Puggo - Jar Jar's Yoda

Harmy your approach looks great.  Thanks a lot both to you and to thorr for taking the time to get that straight.  I'll crop as close as I can on the four sides, but as of now I still plan to retain a marginal amount of the very slightly curved borders so as not to lose any pixels of content. Then resize to 1280x486, and then adding bars on top/bottom.  Glad to know I was wrong on the aspect ratio, it didn't look right to me either.

Rob said:

 If you asked me what was the best hair product or Judy Garland biography, I wouldn't be all "Why don't you just Google it." I would be all "Tresemme Volumizing Mousse and Judy Garland World's Greatest Entertainer."

Information you probably got by Googling it.  BTW, does mousse work on pug fur?

Me and my spleen are wondering if we can have an account?  thanks!

Time for an update...

althor1138's script for combining captures has proven to be a superb tool, and we've tweaked it to the point where I am likely to use it for many, perhaps most, scenes.

Here is a new (silent) sample, this one about 50 seconds with a variety of scenes (about 49 Mb):

  http://rapidshare.com/files/455048968/demo2d.mkv

It was made using the following steps, in this order:

1. Vegas: very slight color correction, mainly to get the clips to match,
2. Avisynth: althor's two scripts to combine captures,
3. Vegas: addition of border,
4. Xvid2PSP:
     changed CRF to 18,
     Lanczos resizing to 1440/480;
     soft pulldown using assumeFPS("ntsc_film");
     very slight denoising using FluxSmoothST;
     very slight sharpening using LimitedSharpenFaster.

There was also a very slight extra sharpening on the two scenes from reel2 (Dagobah and Bespin), during step 1 above, which I probably won't do in the future. I set the horizontal size to 1440 because although the stills had a width of 654, the video has a width of 720 (i.e., I think the aspect ratio was incorrect in previously posted clips).

If anyone would like to suggest a better alternative for noise reduction and sharpening for this application, I'm open to suggestions.  Keep in mind that one of the main reasons for doing smoothing is not to eliminate grain, but to reduce encoding size.  Setting CRF to 18 made a noticeable improvement, but doubled the encode size. FluxSmooth brought it back down by half that amount with imperceptible effect on the video.

SilverWook said:

I'll have a look at Vegas after my taxes are over with.

Try Vegas MovieStudio first.  The interface is basically the same, it does almost everything the pro version does, at about 1/10th the price.

Jetrell Fo said:

So what formats are accepted/not accepted by Vegas?

Depends on the version.  Between the various versions of Vegas, and the various versions of Vegas MovieStudio, there isn't just one answer to your question.  The website has a table showing the varieties and tries to summarize what they each can/can't do.

http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/moviestudiope/compare

I've been using an avisynth script on my ESB 16mm telecine that has been working great... but your captures absolutely have to be frame for frame identical.  It's been tweaked a zillion times... I'll try to remember to post it here tomorrow.

Hey, I still don't think Vegas is all that complicated.  And Sony MovieStudio is slightly simpler and a LOT cheaper.  Plus, if you use one of them and have any questions, there are dozens of people here who might be able to help you out.

Rob said:

One of you homos needs to get your ass in gear and get these raw transfers to BD post haste. 

I guess that's better than "pretty please" :)

It's a complicated business... there's the rights to the music, the rights to the recordings of the music, the rights to making new recordings of the music, the rights to performing the music, the rights to arranging the music, the rights to synchronizing the music with video, the rights to distributing the music, the rights to distributing the scores, etc. etc. etc.

I bought a blu-ray player a couple of years ago so I could see the restored version of 2001.  If that were the only movie to ever come out on blu-ray, I'd still think the purchase was worth it.  :)  And it plays DVDs better than my DVD player.  Today they're a third of the price than when I bought mine.  Even as much of a luddite as I am, I can't think of a reason not to get a blu-ray player these days.

That said, I'm sure it will be easy to make a DVD version of it.

I believe that John Williams retains the rights to his own works.  At least I know that if you are a musical organization and you want to arrange one of his pieces suitably for your group, you have to get approval directly from him.  And he rarely grants permission to perform any arrangement other than his own originals.

Raw transfers aren't THAT big.  If they're DV encoded AVI files it would be about 20Gb for the whole movie if they're SD.  A modest hard drive these days would easily hold multiple scans of all three movies, right?

At the risk of disappointing everyone here, I hate to admit that I have never even ridden on a motorcycle.

