Doctor M

A bit too choppy for my taste.

doubleofive said:

Great stuff, as usual.

I have two more suggestions:

- Bleep out every mention of "Sith". Childish, yes. Funny, maybe.

- Have Yoda speak correctly. This is something that always bothered me in the prequels. When Yoda gets serious in ESB and stops playing around, the backwards talk goes away (for the most part, I'm still working on some statistics to back this up), which made me think that Yoda didn't really talk like that, but slipped into doing it after playing the part of "crazy swamp creature" for 20 years. Then we see that 20 years before that, nearly everything that came out of his mouth sounded like a crazy swamp creature. I'd love to see if even serious edits could work on Yoda's backwards speech, because way too many moments that could have been dramatic in the prequels were ruined by Yoda not being able to make a coherent sentence.

It could be argued that maybe Yoda's non-"English" native language has some weird sentence structure, but consider that when he gets serious, the speech instantly corrects itself. This is definitely a topic for another thread once I have my statistics down, but I'd be interested in hearing what could be done with the prequel dialog either way.

I can't say I've ever noticed Yoda talking 'normal' when serious.  But that's a good point.  Yoda, in theory, is smart enough to speak properly.  It'd be nice to see a prequel edit that has Yoda's speech corrected and he only goes all Yoda-speak when he's excited or serious (which if what you says is true would involve mixing up normal to Yoda-speak on these occasions).

It's not uncommon for non-native speakers of a language to slip into an accent they had lost or their native language when excited.  It makes more sense that Yoda speech pattern develope from living alone in a swamp for so long.

As for THIS edit, it'd be funnier if Yoda was just made more crazy (like the MTV movie awards clip). http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8LKDRb-lK9s

I like the idea of the battledroids speakin in text/internet abbreviations.

Might I suggest instead that the R2 units speak in LOLcat instead of what you've got at the moment?

Sorry to revive a dead thread, but I wanted to let you all know this worked out great.

I was getting a 50-75% failure rate on Memorex blanks.

I've burned a half dozen or more Verbatims so far without a single bad disc.

Verbatims may cost more up front, but they are cheaper in what you don't throw away.  I can't believe Memorex hasn't been sued over this.

Thanks again for the advice. (Btw, I had a bunch of Office Depot store credit and a coupon and used it to buy more Verbatims recently.  OD's were from the Singapore plant as well.)

If anyone who gets a hold of these discs would like to share them on MySpleen, newsgroups or TehParadox, please PM me.

anatema is okay with it being posted as long as his name isn't associated with it.

FYI, I'm told there are 3 discs: one PAL, one NTSC, and one of extras (NTSC only).

jdlouhy said:

Hi Alex,

I would love to get my hands on a copy. I'm up for trading or covering the costs of burning and shipping. Or, if you know of a place I can download it from, that would be cool too.

Thanks for any help you can offer!

I don't think anyone has transferred this yet.

If they have... I second this.  Love to get a copy.

It may seem like stealing someone's idea, word is it is QT's idea.  Supposedly the script called for those scenes to be in the movie.  Can anyone back that up?

Do you intend to add Pai Mai’s white lotus Massacre from Shaolin Executioner?  I've seen two edits with it, and it is a much more effect scene that way.  (And less boring.)

Big Boppa said:

dark_jedi,

As someone who just discovered this forum, let me echo the sentiments of all those who appreciate the incredible efforts you and other like you have made to preserve the original trilogy as they were first seen.

I was 19 when I first saw Star Wars in 1977.  I went to a midnight showing.  I had to walk three miles because the headlights on my car blew out.  I can still remember how much I enjoyed the opening crawl and the way the Star Destroyer fly over blew me away.

To be honest, although I am an old school fan, I have enjoyed many of the changes that Lucas made.  But it's the original versions that really get me pumped.  To me they represent Lucas' original vision as it was, not the bleached and sanitized version he now wants everyone to believe it was.

I also believe an artist's (directors included) skill is manifested through the constraints placed on him/her.  In the original trilogy as filmed, we see the Lucas team at it's best.  The attack on the Death Star only gets better when you know they got the effect by sliding cameras on guide wires.

Imho (and a long windy one at that), Lucas needs to wise up; and not just for the fans.  His own legacy is at risk.  If he is succesful, in 50 or 100 years when no one remembers the original versions and they review his work, what they might say is "Nice  But anyone with decent computer skills can do that"

Anyway, I really appreciate what all of you are doing.  You are giving me back a piece of my youth.  Please don't let the comments of a few idiots make you forget that.

Thanks again.  I look forward to the completion of v3 and project blu.

You really nailed it there.  Heck, in a few years you'd be able to reproduce the Special Editions on a home computer.

I remember thinking a little while back that it's a good thing that some jacka-- didn't think about cleaning up the special effects in Ray Harryhausen's films.  A little computer work and you could smooth out the motion, or heck, it wouldn't be too much trouble to recreate CGI versions of the creatures and just rematte them into the film.

Just because we CAN improve effects in classic films, doesn't me we should.

Too off topic? Um, let's see, something about V3 project, um.. Thanks D_J!

