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Cowclops

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27-Sep-2004
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28-Aug-2011
Posts
39

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Post
#137220
Topic
<strong>The Cowclops Transfers (a.k.a. the PCM audio DVD's, Row47 set) Info and Feedback Thread</strong> (Released)
Link
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/137220/action/topic#137220
Time
Hmm... regular audio is the default sound, but nonetheless you can always change it by hitting the "audio" button on your remote until track 1 (rather than track 2) is selected.

If your PS2 is stretching it vertically, what its really doing is NOT compressing it vertically. If your TV is 4:3 and your PS2 is set to 16:9, its set wrong. You want it set to 4:3, doesn't matter whether its letterbox or pan & scan since all that does is decide which version to default to if a dvd has both letterbox and pan & scan versions. Since no DVDs will bother cramming two videos on one disc these days, doesn't matter what its set to.
Post
#125477
Topic
<strong>The Cowclops Transfers (a.k.a. the PCM audio DVD's, Row47 set) Info and Feedback Thread</strong> (Released)
Link
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/125477/action/topic#125477
Time
Laserman is right as far as the analog vs digital IRE thing is concerned. What it really means is that if the laserdisc outputs black as 7.5 IRE, whatever voltage that refers to (i almost wanna say 7mv) and you want the DVD to output black as 7.5 IRE (I do, because thats how it was mastered) then the black in the DVD must have a digital luminance of 16. As i've already explained ad nauseum, I "can" adjust it, but then George Lucas "can" make Greedo shoot first. If the goal is preserving the definitive collection LDs, thats just how I gotta do it and people will just have to adjust the brightness on their TV.
Post
#125323
Topic
<strong>The Cowclops Transfers (a.k.a. the PCM audio DVD's, Row47 set) Info and Feedback Thread</strong> (Released)
Link
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/125323/action/topic#125323
Time
You don't have to adjust your TV on a movie by movie basis, but if you were to use, say, the AVS laserdisc to set up your TV and then use, say, digital video sesentials, you will find that the settings are not the same. The brightness will be set higher on the DVD because its capable of outputting a "blacker black" in the first place. If you used the same brightness setting on a DVD player as you would on an LD player, the LD would look washed out. Seeing as the video source of this is LD and not film (which has a higher dynamic range than both of these formats) you must account for the fact that there is no shadow detail to be reclaimed. SO, then people say "why not just clip the signal so what was 7 IRE on the LD is now 0 IRE on the DVD." The problem with that is that when you hard clip an image, that is detail that can't be brought back. The reason why its so hard to make the starfield visible is because the difference between the black of outerspace and the dark grey of the starfield is not different enough. Had it been a transfer from film, there would be a greater difference between the "blackest black" of the background and the stars. The only way to maintain it without clipping many of the stars to black is to adjust it in the ANALOG domain, whereby you have much more leeway. If you tweak the brightness setting on your TV, you can choose yourself whether you want ALL the shadow detail and stuff or whether you want the blackest blacks. However, if I were to adjust the black to be blacker for the DVD, it would mean NO one is gonna get quality star fields and everybody is gonna lose shadow details. Thats not a tradeoff i'm going to make, so I stuck to my plan of "DVD on LD."

As long as the video source is LD, black should NOT be 0 IRE, it should be 7 IRE.
Post
#125282
Topic
<strong>The Cowclops Transfers (a.k.a. the PCM audio DVD's, Row47 set) Info and Feedback Thread</strong> (Released)
Link
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/125282/action/topic#125282
Time
I CAN say for sure where the "artifacts" came from, and it wasn't technically compression related. Uncompressed 4:1:1 sampled video would suffer from the exact same problem. DV camcorders (American ones anyway, European PAL camcorders use the same color format as all DVDs) only record one color sample for every 4 luminance samples. So, when it comes time to play it back, if theres a 1 pixel wide bit of bright red surrounded by a a few pixels of some other color, the red will bleed through. In fact, only red, blue, and purple should have issues as the nature of YPbPr video recording means that the resulting green channel is basically full bandwidth. They do this because the human eye is most sensitive to green.

