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Doctor M

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1-Feb-2005
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27-Jun-2025
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Post
#128464
Topic
Dr. M's Reinventing The Wheel Edition (PAL to NTSC+) (Released)
Link
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/128464/action/topic#128464
Time
Snaps above are updated. After a visit to the X0 site and a bit of brightness comparison I tapped a tiny tiny bit more brightness into my filters (4%). It's just enough to keep there being any washing out of detail, but it whitens whites while you brush.
It also allowed me to tap the yellow/green correction up to 25% (from the previous 15%) with only slight clipping in 1 frame of film (a laser blast).
This brings '3PO up even better. I really should rename this project the Quest for the Golden Droid.

In case you're worried about the green increase, the only real greens in the movie are console displays on the Death Star and the readout at the bottom of Luke's binocular thingees.

Tried to adjust the hue, but where one shot needs it tipped one way, the next scene needs it somewhere else. So that is being left alone.

Any whoser, again, corrected pictures are above...

Still looking for a quick easy way through the chapter stops...
Post
#128389
Topic
Dr. M's Reinventing The Wheel Edition (PAL to NTSC+) (Released)
Link
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/128389/action/topic#128389
Time
Well, I was hoping to get some final thumbs up/down from the crowd over the color change and/or the pitch shift setting (there are like 12 variations in Sound Forge).

Assuming all is go, I will post an updated clip of the final DVD with full tech details and if there's general agreement that it warrants release I can send a few discs out to any who want to torrent it or put it on a binaries group.

Since ES is up on MySpleen you all might want to wait since it'll take all of an additional week to get that ready for release as well (barring unforseen problems).

Then there's the whole chapter thing I hadn't considered until just now. Anyone have an NTSC time code list (or .chp file) they want to share?
Post
#128375
Topic
Dr. M's Reinventing The Wheel Edition (PAL to NTSC+) (Released)
Link
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/128375/action/topic#128375
Time
Welllll,
In an ideal situation I would need only to correct the A/V sync at the side changes of both the source materials (about 8 points).
That is of course not the case. Spending several hours working on this today, I have decided that it is beyond my current abilities (or the time I am willing to invest) in order to add a new audio track. The first 1/2 hr falls into place nicely, and then you start seeing sync shifts between scenes where there is no side change from either source.

So I am packing it in with that idea. Sorry guys I wanted it too. If anyone else wants to take this up, you can contact me and I'll help out as best I can.

What I can show you (and what will probably be my final material) is this:
Audio track: Ripped from Moth3r's disc, converted to wav, PAL -> NTSC (all BeSweet at this point), and pitch-shifted (Music2 profile in Sound Forge). I'm going to keep this as PCM audio since the black borders allow a Q of 35 with 1900kbps (no kidding).

Audio clip is here (Right-Click, save target as...)

I DID originally boost all colors 35%, then it was 25%, then it was only yellow and green, now it's 15% (some late movie laserblasts clip above this level). Scanning the whole disc this seemed the best way to go. I just didn't like the pale colored C3PO in the source.

Anyway some snaps for you all. You can see that the black borders on the sides seem beefy, but they are all but completely lost in overscan on a TV.

http://home.earthlink.net/~originaldrm/snap1.jpg
http://home.earthlink.net/~originaldrm/snap2.jpg
http://home.earthlink.net/~originaldrm/snap3.jpg

(Pictures are direct output from VirtualDub, pre-re-encoding.)

The test burn clip from all this was fairly pleasing on a 4:3 35" TV with a THX 5.1 select audio system.
Yes I know it's not perfect and I'll take input on this since I'll probably be running this through the mpg encoder in a few days.

It's not all I hoped for, but in my mind better than most NTSC transfers to date.
Post
#128152
Topic
Dr. M's Reinventing The Wheel Edition (PAL to NTSC+) (Released)
Link
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/128152/action/topic#128152
Time
Hmm, ok first swing and things are looking much better than anticipated.

