CatBus

Iske said:

Can I get a link too? Thanks!

PM sent.

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Mac-Bain said:

SnooPac said:

I think the initial confusion is that you mean rotj 2.5* (not 2.7) is still listed.

And I think that’s a valid question (which might have a good answer/justification):
Why is rotj 2.5 still listed when rotj 3.1 is released (and presumably supercedes it)?

Exactly my point. I wonder if it’s because ROTJ 2.5 is made like all the others DEED (by adding different sources together), whereas 3.0 and 3.1 are from a 1983 source, and demand a different set of skills.

No, ROTJ 2.5 also used 1983 film scans mixed with the Blu-rays. 3.x uses 1983 films scans mixed with the UHDs. It’s the same general process, just with better-quality sources in 4K. I suspect 2.5 wasn’t removed when 3.0 came out because 3.0 had a major error, and 2.5 was the fallback. Then by the time 3.1 came out, failing to remove it was an oversight.

In anticipation of the official ROTJ DeEd 3.1 4K release, I created some UHD artwork.

UHD (4K) Blu-ray: https://drive.google.com/file/d/130M9JMoRdT6oYjM3Dvm22sNgpkifrJuK/view?usp=drive_link
HD (1080p) Blu-ray: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1glb8XnVxqJstm_FOE11EsGmeCgS6HBQ4/view?usp=sharing
DVD: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1rcddg4WCtAqhiOhyaLPqw_1UCww4d050/view?usp=sharing

The only difference between 4K and 1080p cover art is the logos (Blu-ray vs Ultra HD Blu-ray). The DVD cover art is very similar, but some changes were necessary due to the different case proportions.

They’re designed to be in the style of the 1990 VHS releases (Star Wars, Empire, and Jedi), but there are a few places where I modernized things a bit. These owe a lot to the work of ChainsawAsh and EyeShotFirst. There’s nothing preservation-specific about these covers, so they’d work just as well for Despecialized, 4Kxx, D+xx, or anything else you like.

There are also “alternate artwork” versions, which more faithfully reproduce the artwork on the home video releases:

Disc art is also included, in a matching style (including distinct designs for the 1981 version of Star Wars and the 70mm version of Empire; bottom row is alternate artwork):

CHEWBAKAspelledwrong said:

For my curiosity, are you guys burning 4K-UHD spec onto a BD-50, or are these data discs?

Just a BD-50. Bigger than that I hear is trouble, so I’ve never tried.

PSimpso said:

50GB BD-R will work, but you’ll probably want to scale back the audio tracks, or you’ll risk going over the total bitrate limit for 4K Blu-ray players. I did just one lossless track and several lossy, and that was fine. You could probably be less conservative.

I assumed that only the active audio track contributed to the total bitrate limit. Am I wrong about that?

IIRC, the player reads all muxed tracks simultaneously, then decides which ones to play. So you can go over the limit even when the tracks you’re actually using don’t go over that limit.

Stinky-Dinkins said:

Holy shit, it’s been a while since I last checked in this 3.1 UHD version looks amazing. It’ll just burn to a regular 50gb BD-R right, haven’t bothered looking into burning UHD.

50GB BD-R will work, but you’ll probably want to scale back the audio tracks, or you’ll risk going over the total bitrate limit for 4K Blu-ray players. I did just one lossless track and several lossy, and that was fine. You could probably be less conservative.

Also, good to see you again!

Harmy said:

The English tracks are theatrically synced, not sure about all the dubs but for dubs, falling out if sync by one or two frames shouldn’t really matter.

The dubs are also theatrically synced.

Weird. Maybe we discovered some previously unknown variation between the European UHD and the North American one. At this point, Harmy could shed the most light on this. I have no clue.

Could be a crop difference, I suppose. Does the title appear on the same frame?

haru KI do said:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nHcEb54vkiU

This is a v3.0 video, but it should be the same in v3.1.

Looks like everything lines up except DeEd, by one frame. Can’t blame the UHD source for this either.

digitalfreaknyc said:

CatBus said:

digitalfreaknyc said:

Doctor M said:

CatBus said:

Doctor M said:

Harmy said:

The 1080p version is designed for a BD25, if you keep only the English audio and one or two dubs.

The 2160p version is over 40GB just for the video.

Any recommendations for BD50 blanks?

For this one? Verbatim M-disc. It’s gonna be passed down like a family heirloom.

Until version 3.2. 😃

I copied it to a network HDD dock and took a look at it… and I hate to be the first to complain about this amazing piece of work, but it looks like the grain was scrubbed and then fake grain was added.
Was that the 4k source or am I hallucinating?

Thank you for saving me the trouble of downloading. I’ll stick with D+83.

For those unable to detect the snark, D+83 (OTD83) uses the same sources as Despecialized, with the same issues. If you’re happy with OTD83, you’ll be delighted with Despecialized.

No snark intended. I just don’t feel the need to have fake grain added to the picture. I’ll stick with D+83 unless I see some screencaps that sway me otherwise.

