Knightmessenger

I had heard these sources were cropped. Either way they look great especially Star Wars. This may be the best quality version of the films with the proper coloring that you could get. As for the special edition trailers.

I think the 1997 trailer on the 2004 bonus disc actually used an OOT shot where Wedge helps Luke out and shoots a TIE right before the X-wing would have crashed into it. There is a very big noticeable scratch at this point. But then watching Dark Jedi's I swore I saw the shot as it appears in the special edition. So if there are two versions of that trailer maybe I wasn't imagining things. Either way Dark Jedi's '97 extras disc is pretty good and I'd be willing to trade it for some other stuff. I'd reccomend wathing that first before trying to transfer any of the '97 stuff just to see if it would have a good chance of being an improvement. The one thing the '97 vhs tapes have is a small bumper at the end with the 3-d logo and the voiceover "Now see (name of movie) the way it was meant to be all along."

My wishlist would be for someone to capture the 1995 interviews and "One Last Time" trailer since the existing Rowman discs of those are vhs sourced and not from the Faces laserdiscs. Watching the dvd transfers again they looked like the black level was too high as well. I don't think it would be too hard to improve those. Now I wish I had bought the used '95 set I saw in an FYE last summer. But I'm having problems with my DV capture box anyways:

http://forum.videohelp.com/topic361395.html

I've seen some of the color correction split screen comparisons on youtube. If anything those are great to point out just how bad the 2004 transfers were. I don't know if those are the final look or still in progress but there are a few cases where I think the part of the shot should stay blue.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uTp8mKFxmbg&feature=related

In the Milennium Falcon. There's a bright wide light in the cockpit. One example is at 50 seconds above Leia's head. I'm pretty sure that's part is blue even on the gout.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EaskolmE944

Some of the exterior shots of the walkers. The sky looks like it loses too much of the blue hue with the color correction. This occurs at 29 37 49 & 53 seconds. Now I saw another comparison uploaded about 3 months later in October called Hoth Split Screen. It seems to be the same part but with different color correction. The sky appears to maintain it's proper blue color in this sample.

Looking over some of the submitted sample corrections, I think it might be best if only certain parts were desaturated. Like desaturate the blacks and de-red the highlights. The shot on the Lars farm, the people in the shadow are too saturated but I think the background is okay. Anakin in the nightclub looks fine as is. The redone reminds me too much of the questionable color timing done for the Blade Runner deluxe dvd.

The shot of Anakin and Padme looks better in the before shot. The background (shadows) could be desaturated while the people stay somewhat the same. The most saturated part of the image should draw the viewer's eye. With everything equally saturated, the eye has trouble on what to focus. But if Anakin and Padme stay saturated while the background is made less hot, they might stand out more.

One other thing I wanted to mention. I saw the youtube clip of your chase and I liked it. I don't know episode II well enough to notice if it was cut differently but the scene seemed like it had a purpose, some sense of direction instead of wandering aimlessly. And it was nice to have actual music instead of just percussion and drums.

Matt_Kenobi said:

 

On a totally unrelated topic, that's a bad matte line around the MF in the above pic.  Also, why is the MF's engine white, and the stars blue?

I should mention I recorded off the gout but I don't think it was recomposited for the special edition.

I refuse to use the 2004 versions as the color is an utter travesty. Just fixing that puts Adywan's version light years ahead of the official dvd. I also enhanced the contrast/saturation and sharpened it a little in vegas so it would show up better here. (I know edge enhancement is bad for motion but it does make still images look better [particularly stars] and make anything else in the image more noticeable.)

I don't know what Rowman has been up to lately but I recenltly saw one of the clips of R2D2 on Sesame Street on youtube. It looked like it was sourced from a better quality tape than what is on the bonus Empire dvd. Just wanted to mention that.

Thanks for posting those. What did you do to make them appear? I think for the worm it would be better to focus on the frame of the Millenium Falcon cockpit. That's too big to match up with the next exterior shot. So just changing the grid outline (which I think someone has already done in another part of the trilogy) I think would be the easiest way to fix that.