I take back some of what I said about the color levels. Especially the reds. Scanning a larger chunk of the movie (about 40 minutes) I see that the reds are plenty saturated. Also, the blues are full as well (I so much wanted more blue for R2 but that would be bad). Using the Color corrections tip from the X0 Project's web site I maxed out the saturation. Set like that I found at the beginning I couldn't boost most colors without the walls turning non-white (as was observed earlier in my posted clip with the pink-tint). Now I will confirm this later (and post screenies for your approval), but it looks like boosting only green and yellow (and not red, blue, magenta, and cyan) 25% allows us to improve the overall appearence without taking any colors past the 75% target and without adding ANY tinting to the white walls, troopers, or Leia's clothing (maxed out saturation confirms this).

As far as the audio, I took my PCM audio clip and added about 1/3 of a second less than 17 seconds of silence (during the THX logo). The audio appears to sync perfectly for about 30 minutes from the beginning.

Now I can add/remove blank audio from the PCM clip further to see if I can keep going like this but 2 things stand in my way.
First I have to free up a bunch of drive space but given time That's easy enough.

What would be monsterously helpful at this point would be if anybody could quote me as closely as possible the side changes for both the DC edition and the French PAL (? Moth3r's source). I'm thinking that's going to be the key blocks where the audio will need to be resynced each time.

If that's the worst of it, this project should work out great.
Post
#128134
Topic
Dr. M's Reinventing The Wheel Edition (PAL to NTSC+) (Released)
Link
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/128134/action/topic#128134
Time
Anyone who was waiting for an update thursday, I must apologize. My other project was a vhs to dvd coversion of a badly degraded wedding video.
The project was almost done when I made the amazing discovery that in the worst parts, the odd fields were 80% intact and only the even fields were damaged. So a completely unwatchable noise ridden wedding video with some slight filtering has become an amazing resurrection from the trash heap.

With that out of the way I can now start tonight/tomorrow looking at Moth3r's movie.

Now correct me if I'm wrong, but Moth3r did say he added and removed frames to help sink the audio? Ay, that's gonna hurt.
Post
#127622
Topic
Dr. M's Reinventing The Wheel Edition (PAL to NTSC+) (Released)
Link
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/127622/action/topic#127622
Time
Pupil: what is your source for the 72.4 cents number? Calculated or from elsewhere?

Btw, my father back in the 80's(?) had a high end audio cassette player that could let you adjust playback speed and set pitch so you could listen to lectures at faster rates while preserving pitch.

Yeah the technology is old by remember all the sources were analog. But for those you pretty much have an "infinite" sample you're reading and changing as you drag it across some sort of tape head (or record needle). (Ok not infinite but you know what I mean).

But digital recordings only have so many samples per second when if you expand a give sample it now has to go further. This would definitely lower quality.
Post
#127521
Topic
Dr. M's Reinventing The Wheel Edition (PAL to NTSC+) (Released)
Link
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/127521/action/topic#127521
Time
Pupil, no I think we were on the same page the whole time just explaining it differently.

I was referring to the fact that I have worked on other projects taking PAL back to NTSC. They obviously were not pitchshifted like Star Wars.

But you were saying:
So you just need to slow it down (resample it) by 4.096% and its back to the normal speed and pitch again.


In the past (and my future plans) involved using BeSweet's simple 24 fps -> 23,976 FRC preset. Do you know of a program that actually can resample as you've described or are you referring to the kind of process BeSweet already uses?
Post
#127295
Topic
Dr. M's Reinventing The Wheel Edition (PAL to NTSC+) (Released)
Link
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/127295/action/topic#127295
Time
Hmm. First let me nit-pick and say that technically PAL audio isn't time stretched, it is time compressed since the runtime is less than the original. It runs faster, hence the increased frequency. Correcting it requires time expansion. For most PAL material, like it or not, that's really the best alternative out there if you're turning it back to NTSC.

Commenting on the rest (and I could be butt-ass wrong):
As far as pitchshifting. Typically it would not be needed as it only changes the frequency, not the actual speed/length of a clip. In this case (and I thought my ears were playing tricks on me too when I heard the butch C3PO) time expansion is STILL needed. Otherwise when the framerate is slowed to 24fps, the audio will run too short. We are (unfortunately for me) finding that evidentily it will need ADDITIONAL pitchshifting to reverse the whole process they put it through.