I get it now. Now I know that pre-2020 versions of D+xx actually didn’t have any fake grain added. I laughed because I thought you were talking about a recent version of D+83, which of course has the same fake grain as Despecialized, and so I thought you were being snarky (i.e. I thought you were saying “I don’t want fake grain… so I’m sticking with this other preservation that’s full of fake grain!”).

That guy with no name said:

digitalfreaknyc said:

CatBus said:

digitalfreaknyc said:

Doctor M said:

CatBus said:

Doctor M said:

Harmy said:

The 1080p version is designed for a BD25, if you keep only the English audio and one or two dubs.

The 2160p version is over 40GB just for the video.

Any recommendations for BD50 blanks?

For this one? Verbatim M-disc. It’s gonna be passed down like a family heirloom.

Until version 3.2. 😃

I copied it to a network HDD dock and took a look at it… and I hate to be the first to complain about this amazing piece of work, but it looks like the grain was scrubbed and then fake grain was added.
Was that the 4k source or am I hallucinating?

Thank you for saving me the trouble of downloading. I’ll stick with D+83.

For those unable to detect the snark, D+83 (OTD83) uses the same sources as Despecialized, with the same issues. If you’re happy with OTD83, you’ll be delighted with Despecialized.

No snark intended. I just don’t feel the need to have fake grain added to the picture. I’ll stick with D+83 unless I see some screencaps that sway me otherwise.

Do you think the official releases doesn’t have fake grain? Why is fake grain so sanctimonious?

TIL that some old (pre-2020) versions of the D+ projects actually didn’t have fake grain added, and they just had the grain from the 4Kxx projects suddenly appear and disappear as the sources changed, even sometimes appearing in parts of a shot and not others. Wow. The current versions do a better job of blending source materials, using fake grain, as Despecialized does. I guess some people hate fake grain so much that they won’t even upgrade to a recent version of D+83/OTD83, and they’re okay with the jarring grain transitions of the older versions. That’s a choice.

That guy with no name said:

Doctor M said:

CatBus said:

Doctor M said:

Harmy said:

The 1080p version is designed for a BD25, if you keep only the English audio and one or two dubs.

The 2160p version is over 40GB just for the video.

Any recommendations for BD50 blanks?

For this one? Verbatim M-disc. It’s gonna be passed down like a family heirloom.

Until version 3.2. 😃

I copied it to a network HDD dock and took a look at it… and I hate to be the first to complain about this amazing piece of work, but it looks like the grain was scrubbed and then fake grain was added.
Was that the 4k source or am I hallucinating?

No, that’s just how the 4k Blu-ray looks, It’s scrubbed to smithereens… and has so much static grain. Harmy did the best he could to restore the original look. and I’m pretty sure that the grain he added is authentic 35mm is it not? also, how do you not know that at this point? Bad DNR was one of the 2020 Blu-ray’s first issues discussed here.

Pretty easy to miss it, actually. For a lot of Star Wars fans, they hear “Special Edition” and tune out everything about it. Despecialized or D+xx is probably the first time people like that have encountered the UHDs in any form. And yes, you’re absolutely right, they are very heavily scrubbed, so re-graining them is pretty much the only way to go (unless you want to DNR 4Kxx to match!). Nevertheless, possibly a surprise for people who didn’t know that.

digitalfreaknyc said:

Doctor M said:

CatBus said:

Doctor M said:

Harmy said:

The 1080p version is designed for a BD25, if you keep only the English audio and one or two dubs.

The 2160p version is over 40GB just for the video.

Any recommendations for BD50 blanks?

For this one? Verbatim M-disc. It’s gonna be passed down like a family heirloom.

Until version 3.2. 😃

I copied it to a network HDD dock and took a look at it… and I hate to be the first to complain about this amazing piece of work, but it looks like the grain was scrubbed and then fake grain was added.
Was that the 4k source or am I hallucinating?

Thank you for saving me the trouble of downloading. I’ll stick with D+83.

For those unable to detect the snark, D+83 (OTD83) uses the same sources as Despecialized, with the same issues. If you’re happy with OTD83, you’ll be delighted with Despecialized.

MarkM said:

CatBus said:

Verified, I burned this to a BD-50 and played it back in a hardware player. It’s glorious.

Do you mind sharing which authoring tool you used? tsMuxer is my go-to, but as you mention it is having fits with this one.

tsMuxer is what I used. You just have to be careful to keep the audio and subtitle options to a sane level. 32 audio/32 subtitle is the hard limit, but really that’s still too much if you have multiple lossless tracks. I only did one lossless track, to cut down on max bitrate. You could probably get away with more.

Doctor M said:

CatBus said:

Doctor M said:

Harmy said:

The 1080p version is designed for a BD25, if you keep only the English audio and one or two dubs.

The 2160p version is over 40GB just for the video.

Any recommendations for BD50 blanks?

For this one? Verbatim M-disc. It’s gonna be passed down like a family heirloom.

Until version 3.2. 😃

Not for me. I’m stepping off the upgrade train, 3.1 is my final stop. I can’t imagine what I’d upgrade for at this point.

