates though. I guess neither way is wrong but it made me do a double take before I realized what was happening. What kind of denoising did you use if you don’t mind me asking btw? The results are pretty acceptable imo. If I think about the fact that this is a 30 year old laserdisc, it is pretty surprising how much you can pull out of it actually.

Thanks. I actually didn’t duplicate frames… At least intentionally. Which do you mean specifically? I trimmed some from between reels to keep it in sync with the audio but don’t remember doing anything beyond that.

For cleanup, Multiple passes of Neat Video. The initial done in virtualdub to remove only the chroma blotches. Prior to this i also applied vdubs chroma smoother for 4:1:1 video.

The second done in premiere was a full dnr + some sharpening. I overlayed the original video over the top with an opacity of 27% to add back details without adding back all the noise.

All of my 720p files are gout-synced so you shouldn’t have to trim much. It might be better to conform the audio files to the video frames instead of the other way around.

At the end of the scene where the green pig guards shove chewbacca into his cell and then it cuts to the frog outside jabba’s palace there is a couple duplicate frames there. Also, one of the scenes as the shuttle tydirium approaches endor has the same thing.

Thanks for explaining your process. I’ve never used neat video. I guess I’ll have to check it out.

EDIT: Neat Video is pretty neat actually. A little pricey but neat nonetheless.

I don’t see any black frames, nor any duplicates.
Did you need to slice-and-dice the soundtrack? Shrink-to-fit?
AviSynth+FFVideoSource() warns the frame rate is NOT 24000/1001,
yet MPlayer calls it 23.976-- not sure what that’s about
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My eyes aren’t trained to spot noise/reduction,
so I can’t comment on that aspect.

AviSynth’s Info() reports frame rate 23981/1001 or 23.9570…
Does that mean the video, sans black frames, is stretched to fit the audio runtime?

MPlayer thinks aspect ratio is 2.1054; shouldn’t it be closer to 1.7778?
It seems the overscan has been cropped. In that case, shouldn’t SD width be 704?

-oops 😃 double post

I’ve posted GOUT synced tracks for each mix. They shouldn’t require any work, if the video is synced as well.

I’ve found the issue… for some reason virtualdub is outputting all screwy. My resulting AVI files are incorrectly set as DV NTSC pixel aspect ratio (around .9) with a 23.98 frame rate. My computer kept crashing so I was having to render in small chunks, so when I imported to Premiere I created nested sequences for each side. Those also ended up 23.98… but when I went to interpret footage it says 23.976… ugh.

Pretty much, my workprint is a good representation of how I want things to look and sound, but I’m having to start from scratch to deal with the issue.
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I’ll continue to work on this in my spare time, but it’s been delayed for a bit. My children’s mother attempted suicide on Monday and I am suddenly a full time single parent as opposed to 1/2 time.
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On a happier note, I have some leads on acquiring high quality captures of AotC and RotS on Letterbox VHS. With those as well, I will probably aim to release:
2 GB H.264/AAC MP4 files for each film.
BD-5 H.264/PCM for each film

A single BD-25 with all six films. I’ll render a menu in DVD Architect with multiple Playback Options - Play All by Episode Number, Play All by Release Date, Play All Machete Order, or Select Individual Film.

I’ll replace the m2ts files in the resulting folders with lossless h.264/PCM and run through BD Rebuilder set for BD-25 at max quality settings for h.264 and 640kbps Stereo AC3.