CatBus

Jetrell Fo said:

Little is sacred in OT land anymore

AFAICT all that's left is CPY. Everything else is fair game.

DominicCobb said:

What the hell these last two pages

Not only that, but I'm gonna have to call my engraver and change what's gonna be on my tombstone.

Because information is valuable in a military operation?  Remember, the Emperor was playing his "it's a trap" game pretty close to his chest, everyone else just thought it was a regular combat operation.  Of course the enemy should be captured and interrogated whenever possible.  Heck, even if it was widely known to be an Imperial trap, they should still do this.

Yeah, this is a red herring.  When people out in the media distribution world say "original trilogy", they just mean some version of the Special Editions.

Basically ever since they stopped explicitly labeling the Special Editions as such, there's been a lot of consumer confusion about what movie you're actually watching/buying/streaming.  Which, I feel, is an intentional bait-and-switch scam.

The short answer is: unless you got it from OT.com, it's the crappy wrong version you didn't actually want.

I clicked it and I just got this guy singing "Never Gonna Give You Up".  Weird.

team_negative1 said:

There is no one pretending to be anyone here, and unless people are willing to post some proof or evidence, it's tiring to keep hearing the same baseless speculation that adds nothing to this thread.

Seriously?

Unless that persons posts and says it himself, that would be proof, anything else is just distraction not paranoia.

So if -1 posts under the group account and tells us all it's him, that, and only that, proves that he's posting under the group account and pretending it's not him. That must be the double-secret backwards switcheroo approach to evidence, I hadn't thought of that.

You're doing a great job, team. I like your project and what you've done so far. What's really tiring is this "I'm hiding out from the DEA in the bedroom over the garage, but tell everyone I moved to Guatemala, this is totally gonna fool everyone" routine. Or, at the very least, change the team account password so he stops using it. The moderators here have already been on you about this, and they have access to IP address information if you want more proof. Christ.

Moth3r said:

StarThoughts said:

The limitations of a 192 kb/s Dolby Digital track as compared to the LPCM stereo track are pretty apparent to me whenever I hear the music.

ABX test results?

Why, the dialnorm and DRC alone would... oh ;)

Feallan said:

CatBus said:

Keep in mind that Mike's very open about his identity,

... If what he does is illegal, and could get him in trouble, why isn't he keeping low profile? ... But his behavior is mind-boggling to me.

What he's doing is not illegal.  His behavior is that of a law-abiding citizen.  That's the whole point.  He hasn't stepped over the line into piracy or distribution or any such thing, and he doesn't intend to.  So why keep a low profile?  There's no reason for it.  This is a choice he made early in the project, and it allowed him access to resources that would not otherwise have been available.  It will result in a better preservation in the end, and that's the long game here.  Many Star Wars fans are interested in what he's doing.  Where can you find a lot of Star Wars fans?  OT.com.  It's a sharing community second, a Star Wars community first.

Now, I really do get what you're saying.  This is still a sharing community.  And there was a period there, back before Mike had shared anything substantial with anyone in the community, that I felt his project was a net drain on the community's limited resources--a black hole where people's attention went and nothing ever came out.

But that was before Mike shared some of his resources with people here.  Yes, they were shared privately--but the contribution was huge, and the results are freely available to the entire community.  So he gave back (and he found a creative way to do it that AFAICT kept within the law).  He contributed, and my attitude changed.  Because frankly, he's given more to this community at this point than I have, and what would it say about me if I were to say he wasn't doing enough?

EDIT: I guess I should add that I privately believe that Mike's dream of someday providing the scans to some studio that will end up as the definitive Star Wars preservation would only really work if the studio wants to do it on the cheap.  If they do a real quality restoration, they'll use OCNs and other high-level sources to get as much detail as possible, and then use Mike's scans only as a color reference (this is how Tech IB prints are used in high-quality commercial restorations today).  Which means, in my opinion, when Mike provided Harmy with the Star Wars color reference, he provided Harmy with what may ultimately be the entire long-term value of his project.  But that's my opinion.

