Max_Rebo

Zion said:

Now, there are some obvious limitations here. What I've done is taken a still shot and blended together successive frames to end up with a single clean frame. This wouldn't really work for moving shots.

As Moth3r said this is just temporal softening, which is the same thing applied to the Laserdiscs which is why we are left with 4 eyed stormtroopers.

Well, unless you figured out a way to take a high number of separate captures of the same LD and blend each frame together. That would actually be a fun project to test.

Is that not exactly what the X0 player does? it was my understanding that it averages out the signal from 5 NTSC decoders in order to give you a less noisy output. Merging of multiple captures has been discussed a lot and is generally agreed to be a good method for obtaining a cleaner capture.

The other thing I didn't try was auto-aligning all the frames together before creating the Smart Object. With how wobbly the film in these transfers is, the image could probably be even sharper with an alignment and/or video stabilization prior to import.

It would be interesting to see if this could auto-align corresponding video frames from multiple sources accurately enough to give an improved average without any distortion artifacts, for example you could align the NTSC GOUT DVD with a PAL laserdisc capture and average them to make the most of the hortizontal resolution of the DVD and the vertical resolution of the PAL transfer.

I don't know where you're looking but the UK DVD boxset is only £33 ( = $53), the bluray set is £69 ( = $111) those are the prices on Amazon.co.uk, I don't know what the shipping rates are but they can't be that high.

on a side note this is why I have not yet moved over to Blu-ray, to me it just isn't worth twice the price.

ChainsawAsh said:

Alright, it might be too late for this, but I just had a thought and felt I should suggest it, just in case.  Hell, maybe this is how you did it to begin with.

Anyway, I recently downloaded, through Pirate Bay, a very nice-looking 720p Blu-Ray rip of TMP.  I started watching it, but stopped for several reasons - one, all subtitles, including Klingon and Vulcan, are included in the English subtitle channel, requiring it to be turned on and off as needed, which irritates me; second, the primary audio track is Russian stereo, though the secondary is English 5.1 (it's just slightly annoying); and third, I'm encoding video and downloading torrents all at once, so VLC started stuttering hard not 10 minutes into the movie.

So I decided to pop in my Director's Edition DVD instead, which I assume you used as a starting point for this project.

My God what an awful transfer.

Now, since there's been a lot of Director's Edition effects that were noted as accidentally being left in Version 1 of your preservation, FF, and the DE transfer is terrible to begin with.  My suggestion is, basically (don't shoot me, please!) - start over, using the very good Blu-Ray transfer as the backbone (this would, unfortunately, require subtitles to be added manually), and adding in the additional shots as needed.  This would make the transfer much better throughout, and would eliminate (hopefully) all of the Director's Edition effects, including ones that may have been missed.  It also uses the original, no-star-background credits, and the blank-screen overture instead of the Director's Edition credits.

There's a controversy over DNR being applied to the Blu-Ray release, but it isn't noticeable at all upon conversion to standard def (since most Blu-Ray DNR controversies stem from the studios using the exact same DNR levels they did for DVD, it's just that the higher resolution makes it noticeable).

I honestly don't expect you to do this, since it would require starting over from scratch, but I think the overall benefits outweigh the hassle.  Then again, you've already gone through so much hassle with this project that I wouldn't blame you in the slightest if your response was "Fuck off, I'm not doing that."  Just a thought I had, and I would have regretted not bringing it up.

 

I thought about suggesting the same thing, it seems starting with the director's cut and removing every change one by one is a very backwards way of doing things and will lead to noticable changes in quality. Surely it is preferable to use the theatrical cut as the main source and use other sources only where necessary but I do realise that when this was started the theatrical cut was not available in such high quality.

Of the 12 extra minutes (i.e. 12 more than the theatrical cut) how much is made up of scenes which can only be found in the director's cut? and how much is from the deleted scenes?