I'm not sure if those color adjustments really help. Desaturating color helps make bad cinematography less obvious but it doesn't really go at the problem. It's easy to see the color doesn't look as good as a usual film but does anybody know exactly why? What attributes is it missing? The other thing is temporarily increasing the saturation might help reveal the problems better.

I don't want to brag or anything but I think I have a pretty good eye for color correction. (I should thank this site as well as Lucas screwing up the 2004 dvds so badly for helping me develop it.) I enhance and crop most of the photos I upload to facebook while many others don't even bother to rotate the pictures (which FB lets you do easily) that are vertically oriented. I'm pretty good at removing a color tint and I just discovered on Vegas that I can adjust the midtones/highlights/blacks of color separately. From what I've observed the color space needs to be stretched out; that is colors look more vivid with more contrast if the bright areas don't have the same tint as the dark areas. This ability seems to be something 1 ccd cameras lack. I was able to use this 3 way color correction technique to great success for a music video I did of my sister. I used my TRV-615 Hi8 but I think the correction (along with more saturation) made a lot of the clips look like they were shot with a 3ccd camera.

Does it make sense that the attributes of the HD video to film could be similar (although not nearly as drastic) to differences between a 1ccd and 3ccd camera?

Okay I don't know if it's too late to make these revisions or if they could even be done at all but I finally got a chance to record some stuff off the Empire dvd. Here are my pet peeves none of which were fixed in 1997 or 2004.

That lame symettrical ceiling. Yeah I just don't like it. This is supposed to be in a hidden base that I assume was hastily assembled. It looks too well made and professionally done. And I don't like the design either. Boring!

[IMG]http://img101.imageshack.us/img101/9452/empire1oc6.png[/IMG]

The wall behind C3P0. It seems like it's supposed to be a cave wall carved out of ice. Instead it looks like a cheap set of prefabricated plastic molded to look like a cave wall. Would there be any way you could make the wall look more like ice instead of shiny plastic?

[IMG]http://img72.imageshack.us/img72/6562/empire3an2.png[/IMG]

And this one really gets me. When the Millenium Falcon is inside the asteroid worm it displays this unbelievable ability to shrink itself. This also happens when they escape the mother ship from Independence Day. I just hate how the audience is basically told "from this scale there's no way they can escape *wait* the scale has been changed and the ship is a lot smaller in the next shot. They're going to make it after all." It just seems like it's cheating. 

In other words the scale of the cockpit window to the worm's teeth does not match up with the exterior shot scale of the ship slipping through the teeth.

[IMG]http://img101.imageshack.us/img101/9586/empire4qg9.png[/IMG]

[IMG]http://img101.imageshack.us/img101/3047/empire5ns7.png[/IMG]

[IMG]http://img410.imageshack.us/img410/9980/empire6mg3.png[/IMG]

Well it appears I'm having trouble getting the images to show up (again). Hopefully the images can still be accessed. If anyone could offer some pointers they would be appreciated.

But the Gout is about the equivalence of a raw X0 capture from the Definitive Collection. (I know the X0 team claims their capture is better but I figure it's close enough to call it even.) Basically, what the Gout (and the X0 gives) is the quality of the 1993 master without analogue video noise dotcrawl, or other junk present in most laserdisc/vcr playback. It's a lot easier to see the smearing on the Gout than my cowclops (anyone else not like that name?) dvd's because the whole picture on those has more blur, further made worse by digital compression and the double black bars. (which should have been fixed) I don't think Sansweet was lying at all about the 2006 dvd's when he said he had never seen the original movies look better.

The thing that makes a picture look good is lack of interference, generation loss or blockiness and other junk. The Gout has virtually none of this that was not already present on the '93 master.

I'm still looking forward to this because I think this is the only project sourced solely from oot footage to have a chance of beating the Gout.

The only way we could get a better video source beyond this project would be if there was some way to get a hold of the Special Collection, Pal THX and THX fullscreen master tapes. Or the anamorphic video master of the '97 versions that was used in Empire of Dreams.

