Asaki

Darth Mallwalker said:

In my current line of thinking (wild-ass educated guess) this Technidisc pressing LD and Asaki's 1992 widescreen VHS are likely the same transfer/master, and I'd suspect they're missing the same frames at reel changeovers, same 2:3 pulldown cadence, same cropping, etc...

 I can do some screencaps if you like. My capture card's quality isn't the best, but I'll see what I can do.

Darth Mallwalker said:

hairy_hen said:

The smear-free '93 colouring is making me think of the '92 vhs tape that I grew up watching; it seems very familiar in that way.

Did you read Asaki a few days ago, when he noticed the 2 burn marks in the Tantive corridor on his recently acquired VHS? Wasn't that a '92 too?

 Yeah, I assumed he meant the '92 letterbox set (the one I have with burn marks).

What other set has the burn marks? When you first mentioned them, you referred to them as "our old friends".

Yeah, that's why I was asking about the screen caps. It does have two or three of them.

Shouldn't be the wrong thread, I'm referring to the v2 bonuses DJ released to a few people.

Or any other capture will do, I suppose.

Wow, I guess the G'KAR really does look awful...

Can anybody post some captures of the JSC RotJ? I'd like to know if it looks as awful as the letterbox VHS.

Is there a backup of the X0 Project website somewhere? Or at least the screen caps?

So I was skimming through this a bit yesterday, and maybe it's been a while since I last watched the SE, but I don't remember there being CGI in the Rancor scene. Why was this replaced?

LeeThorogood said:

The problem is where would you draw the line? How long would it be before correcting the unwanted side effects would lead to a scene by scene correction?

 As I said in the other thread, having different settings for each reel might be a more reasonable solution than having different settings for each scene.

But I think it's looking pretty great, considering that it's the GOUT.

SilverWook said:

The Emperor hologram seems slightly different somehow, or all the fine scanlines lost with the old video transfers?

 I just watched Adywan's ESB reconstruction last night and I believe the scanlines were visible?

I know everyone's saying it, but this is looking very awesome. Would be even more so if this is the 70mm edit.

Well, it looks better and worse on the big screen. Does look better through this VCR than through others, but it's certainly not as nice as a Laserdisc rip...it really does make you appreciate LD much more when you can compare it side-by-side.

Gray Death Star as predicted, also I noticed it has those two burns over the droids at the beginning.

Had to zoom out the picture for the Greedo scene, since the subtitles are way at the bottom of the black bar =|

But hey, if you already have the set, I'd say watch it (especially if you're on an analogue TV)...it's going to be a heck of a wait before any JSC sets come out of the full trilogy.

Edit: RotJ does not look quite as good as the other two...

The Aluminum Falcon said:

Asaki, did you ever get the 1992 Letterbox VHS set? I have a copy in storage and was wondering if it was worth it to pull it out.

 Just got it today. It looks pretty awesome for a VHS that's almost 20 years old, I have newer VHSes that don't look this good.

Can't wait to check it out on the HD tonight, it should look even better there. On this analogue TV the picture is so sharp that it flickers >_< But then this VCR might have something to do with that (Sharp VC-H810), it's got a whole lot of impressive sounding fancy jargon written on the front of it.

Edit: I'm surprised to find that Hoth is very white here, even in the day-for-night shots. I suspect the Death Star will be very gray in EpIV, like the JSC was, but I'm curious to see if there'll be blue stars later on. I'm just sort of skimming around at the moment.

Puggo - Jar Jar's Yoda said:

I just realized that this statement I made is utter nonsense.  Such a situation would cause reddening on one side, not at the tops of the frame.

 I was wondering how that would be possible...but then I got distracted.

Return of the Puggo?

........... ¬_¬

Personally I love the name.

The Aluminum Falcon said:

Though I'm not a donator and will probably never see this set, I am curious; how does the quality compare to Arnie's V8 and Dark Jedi & Segaflip's collaborative transfer of it?

 As I said on page 63, according to the sample Dark Jedi released, there is a very slight amount of rainbowing, and the detail level is just slightly lower than the V8 (but whether this is due to the hardware used or the noise reduction, I couldn't say).

The V8 suffers from a bit of chroma shifting that this v2 doesn't have, though, and there's a bit of noise if that sort of thing bothers you.

I've only seen a small, two-second clip of the Dark-Sega set, and a handful of screenshots, but I'd say the v2 looks far better.

LeeThorogood said:

@myscamore which LD transfer would you suggest I use? The only non THX transfer I am aware of is the Dark Jedi/Sega JSC preservation and I was under the impression this is not a very good transfer?

As much as I hate to say it, I tried using a simple saturation boost on Arnie.d's V8 and it didn't work half as well as it did on the GOUT =/

But don't let me discourage you, your results may vary.

Erikstormtrooper said:

"The standard definition restoration of Star Wars was indeed completed, long ago. I just never got around to updating the site." Thanks! So you have possibly the holy grail of Star Wars preservations, but it slipped your mind to mention it?

 As far as I'm aware, the restoration he's talking about just fixes all of the more glaring (fixable) errors in the 2004 SE (color timing, visible mattes, blaster/saber colors, etc). It would be useful for other projects (or to people who actually like the SE), but I wouldn't exactly call it a "holy grail".

Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, though. But if I'm not, I'm pretty sure he said he never intended to actually release the project, that he would only give resources for others to do it themselves.

Dunedain said:

What wonders of restoration could be done if the tech guys here had access to a source like that... :)

 Personally, I think he does a great job all by himself @_@

Nice to find his site again, I remember reading it many years back and enjoying it immensely.

msycamore said:

And why not get newsgroup access?

Unless all the search engines are trying to take me for a ride, newsgroups are not free to join =(

I just won the VHS set the other day, it probably won't get here for another week or two.

One thing I will say, though...I've got the VCR going composite video into an HDTV and I'm very surprised at the quality. I guess I was expecting it to look more like a nth generation 1970 televised concert bootleg VCD...or like Comcast's SD offerings... ¬_¬ *cough cough*

From what I understand, ESB and RotJ are also sourced from the JSC...but as I said, I'm no expert on these matters...apparently someone somewhere in the massive X0 thread says that the JSC and the SWE are different masters, but I really do not have the patience to dig through 80+ pages just to find out.

As far as I know, the DC is post-THX/Lowrey/etc. But I could be wrong, I didn't get to put too much research into it.

dark_jedi said:

...only a very select few even offered at the time, but now that everything is finished, now I get a lot of PM's for offers, all I can think of is this, where were you guys back when I started to take them LOL...

I would've gone out and got you some if I knew you were offering JSC v2 in exchange =(

But ah well...I just won the Letterbox Special Collection VHS so I'll likely go back to lurking for a bit until something better comes along...

dark_jedi said:

LOL, DVDShrink them, that kind of defeats the purpose doesn't it?

 I'm just saying. I've shrunk things before, and the results weren't terrible.

Of course dual layer would be better if the option were available.

Or you could DVDShrink them to fit on a single layer. With how many audio tracks this thing's gonna have, I wouldn't be surprised if just chopping some of those out would be enough to do it... ;)

I really like where csd79 is going, and I hope he continues his work at some point.