--edit--

As a side-note, I'm strongly considering using this as a base to create a Theatrical Cut DVD preservation, since many don't have Blu-Ray players or the capability to watch HD MKV files on their computers.  I think a 3-disc set with that, the Director's Edition, and your Special Longer Edition preservation would be absolutely perfect!  Does anyone know if the theatrical mono/stereo mix for the film is available anywhere (I assume the Blu-Ray's 5.1 mix is new)?

The new Blu-ray transfer has also been released on DVD (at least in region 2 it has) but I don't know if it has the original sound mix.

Thanks for this, I have grabbed it and it looks good (well as good as a vcd can look).

Cheers

Looking forward to this, many thanks for your hard work FF.

TheTome said:

Hey, I'm just curious if anyone has made a set of DVD covers based off of the THX VHS release of the OT.

Preferably a set that includes new covers for the prequel trilogy along the same vein.  I've always had a soft spot for those covers but I've been unable to find anything made with them.

Thanks!

 

I'm just finishing up a set based on these I'll post them in a couple of days, I've been searching for good imagery for the prequels but I'm coming up a bit short for AOTC and ROTS.

TLSO said:

Here's the last phase of my cover design I showed:



I have the fronts designed for each movie now.

The Unaltered Originals:

The Prequels:

The Originals:

I wanted the logo a little bigger, so I referenced the Polish cover for some of the novelizations, which had a similar placement. I went against my original decision to leave the episode number off the front (although I still emphasize the movie's title). The back, meanwhile, is being completely revamped to include features and credits and stuff.

The art on the "classic" Empire and Jedi discs are still in progress, because they're being edited from, like, five sources each. I'll patch up some of the seams later.

How's it looking?

I like these a lot, my only suggestions at would be to remove the 'star wars' title from the 'classic' Empire and Jedi covers, just because I think it will look better, also possibly change the Sith logo to reflect the Jedi logo a bit more.

A quick mockup I did compared with yours:

This way it uses the same size 'of the' text as Jedi and moves the bottom line up to the same level, again I just think it looks better but I could be wrong andI know it will throw out teh proportions compared with the other logos.

captainsolo said:

This may have been answered before:

I'm completely new to this: how and where do I find good versions of the 1997 SE's? I used to have the tapes. Is there a good source online or elsewhere? These were my first introduction to the Star Wars world, and I would like to see them again instead of the atrocious 2004 versions.

The best set is known as the 'TB' which is a recording from a French cable channel but it is not currently available to download, I'm working on a better version combining the TB set with other sources and the 5.1 audio from the laserdiscs. Details are here: http://originaltrilogy.com/forum/topic.cfm/Max-Rebos-97-SE-superset-preservation/topic/9031/

Knightmessenger said:

Do you have any examples of the color problems on the '97 versions?

Colour problems:

As you can see the colours are far from perfect (although the third example is probably a "deliberate creative decision"), for the record I intend to preserve these colour problems, this preservation will be the '97 SE as broadcast, the colour correction I have spoken of is just for correcting the small differences between the various sources.

Unfortunately since the French DVD was coming I didn't bother asking anyone to record it from sky, but it is still being show (it's on this Friday and Saturday) and is still available on skyplayer, so if necessary I can try to get a copy from someone.

ReverendBeastly said:

I actually just got word from a lurker here who wishes to remain anonymous that he was able to cap the HD stream from Sky. He sent me a few screenshots, which look pretty excellent. He's going to send me the raw stream, and then from there, it's a matter of me (or someone who wants to help) doing a good PAL-2-NTSC and HD-2-DVD job for mass consumption.

I'm happy to help with this in any way I can.

pittrek said:

I have a problem.

I have a time-coded capture of a concert. After an analysis I found out that beginning with frame 2884 every 221th frame is missing (the timecode is a pretty usefull thing :) )

 

So now I would need a script which takes frames 0-2883, duplicates frame 2884 and then duplicates every 221th frame.

Or in other words I need to duplicate frames 2884, 3105, 3326, 3547, 3768, 3989 and so on.

