[OUT - ruLes] Original Unaltered Trilogy restored using Laserdisc editions - A New Hope (Released)

ATTENTION: this project is superseded now; please go to the new 2.0 thread!

the following description is retained to show differences between the two versions.

,^…^, presents the [OUT ruLes] project

Original Unaltered Trilogy restored using Laserdisc editions

Project mission: restore the Original Unaltered Trilogy using audio and video from various Laserdisc editions.

Video sources: analog video captured directly from Laserdiscs; other analog sources are admitted (VHS, CED, VHD, Beta etc.) only if the material is not present on the Laserdisc format.

Audio sources: analog audio and uncompressed PCM captured directly from Laserdiscs; other analog sources are admitted (like vynil) only if the material is not present on the Laserdisc format.

Subtitles sources: to be decided; Project Threepio seems the logical way.

Project prohibition: use DVD, BD, HDTV or other audio or video from any digital sources.

Episode IV - Star Wars: A New Hope

Source Material

Video: THX PAL laserdiscs

• Star Wars - Coffret Trilogie - CAV
• Star Wars - La Guerre des Etoiles - CAV
• Star Wars - Krieg der Sterne - CAV
• Star Wars - La Guerra de las Galaxias - CLV
• Star Wars - Guerre Stellari - VHS Italian (only for italian crawl and alignment)

Audio: THX PAL laserdiscs

• Star Wars - Coffret Trilogie - English (with French subtitles OOP)

• Star Wars - La Guerre des Etoiles - French (with English crawl subtitled)

• Star Wars - Krieg der Sterne - German (with German crawl)

• Star Wars - La Guerra de las Galaxias - Spanish (with English crawl narrated)

• Star Wars - Guerre Stellari - VHS Italian

Subtitles: to be decided

Captures and setup info

Hardware:

• Pioneer CLD-D925 PAL/NTSC laserdisc player; S-Video out (composite out tested but the video card own comb filter is not better than the laserdisc player)
• PC Sony Vaio Core 2 Duo e6300 dual core 1.86GHz, 3GB RAM, 1TB external HD only for Star Wars; video card AverMedia A16C with Philips SAA713x chipset
• Panasonic S-VHS recorder NV-FS88B
• Sony MiniDisc recorder MDS-J520E

Software:

• VirtualDub as capture software
• VirtualDub and AviSynth for video manipulation
• Foobar2000 and other for audio manipulation

Settings:

• video captured at video capture card native resolution 720x576, YUV, HuffYUV compression
• digital audio from Laserdisc via S/PDIF bit-to-bit perfect 16bit 44,1KHz stereo
• analog audio from VHS converted with the MiniDisc A/D converter 20bit Sigma-Delta modulation and then via S/PDIF perfect 16bit 44,1KHz stereo to PC

**Project Status: DONE
**

Captures: all done

Video treatment: all laserdisc video captures were time and space aligned, then with AviSynth median and average scripts were overlayed to eliminate some noise and put out unwanted video parts (as burned subtitles); little noise reduction and sharpen; NO COLOR CORRECTION at all! Upconverting from PAL 720x576 4:3 to 1280x720 16:9. No “white magic” treatment.

Audio treatment: all digital and analog audio are Dolby Surround encoded; converted to 6 channel WAVs and then to 5.1 Dolby Digital AC3 files.

Subtitles: all done

Conversion from 25p to 23.976p: done

Final formats: .m2ts file@ 720p/23.976fps with five audio tracks and ten subtitles (five forced and five full)

It is available on myspleen.

**To do ASAP
**

• <span style=“text-decoration: line-through;”>video enhancement refiniment (particulary better sharpen)</span>
• <span style=“text-decoration: line-through;”>subtitles (both normal and forced)</span>

done!

To do later

• use “Pyramid” capture to improve crushed black and clipped whites scenes
• correct some glitches, film and laserdisc drop-outs
• make the AVCHD and DVD discs (menus, audio and sub tracks etc.)
• do more captures using different players

If someone read until here, he/she must really interested, so here you are some pictures (GOUT Vs. OUT ruLes):

ImageUpper gallery

USE.com gallery

(same pictures, only on two different hosting services).

Self comments: I know there are many better quality projects around, but all are made using digital altered trilogies, “despecialized”… kudos to all the project maker, for their really good job and long hard work!

I’m not so good as they are, and also my spare time is limited; also, the overall video quality of my project is lower than all the HD projects; but there are some positive things: more image quality coherence (because the video sources are all the same); better colors than GOUT - despite the fact I made NO COLOR CORRECTION (and I’d like to leave it as is, to not lose further quality); better audio quality than GOUT; a certain video “analogness” - read: poor quality 😉

_,,,^..^,,,_ said:

_,,,^..^,,,_ presents the [OUT ruLes] project

Original Unaltered Trilogy restored using Laserdisc editions

 

Episode IV - Star Wars: A New Hope

 

Project mission: restore the Original Unaltered Trilogy using audio and video from various Laserdisc editions.