I just saw this on youtube. The ending for Return of the Jedi while it was in the process of being redone for the special edition. The music is a temporary track and the shots of the planets are just storyboards. It is edited as it appears in the special edition.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eqRmWI6VAtc&feature=related

I don't know, I think if somebody had never seen the ot before and started with the prequels, the turn in episode III might have been pretty shocking. Really, whichever way you watch first you will see stuff revealed that will give away what happens in the other 3.

If someone asked me which to watch first. I'd say oot, then prequels, then Special editions if he/she is still interested. That way you can see it both as audiences did and as the chronological saga.

I still think episode one looks the best on dvd. It was shot on film unlike II and III and the colors are not totally botched like IV-VI. And is presented in anamorphic widescreen without DVNR smearing. I now know what edge enhancement is, I've even seen screenshot examples from the dvd but I've never noticed it on normal tv playback.

(Laputa) Castle in the Sky region 1, now that is an example of bad edge enhancement. I think it looks worse than the oot dvd's. And by the way, Colonel Muska in the (1998 Disney) English dub is voiced by Mark Hamill.

I have the 97 Star Wars soundtrack. I like that it is complete and does not have any of the added music for the new scenes. Even where the Jabba scene goes it just fades like in the original version.

Does the 97 Empire soundtrack have any of the tracked music spliced in from the new scenes? The part where we see Vader land his shuttle in the RotJ outtake sounds really bad, it's an abrupt change in the music and repeats the score of where Vader says "No, I am your father."

Those added scenes to Empire don't get mentioned a lot but I think they are among the worst additions to the trilogy. They show that George has no idea of pacing or story structure or that a scene which on it's own might look cool can make a movie worse. It totally ruins the moment with Luke's escape from the bottom of Cloud City. The Jabba scene in ANH is stupid but it doesn't interrupt nearly as emotionally involving of scenes as the Vader shuttle ones do.

And are the versions of Lapti Nek and Yub Nub in the earlier cd's the same as they sound in the movie? The only isolated versions (Deleted Magic menu audio) I've heard are different.

It's a good comparison but why is the youtube video in a 16x9 frame? I hope we can still upload in 4x3 because I want to add a lot of videos someday. Sure it's a widescreen video but it's letterboxed. I suppose it would have been clever to window box the original version and fill the screen with the SE just so people also got a quick lesson in what animorphic means.

The complete SNL episodes is something exciting but the price on those sets is like $70, way too much. Some of us don't need the figurines, lithographs, certificates and other things that add $30 to the price.

I've heard the SNL sets are only available for a limited time. Is that true?

I saw one of those early 90's trilogy soundtrack sets used at an FYE. It looked tempting but I passed. I think it was about $20, was that a good price?

I'm happy enough with the GOUT for now. I just hope people wisely don't buy the next new Star Wars set on blu-ray unless it has the original movies restored and deleted scenes.

I recently watched my cowclops (transferred using ntsc cld-97 I believe) Empire disc. It makes the Gout look like it really was properly restored. There's just too much video noise from the laserdisc player (even one of the real high end ones) that didn't compress well on a single layer dvd. The lack of compressed analog video noise makes a big difference. And the grain on the Gout isn't so bad, that shows where they didn't use DVNR. And the grain can be filtered out much better today than it could in 1993 anyways. The scene in Empire where Luke peers around the corner to see Han's frozen carbonite floated across the hall has no grain on the walls because it was smeared out. Much rather have the grain and no ghosting.

Even on an HD set, the Gout looks far better than cable tv. Especially the standard channels which look far worse on a flatscreen, equivalent to the average youtube video. Even standard def shown on an HD channel looks so much clearer than the same thing on a SD channel. It's like the Gout to bootleg difference. Same picture source but with far less junk and picture interference. So if people feel the unaltered dvd's are "unwatchable" on an HDtv, I hope they don't watch much actual television or else they'll be cringing like crazy.