From what I'm seeing with soundforge though, pitchshifting doesn't seem to be done on a percentage basis making this much more wobbly a problem to deal with.

So the choices are looking to be: exhaustively edit in an NTSC audio track, give up, or wait for Citizen's release since he will probably not have to add/remove frames to make his audio track match (which will make for an easier match to the DC audio later). Anyone got an external drive they want to send to Citizen for me so I can get the avi files instead

Color: I am not not not color correcting, I played around a bit with it today, and I will say, categorically, it's not happening. Again with this, there is more going on then a few simple tweaks. I will however still use a saturation boost (something in the 25% to 35% region) (a trade-off yes).

I did finished d/l-ing the full ANH tonight, and am about finished working on my current project so I can take a serious swing at this Thursday.
Post
#127237
Topic
Dr. M's Reinventing The Wheel Edition (PAL to NTSC+) (Released)
Link
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/127237/action/topic#127237
Time
So much for a weekend project

A LOT to think about now.
As far as the colors, although I am dissatisfied with the redness of Cowclops, the dullness of the original Moth3r transfer, and the pinkness of the walls in my test version...
I still find any less color (eg, half-way between CC & Moth3r's which technically I am already) to be less visually pleasing, if not as accurate.

As far as the audio, ugh. Anyone have a good alternative? I have Sony SoundForge which has a decent Pitch Shift that could be applied after the time expansion, but I can't just say 4% and I although I'm good, I don't know how it'll sound.
I could cut, and expand silences between scenes/disc changes, etc with the NTSC to try to make it match so I don't have to alter the frames further.

Of course I could always wait for Citizen's release since he is using laserdisc sourced audio, the time may match better.

You guys are talking me out of this...
Post
#127134
Topic
Dr. M's Reinventing The Wheel Edition (PAL to NTSC+) (Released)
Link
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/127134/action/topic#127134
Time
I've noticed a lot of the transfers have been way to red in the past (there's one rebel I tend to call "Flamboyant Guy" (official screenshot #4) because his face is often so red it looks like heavy makeup in most transfers). That's why when I was adjusting I based it on the reddest frame I could find (not this one though).
I did a simple saturation boost and put the brightest red in that clip to 75% of maximum (indicated by the boxes in the graphs below) and let the rest of the colors tag along. Now when I work with the full movie, there might be an even redder point (or other bright color) that I will set using instead. It's good not to exceed that 75% number, since beyond it colors might not be valid on all TV's.
Using ColorTools for VirtualDub set to vectorscope I show the following graphs for the R2/3PO screenshot:

http://home.earthlink.net/~originaldrm/officialvs.jpg
Official^
http://home.earthlink.net/~originaldrm/cc2vs.jpg
Cowclops v2^
http://home.earthlink.net/~originaldrm/moth3r35pvs.jpg
Moth3r's with 35% Saturation Boost^

Now in fairness my screenshot isn't the exact same same frame, but this should give you a good idea that I thought I used retraint.
This frame did NOT have the reddest object in this clip so you can imagine how far up the official one maxes-out at. Cowclops' new edition shows the reddest object to hit 80+% at some point during the same section of film.

As far as moving hues, I could "rotate" 5 degrees clockwise to match the Official DVD or 10+ degrees counter-clockwise for the CC's. That would probably be less desirable. And to move around individual colors isn't going to happen, I have a slight color blindness which prevents me from doing this by eye, and it stands to reason every scene may have different requirements. Though I will give it a look though.

