The Phantom Menace -Theatrical Version - NTSC DVD- ADYWAN - NOW AVAILABLE — Page 3

I'm not about to go and ask my parents to subscribe to a service that I'd probably only use once or twice.  Regardless of price, that's just something that I don't particularly think is a necessary expense at the moment.

I know newsgroups are better... wish I had them...

Moth3r said:

Great stuff, Ady.

This is a project I was considering tackling myself at some point - now I don't have to. And your colour correction is definitely a bonus.

Is it OK to download the files going up now or is there going to be a repack or proper along later... j/k :-)

lo. no there won't be a repack. There is one small glitch that i just couldn't fix though due to the software i used. When playing the movie through the chapters menu the forced subs don't appear. I tried everything but its still switched the subs off in the rendered DVD. playing the movie direct through the main menu or the options menu they work fine. So if playing the movie from the chapters menu just select the first subtitle track using your remote. hopefully they will fix this bug in an update but i'm not holding my breath.

Ok mabye I missed it, but will the DVD be uploaded to Rapidshare or somewhere else for those who don't have usenet or newsgroups???

It will be out there believe me. All of adywans projects make their way to the torrents. I saw ANHR on Oi Bt MuNkY about a week 1/2 after it's release. If it doesn't make it out there I am sure the lot of people who downloaded it will be nice enough to pm it. I for one am going to wait until I can get some more DVD9s.

Forget the official DVD, the bootlegs, the extended versions and the countless edits that are out there, if you are going to watch The Phantom Menace on DVD then this is the version that you must watch.

The video quality is very good as you would expect and the bits inserted in from the TB DVB TV broadcast match the rest of the video perfectly.

However, the real gem in this release is that 5.1 soundtrack. It is simply amazing!! I only have a very cheap and nasty surround sound set up at the moment but it has never sounded so good. Even if you hate the film, just shut your eyes and listen!!!

As stated previously, I have waited a long time to see a top quality release of the theatrical version of this film and this release has been well worth the wait.

So PowerDVD says the audio is Dolby Digital 5.1 EX 448kbps. I thought the maximum AC3 datarate on a laserdisc was 384kbps? Or is PowerDVD giving the wrong information? (Too lazy to demux and check myself.)

Also, the official R1 NTSC DVD has horrendous halos due to edge enhancement (the R2 PAL disc had them as well, but not as bad). I've read that the HDTV source still had some halos, but was much better. Anyone with the R1 DVD want to do some screenshot comparisons?

Moth3r said:

So PowerDVD says the audio is Dolby Digital 5.1 EX 448kbps. I thought the maximum AC3 datarate on a laserdisc was 384kbps? Or is PowerDVD giving the wrong information? (Too lazy to demux and check myself.)

Also, the official R1 NTSC DVD has horrendous halos due to edge enhancement (the R2 PAL disc had them as well, but not as bad). I've read that the HDTV source still had some halos, but was much better. Anyone with the R1 DVD want to do some screenshot comparisons?

Its correct when reporting 448kbps but i don't know why its reporting Dolby Digital EX as that flag was disabled when encoding the AC3 in vegas. It was impossible to just splice the audio from the 3 sides of the laserdisc because there was a second gap in the audio between sides 2 & 3. I had to demux the audio to 6 seperate wavs for each side, then sync it in vegas and patch up the missing audio using the DVD. i chose to use 448kbps because i didn't want to degrade the audio by encoding it back to 384kbps and also some older DVD players have problems playing 384kbps 5.1 audio

The halo effect is still present in the HDTV transfer. I'm actually starting to think that the halo effect has always been there. Its present in the trailers also. The HDTV transfer is a different one to the DVD, yet the sharpening halo effects remain. Very worrying.

adywan said:

... I'm actually starting to think that the halo effect has always been there. Its present in the trailers also.

Really? I read that the trailer (on the R1 DVD) is encoded with quite a low bitrate and isn't quite as detailed, but shows almost no EE.

Moth3r said:

adywan said:

... I'm actually starting to think that the halo effect has always been there. Its present in the trailers also.

Really? I read that the trailer (on the R1 DVD) is encoded with quite a low bitrate and isn't quite as detailed, but shows almost no EE.

taken from the trailer. resized to 200% with no filters or sharpening applied:

From that image, there does seem to still be a bit of horizontal EE, but almost no vertical EE. From what I remember the R1 DVD was a vertical EE nightmare, with ringing apearing over every bright horizontal edge.

The old article I remember reading is here:
http://www.videophile.info/Review/TPM/TPM_01.htm

OMG the R1 shots on that site are horrendous. having never seen the R1 version, being in PAL land, i was always wondering why there was such a fuss kicked up about the EE when it wasn't too noticeable on the Pal DVD. Now i can see why.

Kurgan said:

So, is someone going to post a split screen comparison of the official DVD to this one?

If someone who has the R1 NTSC TPM could capture some screenshots and send me i can get some comparison shots done so you can see the difference

budwhite said:

Damn, I've always though the DD 5.1 on LD had 640 kbit/s.

But really, just 384. Lower bitrate than DVD, that's surprising.

I also read that the bitrate in cinemas for DD is just 320(!!!) That's shockingly low

On 35mm film, the AC3 bitrate has to remain low because there is very little physical room for the digital information to be printed onto the film stock, whilst also being very prone to damage (mainly because the AC3 track is printed between the sprocket holes) so a lot of the available data bandwidth must also be used for error correction. I'm guessing AC3 soundtracks stored on Laserdiscs have to contend with similar issues, due to LD being an analogue storage format like 35mm, hence the low AC3 bitrate.

This was (one of the reasons) why DTS was invented for 35mm film use; there is only a sync pulse track on the actual film stock which allows the DTS audio tracks to be contained on data CDs which are synced to the film. This negates the problems of data bandwidth limits and physical damage necessitating high error correction.

Technically (because AC3 soundtracks on 35mm film and DVD all use the same compression algorithms) if the AC3 soundtracks are both compressed from the same master, your DVD could have a higher fidelity soundtrack on it than the film projected in cinemas.