I copied it to a network HDD dock and took a look at it… and I hate to be the first to complain about this amazing piece of work, but it looks like the grain was scrubbed and then fake grain was added.
Was that the 4k source or am I hallucinating?

That’s almost certainly exactly what happened. The primary 4K source (UHD disc) was heavily grain-scrubbed. To make that blend with 4K83-sourced footage, I have to think fake grain would be involved.

Doctor M said:

Harmy said:

The 1080p version is designed for a BD25, if you keep only the English audio and one or two dubs.

The 2160p version is over 40GB just for the video.

Any recommendations for BD50 blanks?

For this one? Verbatim M-disc. It’s gonna be passed down like a family heirloom.

I’ve been searching for a better Star Wars trilogy, on-and-off, since 1997, back when I naively thought the Special Editions were just an alternate cut that I could simply avoid buying when the OT was inevitably released on the then-new DVD format. And I waited, and waited, and waited… I eventually bought a set of CowClops DVDs of the Definitive Collection Laserdiscs from some disreputable bootlegger. And as it became clearer that Star Wars was never going to get a true DVD-quality release, and the prequels drove the point home that Star Wars and I were parting ways, I sort of stopped for a few years. I gave up looking for Star Wars.

Until I had kids. Then I broke out the Laserdisc transfers again and thought… this isn’t going to cut it. So I found this place, found dark_jedi’s GOUT upscales, which were only marginally better than the Laserdisc transfers I already had, but they were anamorphic! And I could watch Star Wars without the 1993 audio! And then Harmy came along, and negative1, both of them with crazy ideas that could never work, not with the resources we had, and I started searching again, looking for that better trilogy.

But something important just happened. I’m not searching for a new, improved Return of the Jedi anymore. For the first time since 1997, I’m actually entirely satisfied with the video options I have. I don’t feel the need to look anymore, and that’s a truly odd sensation after so many years.

Well, I’m entirely satisfied with Jedi at least. Still searching for the other two 😉

Verified, I burned this to a BD-50 and played it back in a hardware player. It’s glorious.

Keep in mind, I do have some general caveats about this sort of endeavor. While all of the streams (video, audio), may be individually UHD-compatible, there can be problems when you try to burn them to disc collectively. There is both a maximum bitrate for the disc, and a maximum number of audio and subtitle tracks. Some UHD authoring tools (e.g. tsMuxeR) will let you blow right past those limits without so much as a warning, and create an ISO which plays fine on your PC, but not in a hardware player.

So while you may be tempted to make a super-ultra-universal UHD with every conceivable audio track and subtitle (er, well, at least that thought has tempted me…), that is not going to happen. Put it out of your mind. You are limited to 32 audio tracks and 32 subtitle tracks, and you may be limited to fewer than that if you decide to pile on multiple lossless tracks.

Me, I played it safe, because I don’t like making coasters. My disc had 12 audio tracks, and only the primary 5.1 track was lossless – the rest were lossy. I also showed a lot of restraint and only included 19 subtitle tracks, but those are far less likely to put your disc over the edge. You could probably be a lot less conservative and still make a playable disc.

Also, burning discs beyond BD-50 capacity is probably asking for trouble. Stick to BD-50 and avoid worries.

Jedi122 said:

How did you make a lossless DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack out of the 1983 70mm Magnetic Six Track Mix?

That’s the hairy_hen project (it’s a separate project from despecialized, synced to the same standard so that the audio is interchangeable and can be included with many preservations). IIRC this is a reconstruction of that six-channel mix using what we know of the four-track master, the matrixed Laserdisc stereo run through a dolby decoder, and some love (and some educated guesswork when it comes to the LFE). From what we can tell, it’s very close to the real thing. Then you just encode it in a slightly more home-video-friendly format (5.1) instead of the original 4.2.

Nearsighted Scrappile said:

I’m sorry, but if someone can point me to a simple torrent or something, I’d appreciate it. All of this info is a bit much. I just want to watch Harmy’s work.

Check your WORKPRINT PM thread.

FYI, I threw together this little comparison:

The top row shows that 4K is an extremely subtle improvement over 1080p with these films. It’s there, but many would be perfectly satisfied with 1080p. The difference at 1080p is little more than grain resolution, and it’s possible that a different 1080p encoder tuning could even retain that. There’s a bigger, but still not huge, drop-off at 720p, so that’s actually still a solid resolution for presenting these reconstructions – basically the grain gets obliterated, but differences in actual image detail are still pretty minor. That’s good news for the other Despecialized films, which are still at 720p, and most of the grain was added at 720p, so it’s not lost in the downscale.

The bottom row shows some more interesting things. The DVD downscale looks, frankly, like crap. And that’s an anamorphic DVD downscale from 2160p that I made, considerably better than the recycled Laserdisc master which is the best thing we have from Lucasfilm. The GOUT would look even worse!

The 4K83 images show two things: first, that I really like the colors of Despecialized (but that’s just a matter of opinion). The other thing it shows is the advantage of using the UHD source over a projection print source. You can see more fine detail in the UHD-based source, even at some lower resolutions, because of the generational loss baked into projection prints.