LeeThorogood

As I can't make my mind up which up scales better MPEG Streamclip or Compressor, I used MPEG streamclip to crop the frame size to one that was 16x9 using a square pixel aspect ratio. Before cropping the frame size was 768x576 and after it was ~758x426. I then took this video file and run it through compressor to make it anamorphic 16x9. :)

The Flunk version of ANH from the '97SE doesn't have burned in subtitles for the Jabba scene or Greedo scene. :)

If you're talking about the Jabba scenes in ROTJ you would need the TB version of ROTJ. Sadly the TB version is extremely hard to come by! :(

Ah ok, fair enough, no need to apologise, no harm done. :)

Ah ok, still not sure why you posted it here though seems kind of random to me LOL I would have thought it more appropriate to post about it in your own Jedi Archive thread. ;) Personally I have no experience with Proc Amps so I can't advice your either way. Sorry. :(

I'm not sure I follow you Jetrell Fo?

ChainsawAsh said:

I haven't been following too closely, but I'm surprised that you used the Master Lift and Master Gain controls last.  Those are always the very first things I touch when I do color work.  Adjust lift so the blacks are at or very close to 0 (but not below), then adjust gain so the whites are at or very close to 100 (but not over).  Of course, if nothing's pure black or white in the particular shot, I don't go all the way to 0 or 100.

And I wouldn't do the desaturating-the-bottom-portion-of-the-luma-scale thing you were talking about.  Instead, I'd use the far left color wheel (shadows) to get rid of the color cast in the dark areas.  It'll yield better results.

You're using Color, yes?  Are you using just the Primary In room, or are you using some Secondaries as well?

Update time. :)

So I rendered out the latest colour grade over night Sunday and through the day Monday. Overall I was rather pleased with the results, and the render time I might add! :D There was only one big thing I was unhappy with and that was the blacks.

There was some serious crushing going on in places. :( I am 99.9% sure this was being caused by the Luma curve I had set up to increase the contrast and darken the washed out blacks. Initially I tried playing with the Luma curve but this wasn't giving me the results I wanted. To cut a long story short I found I could use the Master Lift control to lift the whole wave form up so that the blacks were at the 0mV/0IRE line rather then below it (The blacks were only shown as below this threshold when I had broadcast safe turned off, when turned on they would appear crushed.) However as I said this lifts the whole waveform up by the same amount so now the whites were above the 700mV/100IRE line so to bring these back to within broadcast safe I used the Master Gain control which squishes the whole wave form down to get the whites just under the 700mV/100IRE line.

The only other change I made was to completely de-saturate anything in the bottom 1/8 - 1/6 of the Luma scale as I had noticed that the blacks had taken on various colour casts. I set this updated colour grade off rendering before I went to bed so with a bit of luck it should be done by the time I get home from work. :)

Thanks for the feedback. :)

I have had a look and as far as the Death Star being blue and Luke's skin tones go there is nothing I can do. Both of these are inconsistencies within the GOUT master itself and not something I can fix with an all over correction like the one I am doing. ;)

The Cantina being overly dark is an unwanted side effect of fixing the washed out blacks. That said it's an unwanted side effect I am willing to live with in order to get rid of the inconsistent and washed out blacks of the GOUT.

So while I've been waiting for things to render etc, I've been reading through the user guide for Color to see if there was anything I could do to further improve the results I was getting. As it turns out the way I was achieving some of the colour corrections was not the best or recommended way but then I guess thats what you get when you don't read the instructions, so I went back, initially to try and modify the colour grade I already had however in the end it was easier to start over. The following are screenshots from the first half of Star Wars using this new grade, let me know what you think. :)

Thanks Jetrell. :)

Here is a question for you all. As a percentage how accurate/close to the colour timing of the Technicolor print would you say ANH from the '97SE is? Not taking the pinkness of Mos Eisley into account. ;)

Dunedain, thanks for the feedback. :D

So I started rendering the colour corrected version last night and man it is taking sooooo much longer this time! Previously my iMac would render out the whole film at 576p overnight, at 2k or 2x576p its taken over night just to do up to the end of the garage scene! I hope this is a good sign that the end result will be a better quality than previously. :)

Before I do a DVD release what I thought I might do is upload a H.264 MKV to the newsgroup that people can download and watch then feedback over how the colour correction looks in motion and if there are any problems of glitches I might have missed. This way I can try and fix them before I do the final release in the form of a DVD9 image.

Thanks for all the feedback everyone! :D I will see what I can do about the crawl but other then that I would say this colour grade is finished! :)

I just have one more VTS to run through AviSynth tonight and then I will be ready to take the whole film into Color and apply the colour grading.