TFN hates Star Wars in general, from what I've been able to tell.

Keep in mind that Mike's very open about his identity, and even assuming he didn't get outright arrested for what you're asking him to do (because "reasons" include "it's illegal"), his career would be most definitely and negatively impacted.

Meanwhile -1 never revealed his real name, is pretending he's not part of his own project anymore (paranoia about the aforementioned "it's illegal"?), appears to be on the same 2076 timeline you're complaining about here anyway, and the quality won't be as good as what Mike's doing.

Some people are willing to break the law for you, a complete stranger. Some people aren't. I wish everyone shared, that'd be great, I understand. But when they have very good reasons not to (such as: it's illegal), I understand when they don't. And I'm happily surprised when they share anything at all, especially when it's the sort of extraordinarily helpful things Mike has given us that could not be gotten from any other source.

Well, I'm asking about this because I actually don't know the capabilities of the target device(s) for testing. Finding out what one or two devices can do is interesting, but it doesn't necessarily tell you what the lowest common denominator is.

As for test patterns, those look good to me (for NTSC naturally).  I'd assume a "correct" device would show just green and blue on the top pattern and all three colors on the bottom pattern.  But I suspect most devices would show all three colors on the top pattern and from what I've read, it's possible they'd even add black padding to the bottom pattern!

Mostly I was concerned about 704x480, from the point-of-view of compatibility. Yeah, it's a valid part of the spec, and I use HCEnc so creating a valid file isn't the problem, but do players actually do the right thing with it?  I've seen a number of reports about hardware players that make me a little nervous about using this lesser-known DVD resolution.  Also, I'm a little fuzzy on the benefit of nominal analogue blanking--is the lack of blanking on this resolution an issue?  But mostly--why do the places that actually bother to have the correct aspect ratio always seem to opt for 720x480 with blanking?  That is the question that really makes me concerned about the player compatibility of 704x480 video.

As for 720x480, so many players already get the PAR wrong, and it doesn't seem like any newly-created players are doing it right--I'm seriously wondering at this point if I should just forget the specs and encode at 720x480, just anticipating that the player will get the PAR wrong and by virtue of two wrongs making a right, the image will look correct.  That is, apparently, the path most major studios are taking.

To the contrary, if one of the goals of the purchase is to avoid the sort of encoding errors that can result from a machine running too hot or just trying to squeeze too much performance out of the machine, going with a solid, reliable, if somewhat conservative machine from a major manufacturer may actually be beneficial.

Unlike most other projects here, this is only an historical archival project.  In 2076, when Mike's prints provide the basis for Criterion's 8K Mauve-ray release of Star Wars, his work will be appreciated, as will his eagerness to share the fruits of his work in every legal manner available to him.

Current generations may never see these prints. That's okay--the point is that future generations may.

In the meantime, those of us stuck in the present are enjoying what Mike has determined he can legally share, which is less than the entire film scanned in glorious 4K, but quite a bit more than nothing.

Seriously, the color reference alone did more than improve Harmy's colors.  It also sped up the whole process by leaps and bounds. You'll see once the ESB project gets going again, how the lack of an authoritative color reference can lead to a storm of second-guessing colors that never, ever ends.  With Star Wars, he could just say, "This is how the colors were." and he'd be right, and we'd move on.  All thanks to this project.  Who knows in what little ways it might still benefit the OT.com community in the future?

Oh, and thanks for the avatar change!

Always glad to be of service when a pedant is needed.

It's not immediately obvious that Mike's restoration does actually benefit people at the present, but it does. Maybe not as much as some would like, but real tangible benefits of this project do exist.

Now if only I could get Mike to use the right apostrophe character in his avatar. That really is something we should be up in arms about.  It should look like a "9", not a "6".