Video sources: analog video captured directly from Laserdiscs; other analog sources are admitted (VHS, CED, VHD, Beta etc.) only if the material is not present on the Laserdisc format.

Audio sources: analog audio and uncompressed PCM captured directly from Laserdiscs; other analog sources are admitted (like vynil) only if the material is not present on the Laserdisc format.

Subtitles sources: to be decided; Project Threepio seems the logical way.

Project prohibition: use DVD, BD, HDTV or other audio or video from any digital sources.

(other info will follow on the next posts)

Do you need any help?

Also, are you going to be releasing the captures unfiltered? (I'm not asking if they're going to be the raw captures. I'm just asking if you plan to do anything to them besides MPEG-2 encoding.)

Which deck(s) do you have access to?  There is considerable variation in quality between the various decks.

Puggo - Jar Jar's Yoda said:

Which deck(s) do you have access to?  There is considerable variation in quality between the various decks.

http://originaltrilogy.com/forum/topic.cfm/Audio-and-or-video-captures-offered-anyone-interested/post/506098/#TopicPost506098

I just updated first post: when the .m2ts file will be ready I'll post here immediately. (the video conversion will be finished tomorrow evening...)

Sorry for the delay...

Harmy did a very good job with his Despecialized version, and I think he's one of the best restorer around here, so after downloading Harmy's test clip, I decided to use the same footage for my test clip, so I could compare myself my version and an HD version not from GOUT.

The video is 1280x544 (in a 1280x720 frame); I used AVC @ 1400kbps, roughly the same Harmy used with his clip; the audio is AC3 5.1 @ 448kbps, italian, converted from the original Dolby Surround VHS HiFi; subtitles not yet set.

I make a script for noise reduction and sharpening (maybe too much?) but not color correction (also no gamma, contrast and brightness touched).

here you are the test clip:

Youtube (bad conversion, just for preview)

Download (155MB - will be online only for 7 days!)

Any advice is welcome!

Damn! I didn't realize you were upscaling, Andrea, or I would have recommended nnedi3_rpow2!

Use ResampleHQ to get square PAR and then use NNEDI2 (or NNEDI3) to upscale from there.

Darth Editous said:

Upscaling is, IMO, a bad idea. NNEDI3 is good, but in my experience TV and player upscalers are better, and all you're doing is wasting encoded bytes on pixels that don't contain any real information. Keep it at the original resolution, let the encoder spend all its bytes on real detail, and leave upscaling to the playback device.

DE

FWIW, Andrea, I agree with this.

I understand your drive to want to make these LDs look as good as possible, but I think it would be more useful to the community to have each (or, at least, one) of the captures uncropped/unresized at ~DVD9 sizes.

I'm not saying to upload the raw captures! I just think that unaltered DVD9s of your captures would go a long way and I'm sure they'd be greatly appreciated.

"You must do what you feel is right, of course." -Ben Kenobi

Thanks for your comments.

As I wrote in my first post, I'll do an AVC coded file at 720p - initially at 25fps, then at 23.976fps, then an AVCHD disc. I also wrote that I'll do a PAL DVD...

I know that upscaling is a bad idea, but because AVCHD @ 720p (or 1080p) is the only format I could make a progressive version at 23.976, it is just necessary. But I (roughly) calculated that using five AC3 soundtracks @448kbps, the video at 1280x720 (really 1280x544) could be compressed at around 7200kbps, quite good for the AVC codec.

Eventually, I could also release a file-only version at 576/23.976 (not standard, but no resize necessary).

I used a simple ResampleHQ as Anthony suggested, and the result is not that bad. But could be better; I'll use the best resize method you all will suggest. I also thought to resize the four captures with different resize methods, to have "slightly different" starting points for median & average; I don't know if this could be useful or it is better to upsize the final clip.

About Youtube links, that's right, it's offline... they send me immediately an advice "... it seems you use some FOX material blah blah blah..." so I preferred to delete the video to avoid any problem; here you are the clip on Sendspace

GOUT Vs OUT ruLes - screenshot comparison

Comments are referred to OUT ruLes in comparison to GOUT, using GOUT frame numbers for reference.

GOUT direct copy from PAL DVD; then resized with the same method used for OUT ruLes.

1570 - Initial crawl: as the Spanish, English and French LD versions has this crawl, I decided to use it instead the one used on GOUT; because EP V and EP VI has the episode number as first line, and because the project will include also both of them, this choice seems logical to me, also if some purists will disagree.