Comments?
Post
#127053
Topic
Dr. M's Reinventing The Wheel Edition (PAL to NTSC+) (Released)
Link
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/127053/action/topic#127053
Time

Major Update: 8/18/05

Current Status
Episode IV - New Hope: Finished - Distributed (v1.1 now being distributed to fix loss of second audio channel glitch)
Episode V - Empire Strikes Back: Finished - Distributed
Episode VI - Return of the Jedi: Finished - Distributing

Covers (by Erikstormtrooper):
http://www.erikstormtrooper.com/Rtw_ep4.jpg
http://www.erikstormtrooper.com/Rtw_ep5.jpg
http://www.erikstormtrooper.com/Rtw_ep6.jpg

(Full Tech Details at Bottom)

History:
I am am producing a new version of OT DVDs.
Out of fairness let me say up front I am not doing a new transfer. I really don’t have the setup to do anything better than what already exists, so I’m not.

I am creating a conversion to NTSC from Moth3r’s absolutely wonderful transfer which outstrips even the newest NTSC versions.
This is largely being done for my own benefit but release now seems required.

Before going any further, I will say, yes Moth3r knows what I am doing to his baby, and he seems to be largely ok with it.

But to be clear these will not be called Moth3r’s NTSC edition (his choice not mine). But in retrospect since this project has grown to be more than a simple format conversion, I absolutely respect that decision.
So since I am making hard work of something that is already extremely good, I have dubbed this “Reinventing The Wheel Edition” (RtW for short).

Why I am doing this:
Although I love PAL’s native higher vertical resolution, it’s 4% speedup (originally) was an issue for me. Also (and I don’t want to step on toes here) I don’t care for the washed out color in the original version. Foremost is that I DON’T OWN A PAL DVD PLAYER.

Now first the basics.
There are several ways to play a PAL DVD:
Obviously you can get a PAL or multistandard player.

Updated Tips for purists: If you want a true NTSC version of Moth3r’s discs you can use the Patch Method which uses IFOEdit to try and convince your DVD player that “this is not the PAL disc you are looking for”. It works on many units (but not all) and basically counts on manufacturers being cheap and using the same internal hardware internationally and just making tweaks for regions and formats. Compatibility with this varies.

Now if you augment this by demuxing the audio and video then using DGPulldown from 25 fps to 29.97 fps and remuxing/authoring you have a different beast altogether.
I saw this for the first time today and thought it was genius, what they are doing is using IFO edit to fool the DVD player into resizing the video to NTSC for you. The DGPulldown keeps the video at 25 fps on the disc but the DVD player performs telecining on the fly up to 29.97 fps for you (no I didn’t think that was possible either). The huge benefit is the audio does NOT have to be re-encoded. In fact nothing does. You’re just tweaking a bunch of flags and let the hardware do the rest for you.

This is perfect for Moth3r’s DVD’s since we know the audio to have been pitch correct to account for the 4% speed up.
Since this method would make a highly compatible version of Moth3r’s movie in NTSC, it’s almost a shame to not have done it originally… but I like overdoing projects (and it’s too late to go back now).

Finally you can re-encode (which is what I’ve done).
Since I do not have any raw avi files to work with, I am going from the public DVD version of these discs that everyone has access to.
Using VirtualDubMod or AVISynth, you change the framerate to 23.976 (NTSCfilm, just a bit over 1 fps slower than PAL), crop 72 lines from the top and bottom, resize to 720x360 and add 60 line borders above and below. Also the sound must be time expanded so it all syncs. That could be done in an afternoon to tell you the truth and was my original plan.

But why stop there?
As long as there’s filtering going on, why not improve the color, etc.
http://adventureclub.postrock.net/anh.jpg
http://adventureclub.postrock.net/anh2.jpg

Yes the above is from an actual NTSC frames (after re-encoding). Still not any more difficult to do really.

Actually what you see includes a 4% reduction in the white point (to brighten the whites) and 25% boost in the Yellow and Green saturation.

Edit: Return of the Jedi required slightly different handling. Unsharp Mask was used to sharpen, Yellow/Green was boosted only 10%, but Red, Blue and Cyan were desaturated by 15%.

At this point I could explain the increased lines of resolution of PAL laserdiscs vs NTSC, but I’ll save that for the PAL transfer threads: Here’s Moth3r’s.

What is important to understand is that an anamorphic NTSC DVD of Star Wars (which is in 2.35:1 aspect ratio) can use up to 360 vertical lines for the movie. This is about 50% more lines than even the PAL laserdisc source.