So, no, its not the DVD compression that did it. In fact I compressed the second set using pretty much identical parameters to what I did with the first set.
Post
#124060
Topic
<strong>The Cowclops Transfers (a.k.a. the PCM audio DVD's, Row47 set) Info and Feedback Thread</strong> (Released)
Link
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/124060/action/topic#124060
Time
I would be kicking eros in the junk right now if this weren't the internet. He had no specific questions and complained that he didn't get any specific responses when all the info anybody could hope for was already in the thread. Let him stand as an example of what NOT to do when looking for help about something.

The subtitle question was pretty much already answered correctly, though I'll elaborate further since I made it so I know what I did to it.

Basically, heres what I did. The subtitles are in the black bars in the laserdisc version of the movies. When I cropped some of the black bars off to turn it into an anamorphic ratio DVD, I didn't lose any of the subtitles, and I wanted to leave the originals in so as to stick with the "Definitive Collection LD-on-DVD" motif. Since they are still fully there on the disc, you can see them just fine on any 4:3 display and probably all 16:9 digital projectors or most specifically anything that doesn't overscan the video. CRT-based 16:9 sets (projection or not) still have some overscan, however. Sooo, on these TVs you may not be able to see the subtitles at all, because erasing some of the black moved the subtitles out of the "safe-title" area as they call it. To compensate for that, I made it so you can turn on dvd-software subtitles of the same lines that will not appear in the overscan area, and in most DVDs should actually occupy the video frame itself. This way, those who can see the LD subtitles don't have to worry about anything, and those who can not see the LD subtitles can turn on the software encoded DVD subtitles. The bottom line is, if you're still using a display that overscans the video, you better hope it overscans the LD subtitles all the way or you might see a subtitle and a half. I suspect the people using analog 16:9 sets are in the minority, however. Most people probably watch on a PC monitor, a 4:3 tv, or 16:9 digital projection.
Post
#122990
Topic
<strong>The Cowclops Transfers (a.k.a. the PCM audio DVD's, Row47 set) Info and Feedback Thread</strong> (Released)
Link
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/122990/action/topic#122990
Time
The smearing is caused by noise reduction that acts too frequently.

Think of it this way... you have two dimensions to the noise reduction filter... the "more often/less often" dimension and the "stronger/weaker" dimension.

The first time around, to avoid the smearing, I used a more often and weaker noise filter. This resulted in less overall video noise and because it was on the weaker side, the smearing wasn't completely intolerable (though you noticed it and I knew about the side effect all along). Of course my goal was to minimize the smearing while maintaing lower overall noise.

I realized that there is no way to really eliminate the noise without trading it off for smearing in the moving scenes or loss of detail everywhere, so on the new set I used noise reduction that is actually stronger (because it searches more frames at a time to decide what the noise free version is) but it is applied in full strength less often. What this means is that in the most still scenes, you get near perfect noise reduction, but as soon as you get any movement the entire frame basically reverts to the sharp, but noisy image. What it really means is that you don't get anywhere near as much smearing because no real noise reduction is being applied to the moving scene, PLUS since its moving you're less likely to be able to focus on any noise ANYWAY. This goes back to the whole reason some still frames may not look that great... if you freeze frame something that isn't perfectly still, you'll see the noise and it won't look that pretty, but in motion your eyes won't be able to follow it anyway.

Mind you, I didn't manually do this on a scene by scene basis, just decided on an overall setting once and used it for all 3 movies. When I say its "applied less often" it means that the algorithm that decides whether to apply noise reduction or not to any individual portion of a frame kicks in less frequently.
Post
#122168
Topic
<strong>The Cowclops Transfers (a.k.a. the PCM audio DVD's, Row47 set) Info and Feedback Thread</strong> (Released)
Link
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/122168/action/topic#122168
Time
Whats funny is, people have asked more often the quality difference between the final version and the uncompressed version of my capture (an irrelevant question which you already know the answer to) more often than how it actually compares to a DVD. Basically, on a scale of 1 to 10 if film and HD are 10, DVD is 9, I would put laserdiscs (and thus my DVDs) around an 8... and VHS at 5. So, LDs aren't going to look as good as a DVD, but it will be a major improvement over VHS. If theres one thing that I prefer on my discs vs the official DVDs, its that there are a few stupid quality control issues that they apparently didn't notice on the official A New Hope disc. Namely, the fanfare at the beginning of the assault on the death star is virtually inaudible for some reason. Video quality wise, they seem to have thoroughly screwed with the color on A New Hope to the point where some scenes have completely blown out reds and it overall just looks disgusting. On the whole, the legit DVD is of course sharper. But then, there is no "legit DVD" of the non special edition version, so this is probably the best you can do on that for now.
Post
#119051
Topic
<strong>The Cowclops Transfers (a.k.a. the PCM audio DVD's, Row47 set) Info and Feedback Thread</strong> (Released)
Link
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/119051/action/topic#119051
Time
But I already explained it. Multiple times. And again right now. THE Q LEVEL WILL NOT TELL YOU HOW GOOD THE PICTURE QUALITY IS. What it does tell you is how the overall compression artifacts compare to compression artifacts in hollywood DVDs. That is to say, the MPEG artifacts will be less than a standard hollywood DVD, but because the input signal is a tad cruddier in the first place, the output may have manifestations of garbage that are a direct result of the input source that are all but non existent on 100% clean film->dvd transfers.

