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Patrick R.

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Join date
10-May-2003
Last activity
10-Apr-2016
Posts
229

Post History

Post
#32801
Topic
SE Trilogy on DVD coming this Fall
Link
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/32801/action/topic#32801
Time
If anyone is interested, you may want to check out this very long thread at www.dvdrhelp.com . That is where I got my information while I was converting my LD's. I'll gladly give any information to anyone who needs help in converting there LD's to DVD. The thread is here: It is quite a long read. I would mainly look at the last 10 pages or so. I've been an active member there for a few years, so it was easy for me to keep up with. What I also did was click on the printer friendly button and save the whole thread as a Word file and edit out the posts that I didn't need. There are people there just as upset as we are about the whole situation.

I actually bought the LD Player and LD's in Nov. 2002, but I wasn't too successful in getting any of them made until I bought a Canopus ADVC-100. I was having sound sync issues before I bought that jewel. I attribute the problem to my cheap built in soundcard though.

Once I got started, I was able to finish all 3 films in a month and a half due to my work schedule and occassional laziness.

I hope this information helps.



Patrick
Post
#32799
Topic
SE Trilogy on DVD coming this Fall
Link
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/32799/action/topic#32799
Time
Jay,

Please don't give up hope. Having your website has been a great inspiration to me. I'm not buying the Sept. set as it stands now nor am I seeing Episode III. I hated Episodes I and II anyway, so not seeing III is no loss. I will see Episode III only if the Original Versions come to DVD before it comes out.


I too have DVD's of the Original Versions. I just finished making them from the Definitive Collection LD's late last month. I worked very hard on them from Thanksgiving until the end of January. They aren't perfect, but they are better than the Special Editions. I plan to make better versions once the technology improves. To keep the bitrates high, I split each film onto two DVD-R's. I converted them to 16:9, cropped the LD black bars, and added my own pure black bars. This made them look better because the LD black bars are too light and are not pure black. Since I did this, I had to recreate the subtitles for Greedo in Hope and Jabba in Jedi. I'm not trying to toot my own horn, but my subtitles look better than the LD's because they are yellow and easy to read. They are also in the film image as they were originally instead of in the bottom black bar.

The disc that took the longest was the extras. I encoded each interview separately. I also took all of the still images and made slideshows instead of having them setup like they were on the LD where you had to keep pressing the >> button. Basically the disc flows like this: Main menu pictures of each of the original posters (one for each film) that you click on to go to a submenu. Each of these submenus lists all of the extras for that film. The hardest part was making a play all button option where you could choose to play all of the interviews or slideshows for that particular film.

Here are pictures of my menus for the extras disc. I know they are cheesy, but I feel pretty good about them.

Anyway, my plan is to buy a 250 Gb hard drive and capture all 3 of the films to it (I didn't have the space to keep the captures, only the encoded MPEG-2 files I made) and one of those new DVD burners that can make dual layered DVD's. That way I can fix a couple little trouble spots with my encodes and have each film on one disc. I worked too hard on creating my own DVD's to buy Lucas' garbage SE's.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not against his artistic vision. I don't expect him to drop his SE's. I just want hime to include the Original Versions along side those. I guess that's too much for him to handle though.

I also hear you about all of the sheep who are going to flock to buy the Sept. release. I don't care what it is. I won't buy any DVD unless it is absolutely what I want. I held off on many releases until better versions came along because of being burned so many times by subpar releases.

I hope you don't mind, but here are the pictures from my extra disc menus. They are nothing fancy, but I kind of like them. I didn't put any motion menus or any background music on any of the discs I made. I wanted to save as much space as I could for the audio and video quality. I also hope the pictures don't violate the file size limits of the forum.

Take care.

Patrick




Post
#31612
Topic
How do u all like Eps I & II compare to OT
Link
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/31612/action/topic#31612
Time
I hate the PT and love the OT. I'm not even bothering with EP III in the theater unless Lucas supports our cause here.

I am in the minority here, but I actually favor TPM over AOTC. In spite of its ecessive chessiness, TPM felt like a Star Wars film. It actually reminded me of ROTJ because of the 3 part climax.

AOTC had too many problems for me to enjoy it. The cheesy love story really just about put me to sleep. I know Star Wars has always borrowed from other works. Hope is actually heavily inspired by Kurosawa's Hidden Fortress. However, it looks like Lucas borrowed from Fifth Element, Blade Runner, and Gladiator. The stuff on Curoscant reminded me of an overcrowded version of Blade Runner, and the chase there reminded me of Fifth Element. The ending with Anakin, Padme, and Obi-Wan tied to the columns and fighting the monsters, reminded me a lot of a twisted version Gladiator only not as exciting.

The part with 3PO having his head switched with a Battle Droid and so forth was so stupid. It wouldn't have been so bad if they wouldn't have carried on with it so long. That part made the Jar Jar Binks annoyances in TPM seem trite. It also seemed that every last alien character was 100% CGI. What happened to the art of makeup effects? Also, the Yoda duel really did not impress me. That scene reminded me of Sonic The Hedgehog.

I believe the PT suffers from the ability to do anything technical wise for one. Back during the OT, they had to come up with ways to get around the technological barriers and it actually seemed they focused on the story and characters a lot more instead of the effects. Now, they can do anything with effects, so they overload the films with them.

The main thing the PT suffers from though is that it appears Lucas didn't remember what he wrote in the OT. It seems that he is twisting the OT to fit around the PT instead of the other way around, if that makes sense. It would have been better if Lucas had seriously worked on these films all along instead of lying about it all these years.

I keep hearing Ep. III is going to tie the PT to the OT very nicely. Well, if the rumors are true about a TV miniseries to occur between III and IV, it doesn't seem like it is going to wrap things up as well as everyone says. That's all speculation though. I can't really see them doing a TV miniseries.

Sorry these thoughts are random, but it is early in the morning.

Patrick