none said:
German - Pre-ANH VHS
Krieg der Sterne Eröffnungssequenz
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r3THFc9ocbI
I'm pretty sure that's a recreation and not the original.
For my crawl re-creation I applied a matte choker effect to the upper half of the crawl. That pretty much eliminated most artifacts.
EDIT
Oops, little correction: Checking my AE comp I didn't use a matte choker, but I blurred the crawl a bit while it was still at 1920 pixels width (0.6 pixels fast blur) and then re-sharpened it by adding contrast to the (now blurred) alpha channel of the text (Alpha-Levels: input 71/191, gamma 1.0, output 0/255)
Of course I applied these values to freshly typed text that had all the sharp corners of a digital font, and I used the blur (and some more filters, like a Median after that) to make it look more like an optical composite. If I remember correctly you extracted the text from the actual crawl, so it's already "rounded" off, so my values might not work for you.
Harmy said:
Also, and I brought this up before but it didn't spark the discussion I was hoping for, for the Czech BD release, they changed the Czech title of ROTJ taking "the Jedi" to be plural, so it basically now translates as "The Return of the Jedi Order".
Well, it wouldn't spark too much discussion from us Germans anyway, as it's always been "Die Rückkehr der Jedi-Ritter" -> "The Return of the Jedi Knights" in German ;)
As some of you might know I've already re-created the German intros as faithfully as I possibly could in HD (SW, TESB, ROTJ) and I was thinking about doing that for some other languages as well, IF I could get usable captures of the translated opening cards and crawls. Preferrably the pre-SE versions (since that's the point of Harmy's project).
I found the French SW crawl on YouTube as well (the same one posted a bit earlier in this thread), but if someone has better captures of these things, feel free to PM me.
Thanks! I've checked both SW (with Harmy's 2.0 workprint) and TESB with his 1.0 Despecialization, and both French tracks are perfectly in sync. (I don't have the ROTJ Despecialization here right now)
If you upload the French track, I can quickly check it against 1.0
Great, I found one last bug in my German soundtrack. I'll upload a fixed version.
You can easily check if an audio file syncs up by playing the MKV (or the demuxed M2TS file) with Media Player Classic. Just put the audio file in the same folder and name it exactly like the video file (but with a different file extension, of course). The audio file will then show up in the audio track selection when playing the movie in MPC.
Great :)
Also someone with the US-GOUT should rip the French soundtrack off of it, so that we have one more language down.
I was wondering what kind of Blu-ray recorder and blanks people around here are using and/or recommending.
Several reviews state that some recorders work better with a specific brand of recordable discs, while most disc reviews really don't have anything good to say about any brand of blanks. Has this changed by now?
I plan on finally buying a BD-burner and some inkjet-printable BD25s, but there are so many recorders on the market that it's hard to pick one. Any suggestions?
Harmy said:
Well, Laserschwert, I assume that you're from Germany, and postage between our two countries should be quite simple, fast and relatively cheap, so if you sent me an external HDD I could send it back to you with the lossless encode to use for your German version.
I'll think about it. How many GB do you estimate for that?
Perfect!
So are you planning to make the MKV somewhat BD25 sized? (I guess 15 to 20 GB might make sense to leave enough room for some self-made audio options).
Harmy said:
On a brighter note, here's the fixed pandown and stardestroyer flyover shot, including a reconstructed frame, which was missing in the SE (one before last in the shot) and highlights fixed in the next shot:
I've got a teeny-tiny thing (I hate being a prefectionist :p):
Now that the whole frame is moving after the pan down, you see a tiny slice of black on the edges where Tatooine leaves the frame. If your version of After Effects has the an effect called "RepeTile" that's very easy to fix, as with that one you can basically "smear" the edge pixels of a layer further to the sides. This would take care of that.
Not that it's THAT prominent... just noticed. Apart from that it's perfect now!
BTW, I'm always using the Lagarith codec for lossless compression... brings your Mos Eisley shot down to 50% of its uncompressed size. Haven't heard of the UtVideo Codec before - I'll give it a shot.
Yeah, in that case I assume it's just the strong compression on the workprint causing it.
In that case I'll add this shot to your to-do list ;-)
Is the color timing of the Blu-ray identical to the HDTV version? In that case switching footage shouldn't be that much of a problem.
Also, I've found another thing: The matte painting with the speeder flying into Mos Eisley has no gate weave either.
CatBus said:
Harmy said:
Yeah, there's more of that going on. I think it's already in the source but it gets more visible due to the brightening I did.
Is it possible the HDTV capture doesn't have this issue? i.e. maybe it's a problem with the Blu-ray encode, rather than the HD source? I sure don't remember seeing any sign of this in v1.
You're right, I've just checked 1.0, and the flickering isn't there.
Thanks... I'll just see what I can do once msycamore has uploaded his JSC version of that shot.
Nah, that image was taken from THIS thread. But I've PMed msycamore about it - maybe he can upload the whole JSC shot.
Based on a quick test with the still it's rather easy:
But it might look horrible in motion, who knows...
Harmy said:
Well, if you want, I'll be happy to upload the lossless version of the shot for you (it's something like 600MB) and you can give it a shot.
Do you have both versions (your finished one and the JSC-shot)? Because without the JSC one I can't really fix anything ;)
The workprint looks great! Still, I've noticed a few things:
During the crawl and the pan down you've got a wonderful gate-weave effect going on, but it stops after the pan down, so that the stars, the planet and the moon now are rock solid, which is slightly distracting. Would it be possible to add a slight movement to the background, or - if that's not possible due to the layers - the whole image? I bet it wouldn't really matter if the ships flying by are moving a bit as well...
In the shot of Luke igniting and swinging the lightsaber for the first time, the background (wall) is flickering.
In this shot the dome on the R2 unit (and the sunlit parts of the stormtrooper armors) is really blown out, and although I know that it looks like that on the GOUT as well, the JSC version (and the Blu-ray as well) definitely shows that there was more detail in those highlights before:
Have you thought about darkening your whites just a tiny bit and overlaying the JSC highlight onto those areas, to get the missing detail back in there? If I had both versions of the shot here, I'd really love to try that...
The NTSC-GOUTs run at 29.97fps and at 23.976 after IVTCing them... the running time is identical in both cases though ;)
Of course! It's a HUGE part of the nostalgia regarding these movies.
Harmy said:
Well, there could be like one frame difference here and there.
Well, as long as it stays in sync with Hairy_Hen's 5.1 track, I'm good.
The German audio track is finished, I only have to convert it to AC3 now.