The next person that asks me how the uncompressed video compares to the compressed video is going to get a bag of dogshit mailed to their house instead of the actual discs. The first time, it was a legitmate question. The third time, it was old but I still had the patience to explain it again in a slightly different way. By now, it is beating a horse that is dead and 70% rotted. Please stop forcing me to reword what I've already said a hundred times on this forum for anyone and everyone to read. If you didn't understand it by about the third time I explained it, chalk it up to something you just might never understand and instead use your eyes to judge whether you like it or not.
Post
#119029
Topic
<strong>The Cowclops Transfers (a.k.a. the PCM audio DVD's, Row47 set) Info and Feedback Thread</strong> (Released)
Link
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/119029/action/topic#119029
Time
As explained about 14 times in this thread already, all mpeg streams have a number associated with each gop sequence (a short sequence of frames whereby the compression method repeats). This number is called the Q level or quality level. It ranges from 1 to 100 where 1 is "basically identical to the original frame." Most professional movies end up with a Q level between 3 and 5, so it is relatively close to the original uncompressed source. My Star Wars set, even in single layer form, has a Q of about 2 on average. This number does not lie... it tells you exactly the amount of picture quality lost due to compression, and the amount lost due to compression is less than what most dual layer hollywood DVDs have to go through.

In other words, artifacts you see were there before I even compressed it, which means it was probably on the LD itself and not something I did in the process of finishing the video.
Post
#117637
Topic
<strong>The Cowclops Transfers (a.k.a. the PCM audio DVD's, Row47 set) Info and Feedback Thread</strong> (Released)
Link
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/117637/action/topic#117637
Time
For this, I think the average bitrate was about 3200 kbps or so. The average Q in bitrate viewer is less than 3, so really there are minimal compression artifacts. I believe I used an image priority setting of 40, as the noise can at times confuse the compressor so I went for a closer to balanced setting, leaning towards giving most of the bitrate to sharp areas. In cleaner signals, I would use a lower image priority setting so as to prevent mosquito noise. I had the max set to 8500 because with PCM audio, if it goes over that it might make some DVD players choke on the signal. All in all, it didn't matter much as the bitrate stays mostly between about 2000 and 5000 kbps.
Post
#117332
Topic
<strong>The Cowclops Transfers (a.k.a. the PCM audio DVD's, Row47 set) Info and Feedback Thread</strong> (Released)
Link
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/117332/action/topic#117332
Time
lol, for the record, don't bother asking me for screen shots from the original cap. I just can't keep 150GB of video on my hard drive. What I really have to say is, to judge what it looks like you REALLY REALLY have to use the hardware that LASERDISCS were intended for. Get a traditional 32" standard definition 4:3 set, hook up a regular 480i DVD player to it, and watch it on that. Also, turn down the brightness so you can JUST BARELY tell the difference between the DVD player's anamorphic border and the "actually encoded on the disc" black border. That will give you the proper black level.

As laserman was hinting at, chroma noise on ALL laserdisc players is pretty much garbage compared to what people are used to watching especially on DVD. The noise reduction I did was to make it easier to compress, not to stamp out all the noise. In motion, it makes perfectly still scenes smoother, but anything with a slight amount of movement will retain all the original noise. If you grab a single frame, it might look goofy, even if the entire sequence looks fine.

