Moth3r

[Thread moved from General Star Wars discsussion.]

Countdown with Richard Whiteley was better.

Ziz said:

A few pages back I mentioned that I got another copy of the SWHS from someone on Fanedit.org.  Finally got around to checking it out and backtracking what I got.

Short version - see this post at FE

Presentation is better, as it has an actual menu screen and some other content on it.  Video quality looks decent enough, but I don't know enough about the differences in the various copies floating around that I could ID one section over another as coming from which copy.

For those not registered at the above forum - is it this version?

Oh, when you said "VHS breakup flaws digitally repaired" I assumed you meant by using some kind of AviSynth filter.

Unfortunately, I've been informed this movie got a widescreen transfer in France under the name Evasion sur commande.

Why is that unfortunate? I would have thought you'd be happy that there was a better source available. Or is it unfortunate that you only found out about it after your VHS preservation was complete? :)

In the past I've used a command line program called xport to demux the video and audio from the transport stream. It cuts the beginning of the audio to sync with the video so there is no need to apply a delay.

What was your solution?

Johnny Ringo said:

Am I dead having still not answered those "Saarlac escape" questions?

Certainly not dead, as the Sarlacc would keep you alive for 1000 years.

Although all your body hair has probably been digested away by now...

DVD release never appeared. Now showing as 1 Jan 2020?

WTF??

Well done for completing another worthy fan preservation. I've created a page for it on fanedits.com; feel free to add DVD specs or more information there.

I'd be interested to hear about the filtering you used to clean up the VHS video, and see example screenshots showing raw capture vs. processed.

What character did Shelagh Fraser portray?

Aunt Beru

In my preferences, I disabled "Show images in posts".

JPG images are replaced with links as expected. However, PNG images are still appearing.

EDIT: Now noticed some JPGs are still being shown too, for example the images in this post:
http://originaltrilogy.com/forum/topic.cfm/The-X-Project-Laserdisc-on-Steroids/post/334304/#post334304

--

A related suggestion for future enhancement - it would be nice if the option could be tailored to be more flexible, e.g. "Replace images with links if wider than 600px/larger than 100KB, etc."

That way, users can still see reasonably sized images, but when a post contains dozens of huge scans (because the ignorant poster has ignored requests to use thumbnail links instead) the large images are replaced with text links.

The ignore feature isn't much use in this case, as even though the posts themselves are not displayed, the images are still loaded as the page is rendered.

Puggo - Jar Jar's Yoda said:

The film is scope, and all I did for the sample I posted was tell Vegas to change the aspect ratio.  After I do the real capture, I'm going to need some advice as to the best way to convert 4:3 scope into actual anamorphic.

Out of interest, what does a frame from the raw capture look like? Are there no black bars at all (i.e. the actual capture is "more" anamorphic than 16:9)?

Either way, I can't see that the resizing is going to cause you any problems.

As for the speed, all I did was guestimate the fps and do a crude pulldown, then synched the audio as best as I could.  There shouldn't be pitch shifting, because wherever I had to stretch or shrink the audio, I had the editor retain the pitch (that more often causes artifacts, but I didn't notice any here). When I do the final capture, I'll use the existing mono mix as reference.  Is it pitch-accurate?

Yes, the mono mix is pitch accurate to NTSC-film speed (23.976 fps as opposed to 24 fps, but close enough).

Further analysis of the sample, while you're waiting for the gate mods:

As someone has already mentioned, there is a jump during the starfield pan-down after the crawl. Is this a section of missing film or a capture error?

I also noticed the blockade runner flying backwards for one frame!

Regarding what I said before about lowering the black level, it seems it's not as easy as a simple brightness adjustment. If you set it correctly for one scene, then compare other parts of the sample using this setting, frames with a high average luma level can still be too bright whereas darker sections actually end up with crunched blacks.

(I will get around to posting screenshots at some point...)

Obviously you won't want to go through the whole movie and adjust brightness and contrast on a scene-by-scene basis.  I'm wondering if our resident AviSynth scripting guru (g-force, you reading this?) could come up with something?

PaulisDead2221 said:

Near the back of the skiff, where our players have decided to do battle, see you auntie breaks out a stolen blaster rifle, and prepares to fire.  Though it hasn't been specified who the blaster is aimed at.  The bolt rings wildly through the crowd and hits (random number generator), Moth3r.  Damn.  The shot incapacitates the maternal moderator, making it impossible to answer any questions this round.

Bugger.

See this thread.

Just use your script as the source for TMPGEnc (or whatever encoder you're using).

The audio is muxed with the video when you author the DVD.

Sure, it's an old project, but you raise some interesting points. Ideally I'd like to split the audio discussion off to the technical forum, but I can't, so I'll continue here...

...pitch-shifting is actually never applied as it's degrading sonic quality, even the best algos do, with only a few exceptions like for instance the "Lord of the Rings" PAL discs.

