AntcuFaalb

I now have two losslessly-compressed (Huffyuv) AVIs for DVDs 1 and 2. Together, they represent the entire film, but some credits are missing, as the source VHS cuts off right after displaying "Robert Watts". I also think there's a 1-2 minute drop-out somewhere in the middle, but I haven't started to look for it yet.

The quality is nice, but it definitely needs some deflickering, cropping, deinterlacing, resizing, and the works. I think the Panasonic AG-1980 would do a much better job at preserving it than my Toshiba DVR620.

It can't be the mono mix. Luke clearly says "Blast it, Biggs! Where are you?" and Porkins' scream is audible. I tried listening for C-3PO's line, but I couldn't hear it.

Here's a sample from Part 1: Sample 7

Here's a sample from Part 2: Sample 8

OK, I'm ripping DVDs 1 and 2 of my XP Mode recording. There's ~1 minute of (intentional) overlap between the two. Should I join them or post each DVD separately?

msycamore said:

Ok, did check my AviSynth working files on this today, it turned out I had set a saturation boost of 1.05 when I authored this disc, and that's one of the reasons the later parts of the transfer is so highly saturated in places, I probably thought Side 1 needed some additional saturation and simply forgot to check the remaining sides of the LD. As have been mentioned earlier I also did a fairly poor job on setting the contrast and that also made a big difference.

But I'm willing to correct my mistakes and not do as Lucasfilm and say it was a deliberate creative decision. ;) So I can upload an improved one if there's still interest in that.

Here's a few samples of what you can expect of a 2nd version:

Rebel blockade runner: http://www.sendspace.com/file/4h6ana

Mos Eisley spaceport: http://www.sendspace.com/file/p4nr7f

And again, thanks for all the positive response and all of you who helped seeding this.

I'm definitely interested! It would help my project(s) greatly. Thanks!!!

What maybe of note is the brightness, details in the shadows like the machinery just to the right of R5's head often gets blended into the background.

That may be a problem with the Toshiba DVR620. Maybe the Panasonic AG-1980 can bring those details out. (Alternatively, I may just need to adjust the brightness/contrast.)

Mavimao said:

Do you know if it's the mono mix on the tape?

Not yet, but myself and others will determine that (as well as other details) after I post the XP Mode recording.

Does anyone here with a Panasonic AG-1980 live in the NorthEast (of the US, that is)? I live in Maryland.

Please don't call it PSB, as there is a "Puggo Strikes Back" project that is almost done already called PSB (a 16mm capture of ESB).

How about ASW (Adult Star Wars) ?

OK, I'll come up with a different name.

My suggestion is to finish your initial capture, make it available to some of the knowledgeable folks on the forum (not me - I really don't know all that much about the various versions).  Then when it is determined what this is a capture of, decide if is worth making a real high-end capture of it.  If it is an in-theater capture, or 35mm capture, that would be of great interest.  A 16mm, not so much.  It all depends on the content, video and audio.  If Luke misses with the grappling hook, for example, there would be some interest :)

I'll try to get my second recording done tonight or tomorrow (for evaluation purposes only, of course). Everyone: PM me if you'd like a copy.

The Panasonic would blow your transfer system out of the water.  But for evaluation purposes, yours should work perfectly adequately.  Just be very careful with the tape and don't rush with the tape deck controls - would be a shame if the deck ate the tape.

I hope it's unique! I'd love to see what the Panasonic can do.

I tend to be an overly-cautious person...

Work at a pace where you'll make less mistakes.  The tape has been sitting for decades.

I tend to work better at night. Computer Programming as a career and a hobby does that to you, I guess.

Agree this is something new to this community.  You mentioned your budget but what is the specific machine?  That'll clue in the tech minds around here on the limitations of your capture and what may improve enlisting outside assistance.

The machine's a Toshiba DVR620. It's hardly high-end. I think my wallet may've influenced my wording :-)

As this is new, yup you get to name it.  (there already is a PSB in the works)  But before you do let's attempt to get some more information on it's background.  As there's the porn store story behind it, maybe the tape owner has another story about it's origin or their remembrances of the tape.  Would be interested to where geographically the tape was purchased.  (town or state)  A recently emerged 77 audio recording was named after the person who recorded it.  Naming is not always that easy.  Maybe the original tape owner can ask their dad about the buying of it.  How much did he pay?  100-250 dollars?  We're other dads doing the same?

I can't get much information out of him. We both work for the Federal Government, so he gets understandably uneasy whenever I bring it up, but I'll continue to try.

Personally, I like pictures of the tape (connection to the past), if you can scan them or take a photo, would be nice as part of the final preservation.

I'll be sure to take some nice pictures of it with my digital camera.

Since this is cropped differently in the vertical, there is a chance this is a 16mm preservation. (similar to Puggo Grande, Krig and Catnap)  This version is cropped more vertically then the 16mm.

It may be, but do keep in mind that my mobile phone camera clipped a good amount off of the top of Samples 2 and 3.