2833 - More stars in the sky, but the space is lighter than GOUT, due to the script I generally used over the whole movie; I'm thinking about using a less aggressive detailers for the initial crawl and some outer space scenes, to leave black blacker.

3724-5 - Tantive corridor orange error: the first frame needs correction, while the second seems it was "auto corrected" with the median&average process... image is a lot cleaner than GOUT, but the corridor is pinker...

4249 - ...but few scenes later, the GOUT corridor is pinker instead!

10398 - more stars out there, and a little fewer lines of resolution on the bottom of the image.

11331 - Leia's face and shirt color are better.

11381 - Darth Vader is black and not blue-ish.

11313 - Sky and sand have better colors; sky has not white clipping.

14943 - Better sky, and the darker band on the right side is almost vanished.

19734 - R2-D2 is white (light gray, actually, because is so dirt ;-) and not pink-ish like in GOUT.

22036 - no more four-eyes stormtrooper! colors are more real.

36613 - Sunset is less violet, and the right "bloom" is less noticeable.

36726 - Binary sunset has completely different color timing... don't know if it's perfect, but it seems more close to the original film than GOUT.

38066 - binoculars' digits are green instead of red... which is the right color?

38067-8-9 Binoculars green&blue error... the green and blue frames are present in all the THX PAL laserdiscs and VHS... I thought delete those two frames, take the third frame and repeat it three times; the result will be less distracting than the actual scene.

47121 - no DVNR problems on Luke's face!

60865 - the image is shifted more than usual, compared to GOUT.

61356 - White droid, blacker stormtrooper's accessories.

62163 - The most (in)famous scene ruined by high DVNR, here is intact! "Look ma', I have legs!"

63180 - The DVNR blurred the guy's face (on the right side); now it is more recognizable.

66577 - Obi Wan's lightsaber is not "bleeding" light anymore, but the scene is darker than GOUT.

70648 - lighter scene and better colors.

70848 - better colors - note the green on the wall is not there anymore.

73276 - stormtroopers are white and not pink-ish

86978 - The Death Star interiors are dark grey and not blue-violet...

95409 - ... but here the opposite is true! Maybe the soldier is surprised for that?

96557 - here the resolution of laserdisc is visibly lower.

96722 - "Obi-Wan is not blind anymore!"

102113 - now the Death Star's interior is again dark grey...

103741 - Stormtrooper is white and not pink, the wall grey and not violet.

117182 - metal seems more real, white is whiter, some lines of resolution more on top.

120140 - Chewbacca's fur color is better, lights are white and not pink, a little more resolution.

127631 - Vader's lightsaber is "cut" on top, Obi-Wan's one is too light, and his cap is black(?!?)... this time GOUT is better!

127881 - ... but few frames after, it's the opposite: Obi-Wan robe has the right color, and his lightsaber, also if too light, at least is not green... but Vader is not as black as it should be; in GOUT, he's better.

146944 - I don't know which forest has the right color... the top could be a young forest after the rain, the bottom could be a very old forest without rain for years... but the bottom has white clipping problems (look at the cloud under the planet).

147238 - This time GOUT has white clipping problems... look inside the green; in GOUT some details are lost.

151933 - The ship is white and not blue, but the stars are better on GOUT.

165769 - R2-D2 is really dirt here, but at least is white(ish) and not pink(ish)...

168485 - Seems there are some details more; for sure, some lines of resolution more on top.

*** *** ***

Conclusions: the truth is GL doesn't care much about the original unaltered trilogy, and so the related DVD has not the best qualities (poor video quality non anamorphic taken from the laserdisc master, simple stereo soundtracks). But neverthless the production cost of this DVD was surely very high. So I'm proud to have started this project, with a quality sometimes better than that DVD, using only a PC, a laserdisc player, some laserdiscs and free softwares like Avisynth and Virtualdub. And obviously all the help found here, given by really precious people.

Tests are going on; for the moment, the only thing I must add to release some version are the forced subtitles.

If someone want to see some other screenshot(s), post here the frame number(s).

I'm waiting for your comments.

_,,,^..^,,,_ said:

Conclusions: the truth is GL doesn't care much about the original unaltered trilogy, and so the related DVD has not the best qualities (poor video quality non anamorphic taken from the laserdisc master, simple stereo soundtracks). But neverthless the production cost of this DVD was surely very high. So I'm proud to have started this project, with a quality sometimes better than that DVD, using only a PC, a laserdisc player, some laserdiscs and free softwares like Avisynth and Virtualdub. And obviously all the help found here, given by really precious people.

I'm waiting for your comments.