AxiaEuxine said:

CGI vs Puppets. 99% of the time CGI looks better is this day an age, yes the orginal CGI Jabba was bad but he looks great now. The Puppet in TPM needs to be replaced with CGI. (yes I know thats been done and merely awaits release.) And I like the new musical number in Jedi.

Some things are subjective, others are not. Even with the same storyline, the prequel movies could have been executed better. And I don't hate them, I like I and III but think II was just a confusing mess.

Either way, the OT models and puppets were way better than the CG in the prequels. The prequels did have a lot of effects that were better than what was seen in the originals but most of those were models and puppets. The costumes and minatures like the Naboo city ended up looking great. The biggest improvement from the OT to the PT was really in the prosthetics, I think.

I'm sure they are the exact same discs from before. This goes for the prequel dvd's as well as the 2006 oot. So this is just a new box. Nothing is new or different. That being said, I think this is still a small victory. It's far from deluxe or even basic standard but think about it, there has been progress.

First, we weren't even going to get the originals ever again. Then Lucas finally caved but only to laserdisc standard. And you would have to buy the '04 versions again and individually. Plus the 2006 gout would be be discontinued at the end of that year after less than 4 months. LFL even said that would be the only time the original versions would be released on dvd. But then for some reason they were kept in print and still are available. Now they for some reason release a slim boxset and keep the originals included with the ot. LFL has caved in a little further.

Now the average person who just buys the set at Christmas because it was on display is going to get the originals. Before, I would think that many who don't know about the different versions would still buy the '04 box set over the individual releases because they would prefer one package. That same Joe the Shopper would now probably buy the new slim sleek set because it has all the movies together and is cheaper than the '04 set. This will get the oot more exposure beyond the people who specifically wanted it. And I think more people will become fans of the originals. It also sets a precedent to have both versions (in some form) in any future release. I think some people at Fox or LFL definitely want the originals restored. So they've gradually creaked the door open slightly more and more as much as Lucas will let them.

I know this is another lame release where they only spent money on a new cover and box. But the more widespread the oot becomes, the more likely demand for the originals restored will increase. This takes momentum out of a possible blu-ray release without the restored oot. Plus more people will probably notice the vast color differences between the 2004 and 1993 versions.

SilverWook said:

The Neverending Story has been released on Blu Ray in Europe, so that might present a new opportunity to get that track in better quality?

You mean for the Ivory Tower. No because that will be the Doldinger theme that I linked to, not the one by Moroder. I don't know for sure but it's likely the Doldinger Ivory Tower theme made it onto the german soundtrack. Anyways when I recorded off the dvd, I mean I literally recorded off the dvd. I hooked it up to my capture box and played the video through, I didn't rip the audio.

Does the blu-ray release mean The Never Ending Story received a new transfer? Because the movie could sure use a special edition dvd release, I don't know what Warner Brothers is waiting for.

My tv studies professor actually had a dvd of the series. He said he bought it at a comic con. The quality isn't that great though, there was a lot of pixelation. If it was done something like 5 years ago, it could probably be remastered for dvd today with less compression even if the source used wasn't that great.

My hard drive crashed and I lost some of the edited avi files. I still have the original tapes and some of the raw captures on dvd data discs. But in order to reedit them, I need to rip some of my dvds since those have the videos in their final edited form. I'm not looking to edit the ripped video much, just mainly as a guide to match things up. And since they're from my dvd's, I don't have to worry about copy protection but I might want to rip copy protected video at some point later on.

What program (free if possible) would you reccomend? I've heard about something in a videohelp guide called I think dvd decryptor. Is that a good choice?

I just compared my Robin Hood: Men in Tights vhs with a 1.85:1 letterboxed broadcast on Fox Movie Channel. It's open matte. Which means that every Robin Hood movie I can think of has a 1.33:1 aspect ratio. Adventures from 1937 is in Academy standard, the 1973 Disney movie is open matte (and the new dvd cropped it), Prince of Thieves from 1987 with Kevin Costner's lack of an English accent is matted according to the back of the warner dvd. Plus Men in Tights. Prince of Thieves and Men in Tights were only released in 4:3 on vhs. 