How long is the recording?  If this is a theater boot from 78 there's a chance pieces could be missing.  From what you've watched are there any signs of it being a well worn print, with some wear and tear?

It's 2 hours and 1 minute long, including some static at the beginning and end. I don't see any signs of it being a well-worn print. Excluding the aforementioned flicker and some shakiness, it looks very well preserved.

OK, my emergency-backup normal/SP quality capture is done. It looks great, but the flicker is annoying.

I plan to work on a high/XP quality capture tonight. It'll require 2 DVD-Rs, as the recorder fills a 4.7GB DVD-R with only 1 hour of footage in XP Mode.

frank678 said:

That's fair enough but protect this tape with your life until its safely transferred!

I've been and will continue to be incredibly careful with it.

frank678 said:

Awesome find!

The colours look like they could be really nice and intact on this.

However if this is going to be a real great preservation can I make a plea for it picking up a classier nickname to PornShopBoot before that sticks !!! I suppose PSB would work but perhaps you could come up with a name AntcuFaalb

I really like PornShopBoot, but I think I'll go with PSB (PornShopBoot, PornStrikesBack, PuggoStrikesBack :-).

Moth3r said:

It's not the same source as the widescreen bootleg I shared. That source was horizontally compressed like this one, but also had black bars top and bottom.

What is the "high-end VHS-to-DVD converter" you've bought?

Forgive me for a poor choice of words on my part :-( By high-end I meant that it was on the upper-end of my budget ($200) with pretty good reviews. I now plan to work with Puggo to get access to the really high-end stuff!

Do you think that this PornShopBoot may have originated from a hitherto unknown source?

Puggo - Jar Jar's Yoda said:

If it this turns out to be something of interest, I have a Panasonic AG-1980 which is well-known as one of the very best decks ever made for extracting detail from old VHS tapes.  Not that I'm in need of yet another project...

Puggo, I'd love your help! PM me, please.

Everyone: Thanks for the motivation and information!

I'm staying up late tonight to do the VHS->DVD conversion. I took a small one-minute sample and I've to say: it looks great! My samples really don't do it justice.

The following's a screenshot from the aforementioned one-minute DVD sample: Sample 6

none: I think I may need more help with identifying the source. I do think you're right in saying it's widescreen, as it looks like it was horizontally-compressed into fullscreen. I plan to have this up somewhere by tomorrow evening, so let's work on it together, OK?

SilverWook: It definitely is weird. I think it may've been a Smut+Illegal(x) store.

A coworker of mine lent me a bootleg VHS of Star Wars purchased by his father in 1978 from a porn store. The colors are vibrant and the picture quality is excellent (for a VHS, that is). It's very well preserved and is on a RCA VK250 Premium Quality Video Cassette, which was popular in the late '70s.

The following images don't do it justice, as they're of a 10" CRT TV and taken with a mobile phone.

Sample 1 Sample 2 Sample 3

The following two images are of the RCA VK250.

Sample 4 Sample 5

I purchased a high-end VHS-to-DVD converter today to get this out to OTers ASAP. Is anyone interested?

frank678 said:

AntcuFaalb said:

frank678 said:

What is/how does ColourLike work?

Click Here

After experimenting with ColourLike() using the Technidisc and the GOUT, I've decided that it doesn't work well enough; e.g., GOUT w/ Technidisc colors has weird patches of what are best described as murky rainbows.

Do you have to have 2 complete films to do this. Can you use the values of a still and apply it to a whole scene?

Also it's possible myscamore might be willing to recapture the Technidisc if you can see a way forward with it that you can't get now, etc. I'm interested to see what you arrive at anyway whatever version you work on, some of these versions look so bad in places practically anything is an improvement!

1. Yes, you can use the values of a still for a whole scene, but I haven't tried it yet.
2. I've spoken with myscamore about this, actually. Due to some technology-related issues, he's unable to recapture the Technidisc at this time.

On an unrelated note: Now that I have three different sources of the JSC, I'm going to start experimenting with a new approach this evening; that is, I'm going to try using TooT() (two-out-of-three). (The three different sources are: V8, X9, and Dark/Sega.)

frank678 said:

What is/how does ColourLike work?

Click Here

After experimenting with ColourLike() using the Technidisc and the GOUT, I've decided that it doesn't work well enough; e.g., GOUT w/ Technidisc colors has weird patches of what are best described as murky rainbows.

bkev said:

Wow! You've done some good clean-up on this so far and it sounds like you're only getting started. Filtering out the rainbowing was definitely a good choice; it's one of my bigger problems with the Technidisc. I'm looking forward to seeing what else you can do.

Now then, one problem that msycamore frequently brings up with his own transfer is the poor white balance as shown here. Are you planning on addressing that specifically?

Thanks! I'm still experimenting, so this project can go many different ways.

