schorman's HDTV Star Wars Saga Preservation (Released)

Hello,

I completed this a few weeks ago, but since the birth of my son I haven’t had time to post until now.

I have attempted to preserve the best quality versions of the Prequel and Original trilogies as released on DVD between 2001 and 2005.  I can’t believe these ****s have been around for nearly ten years already. While they are not how I prefer to watch the OT, the completist in me would like to preserve these versions, in HD, along with the others.

Before explaining the details of the project, I would like to mention that this project may, in fact, seem to duplicate work done previously by Wookie Groomer, and for many people may not be a necessary or even desirable thing to download.  My impetus for completing the project is mainly that upon deconstructing Wookie Groomer’s release, I noticed many instances of repeated frames, damaged frames, and altogether missing frames, sprinkled through out each film.  While the audio tracks maintain sync throughout, the missing frames bothered me enough to attempt to fix it.  Additionally, I consider my project to be a preservation and as such have not attempted to color correct any of the films (though the different sources do have minor color variation that I’ve attempted to match).

I have gone through all six films pretty much frame by frame, and have tested my results against the original dvds by inverting and averaging the two, looking for damaged and missing frames.

I will begin posting to the Spleen beginning tomorrow.

Video Sources:

My sources were, in order of priority:

1. German HDTV (Discussed Here: “Star Wars HD rips”)

2. British HDTV (HV versions found on usenet)

3. Official Blu Rays (Used minimally, mainly for detail on opening crawl and small patches throughout.  NOT used at all for TPM or AOTC, as they were too different.)

4. Wookie Groomer’s AOTC (Again, only used for small patches.  The available German HD rip for AOTC is terrible.  It has damaged frames throughout the film, but Wookie Groomer’s version did not suffer from as much damage, even though I understand it to be from the same source.  This was used mainly because the BD version has such drastically different colors.)

Here are my avisynth scripts for your inspection, or for anyone to use/edit at their leisure.  I believe the only extra plugins are MSharpen and ColourLike.  There are a couple of files necessary for using the ColourLike Plugin that I’ll post below, as well as a short patch for ANH, needed for avoiding a few bad frames.

TPM

AOTC - ColourLike Files for AOTC

ROTS

ANH  -  ColourLike Files & Patch for ANH

TESB

ROTJ

Note: If attempting to encode these on your own, ANH and AOTC must be encoded in parts, then joined together using either tsmuxer or mkvmerge.  ANH is pretty easy and has only three parts.  AOTC on the other hand had so much damage, that I ended up needing to use a ridiculous 35 parts.  This was done because encoding it in full resulted in doubled frames or missing frames at the junctions.

Video Encoding:

I encoded using MeGui using x264 with constant quality Level 10.  I chose level 10 mainly because I saw reduced quality at level 15 and even at level 12.  This produced large files, in the same manner that Wookie Groomer originally did.  I capped the bit rate at 40 Mb/sec and maintained Blu Ray compatibility, in case anyone wants to burn it to disc.

Audio Sources:

Track 1) English DDEX 5.1 from DVD releases (prequel tracks have had the EX flag set using “exme.exe”)

Track 2) English DD Surround 2.0 from DVD releases (AOTC was sourced from the region 2 disc, but had to be fixed and re-encoded due to pal speedup.  Patched headbutt scene with audio from the Spanish 2.0 Mix.)

Track 3) DVD Audio Commentary from DVD releases

Track 4) Bonus - not publishing it here.

Track 5) Spanish DD 2.0 from DVD releases.

Track 6) French DD 2.0 from DVD releases.

Subtitles:

I have totally redone the English subtitles for each film.  I have based them on the DVD subtitles, but have edited and retimed them to fit my preferences.  I have removed all captions for the hearing impaired and have made sure that the timings match the spoken line.  This is against published best practices for readability, but this is how I prefer them.