 

Is here some AviSynth "guru" who can help me with this script ?

the easiest way is just to use:

DuplicateFrame(2884,
3105,
3326,
3547,
3768,
3989,
4210,
4431,
4652,
4873,
5094,
5315,
5536,
5757,
5978,
6199,
6420,
6641,
6862,
7083,
7304,
7525,
7746,
7967,
8188,
8409,
8630,
8851,
9072,
9293,
9514,
9735,
9956,
10177,
10398,
10619,
10840,
11061)

etc. etc. until the number is within 221 of the total number of frames. this will add in frames but not effect the soundtrack.

I was going to do it a more elegant way but that would involve thinking and I'm not in the mood for that right now. :)

to get the list of numbers just use Excel

with cell A1 =2884, cell A2 = A1+221 then fill down, copy the list straight into your avs file and add a comma after each one.

the DVD is scheduled for release in September.

http://www.find-dvd.co.uk/C4DVD10203.htm

The_RockRope said:

FanFiltration said:The Deleted Scenes in The Incredible Hulk easily surpass any such bonus feature you've ever seen on Blu-ray. Totaling 42:45, these 23 scenes span the entire film, from the opening in Brazil to the ending.

 That is the same amount of deleted scenes on the DVD-version. So in other words are there no more extra scenes on the Blu-ray at all?

The deleted scenes on the blu-ray are the same as those on the 2/3 disc DVD sets, which total about 42 minutes (including the alternate opening).

The deleted scenes that have not been released (up to another 30 minutes worth) are mainly the origin scenes, which were originally going to be used as flashbacks throughout the film but in the end were mainly used for the title sequence.

It's obvious that these scenes were all cut early on, for multiple reasons. First, they're all in 480p MPEG-2 format, so their resolution is poor, particularly in light of the incredible quality of the feature film's video. Second, the audio is strictly a two-channel affair. Third, the video is completely free from any semblance of post-production work, as indicated by the poor contrast and lack of color saturation. 

Yes, I know that that the scenes are somewhat subpar compared with rest of the movies quality, but I will try to fix that problem in this cut. 

Many of the earlier scenes, like Banner doing yoga or building his chemistry set, were justifiably cut. But most of the scenes in the middle of the film, such as Banner interacting with Betty's new boyfriend or the General talking with his second in command, would've really added some good context or exposition to the main work. As a result, the last two-thirds of these deleted scenes are a must watch.

Actually my plan is to use most the scenes. Some scenes will perhaps be edited slightly to be shorter.

I think most of the scenes are quite worthwhile and I'd like to see a version of the film with all of them put back in but it would probably drag a bit and wouldn't be the ideal cut of the film.

Moth3r said:

 

Moth3r, this is some great advice, but I have one question where can I find this histogram tool? is it a virtualdub pluggin? or part of a version of virtualdub I don't have? or something else entirely?

Cheers

Hello all,

You may be happy to know that I have actually found the time to do some work on this, I spent a bit of time the other day syncing up the 5.1 track for ESB which I nearly completed, but eventually got really pissed off and decided to work on the video instead so I have now correctly aligned all the sources for ANH so that I can cut and fade between them at will.

The only major hurdle I have yet to jump is the colour correction, I still intend to write a new avisynth filter which requires a little more C++ knowledge than I currently have but I have a couple of text books and it shouldn't take too long.

adywan said:

yeh, i watched the ITV showings. Funny thing about them using the 2004 version for ROTJ. Last year they showed all 3 of the '97 versions so i was hoping they did the same this year so i could get a higher res of Sebastian Shaw for my ROTJ:R. I recorded all 3 and was so disappointed when i got to Jedi. But i have ANH from ITV if you need it

Cheers mate, I will PM you.

Moth3r said:

Maybe ITV decided they wanted to show ROTJ in HD, therefore they used the '04 version?

I think they did show ROTJ in HD, but it is still odd that they switched from SD to HD for just one film.

davewozere05 said:

I have just bought a new VHS set from amazon of these. Im gonna record to DL DVDs and that should be good enough quality I think and I might edit. If they are good enough i could post some screenshots i supppose.