Since the source in this case is a laserdisc you can be sure that in 1997 they didn't use time-strechting/pitch-shifting back then, they use either resampling or much more likely some analog conversion.

But yes, I agree that slowing down by resampling is the best way to go when you want to use a higher pitched PAL source in NTSC land. This is how the mono mix restoration was handled (the mono mix was sourced from a PAL TV broadcast and did have the PAL speed up present).

I was correct at post 3.

When I say "combed frames", this is what I'm talking about:

Objects in motion have a "comb" effect at their edges.

Use telecide + decimate to return it to 23.976fps.

How about this one:

Star Wars SE- so whats the fuss about???

Digital effects look like digital effects...

When the Land Speeder flies over the camera towards Mos Eisley - it
looks just as bad as a card board flat. The city itself is a silicon
dream. Sorry George, but adding all that crap was a waste of time. If
it was just to clean up the matte lines and improve the explosions -
fine. This stuff looks as bad as Anaconda...

The original was considered a modern masterpiece. Why then do we not
attempt to preserve that for future generations???

 

I just don't think that the added digitations added enough to the film
to merit the full scale alteration (some say destruction) of a
milestone, classic film.

I have to agree that the SWSE wasn't anything to get joyous over.  I thought
the new effects detracted from the film.  The best of the three re-do's was
Empire because the changes were not as noticable.  They really fucked up Return
with the new (horrible) song that replaced "lapti Nik".

Actually, I feel the exact opposite.  I thought the addition
of Jaba to Star Wars was good, added a sense of continuity.
The digital effects weren't that big a deal, but they weren't very
noticable for a younger, first time viewer.  As for the song in Jedi,
good riddance, the Ewoks should have been digitally edited out
as well.

Janskeet said:

I would like to see what these Usenet forums looked like and what people were discussing in forums about the OT before it was even complete. Do you people know anymore about this?

... I assume this Usenet was very primative by today's standard and you could only send text form one computer to another and there was no fancy forum GUI and such.

I've been using Usenet since 1991. I can't really remember what it looked like back than, I think it was accessed via a VT100 or Kermit window on my Amiga, plugged into the university network.

I still use it now on occasion, using Outlook Express (ugh!). Obviously there is a huge Usenet archive you can access through Google Groups, if you use the advanced search you can turn up Star Wars-related posts from '81 to '83.

rockin said:

Okay it's all working good now - well seems to be. It's encoding that's the main thing!!! Only, it says it's going to take 33 days... :/

How fast is your PC?

Oldschooljedi said:

I have a mono-PAL-version from you, it is 79,7 MB big, and I have also a mono-NTSC-Version from you, it is 83,1 MB big.

They both are a AC3-files. What do you think, would the NTSC-file match with the encoded (NTSC) GOUT? What is the restored version for the NTSC GOUT, are these the files?

How can speed the NTSC-version up, if this is the right one?

If the audio includes the fox fanfare and the start of the title them, then it's the restored version.

To sync to the GOUT, you need to add 1.017s to the start of the file. To convert to PAL speed, you need to speed up by 4.27%.

Puggo - Jar Jar's Yoda said:

Were previous fan-made telecines taken off of 35mm, 16mm, or 8mm films?

I'm pretty sure the widescreen version that I uploaded was originally from a 35mm print; however, it was from a unknown generation VHS copy duped onto DVD via a standalone recorder, so there had been a lot of quality lost before it reahed me.

I had a little play with your sample in VirtualDub using the levels filter. Lowering the black level does improve the image IMO (I'll post screenshots at some point). Also noticed, interestingly, the image gets marginally brighter towards the right hand side of the image. Could that be a slight misalignment of the camera?

Regarding the camera, is that the optimal focus you can get? It looks a little blurred, just wondered if that could be improved, or if it's a limitation of the workprinter method.

And what are you doing spending money on a swanky new plasma display? You need to be getting a new HDV cam for this project... ;-)

Oldschooljedi said:

I will sync this with the mono-mix for the GOUT, that Moth3r postet a few months ago.

I have both mixes, for NTSC and PAL and if someone is interested, I could upload them again...

I don't recall ever posting a PAL version of the mono mix - not the restored version, anyway. I did once post the raw capture, roughly synced to the GOUT disc, is that what you mean?

Don't use it, there are sections missing. I'd say get the restored version for the NTSC GOUT and speed it up.

Did you preview the script before attempting to encode? Are you sure it's the encoder that's failing?

skyjedi2005 said:

I'm not from the uk but seriously this guy is a fucking twat.

Yes but he's funny.

Unlike Alan Carr, who is a twat.

@Negative1:

1. Use clickable thumbnails when posting images; it keeps the forum neater and reduces page load times. Copy ImageShack's "Thumbnail for Forums (2)" link, for example:

2. Do not post any images if you plan to remove them at a later date.

What creatures disguise their signals by emulating bird calls?

Ewoks.