Further, I have attempted to render the subtitles using fonts that match the theatrical subtitles. I have used “Franklin Gothic Demi Condensed” for the prequels and a slightly modified version of “Alternate Gothic 2 BT” for the OT.

I have included the Subtitles as 1080p Vobsub tracks for compatibility reasons, as I am posting mkv’s.  I will, however include the original ASS files, SRT text subs, as well as a rendered BD SUP tracks for anyone interested.

Track 1) English Subs

Track 2) Spanish Subs (I think I got these from Subscene, but I can’t quite remember)

Track 3) Speaker names and titles for the DVD Audio Commentary Track (From DVD)

In the Future:

I am currently attempting to teach myself to code BD-J.  I have some background in Java, so I don’t think it will be that difficult to learn the Blu Ray version, knock on wood.  Anyway I plan to eventually create BD menus, etc. for these releases.

Update 1 (5/30/14):

I’ve posted the PT at this point.  I think I’ll seed these until Monday before putting up the 2004 OT.

Update 2 (6/1/14):

I noticed that I uploaded a previous version of AOTC without a couple of error frames corrected.  I have posted the correct version and have begun to seed ANH.

Episodes 1 - 4 are now available.

They are the DVD cuts, but if you checkout the script for ROTS, you'll see that you could output the theatrical cut by changing the final output from "DVDFull" to "TheaterFull".  That will substitute the missing diagonal wipe from the BD version.

If I rip the R4 DVD audio from AOTC and change fps from 25 to 24000/1001 will it mux straight to your version?

Yeah, that should work, but you may need to add some sort of delay setting.  I'm not sure if the R4 DVD has the same number of frames at the start of the film.

Could you post comparison screencaps? How do the colors compare to the BluRay versions, particularly AOTC and ROTS?

Do you happen to know if these sync with the existing DVD versions? I'm downloading AOTC currently, and may be able to use it for version 2 of my Ep2 edit. I prefer the bleak, white-ish look of the DVDs to the saturated green of the BR.

Update:  All six episodes are now posted to myspleen.

Hal, I'll post some screen caps by this weekend.  Sorry for the delay.

All six will sync with the NTSC R1 DVDs.  Coloring should match the DVDs for AOTC, and all others.

FYI, I'm making preparations to use this as my primary source for v2 of my AOTC edit. Hopefully a re-sync and "reconnect media" will suffice. 

The color palette is much more appealing. I remember AOTC being white and overcast. 

I don't plan on giving ROTS the same treatment, because it's only AOTC that felt off with the BR to me personally. And I wouldn't mind AOTC and ROTS being a little more visually distinct from each other.

All this is to say: good work, and I appreciate the resource being made available. You're name will be in the credits. 

Too bad I have to spend two weeks re-encoding AOTC, though. But it was an easy call to make once I saw the results of your project.

EDIT: I'm very sorry, but I need to rescind this proposition. My computer gave me a scare today and I'm flustered into getting this project out the door as soon as possible. I admire this project, however. Sorry for the abrupt turnabout.

I downloaded these (except for Ep 3) and they should be useful for Despecialized, especially ROTJ and potentially an eventual TPM DeEd. Thanks schorman for this wonderful preservation!

Also, I just wanted to say, that if it was possible, once/if you get to doing the menus, it would be pretty wizard, if you could replicate the structure of the 2004 DVD menus by using the videos from the DVD menus and upscaling them to 1080p (I guess PAL DVDs would be better, since they have better resolution).

Check out this sample of Schorman's preservation (pretty much the highest quality of the DVD master available), the BD and a quick adjustment of the BD I made - the BD, while it quite obviously much had more detail before the scrubbing of the grain, still has more detail than the DVD master even after the DVNR.

I added some grain and sharpened it a bit to couteract the soft DVNR look and bring out some of the lost detail - it was just a quick experiment and it would need some fine-tuning.

I just noticed something interesting when comparing the two - the scene, which was shot on digital (the one where Qui-Gon takes Anankin's blood sample) actually looks better in the HDTV version.