The Aluminum Falcon said:

Pacing is probably why the pre-Death Star battle meeting between Biggs and Luke was cut in the theatrical version. It somewhat ruins the grim atmosphere before the battle (i.e. Ben dead, Han leaving, Leia not that hopeful) by having a friendly meeting between two old friends.

That's assuming that it was removed.  I swear I remember that scene in the theater in Utah in 1977, three times no less (I'm serious).  And I remember the complete dialog being considerably better in its entirety than the shortened version in the SE.  Of course, nobody in their right mind believes me.

I enjoyed TPM enough to see it three times in the theater, not because I liked the movie as a whole, but because I really enjoyed certain scenes.  Particularly:

• seeing Tatooine again,
• a great-looking sith villain,
• the lightsaber duel and accompanying choral music, which I still consider to be incredible, and
• the parade at the end, I liked the marching band (reminded me of drumcorps, another hobby of mine)

I saw AOTC and ROTS exactly once in the theater, each, and almost less because in each case I almost left early both times.  As an aside, I was also amazed at how they were able to make someone so hot (NP) look so drab.

xytan4 said:

So they're both standard definition?

Yes, but the greater space often means that it can be encoded at a higher bitrate and still fit on one disk, improving the quality.

MJPollard said:

The only thing left now is to whine about how he did it, and if you're honest with yourselves, you'll admit that there will be people who will continue to find something to complain about no matter what he does or how he does it.

I guess I can't disagree with any of your post, except for the above.  When Lucasfilm releases a decent version (which I think they will do, someday), my complaints end.  It would be nice if they did that before I died :)

Saying that Ady's changes are ok because they are "better" than the SE changes kinda misses DJ's point.  But as long as people understand that neither the SE nor Adywan's revisited editions are suitable replacements for a properly restored OT, then I don't care if there are some people out there who happen to prefer watching one or the other of them.  That's just natural human diversity.

Memorex is bad all around.  Even their lightscribe won't hold an image.

From what I've read lately on the various innernets, for SL Taiyo Yuden is the way to go, but they aren't as reliable for DL.  Verbatim is king of DL.  This is all subject to change on a moment-by-moment basis, of course.  As for myself, I've never burned a TY or VB coaster.  Memorex, however, is another story.

A question, and a comment:

What is a G'KAR?

Regarding the matte lines, there are two schools of thought.  When I first saw them, I was surprised, because I never saw them in the theater.  If their exposure is a byproduct of conversion to home video, then removing them is actually an act of preservation of the original theatrical experience.

But I understand your wanting to put them back in.  Everyone has their own original experiences and it's good that so many of them are being restored.

RedFive said:

I've also looked at Puggo's stuff, which is an actual transfer from old film reels, correct?  Wouldn't that make this version the closest to the original?

Opinions differ on the meaning of "closest to the original".  My editions have sometimes been labeled thusly.  However, in my mind, the various Puggo editions are not at all close to the originals.  When I saw Star Wars in the theater in 1977, it was pristine sharp, ultra-high definition, with colors that leaped off the screen, sound that blew you out of your seat... not all grungy and grainy like the GOUT or like mine!  So to me, efforts such as Harmy's (and Adywan's reconstructed ESB, ocp's classic editions, dartheditous' ANH, etc.) are the closest to my memory of the original theatrical experience. George's special editions, even though they have the kind of detail I remember, ruin some of the original experience because of the inclusion of inappropriate computer graphics that are out of place amidst the earthy realism of the original films (notably on Tatooine and in Jabba's Palace), and are more reminiscent of the PT.

My purpose for doing the film transfers was to create reference material that people could use to research what was likely on the screen in 1977 (etc.).  They are full of grain, wobbliness, dirt, fuzzballs, faded colors, assorted mouse droppings, etc.  To my amazement, some people have claimed to actually enjoy watching them :)

I don't know if this is feasible for you, but one way to "fake" dual boot is to simply have a separate boot disk that contains the other OS.  My tower is open and if for some reason I need to boot off another disk, I simply unplug my boot disk and plug in my other boot disk.  I know the ribbon cables aren't really intended for doing this on a regular basis, but it's not difficult if done relatively infrequently.

none said:

People stopped listening to music because every tv and movie suddenly became cheap enough to consume in mass quantities.

People have stopped listening to music?  I'm not sure about that.

There is a lot less support for live music.  And that is partly the music industry's fault for focusing on engineered rather than acoustic music.

This is now my favorite version of ESB.  Can't wait for the despecialized SW!