By default Levels clamps input luma to [16,235], converts it to [0,255] for making changes, and then scales the output back to [16,235].

As such, Levels(0,1,255,0,255), does nothing on a [16,235] clip, but it clamps (or rounds) a [0,255] clip to [16,235].

http://avisynth.org/mediawiki/Levels

Don't let the numbers confuse you ChainsawAsh, the filter works like it should.

You could probably reconstruct the frame using the previous frame and just brightening the snot out of it (assuming there isn't too much movement).

Btw, has anyone tried lowering the overall brightness with levels?

The last integer is the input level.  While you can't recover detail lost (like in the frame posted above), you can bring down the range.  So to lower it 5 points would be: Levels(0, 1, 255, 0, 250).

justicefrog said:

Sweet, I will definitely try that, thanks!  As far as the "Redux" version I had no idea there was one, is that a variant of the screener where somebody just tweaked the color saturation like you mentioned?  Does that ability come standard with most video-editing programs?

I've only seen Redux with no information details and all links seem dead.  The only thing I know is it might be a better transfer, slightly desaturated and converted to DVD.

Anyone know more than this?

As far as desaturating, most editors have some sort of ability to do it.  If you are using Womble Mpeg Video Wizard, I would say DON'T use any of their video filters.  Womble would then have to re-encode the video and its mpeg encoder is possibly the worst one ever made.

I'm going to say the second clip is the best based on those screenshots.

The shots of the third appear over-brightened and more detail is lost from it (just check any light source in an image).

Still, I definitely like the return of the grain after the first try.

A couple thoughts.

If you don't have the "Redux" version of the screener, I recommend you try reducing the color saturation by about half.  The versions floating around are way overblown.

Also, as far as isolating dialog from the trailer, assuming the trailer is stereo (mono there is no help for), you can try doing an upmix to 5.1 with a dolby prologic decoder (my guide is somewhere on this site).  The output should have the dialog in the center channel.

I know it sounds silly, but to make things look less plastic-y you might want to try messing around with AddGrain().

Does the forum set fixed width to images?  No matter how wide I open the browser, I can't see the right half of those HD shots.

Btw, they don't look bad at all.  The edges are good, and there aren't any obvious upscaling artifacts.  Looks over scrubbed, but that probably isn't g-force's script.  You can't create detail that isn't there.

A couple thoughts.

The first may sound obvious, but: cell times are based on 29.97 frames/sec.  regardless of if the film is progressive or not.

If you've found the chapter locations yourself using just about anything (VirtualDub, etc.), your numbers are probably based on 23.976.  Multiplying by 1.25 will fix that.

Also, if your cells are ripped using DVD Decrypter, they may also be wrong.  The program doesn't handle NTSC cell times well (only PAL).  Grab PGCDemux and try reripping just the celltimes.

I found some flavor of this on Cinemageddon.  Looks bad (VHS to XviD), but it's a start.

Templar said:

Doctor M, the original Trancers isn't a Full Moon Production, it is one of the last Empire Pictures productions, which, like Re-Animator, were actually thetrically released, although in a very limited run.

All the Trancers sequels that followed though were Full Moon productions.

 

I did not know that.  Thank you.  Do we know for a fact the laserdisc is open matte and not pan and scan?

Edit: Just noticed that you went with 1.77:1-ish not 1.85:1.  Okay, probably the best way to go.

Many thanks, I'll have to check it out.  Love this movie.

I've seen the official DVD and was mad that it looked like monkey-ass.  The colors are crap compared to the laserdisc (not to mention the horrible new compression artifacts.)

Edit: I'm not sure if I'm comfortable with the artificial anamorphicizing.

Full Moon Video was always direct to VHS (sort of like Asylum is now).  I'm not sure I believe IMDB's 1.85:1 AR in the tech specs since this probably was never intended to see the inside of a theater.

Check this: http://blogs.indiewire.com/theplaylist/archives/2011/02/25/quentin_tarantinos_kill_bill_the_whole_bloody_affair_to_finally_premiere_in/

Official Whole Bloody Affair with new animated scene for O-Ren.

I've never been a fan of DVD Lab Pro for rebuilding discs (I do use it for custom ground up discs though).  For one thing it only accepts text subtitles (does the original GOUT have subs?).

The other issue is the chapters points.  They are moved to the nearest I-frame.

When I rebuild discs I use Muxman.  You set the celltime for the chapters, and that's where they end up.  (It also takes subtitles in untouched .SUP format.).  (Oh yeah and the basic version does everything I need and is free.)

You can then use the output with VOBBlanker to rebuild the disc with the new movie.

...Just my method FWIW.

Sorry to bump an old thread like this, but today is the first I'd heard of the workprint.

I found some dead links to a Workprint "Redux".  Does anyone have info on that version and possibly info on where good links can be found?

You should give Tritical's EDIUpsizer a go.  It's built off of NEDI.  He also has a FastEDIUpsizer, but I don't know if you are sacrificing speed for quality: http://bengal.missouri.edu/~kes25c/

Moth3r's linked script seems newer, but may be very similar.  NNEDI (instead of standard filter flavors) is needed when upscaling by large factors.