I plan to address color-related issues later, as thinking about them gives me a bad headache. Ideally, I'd like to address each issue specifically. What changes to the white balance look best to you?

msycamore said:

Dark/Sega and V8 DVD's are two different preservations of the japanese Special Collection LD, X9 found on the newsgroup is a raw capture of the JSC LD, so that is probably what you're looking for.

Also, the X9 capture was not the source for V8 and Dark/Sega DVD's.

Wow, that's great! Thanks for the information.

I've wanted to experiment with TooT() (two-out-of-three) in AviSynth and I now have three different JSC sources to experiment with!

Looks like I'll have to IVTC X9 first...

For ANH: Are V8, X9, and Dark/Sega all JSC captures? If so, are they 3 distinct captures of the JSC LD or is, for instance, Dark/Sega a touch-up of X9?

I did search for these answers, but I’d like to be 100% sure before moving on. Thanks!

msycamore said:

bkev said:

Filtering out the rainbowing was definitely a good choice; it's one of my bigger problems with the Technidisc.

Yeah, I agree, it's very ugly but I ultimately decided to left it in, as the side effects of such filtering are often worse than the original problem. It's no match to get rid of, but what you often end up with is smearing, ghosting, objects that should have colors gets desaturated - seen on lights and lasers etc. I have not yet found a good derainbowing filter that not introduce artifacts of some sort. Fast moving scenes are the toughest.

LUTDeRainbow works well. I plan to ColourLike against another source anyway.

Do you know of any filters for temporal color stabilization? Alternatively, is it commonly called something different?

frank678 said:

LexX said:

You_Too said:

I don't know about ESB and ROTJ, but I can tell you that in any version of SW the colors are inconsistent, and they've been confirmed to have been like that on some original prints as well.

But is the GOUT inconsistent because the film originally was or is it because it is GOUT?

It says here http://savestarwars.com/filmpreservation.html the original 1970s film stocks were unstable. Mike Verta talks about element damage here http://originaltrilogy.com/forum/topic.cfm/Color-correcting-the-Blu-Rays/post/548757/#TopicPost548757

and said on his forum that the colour seperations are missing elements.

So the original prints from the negative would be more consistent and then its been degrading organically since then. There might be a consitent linear pattern to a print fade (e.g. it gets pink, more pink, very pink, red) but it would be linear relative to the start and subsequent conditions being identical. If theres 4 different stocks within the film the fade couldnt fade in linear way across the whole film but only on the individual stock in linear conditions?

An ambitious person could start a thread and try to post up screengrabs of a still from every version of the film available and try and track fade patterns - however specific versions would have additional variations added in by the settings the transfer was done through and additional colour corrections added in (to either reverse colour loss/or for aesthetic reasons).

This is my understanding of the subject to date anyway.

My speculative idea is that the GOUT print is from the same source as the Technidisc print thats been through a cleaning solution (?) or printed on a different stock? which stabilizes the excess colour fluctuations-saturations of the Technidisc but the GOUT has not been colour corrected. The Technidisc has not been colour corrected. The special editions and the widescreen editions immediately prior to Technidisc seem all to have been tinted blue to dye-down the pink/red (not the JSC which I think is also not corrected). The special editions also have additional scene by scene corrections? This is all speculative and would welcome correction on this.

 

 

Thanks for the information.

Do you know if anything was changed for the 1982 LaserDisc release? Does that release have any specific problems (besides being fullscreen)?

Asaki said:

I don't mind the dirt. Can we see what the "rainbow" cleanup looks like?

Sure: Sample 5 Sample 6!

For Sample 5: Look at the ridges of Darth Vader's "nose".

For Sample 6: Look at the ridges of both ships (and elsewhere).

Joel said:

If you have any big stuff to fix that doesn't get cleaned up with automated processes, I'd be happy to take a crack at it with AE rotoscoping (I outlined some of this in the x9 thread, not realizing that you'd moved on from that already :) )

The automated process is working rather well, actually. I'd like to see how far I can get with it before resorting to manual touch-ups.

My current problem is that it removes most of the starfields, so my spouse and I will have to sit down for a few hours to get the [begin, end] frame numbers for each scene containing stars in order to skip over them. Fortunately, ANH doesn't have many of these scenes.

I would estimate that 95% of the defects in the SWE Technidisc are removed with this automated process. I'd like to scrub through the remaining 5% manually, but it's 174,258 frames to look at. Can you (and others?!) help me find these defects? If so, I can provide you with my working copy.

So I've decided to start a new thread for the SWOLT project and switch from the X9 capture to the SWE Technidisc.

The following three images are the result of applying UnDot, LUTDeRainbow, RemoveSpots, and DeSpot to it in AviSynth. (Note: Neat Video is not in use here. Moreover, I still have to tweak the settings of some of the aforementioned filters.)

These images are not manually touched-up: Sample 1 Sample 2 Sample 3.

The following image shows that this process doesn't result in much (if any) detail/quality loss: Sample 4. (Hint: look at the ridges on her blaster.)