Jonno

That’s not quite accurate. There was a trend for a certain period of the 70s (and early 80s) for ‘Fotonovels’ - books retelling films via a series of stills. These were achieved via photographically enlarging actual film frames (probably an interneg?) and gave a visual summation of the film in the days before home video.

Many were small paperbacks, though some were larger format books - I have Psycho and (probably the best example made) Alien. The Star Warses never received this treatment, for some reason, but I imagine it was discussed.

Glad to hear it 😃

The simplest tool for this kind of job is probably ClownBD. It’s a bit old now, but it combines the best of the various demux and remux tools along with a pretty straightforward frontend - you’ll be able to simplify the set of video and audio streams that make it to the final disc, and (provided they’re BD compliant) they’ll transfer without reencoding.

It’s still available here: https://www.videohelp.com/software/Clown-BD

Do take note of the other tools that will need to be added to the installation folder before it can work (such as tsMuxeR).

Which trailer are you remaking?

That’ll be the one - it was sandwiched between ANH and ESB in the 1982 double bill.

I watched the film again a couple of nights ago (good old theatrical cut). It’s remarkable how effective some of the shots are, considering that it shouldn’t work at all. Matting an miniature puppet creature into live action and having it interact with actors? Pretty ballsy stuff.

So he/she has spent 5 minutes with desktop tools to superficially improve the matching of colour and contrast, then dismissed the work of the original effects artists as ‘inexperienced or lazy’ - entirely disregarding how complex, difficult and ambitious these composites were in the pre-digital age.

Cool.

It’s Machine Bold.
https://www.linotype.com/669242/itc-machine-bold-product.html

Fair enough - of course different people may have different reasons. Yours is the only one I could reasonably ask you for 😃

Just out of interest, why do folks like to include the THX logos/banners on their designs? Is it a nostalgia thing, brand consistency, or a (perceived) mark of high standards?

I can think of solid reasons not to. After 20ish years of questionable DVD releases, THX is hardly a brand of quality these days. But more to the point, it simply isn’t true of the releases we’re likely to put in these cases - Despecialized, Revisited, Silver Screen or any fan edit you care to mention have either been (rightly) reprocessed from their THX-certified origins, or never came from that source to begin with.

Just curious - I guess the last examples stuck out, because that branding is the only text on otherwise beautifully minimal designs. Fox or Lucasfilm might be more apt.

If you’re burning a disc, it doesn’t matter - whether you load a disc folder or an iso into imgBurn, the result is the same.

Yep. Start by muxing each item into its own BD folder (not iso yet). I like ClownBD for this, since it does the best job of demuxing before remuxing, but tsMuxer will be fine too.

Then drag your folders into a new MultiAVCHD project. It will ask each time if you want to reauthor them: say no each time.
When your folders are all listed in the order you want them, hit the ‘merge’ button in the middle - this will save everything as a new BD folder with a combined playlist. you DO need to do the final BD assembly after this (click the main ‘Start’ button and select Blu-ray disc) but this should take a matter of seconds if you’re saving to the same HDD.

Note that this process only produces a Blu-ray folder - no problem if you want to burn to disc, but if you need an iso version you can use imgBurn to convert.

What folder? This sounds like a different source from the OP.

Plastic Galaxy is older, but Elstree 1976 only became commercially available last November.

That it’s not for your own profit doesn’t alter the fact that you’d be harming the makers’ own opportunities to profit from their work (and before we get into daft comparisons, this isn’t Disney we’re talking about here: just an independent filmmaker with a small production company).

yotsuya said:

So the 1993 mix found in DE, Faces, and GOUT would have been the first 5.0 mix released followed in 1997 by the 5.0 Cinema DTS and 5.1 Dolby Digital for the SE.

Are you suggesting that the 1993 mix was constructed with stereo surrounds? Because it certainly wasn’t (and couldn’t have been) presented that way - those releases were matrixed 4.0 PCM all the way.

Great news - enjoy!

What size are your iso files? If they’re around the 7-8GB mark, they’re AVCHD images, i.e. HD video designed to be burned to (and played from) a dual-layer DVD-R disc.

(The AVCHD format uses the same file structure as Blu-rays - hence the BDMV and CERTIFICATE folders - but at a size that means you don’t need a Blu-ray burner or disc. You do, however, need an AVCHD-compatible Blu-ray player to view the result).

That all being the case, your Superdrive should be able to burn those iso files to dual-layer blank DVDs. I don’t know Mac software, though - presumably Toast (or whatever) can open an iso to burn to disc? If it can do that, it doesn’t need to know what the actual content is - it’ll just burn those bits.

You should have continued this thread rather than starting a new one:
http://originaltrilogy.com/topic/Need-help-making-Despecialized-Edition-DVDs/id/54992

Guess I wasn’t as helpful as I thought I was.

pittrek said:

• I heard rumours about a different theatrical version (maybe 70mm?) without the “II”, called simply Star Trek - The Wrath of Khan - any more info?

Yes, that was the 70mm - presumably a similar case to ESB, where the 35mm prints had a little more refinement than the first-run 70mm.

(not my pic)

Yeah, I’ve always thought that scene needed more tension. 6/10 insufficient snapping.

Generally speaking, if a well-handled DVD transfer from the same source is available, it will look a great deal better than the equivalent laserdisc. Other opinions are available here, but IMO it’s especially true of the Criterion Robocop - a marvellous picture for a non-anamorphic transfer.

Soundwise, you do want the uncompressed PCM from the laserdisc. Terrific track.

RU.08 said:

Check out the soundtracks in the photos - they all look like glorious mono… except the first one that looks to be stereo! We might end up with quite a funky soundtrack. 😄

Those look like stereo optical tracks to me - two stripes. They probably look like similar channels in those sections because they’re dialogue scenes, i.e. common information to be directed to the centre by the decoder.

I’m certainly not aware of the existence of a mono Alien mix, anyway…

I love it!

By the way, this should probably be in ‘preservations’, not ‘fan edits’ - unless you’ve recut the film before scanning it 😉

The first thing I’d try would be some quality blanks. If it’s just DVD-Rs you want, Verbatims should be reasonably priced.

If they’re still giving you issues, there may be a problem with your burner.

What exactly did the error say? What kind of disc are you burning to?