LeeThorogood

The DVD-Rs came yesterday morning :D I captured ANH last night, backed up the raw capture of ANH this morning, and am now just playing with the filters and their settings as well as subtitles and chapter markers, I should be ready to begin rendering the timeline tonight, which if all goes well should mean I would be ready to start authoring the DVD by Wednesday night.

As Jetrell Fo was able to provide me with Darth Editous' DD 5.1 audio captures from the NTSC boxset (Huge Thanks by the way!) I had a go out of curiosity at syncing them up to my PAL captures, I am pleased to say I have successfully synced the 5.1 audio to both ROTJ and ESB :D I find it interesting that although I only have stereo output on my iMac the 5.1 audio seems to sound much better then the stereo captures from my LaserDiscs, perhaps its just me. :|

I am thinking that once ANH is done I may go back and take a second look at Empire as I am not 100% its looking as good as it could. I probably should have played around with the filters and settings, but I just assumed that what worked for Jedi would work for Empire, now I am not too sure it does.

Ultimately I would like to have this release completely finished in the next 2 weeks, 3 at the most.

What was up with the GKAR that it was giving you problems?

Good News everybody!

The (stereo audio) DL DVDs for ESB & ROTJ are finished! I am waiting on some DVD-Rs I ordered to arrive so I can backup the raw captures before I move onto ANH as I need to free up some room on my Hard Drive.

Darth Editous said:

LeeThorogood said:

Just out of curiosity is the 5.1 AC-3 audio 29.97 or 23.98fps? Just wondering if I would need to IVTC the audio before adjusting the frame-rate/speed to match PAL.

There's no distinction - it's AC3 audio that runs for the length of the movie, whether the video is 23.976fps progressive or 29.97fps telecined (AC3 itself is made of "frames", and IIRC runs at 32fps).

DE

dark_jedi said:

LeeThorogood said:

 

I was also thinking that instead of having 2 audio tracks (stereo and 5.1 DD) on the final release, it would be easier to just have the one 5.1 DD track.

 

This is exactly what I am doing, no need for stereo at all, I agree with you.

dark_jedi said:That DTS is not true DTS I am sure, I have that set to and Darth Editous' LD rip of the DD 5.1 sounds way better, and these files will NOT just line right up, there is a lot more to it than you think, believe me, I am working on this now for my set, if this set looks better than the one I am working on, I offered to make NTSC versions for him and sync the DD 5.1 also to it, but have heard no word since.

alphabetty spaghetti said:

Can people who live in the U.K. send DL discs also ?

Jetrell Fo said:I am genuinely excited to see your results....the preservation projects are a very cool idea. Thanks for all that you're doing.

:)

If needed, I have AC3 audio files for the SE from Darth Editous who was kind enough to share them.  I would gladly offer them if they would help.  They are separate, 1 from each LD side so they would have to be put back together...and they might be from the NTSC version so they would probably have to be adjusted...but it would offer a second audio option anyways.

Darth Editous said:
They are from the NTSC discs - PAL LD never had enough room to hold an AC3 track.

Please hang on to those files because I may have mislaid them myself :$ ;)

DE

Hurrah! If everything goes to plan Jedi will be finished by the end of today! Its been a long 8 weeks but I have finally nailed down the work-flow, filters and encoding settings that work best for my set-up.

If there is time I am hoping to capture ESB this evening, so that I can do all the editing tomorrow evening which would hopefully mean I could have Empire finished by Friday evening. I suspect ANH may take a bit longer as I may need to tweak some filter settings to account for it being a darker print than the other two but I will cross that bridge when I come to it.

Once ANH is finished I will hopefully be able to give you all an estimate on when and where this release will be available.

Can't wait to see this release and the artwork to go with it! It's all sounding very cool and exciting. :D

Sounds really cool Dark Jedi. I'm really looking forward to this release!

IMO Luke on the speeder looks better for ROTJ. :)

captainsolo said:
What's the best Apple codec to use for NTSC LD transfer video? I've got some files to export and wasn't sure which one would work best.

Ok I have an update.

After several days of trying to get the GOUT to match the SE and bridge the Disc changes and failing I gave up on that idea. Now I do happen to have the SE on Widescreen VHS so I have used this to bridge the disc changes.

The VHS footage only lasts for about 20 secs at each disc change and doesn't look as awful as you might think! Although its still not as good as the LaserDisc footage. I have also removed the black restore/enhance filter I was using as it was causing blocking problems and as it was at such a low setting it seemed to be too much work/hassle for little gain.

I am currently rendering out the timeline. Hopefully this will be the last time! I will post when a final DVD is ready to be made available.

Dark Jedi if you are still able to get me those clips I asked for that would be fantastic as I would rather use the DVB clips instead of the VHS ones, if not and I know you've been busy, then not to worry the VHS will have to do. :)

I think I personally have only brought the Star Was trilogy once at retail, twice off ebay, the rest of my collection were presents from family.

1994 CBS FOX THX Fullscreen VHS tapes - present for birthday from parents
1997 Gold Fullscreen SE VHS boxset - present from parents
2004 Silver DVD boxset - Christmas present from uncle
2006 GOUT DVDs - I brought these from play.com
1997 Silver Widescreen SE VHS boxset - I brough these from ebay
1997 SE LaserDiscs - I brought these from ebay.