PM sent.  Yeah, you have to be careful rendering the subtitles yourself because the SRT files are UTF-8, which some renderers may not understand, and also there may be some other issues depending on which fonts you choose.  Using the pre-rendered ones is best ;)

porkinsred6 said:

Maybe I obsess over this too much.

No such thing as too much obsessing.

http://originaltrilogy.com/forum/topic.cfm/Adventures-in-Raising-the-Next-Generation-of-Original-Star-Wars-Fans/topic/12304/

I'm no expert, I could easily be doing something wrong, but...

For AVC:

x264 --preset=veryslow --tune=grain --bluray-compat --fps=23.976 --force-cfr --vbv-maxrate=25000 --vbv-bufsize=30000 --crf=18 --level=4.1 --keyint=24 --open-gop --slices=4 -o output.264 input.264

To be clear, I target BD25@1080p and this usually hits the target for a standard-length film (19-21GiB video--not much headroom for extras--I'd increase crf to make more room).  Also, the vbv-maxrate could be unneccessarily low but I've heard about burned media sometimes needing lower peak rates--maybe this is unsubstantiated.  Either way, I do know my encodes work across a wide range of media and players, so that's the test I'm most concerned with, and the results are generally pretty good-looking, so I'm happy.

For MPEG-2:

I use the HCEnc GUI, targetting DVD9@720x480 avg bitrate 6500, max bitrate 8000, pulldown yes, profile best.  This usually gives you ~5.5GiB video files and lots of headroom for extra audio and subtitle streams.

All Windows for now, although I'm making plans to jump that ship.

An alternate take is: since the future can be assumed to be increasingly digital, and analogue displays often have aspect ratio issues in their own right, why not just pretend 720x480 is 16x9?  Digital systems will do this anyway, and analogue systems may end up with a stretched, cropped image, but with their aspect ratio issues and overscan, they may have ended up stretched and cropped regardless of how correct the source image was.

Or, "How I Learned to Stop Worrying And Love Doing It Wrong Just Like Hollywood"...

I've done enough reading to know that 704x480 is the closest NTSC 16x9 video size for DVD video, and 720x480 is actually a little wider than 16x9.  The question I have is: what's the difference between adding 8px borders (nominal analogue blanking) onto 704x480 video to make it 720x480 and putting that on DVD (which seems to be the way most commercial DVDs with correct aspect ratios use), and simply encoding a 704x480 video and putting that directly on DVD without modification?

The problem I'm encountering is that adding black borders and then putting it in a 720x480 frame results in digital players (software players, Blu-ray players) incorrectly assuming the black bars are part of the 16x9 image and displaying them, resulting in a displayed image that is slightly too narrow horizontally.  Analogue DVD players are fine and discard the borders, as they should.

I'm just looking for a way to have an image that displays correctly on digital players without screwing up analogue players.  Directly encoding 704x480 seems like it might work, but am I overlooking something?

And let's pretend I just don't care about overscan on the output device.  We're only talking about nominal analogue blanking, that's it.

SilverWook said:

It's not a happy ending, if it makes you feel any better.

Yeah, because that statement is really going to make the images in our heads more tolerable. Thanks so much.

Not that it hasn't been said before, but I just want to add that this rocks.  Holy damn does it rock. Nice work, everyone involved.

He's like the man on the run who tries to drop off the grid and make himself disappear, but he keeps using his credit card.  Okay, maybe he really hasn't been here since November, but we've heard this "-1 doesn't live here anymore" spiel before.

I am sorely tempted, but I'm pretty burned out on audio work right now and badly need a little break.  It's just one film too, not the entire trilogy, so that makes the workload smaller.

EDIT: I'm assuming it needs to be despecialized, which is really the hard part. But then, I also just hate the idea of anyone trying to tie the long-term survival of their language to the cinematic albatross of the Special Edition, so that also provides more motivation.  Ergh, so torn.