Good luck with that, if you want to get the best out of them make sure you do multiple captures and average them to reduce the noise and also set the black and white points correctly, personally I wouldn't waste a DL DVD on a VHS transfer, single layer is more than big enough.

Knightmessenger said:

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.

They are slightly cropped and stretched, but the cropping is only around 8 pixels from each side, which would be well into the overscan region on a lot of TVs, and the stretching is easily corrected. However the '97 version isn't without it's colour problems, for example Hoth is possibly more blue that on the '04 DVDs.

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."

I didn't know Dark Jedi had done a '97 extras disc, I'll PM you about a trade. I haven't thought much about extras, as a minimum I'd want the 'making of' stuff so it has everything the VHS has, but I will think about this more later on.

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

Wow that's a really messed up capture, I'm doing a load of VHS transfers of home movies at the moment which is unfortunately slowing down progres on other projects, but I have a PCI capture card so I don't know anything about DV boxes, good luck getting that sorted out.

ReverendBeastly said:

I read about the French DVD a few places, but there was no source quoting and, like you, I can't find it on any retailers. I tried Amazon.fr, Virgin.fr and CDWow, and for a DVD supposedly being released this month, that is a bit weird. I think a cap from Sky is still in order, just for safety.

Yeah it is a bit strange that it's not available for pre-order anywhere, I think it's probably been delayed/cancelled so I still intend to try and get a capture of this from Sky.

EDIT: Further digging has revealed that the french DVD should include both versions of the film and is set for a March/April 2009 release, or to coincide with the theatrical release of Richard Kelly's next film 'The Box', which could be as late as November '09, and I definitely want to see it before then.

djsmokingjam said:

It's worth noting that for some reason Sky have enabled copy-protection on many (but not all) of their boxes recently - many subscribers have been complaining recently about not being able to record.  Presumably this problem does not apply to anyone who gets Sky Indie via Virgin?

Wish I could help, but I don't know anyone with the Sky Movies package.

Hopefully this wont casue a problem as someone has already managed to upload an mp4 encode sourced from Sky.

But more importantly I have done a bit of digging and it looks like we may not need to bother with this preservation it seems there should be a French DVD released this month with not only the Cannes cut but also a commentary, deleted scenes, and something of Richard Kelly at Cannes (interview maybe?), however I can't find any details except this poster, I haven't found anywhere actually selling it, we'll  have to wait and see.

ReverendBeastly said:

Very cool! 152mins sounds about right, the Cannes cut is supposedly 160mins long, and based on the crappy MP4 I was able to download, a simple (and annoying) speedup was applied. If one is a Sky subscriber, could one download the on-demand version? Would that be better than capping it from a broadcast?

I assume the 160 min is at 24fps (and probably just an estimate), the mp4 is based of the sky version which will be at 25fps so it should run about 153/154 min so the length deffinitely seems correct, fortunately PAL speed up is very easy to correct.

Sky subscribbers can download the on-demand version (as long as they subscribe to the movies package) to either their skybox or their PC, but either way it will be encrypted and probably need to be captured via analogue, the broadcast should be a much higher bitrate than the on-demand version so there is no real advantage to using it, it's just nice to know it's there if we miss the opportunity to record the broadcasts.

Unfortunately no updates at the moment, I have been really busy with my new job and I am currently working away from home.

The only vaguely relevant thing I have done recently relates to the recent showings of the trilogy on ITV here in the UK, now the last few times they have shown them it has been the 2004 versions (Pan & Scanned to 16:9) so I usually just ignore them however I flicked over when ANH was on and realised that Luke didn't have a Green lightsaber in the Falcon so it was actually the '97 version which surprised me but I thought little more of it (except I realised the pan&scanned version showed the same problems as the sources I'm using i.e. it was stretched), a day or two later it occoured to me that it might be really useful to record these versions to use as a reference for colours and subtitles so I recorded ESB, so I now have a slightly stretched P&S version of the '97 ESB, and then last weekend I set ROTJ to record (and proceeded to watch the theatrical version on DVD) however the really odd thing is ROTJ was the '04 version, so the recording is completely useless to me.