It must just be my PC then forget I said anything :)

I think something might have gone wrong with the upload Harmy, as the video is all red, and there is some weird ghosting going on too.:(

Some Pics from the latest colour grade:






As always let me know what you think :)

Hairy Hen, Moth3r thank you for all your help! :D I am at work at the moment, but when I get home tonight I will have a go at encoding with the settings you've suggested. :)

With regard to the Coffret audio, so what you're saying is if I was to compare the audio from the NTSC GOUT DVD and the Coffret LDs if the waveform for the opening title looks the same then its been pitch shifted otherwise it hasn't?

As always my apologies if I am slow on the uptake, like I said before audio is not my thing, although I am always willing to learn. :)

I had some time this evening to take another bash at doing some of the audio for the '97 SE so here is what I have done so far:

1. I used MPEG streamclip to export the following from DEs AC3 files:
- Stereo AIFF for Left & Right
- Mono AIFF for Center
- Mono AIFF for LFE
- Stereo AIFF for Left Surround & Right Surround

2. I used Audacity's change speed effect to speed the audio up by 4.271% I then exported this in the same configuration as listed above.

3. I opened up my '97SE project file in Final Cut Pro and sync'd the center channel to my original LD audio captures. The audio sync'd up perfectly this time no need to make any time adjustments in Final Cut at all! :D

4. At this point although the timeline has 6 audio tracks, it is outputting them as 2 channel stereo so I went to configure the audio output and this is where I got stuck. There is a 5.1 surround preset which has the following downmix settings: Left 0db, Right 0db, Center -3db, LFE none, Left Surround -3db and Right Surround -3db

The reason I got stuck is I wasn't sure if I needed these downmix settings or not as I am using Darth Editious' AC3 captures as the source. Should I leave the preset as it is or should I turn off the downmixing?

I was also wondering if anyone can help me figure out how to configure the following settings in my AC3 encoder?



Many thanks in advance. :)

Gungankiller said:

I'm new here, so Hello everybody! I need help. Could someone send me a PM telling me where to find LeeThorogood's PAL LaserDisc '97 SE? Thanks in advance!

Moth3r said:
hairy_hen's post about pitch correction vs. simple speedup made me wonder. I discovered that the 1995 UK VHS releases had pitch-corrected audio. The "coffret" laserdisc set has English audio; is this the same corrected audio track in digital form?

I can't remember whether the French audio on the individual LD releases had speed up or not. Never really paid much attention to the French track.

The GOUT Region 2 PAL discs have sped-up audio.

Jetrell Fo said:
Is there a PAL 5.1 equivalent audio rip instead of the NTSC audio?  Maybe at least someone here who'd consider capturing the audio from your LD's if you sent them out?  That would probably be a better way to address this, though it would add some time to it....could be far more worth it in the end instead of the audio you have now not getting the chance to shine properly.

Just some thoughts anyways.....

Thanks Hairy Hen! Audacity has a change speed effect here is the description of it:

"Change Speed - changes the speed of the audio by resampling. Making the speed higher will also increase the pitch, and vice versa. This will change the length of the selection."
From: http://audacity.sourceforge.net/onlinehelp-1.2/menu_effect.htm

Does this sound like it would do what I need it to do?

Many Thanks

I don't know about anyone else, but those HD shots look a little plastic to me, as if there had been excessive grain removal. :S Besides that however they are looking really good! :D

Thanks Video Collector I really appreciate the encouragement! ;)

Here are some more comparisons of the raw GOUT vs my latest colour grade:



Only now when I compare this colour grade with what I had before can I see just how extreme they were. LOL This is why I need feedback because its so easy to become blind-sighted on a project like this.

A couple more, same layout as before:

dark_jedi, Adywan Thanks for the feedback! How do these look:



On the left is the setting I was using on the right is my latest revision.

dark_jedi said:
Sorry to hear that Lee, but without good audio it ruins the experience as Ady has said, it certainly would for me, plus the fact that you did DL encodes to me(and this is only me) is a waste, it is only an LD, hell I didn't even use DL's for the 97 SE V2(DV Broadcast source) or the JSC V2 I did.

adywan said:

LeeThorogood said:

Adywan thanks for posting the comment about the audio sync its nice to know I did something right. ;) What did you think to the video quality considering the source was LaserDisc? Furthermore how does everyone else feel about authoring these as DL DVDs being too much?

It all depends on the encoder used for Mpeg2. Some encoders need the higher bitrate to maintain the quality while others, like procoder3, can do the same job at a lower bitrate. As these were a first gen rip from a laserdisc then i think the DL approach was the way to go. With the broadcasts being only single layer in the first place then DJ's approach of SL was the way to go with his as the extra bitrate wouldn't have affected the quality very much

For the audio , i can't help wiht that because i don't know what apps that i use would work on a Mac (i'm a PC guy), but you need to speed the NTSC audio up from 23.976fps to 25fps, not stretch. Eac3to does this easily and you can get a gui for it but i don't know if it would work on a mac. I'm sure that someone here who uses a Mac would know how to do it