I was only joking ;) I appreciate all the positive input you and everyone else has give me thus far!

I can only imagine, but I would guess the fact that the broadcast versions were distributed on DVD5s would mean they suffer from MPEG2 artefacts as well as medium-low bit rates, not to mention I remember reading somewhere that they had been filtered which means its not a clean capture per se.

To be honest I am a little curious to see how my DVDs will match up to the broadcast versions, if only to see how good a transfer I have achieved. :)

Thanks for the help Dark Jedi! I am in no rush as I still need to re-filter and re-render the special feature segments which will probably take most of the weekend to do. I need two scenes for Jedi and one for ESB.

For Jedi I would like from just before
to just after

and from just before

to just after

For ESB I would like from just before
to just after

With these I will be able to cover up the side changes :D

dark_jedi said:I wish I was doing Jedi now because I would LOVE to compare screens with you

Sorry thats what I actually mean't, that the GOUT is superior quality so you would have to degrade it to match the LD captures. I'll stop watermarking the images from now on if they are bothering people ;)

Dark Jedi, as you have access to the TB/Gkar Digital Broadcast releases I don't suppose you could provide me with the few short scenes I need? If not thats not a problem I will give slotting the GOUT in a go :)

ChainsawAsh thats easier said then done, its not just a simple case of cutting in the missing footage/transitions as it were. You have to adjust the GOUT colours to match the SE, you also have to adjust the quality of the GOUT picture to match that of the LD captures.

I have uploaded a new set of snapshots of the latest version of ROTJ with all the new filters I mentioned previously applied.























I've just noticed there is some slight jaggedness to these snapshots, I'm not sure why that is but its certainly not present in the actual video!

Let me know what you think overall, I would rather not re-render this time line again, but if it needs to be done then it needs to be done.

Here is a clip of the transition between side 1 & 2 of ROTJ.

http://img832.imageshack.us/img832/7720/file13853.mp4

Please note the video quality is not indicative of the final product as I compressed it down to Youtube quality to keep the file size small.

I don't have the US '97 SE box set, so I can't compare the two.

Moth3r said:

The problem is that on some laserdisc releases, they put a "fade to black" at the end side 1, then had a "fade in" at the start of side 2. You can't just cut at the start of the fade because you lose the end of the scene.

Not to worry I most certainly am trimming the end / start of each side as much as possible! I agree to not edit out the side changes would look terrible!

The problem I am having is if you edit the video down to straight cuts from one side to the next, the audio also gets cut so that it ends / starts abruptly which doesn't sound very good. :(

So what I have done is trim off as much of the end/start of each side as I can without clipping the audio, the result is for ROTJ any way that the picture fades to black and then fades back to the next scene almost instantly, as I say the whole fade from one side to the next lasts for about a second.

ANH's side change occurs on a straight cut any way so that's not a problem.

ESB however will be a pain but I am thinking if I can create a gradient that matches the wipe on the LDs I should be able to use an Alpha transition to seem the two sides together. I will have to play around a bit and see what I can come up with.

I hope this better explains what I am doing, if I get a chance I will post a clip of going from one side to the next to show what I mean.

The LaserDiscs do fade to black and back again at the side changes.

For ANH however its a straight cut so it wont be noticed, for ROTJ the side changes occur where there would normally be fade transitions so the fade to black and back again doesn't stick out too much and is very brief. The side changes on ROTJ occur in two places first between the Rebel shuttle approaching Endor and the Shuttle Landing on Endor. Second between the Rebels first entering the bunker and Luke arriving on the Death Star with Vader.

The one that will stick out the most will be ESB. With ESB the side change occurs where there would normally be a diagonal wipe between the Falcon escaping from the space slug and Luke training on Degobah. The problem is the diagonal wipe is still in place however now it wipes to black and then back again.

I have already played with getting the ESB transition to look right, the results were less then successful, I will probably take another look when I get to ESB next week but I'm not optimistic.

Ok I have an update on ROTJ. I know that I said it was done, and it was, but then when I watched it through I noticed a few things that bugged me mainly:

- The way I had cut the side changes, I have redone these and they are much better. I would mention that in my release you have a fade in to and then out from black where the side changes were lasting about a second its not ideal but its the best I can do.

- Chroma problems. Due to the way the Apple DV codec (which was used for initial capturing) works it doesn't smooth out the chroma and while the filter I was using was ok I found a new filter that does a much nicer job.

- Colour Correction, I have switched over to a Gamma Levels filter that lets me set the input and output level for blacks and have tweaked it to recognise the blacks were washed out in the initial capture. This filter does a better job of restoring/enhancing the blacks without affecting the rest of the picture.

- Noise Reduction, The biggest pain in the arse of this project. Too little and the image is still too noisy, too much and everything is overly smooth and blurry. I am once again using a different filter now which I find to give better results.

The time line is about 50-60% rendered (Initially it was reported it would take 48hrs and it seems it will hit that mark give or take a few hours, probably give)

Apologies for the delay, stay tuned for updates!

Thanks for the explanation Dark Jedi, it really helps me to understand why these are so rare!

Hopefully one day these will reappear in the usual places so everyone can enjoy them again. :) In the meantime I have my LD preservation project, and am really excited about your Take 2 project too, keep up the good work!