Obviously someone at ITV used the wrong version for ANH and ESB, but it's a shame I didn't get a recordings of all 3 to use as a colour reference, so I'll just have to hope they make the same mistake again.

seventiesfilmnut said:

Hi Max.

 

Not sure if you still need them, but a while back I transferred all the extras on the superb 1997 SE Laserdisc boxed set (NTSC version). Have all the docs. and trailers etc in nice quality - used a Panasonic stand-alone DVD -recorder directly linked up to a Pioneer CLD-2950 LD player using pro-fi gold leads.

If these are any good to you I'll send you copies of the discs.

- 7FN

 These will certainly be useful although I haven't really started to think about extras yet.

I really want to see this and I'm in the UK but unfortunately I don't have Sky, I'll ask around and see if I can get a friend to record it as I have all the necessary equipment to capture it and author a DVD.

It also seems to be available on Sky Player, their on-demand service, with a stated running time of 152min (file size 1097mb) but you still need to be a sky subscribber to get it.

Johnboy3434 said:

Max_Rebo said:

Vaguely relevant to this discussion, basically stupid people are complaining about youtube going widescreen, this is the level of stupidity we have to contend with.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/hi/technology/newsid_7749000/7749536.stm

 

I wouldn't consider those complaints "stupidity". They simply don't like the black bars. It's not really "stupidity" until they say the black bars are actually covering the picture. Then I want to smother them in their sleep.

Yeah I was probably being a bit harsh, most of them just seem to be asking to have the choice, which is a good thing, it just ammuses me that people complain about this when 16:9 is becoming the standard for tv/video, people just need to accept black bars in one form or another, they're not that bad I don't know how people can descride them as "distracting".

Vaguely relevant to this discussion, basically stupid people are complaining about youtube going widescreen, this is the level of stupidity we have to contend with.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/hi/technology/newsid_7749000/7749536.stm

Johnboy3434 said:

ChainsawAsh said:

I understand your argument, but as a preservationist, I can't accept it - that's like saying that old effects should be updated to meet current technological standards because it's ugly in comparison to what we see now. While there are those who would argue for that, the concept horrifies me.

 

I don't see that as the same argument at all. Old effects, ugly or not, were deliberately added. The directors didn't have a choice of whether the grain was there or not. If grain were deliberately added by the filmmakers, then I would be against removing it, because its presence was a conscious choice. However, with natural grain, there was no choice. Yes, they could choose between different film stocks for variations in the grain level, but they didn't have the opportunity to buy No Grain Film Stock (C).

Your argument is flawed because you assume that cinematographers would always chose the film stock which would show the least grain and that their ideal is to have none, but often a film stock is chosen specifically because it shows more grain. So film grain may not have been deliberately added but a deliberate artistic choice has been made not to minimize it.

Your argument is little different to saying that all Black and white film should be colorized because filmmakers didn't have the choice to use colour film, but that would be making the assumption that colour is better and if that is true why do people still use black and white film?

The truth is when films are made the prople making them have a very good idea how they will look when they are finished and by removing the grain your are changing the final result, the intended result, and that's just wrong. By all means clean a classic painting remove every bit of dirt but don't remove the brushstrokes, they are meant to be there they are part of the artists intention.

Uncanny Antman said:

By the by, I got my copy today, and that review is spot on.  Censored version of the extended cut.

 

Looks like I'll be splicing before long.

 The review says the video quality on the extended version isn't great, what's you opinion on that? could you post some screenshots comparing the 2 versions?

cheers

FanFiltration said:

Mitch said:

jephyork said:

Have you tried "restoring" the left and right sides by recycling the background from earlier in the same shot?  As far as I can recall, it's pretty static...

 

-Jeph

 

 That is an interesting idea! Fanfiltration is that possible?

I'll give it a shot...

 

I'm pretty sure I suggested that about a year ago! From the clips you posted at the time it should definitely be possible but if you don't have any luck with it I'd like to give it a go, if you can hook me up with your best versions of that scene.