Chewtobacca

Your ideas are intriguing. I like the idea of the film having a tighter pace, and the proposed changes to the the music and color seem fitting and well thought out.

The new title sounds rather odd and ungrammatical though.  I am not entirely sure what it means. As a suggestion, how does No Country for Old Gunmen sound?    

Well, that seems really short sighted of Paramount.  It was audio material meant for the theatrical cut after all.  If they upmixed the sountrack to 7.1 without those extra audio effects one wonders how they managed it.

Jeyl said:

Paramount has pretty much abandoned the Director's Edition of ST:TMP.

That's a shame, if it is true.  I like the director's cut.

I remember Robert Wise saying in his commentary that the Director's Cut audio mix was improved with extra sounds and effects that there was no time to integrate into the theatrical release.  I wonder if they were used for the theatrical cut blu-ray -- which I have yet to purchase. 

Asteroid-Man said:

The differences would be:

No opening logos to the DVD

That Opening Video I showed a few weeks ago is cut

The Scene Selections Intro Video is cut

Scene Selection Thumbnails are Still Images

Moth3r is right: just re-encode your edit.  Cutting out elements you have worked hard to create just to make your file fit on a DVD-9 is just crazy.  DVD Rebuilder is definitely better than DVD Shrink, but I don't understand why you can't just render your project again.

Moth3r said:

Just sticking my oar in re. the AR discussion

Was that an original aspect ratio pun, Moth3r?  If so, it was very slickly done. :-)

Adywan, have you ever though about writing a basic guide to color correction at some point?  I know much of it must be trial and error after a point, but I'm sure there are some basic pointers, such as you gave above, that people would find very useful when color correcting Star Wars and other films.  (I don't if you're a Star Trek fan, but the blu-ray of The Wrath of Khan has the same blue tint as episode V, though perhaps not quite as bad.)  More and more people seem to be attempting color correction in their Star Wars edits these days.

Timstuff, your colors are a definite improvement, but I have to agree that BmB's gray looks slightly better.  What are you using for the color corection, may I ask?  Sony Vegas? 

There is no episode VI of Adywan's releases as yet, only Ewokgroomer's conversions of Wookiegroomer's blu-rays.  There should really be a thread about these, if there isn't one already.

I understand better now.  Thanks!  :-) 

I love the prospect of an HD edition of your work, but will believe in these blu-rays when they finally appear!  Nonetheless, I can see why you wouldn't relish the prospect of redoing all your work -- again! I'll just have to be patient... :)

Yes; the Death Star looks really good.  The improvement in the Star Destroyer is even more marked, in my opinion.  I am really excited about the new version of your edit.  The color correction pictures look amazing.

I don't know why TVs offer "exact scan", because overscan (unrelated to NAB) dictates that around 5% of the picture around the edges should be considered "unsafe", and professional TV is produced with this in mind (including HD).

I thought this was for blu-ray.  I have always been told that unless I am viewing a blu-ray on exact scan I am not getting the full picture quality. This is what I set my TV to every time I watch blu-ray.

Why is ovescan unrelated to NAB?  When I looked at NAB in that wikipedia article it seemed to relate it to overscan. No doubt I've misunderstood again.  :-)

From what I read it seems that this 1050 instead of 1024 business is just because if you resize exactly to 1024 people with old sets lose part of the picture, as it then seems "lifted" slightly on their screens when it overscans.  I don't think this affects the AR itself though.  Isn't it more the scope of the film?

I think the 7 pixels not 8 might have been due to the fact that the HDTV was 720p not 1080, and the fact that the DVD had no black bits at the side. 

Yes; they are.  You can do the whole thing with freeware solutions. 

I know Virtualdubmod will also do the resizing, but the application Moth3r mentioned sounds interesting.   

As you are using Adywan's AVCHDs, the audio should already be DVD compliant.  I recommend you convert from AVCHD to NTSC not PAL, as the audio will be then be done already and it will play in your player; you just have to convert the video.

As an MPEG-2 encoder, you should use HC Enc.  It is great quality and free.

Thanks for your explanation, DE.  I'm still a little in the dark though. :-)  (Sorry to talk about this in your thread.) 

HD doesn't have NAB, so an HD picture should be scaled down to 704x576 and padded (although 704x576 is also valid for DVD video, so you could skip padding it to 720).

This starts to explain certain pecularities with DVD transfers.  They often have a black area at one side or both sides when ripped, though some of them don't nowadays. 

These black bars are designed for old non-HDTVs that overscan, are they?  If you view many DVDs on your widescreen television on exact scan (or just scan, whatever the manufacturer calls 1:1) you can see the black bars.  Would your TV be functioning as a square pixel display in this case, or is it just monitors?  because I don't see why one would need to crop a transfer to suit a monitor.

I recently worked with a PAL anamorphic widescreen DVD transfer that did *not* have those black pixels at either side when ripped.  I added in some HDTV footage to match it.  To do so, I had to crop 7 pixels from either side of the HDTV footage and resize to 720x576.  I didn't know about any of this at the time.  I was just taking snapshots of my sources into photoshop, measuring the pixels of visible image, calculating the aspect ratio accordingly and resizing.  I take it I did right? I would hate to have to re-do my work.  Both DVD and HDTV were 1024x440 with borders cropped at the end, or about 2.32:1, and visually they fitted perfectly.