I'll be the first to admit that this project is not for me, but I think it's great how much you care about what you're doing. I think you hit the nail on the head, talking about how you've done this with comparatively simple tools and free software, as compared to Lucasfilm and all of their resources. I must also admit I am quite surprised at how well (more or less), it holds up to the GOUT.

SS4DarthPayne said:

I'll be the first to admit that this project is not for me, but I think it's great how much you care about what you're doing. I think you hit the nail on the head, talking about how you've done this with comparatively simple tools and free software, as compared to Lucasfilm and all of their resources. I must also admit I am quite surprised at how well (more or less), it holds up to the GOUT.

Thank you, SS4DarthPayne, you hit the point... today is possible to restore a movie at home, using free software and really cheap hardware, with really high quality results - see Harmy's work and many others.

My project isn't perfect, but I started it for two reasons: I wanted a better GOUT version (also with italian language) AND I wanted to prove myself that I could do it. Maybe more for the second reason than the first one...

If only GL wanted to do something like this, with only a small fraction of the devotion of all the fans of his movies found here... with his money, he could reach top results... but instead... he spent dozen million $$$, and what we have is BD version, at the end! /_xx/

You_Too said:

Yeah it looks good compared to the GOUT there, but for the comparisons it would be even better with the NTSC GOUT for SW, since it's got more detail preserved than the PAL version for some reason.

And the sharpening in your version seems a bit too strong maybe. And why is it only vertical sharpening? At least that's what it looks like.

I'm still thinking what results can be achieved nowadays, using a simple laserdisc as source... some years ago, these kind of results were possible only for production houses, and mere mortals could only dream about them!

You_Too, sorry, I live in Italy, one of the PAL lands... I have not access to the GOUT NTSC, but if someone could point me to the m2v file I'll be happy.

By the way, also if the NTSC GOUT has more details, at least the PAL GOUT *should* have more lines of resolution...

Yes, the sharpening seems too strong, but when seen in action is better; download the clip and tell me what do you think. On my 55' LED, it's good.

I'm thinking about the next step... making the same treatment I've done until here, but using the NTSC captures of the Definitive Collection (US, two copies, and Japanese) plus "Faces", and the Pioneer HLD-X9 as the laserdisc player... (using all the scenes not affected by the DVNR, of course) and then merging the result with the result of the PAL captures... what do you all think?

_,,,^..^,,,_ said:

38066 - binoculars' digits are green instead of red... which is the right color?

Green is the correct color.

Great job, _,,,^..^,,,_ ! the screencaps looking good. I would also recommend reducing the sharpening but you're the boss.

Just a thought regarding multi-cap average and median scripts in general, I wonder if you potentially could get even better results if you average the medians? For example, use 4 or 5 captures, make 3 different median of three then average the medians. Perhaps the differing results would be so minor that the trouble going through such a tedious step isn't worth it. Thoughts?

msycamore, thanks! Someone who appreciate my work is very welcome, and keep me on focus.

Indeed, you are smart (but we all knew that...); infact, I did that! First four median of three, then average of the four median...

Yoo_Too noted that vertical sharpening was more pronounced than horizontal, and I suspect something was wrong... infact, some parts of the captures were slightly off alignment (just 1 pixel)... as they are YUV2, avisynth forbid to crop just 1 pixel, but I find a way to do it: I upsized with pointresize (basically a 1:2 resize without interpolation), so I can crop only 1 pixel if I have to, then I made the opposite, and pointresize 2:1, without any loss; I could also use converttorgb without resizing, but I'd like to keep the colorspace as long as I can, and I think the former method is lossless... Am I right?

So now I have to realingn all of them... last four hours I realigned just two of them, but I'm tired now... hope to finish the other two tomorrow morning. About the sharpening, I'm working on this too.

What I really need soon are the subtitles - at least the forced one, in english, italian, french, german and spanish. Someone could help me?

@Yoo_Too: I found some NTSC GOUT frames at http://aptirrelevance.com/otscreenshots/frames.php; I used them as comparison with my work (but I don't understand why they are 720x306...) - the difference between NTSC and PAL were not huge, but some are noticeable... if someone want to see them, let me know - 720x306px x2frames x36pics... will be a long long post, but if I'm allowed to do it here, let me know!

I finished to re-align all the four captures; I changed their ratio on median&average script; I lowered the sharpening (maybe too much?)

If someone is just curious to see some scenes - two with no (apparent) DVNR or IVTC problems, just take a look... here you are four test clips I uploaded on YouTube - as they are short, 8 seconds, and without audio, maybe they will stay there for a while... ;-)

Tantive Corridor

Look Sir, droids

Mos Eisley "no legs"

Light saber

Just don't forget (as I did...) to set the quality at 720hd... and don't forget they are taken from laserdiscs!

Let's try now.