Now ideally I would have raw video so I could resize up instead of down for the disc, and also I wouldn’t have to recompress previously compressed video, but that is not the case unfortunately.

ORIGINALLY I had every intention of adding left/right black borders and reducing overall size to prevent further loss of picture in TV overscan regions. The reasoning being that there is excessive cropping at times in the original disc. Public opinion (and lots of explainations) convinced me to drop that idea in favor of preserving as many lines of resolution as possible.

BUT what about the audio? If you keep reading all the posts to follow you will see there has been much debate about how best to accomplish this.
I finally gave up on giving up and will be using an NTSC audio rip from the Definitive Collection. [Thanks to Arnie.d] A little jiggery-pokery with a shoe-horn and you have wonderful PCM digital audio from laserdisc source (bye-bye analog tape that’s been sped up, pitch shifted, analog recorded, ripped, encoded, decompressed, slowed down, and pitch-shifted again (no kidding that’s where this was going)).

Final thoughts:
I am not doing menus (not really a need).

For those concerned about further quality loss in the re-encode process, a Constant Quality first pass indicated that I’m using about 50% more bitrate than is need for a Q of 30, so relax.

Release:
Yes please. Not waiting for Episode VI, contact me if you want to help.

Feel free to talk amongst yourselves.
-Dr. M

Source Material
Video: Moth3r’s DVD, originally from the French 1995 THX PAL Laserdiscs
Audio: Uncompressed PCM “Definitive Collection” NTSC, Pioneer DVL-919 to Canopus ADVC55 (DV - analog capture) [Thanx arnie.d]

Original Hardware (taken from Moth3r’s details):
Pioneer CLD-D925 Laserdisc player
Toshiba VT-728B VCR
Leadtek WinFast VC100 XP video capture card
PC: Athlon XP 2700, 1GB RAM

Re-Mastering Hardware:
Athlon XP 3500+, 1 GB RAM

Original Software (Moth3r)
Capturing:
btwincap drivers
VirtualVCR
Huffyuv codec
Post-processing:
VirtualDubMod
AVISynth
Encoding:
CCE 2.70 (video)

Remastering Software:
Vobs files ripped/demuxed merged: (various)
VirtualDubMod to filter and frameserve
Womble Mpeg Video Wizard to edit and sync audio
Re-encoding:
CCE SP 2.67 - 6 (+1) pass VBR
CCE SP 2.70 - 5 (+1) pass VBR (RotJ)

DVD Authoring:
DVDMaestro

For quality preservation SFV files (disc checksums) were generated with Easy SFV Creator and are available.
The SFV files should appear on the DVD. If it isn’t there (smack the guy that sent it to you), then check your disc using these:
ANH’s SFV v1.1
ESB’s SFV
RotJ’s SFV

Post
#126688
Topic
.: Moth3r's PAL DVD project :.
Link
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/126688/action/topic#126688
Time
To answer another question, the PAL laserdiscs are more tightly framed, this means that when you put the NTSC version and the PAL version side by side, that some of the picture is missing on the PAL version - you could think of it as the PAL version is a bit more 'zoomed in' so some of the picture has fallen off the bottom of the screen so to speak.


I've been working on a different PAL to NTSC project recently. The source was originally NTSC that was PAL-ified and I am re-NTSC-ify-ing it.
In the process I ran into the same thing: tighter framing. In fact a lot of the names in the opening credits were lost in the overscan area when I was done. What it looks like (and I'd really love if someone can verify authoritatively on this) that they cut off a percentage of the left and right portions of the frame and then just enlarged what's left in order to get instant PAL resolution.

Now back to the PAL Star Wars: although the laserdiscs should IN THEORY have been derivied from a film source, I'm wondering if they started with some form of 480 line master that they did this butcher-jobber thing to. It would explain the tighter cropping and mean that any NTSC conversion of Moth3r's DVD would have to involve adding vertical black borders to prevent further loss in the overscan area of a TV (which is what I'm doing with my other project).

Anyone?