Preserving the "Italian" Original Trilogy (Released) — Page 6

Well, I'm 25, I'm not 10 lol ;P

I've been messing with tapes my whole life.

I forgot you are 25, I remembered you was around 20... well, when I was 11 it was 1982, and VHS was not in any home in Italy... at that time, I was "only" programming Basic with my old Spectrum... but this is another story... (^^,)

Keep going to mess with those VHS tapes, it was really funny when I used to mess with them myself... then I discovered the laserdisc, and the poor tapes went in a remote closet...

So, little update: even though my hard drive is still kaput, I managed to capture the opening sequences from the 3 vhs tapes with a laptop and a usb stick. At least I know I won't have to do that later. I captured them in uncompressed Yuv2 and they look fine.

What prompted me to do it, was an idea that popped into my head the other day.

You're familiar with how a flatbed scanner works, right?

Well, I applied the same concept to the Star Wars crawl. It's already moving, so if we just sample one row of pixels, and add them all up, we'll have "scanned" the whole image, right?

So, I opened my crawl in Virtualdub. First thing, since it's PAL, 25fps interlaced, I used the bob filter to double up the frames, this way it's no longer interlaced. I have to do it because otherwise the next steps will retain scanline artifacts, I've tried it.

By the way, if you're using NTSC I'd recommend an inverse telecine, but keep in mind I haven't tried that.

Now, let's add the "null transform" filter so we can crop the picture. In my case, the original video was 720*576. [Methinks I should add screenshots to better illustrate the whole process]

Crop the picture close to the bottom, so you'll get the most resolution out of it. Set the crop boundaries so that the slit will be at a point in the crawl where the text won't be cut at the sides. Now the frame should be your horizontal resolution*1, in my case it's 720*1.

Cut everything else from the timeline, so you'll only have the crawl.

Export as an image sequence. I used pngs'.

You should now have a folder full of thousands of 720*1 pngs', and most of them look like black and yellow barcodes. Open Gimp, and open the image sequence as layers. Invert the layer order, because we want the first frame on top.

Now, the last step involves a 3rd party script you have to download. Basically, it was designed to make animations for Minecraft textures, and what it does, is it takes all the levels and stacks them on top of one another.

So, this is the end result:

Pretty nifty, huh?

Just be sure and avoid pan and scan tapes, my Return Of The Jedi was pretty bad in that regard:

Yes, it really is that cropped!

Hi. I just started a new thread (http://originaltrilogy.com/forum/topic.cfm/Star-Wars-Despecialized-Edition-The-International-Blu-ray-Project/topic/16467/). My goal is to bring together all the foreign preservations together on a same disc to give all non native English speakers like me a choice between the original version and the version they grew up with. Would you be OK for me to use footage from your version (namely: the Opening and ending credits and the Greedo bit), giving you credit for it of course.

Thanks in advance.

johnlocke2342 said:

Hi. I just started a new thread (http://originaltrilogy.com/forum/topic.cfm/Star-Wars-Despecialized-Edition-The-International-Blu-ray-Project/topic/16467/). My goal is to bring together all the foreign preservations together on a same disc to give all non native English speakers like me a choice between the original version and the version they grew up with. Would you be OK for me to use footage from your version (namely: the Opening and ending credits and the Greedo bit), giving you credit for it of course.

Thanks in advance.

An interesting project for sure, if you can pull off seamless branching on an AVCHD disk.

Just one caveat: I would give you the uncompressed files if I had them, but I lost everything in a hard drive crash. And I recently came to the realization that I used the wrong logo for the opening titles, despite Laserschwert giving me the correct one!

So I'm going to eventually make a 2.0 of this italian project, to perfect those sequences, correct everything I've missed, and to add a new soundtrack from vhs. Until then, I hope you're not in a hurry, because I'm gonna have to put the kibosh on it.

Anyone know if the theatrical Italian audio for Star Wars had the "extra" score during the trash compactor scene referred to in this thread?

http://originaltrilogy.com/forum/topic.cfm/International-Audio-including-Voice-Over-Translations/topic/14451/page/5/

Apparently at least the Spanish audio had this extra music on their VHS releases.  I'm not sure if any German home video releases had it, but it was on the German theatrical prints as well.  I suspect it was on the international master used by the French, Italian, and Japanese theatrical releases.  You can hear the music on Laserschwert's German theatrical audio reconstruction for Star Wars.  It had been removed on the German and Spanish GOUT audio.

Anyway, if someone can confirm this music was on the theatrical release (or at least on VHS releases, which strongly implies it was on the theatrical release), I should be able to merge the music into my copy of the GOUT audio, unless someone has a different suggestion.

I must say I never (consciously) noticed any difference. Will check and report asap.

Looks like several French releases were without the music, except one Laserdisc release with the music, so I'm not sure what we'd prove if we didn't find anything.  And I'm not entirely sure what we're proving by finding something either ;) I think film prints may be the only way to prove anything definitively, and we have that for German at least, which is what's swaying my opinion for everything else.

Seems the THX releases (THX VHS for Spanish, 1995 THX Laserdisc for French) are the ones with this music, at least for other languages, if that helps narrow down the search for Italian releases.

Polish 1995 THX VHS doesn't have the music.

This search for audio variation is limited to languages that used a 1977 international audio master for theatrical releases in 1977/78.  Other languages would have used different audio masters, depending on when they were created.

Not really sure of anything, that just seems to be the pattern so far.  It's certainly worth checking non-THX releases too.

thxita said:

THX release, uh? That's the one you adore Leo, isn't it?

 ha ha ha very funny  ;P

I've listened carefully to my 1991 vhs, the music is not there. And I won't even check the gout cause I'm sure it's identical.

I listened to the french thx master, that cue sounds really out of place. Must've been one of the many mistakes in their mastering process.

Oh, I totally agree. Not only does the scene sound wrong with the music, but the music is LOUD on top of that.  I completely understand why someone went through the trouble of removing that music.  I'm just trying to put together if it was on all of the theatrical versions or just some of them.  It's about theatrical fidelity, even if I cringe a bit hearing the theatrical audio.

I'd still like someone to check the THX audio if they have it.

thxita should still have a copy of the italian thx track. Could you look that up for us, sugar?

thxita said:

LOL I have the 1997 version. I don't know if it's the same as the thx release.

If it's not Special Edition, and it's 1993 or later, it might be THX.  May as well give it a listen.

Ugh, no, that's a whole new steaming pile. Sorry, I thought maybe foreign markets may have had OOT releases as late as 1997.

Of well, maybe we just won't know if it's on the Italian THX release.

thxita said:

LOL I have the 1997 version. I don't know if it's the same as the thx release.

 but we do have the 1995 thx audio, two people gave it to us and we saved it for archival purposes, remember? Or did you delete it?

If you don't have it anymore, it's on Andrea's OUT.