And avoid the South Park Imaginationland dvd! The video is inexplicably cropped to widescreen even though the episodes were shown on tv 4:3. The back of the dvd even falsely says full screen! Even more inexplicably worse, another reviewer on Amazon claims that it is letterboxed. As in not animorphic which means the video is modified from its aspect ratio to NOT fit any tv screen. That's even more ridiculous than the GOUT.

Are you telling me it's possible to make color labels on the actual discs themselves. Because I know about paper labels ruining dvd playback and I now have a lightscribe burner but are there other possibilities?

skyjedi2005 said:

What i find damn near impossible is to find all the open matte versions of the studio ghibli films released on vhs or dvd worldwide is getting very difficult.

I think howl's moving castle may be the only movie of miyazaki's only available matted in wisdescreen and no pan and scan or open matte release.

The only full frame release of nausicaa was the badly butchered warriors of the wind.

The only Ghibli movies I know of being released in 4:3 are Princess Mononoke, Kiki's Delivery Service and My Neighbor Totoro. And that was only in the US with only Totoro getting a 4:3 dvd release. I think even the Japanese vhs Hi-vision transfers were letterboxed. Even the 2003 US vhs releases of Laputa and Spirited Away are letterboxed.

Both Kiki and Laputa were dubbed by Disney in 1998. But only Kiki was released on a dubbed 4:3 vhs and a special letterboxed version with original Japanese and English subtitles. (Even though there was a preview trailer for Castle in the Sky on the Kiki tape.) In 2003, both movies were released to dvd and vhs. Rather than spend money on 2 different transfers, the Castle in the Sky vhs was letterboxed using (I assume) the same (crappy edge enhanced) widescreen master as the dvd. I would think this was to avoid spending money on pan & scan. I would think they would have made the vhs 4:3 if all it required was removing the mattes. I'm also pretty sure Kiki also got a vhs rerelease in '03 but I don't know if that was still 4:3 or widescreen like the dvd.

Someone could compare the 1998 4:3 Kiki vhs to the '98 letterbox to the '03 dvd. This only has dvd comparisons.

Kiki: http://www.dvdbeaver.com/film/dvdcompare/kikisdelivery.htm

Or better yet, I have the book The Art of Kiki's Delivery Service. It includes many still pictures of frames and most appear to be 1.85:1 ratio. Some are different but those are either backgrounds or cel art. (Some of the backgrounds would be used to track across or up/down.) Watching the R1 dvd (on a computer with no overscan), in many scenes, the dvd frame was cropped compared to the cel art on all 4 sides. The last frame on the dvd beaver comparison can be seen on page 146 without credits. Interestingly, in the cel art, I can see the older woman's face while each dvd frame cuts her off. The cel art also shows more on both sides but the R3 dvd has more on the bottom.

Viz media also has released art books for Totoro, Howl's Moving Castle and Porco Rosso.

The US video trailer for Castle in the Sky is 4:3, you could always compare those parts. Does anybody know where that music is from? I've also heard it on ESPN promos for golf tournaments.

The only comparison with a 4:3 example I could find was for Totoro. Additional comparison of the opening and closing credits may be of interest since those are letterboxed on the fox release.

Totoro: http://www.bulletsnbabesdvd.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=2498

Mononoke: http://www.dvdbeaver.com/film/DVDCompare7/princessmono5.htm

Nausicaa: http://www.dvdbeaver.com/film/DVDCompare9/nausica.htm

And because it's my favorite, Whisper of the Heart: http://www.bulletsnbabesdvd.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=3822

If someone was to overlay the fullscreen image with the widescreen one, what aspect ratio would that measure out to? The pan & scan version appears to have more vertical information than if it was taken from a 1.66:1 source. (the full camera negative would be less wide than 1.66:1) Beauty and the Beast is an example of what a 1.66:1 film compares between the pan & scan vhs to matted to 1.85:1 on the dvd.