Its pretty much the nature of LDs vs "single frames of LD rips people are seeing." Most people on here are seeing screen caps from LDs that have had the noise reduced to non existant levels... but in the process you get some less-than-desirable smearing and a bit of a loss of detail compared to if you minimized the amount of noise reduction.

Basically, a strong noise reduction filter DOES make for better screen shots, but it doesn't show what the video really looks like in motion. No noise reduction makes it just about impossible to compress, which can make for ok sharpness but adds lots of artifacts and crap too. I just went one step better than "no" noise reduction by using a setup so weak, it only affects the most still scenes.

To sum it up... you'll know what I mean when you see it.
Post
#115547
Topic
<strong>The Cowclops Transfers (a.k.a. the PCM audio DVD's, Row47 set) Info and Feedback Thread</strong> (Released)
Link
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/115547/action/topic#115547
Time
Return of the Jedi is 99% done. If anyone has the sound track for A New Hope or ROTJ in at least 160kbps mp3 format, it would be a great help if I could have a couple tracks off it to finish up the RotJ disc and make the extras disc. Music is about the only thing I need that I don't have right now.
Post
#101232
Topic
<strong>The Cowclops Transfers (a.k.a. the PCM audio DVD's, Row47 set) Info and Feedback Thread</strong> (Released)
Link
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/101232/action/topic#101232
Time
Yeah, the color banding was DV camcorder thing. Not sure what you mean with the frame rate problems... I watched the originals all the way through a couple times and never noticed anything with the "frame rate." Though, in the Indiana Jones LD rips I did even before I did Star Wars, (obviously, this was a long time before the real discs came out, which are amazing I might add,) there were some shots where the 3:2 pulldown sequence changed, and I didn't notice it changed so it would look weird for a shot, then be correct, then look weird, only in a couple scenes though. Either way, if there were any issues I missed the first time around, I'd say theres a minimal chance I made the exact same mistakes this time since my "order of operations" was much more logical this time around.

And yeah, the commentary track is just 64kbps mono. I did some quick line by line normalization to keep the volume from being COMPLETELY all over the place (they really did a shitty job with that. You can barely hear what they're saying in some spots).

I think I'll do Return of the Jedi this week. Then I'll just need to do the extras disc, and it will be done.
Post
#99175
Topic
<strong>The Cowclops Transfers (a.k.a. the PCM audio DVD's, Row47 set) Info and Feedback Thread</strong> (Released)
Link
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/99175/action/topic#99175
Time
A) What makes you think thats a cap from special edition? Those look like plastic models to me.

B) For fucks sake raised to the 20th power, the video fits JUST FINE on a single layer disc with menus and everything. No we will not be offering it on dual layer, except I made a dual layer version anyway to compare the Q levels of each disc and show how unnecessary it is. It goes like this:

1. Soft video is easy to compress
2. Laserdiscs are softer than DVD
3. Thus laserdisc video is easier to compress than "usual" dvd material.
4. Thus shut the hell up. QED.

C) The SW and ESB DVDs are done, now I just need to finish RotJ and the extras disc, and i'll send that stuff off to TR47.

D) I hate doing screen shots. When the stuff is done, whoever wants to make the screen shots can do them.
Post
#98113
Topic
<strong>The Cowclops Transfers (a.k.a. the PCM audio DVD's, Row47 set) Info and Feedback Thread</strong> (Released)
Link
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/98113/action/topic#98113
Time
Actually, I'm doing the menus now, and I like them. They will have "fmv window" style chapter select screens, and will generally work like a professional DVD even if the animation isn't quite as cool as say, the Lord of the Rings dvds, it will nonetheless not be static junk with text that looks like it was scribbled in poop by a 3 year old. I'm about halfway done with the menus for A New Hope.
Post
#97577
Topic
<strong>The Cowclops Transfers (a.k.a. the PCM audio DVD's, Row47 set) Info and Feedback Thread</strong> (Released)
Link
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/97577/action/topic#97577
Time
What do you mean, did I "Get it" from there?

You looked up my web site and you're asking me if I took something off my own web site? I think it works the other way around... I put stuff up there.

Wouldn't you think it obvious, that if my nick is "Cowclops" and the logo is a Cowclops, that cowclops.net is prooooooobably my own server?