I am sorry to be a massive pain in the neck, but this is a new thing to me.  Can you explain exactly what you did with the Death Star footage?  (MOth3r, I'll move this to PM, if it's annoying.) 

Moth3r said:

Strictly speaking, a PAL 16:9 image from DVD at 720 x 576 should be stretched to 1050 x 576 for the correct AR, not 1024 x 576 as you might expect.

I have never heard this before.  Would you mind explaining it Moth3r?  I have always used 1024x576. 

Is it to do with overscan?

While I can see by the numbers that it would make the squish worse, I don't understand the 1050 part.  Does this mean I have made mistakes when I have downsized HDTV broadcasts to PAL? 

Darth Editous said:

Okay, can someone who's into schematics and stuff tell me, is the Death Star supposed to be a sphere, or an ovoid? In every shot it's about 10% off being a circle.

Does the Death Star spin?  Spinning spheres exhibit oblation (bulging in the middle), but I doubt it would cause a 10% difference.  I think it is only a small effect. 

I hope he rests in peace.  Whatever the cause of death, his age relative to one's own makes one stop and think.

I have read so many contradictory reports of the merits of various burn speeds online that I no longer know which to trust --  many of them backed with seemingly-convincing bitrate graphs that apparently demonstrate x, y and z.  Despite sustained periods of experimentation with both high and low speed burns, I experience failed DL burns -- by which I mean burns that fail Imgburn's verification process, and which I therefore discard -- with equal frequency at high and low speeds. 

I currently burn Verbatim DL at 2.4x speed (despite the fact that the discs are the new 8x discs, not the old 2.4x discs), which seems to produce fewest burns - though that might be my imagination.  I find it hard to have any opinion on the matter, other than the opinion that the issue polarises people and I fail to see the justification for having deeply-held convictions either way.

post deleted (Sorry, Moth3r)

Do people have to quote the whole of other people's posts every time they comment?  Great though the accessories and the various mockups look, I tire of having to scroll past them just to see basic comments praising them. 

If I remember correctly, the Ewokgroomer release I downloaded was an ISO not an MKV.  I only downloaded ROTJ, and it was a while ago, so I may be wrong.

The standard recommendation is to use Verbatim DL from Singapore not India, as they are the best (should say on the box).  You use +R or -R based on what your PC uses I believe.  I have always used +R.

TDK are not bad really - I use TDK single-layer discs - so if you have bought some, give them a try.  If you've bought them, you might as well try them lol.

Why people make MKVs that are the size of DVD-5 or DVD-9 discs and don't realize that the size of the AVCHD folders takes them over the disc size is beyond me.  I have had the same problem before, and if I had to burn the file to disc (I play content through a media player, so I usually burn nothing), I extracted the audio and re-encoded it to a slightly lower bitrate e.g. 448 to 384.  This sometimes works, if the file is just over.  Otherwise I transcoded the file, which sucks really, but I don't  know what else to suggest.

I hope that someone more knowledgeable than I can advise you.

Yes; tsmuxer is the way to convert an mkv to AVCHD.  To uncrop a cropped MKV, you can use multiAVCHD or uncropMKV, both by the same author.

@Lord_Vader RS links are not available.  You'll have to look in the usual place.

Now that is much more like it.  Well done, Ady!

Monroville said:

 The Falcon (especially when it is to the right of the cloud, immediately before moving past the sun and the camera swinging around) looks either too bright (in comparison to the cloud right next to it) or there is not enough detail... something just looks odd or CGI about it. 

I do not think the Falcon is too bright.  I do think there is not enough detail, or that the detail that is there is not sufficiently dark/pronounced, to the effect that the Falcon seems whitewashed and artificial as it comes up to the point at which it is closest to the viewer. 

Darth Editous said:

The noise reduction is just too bad in the GOUT for me to want to do this for every SE addition - it was okay for that checkpoint scene, but (for example) when they go past the next Ronto before stopping outside the Cantina, the GOUT quality is abysmal.

 

I had actually forgotten that I had asked!  I don't know what gave me the idea that you had a 480p project in the works.  

Thanks for the reply.  I did not realize that the other scenes that the SE changed were quite so bad on the GOUT .  That is a shame.  A high quality theatrical version must remain a dream then; though G-Force's latest offering is very good in terms of quality.  If that is the best looking the theatrical version becomes for the rest of my life, I can live with it.

I just cannot abide the SE additions.  The only film for which I do not feel quite so strongly about that is the 1997 SE of ESB, which thanks to Adywan we have in HD.  It is fortunate that ESB weathered the SEs relatively unchanged, although I wish the ROTJ take of Vader's shuttle arriving had been cut from the AVCHD, as that really irritates me. 

Zaphod said:

Until Ady has time to get his Episode II, III and VI AVCHD discs done, has anyone out there made their own that they're willing to share?

Ewokgroomer made AVCHD DVD-9 versions of WookieGroomer's BD-50 releases.  You'll find them in the usual place.

@Wutwut, you're welcome. 

Once again, PM sent.