RU.08

Well, if all he used was the SR plugin with no additional enhancements, then it would look like shit. Precisely because that's how the GOUT looks anyway. What's interesting is DrDre has done (essentially) the same thing that I did with SD footage I wanted to upscale, and YouToo and others as well. And that is to find the right method to enhance the detail in the source, to make it look as good as possible. He has found quite a good way to filter out the noise present to prevent it from being enhanced to the same degree as the other detail.

It certainly isn't SR on its own that brings the source to life - its his Avisynth script that implements SR in his own uniquely designed way.

Ditto to all the above comments! :)

Here's a quick compare of a shot that was changed slightly for the bluray. More endless tinkering from Lucas.

http://screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/133266

Yikes! That sucks. Hopefully you don't have to wait too long for surgery.

Harmy's trilogy and Adywan's Ep1 are reconstructions of an approximation to the theatrical cut. They still contain considerable differences (especially the OT films). Branching from Ep1 Theatrical to the DVD version is possible, as there are less differences than in the OT where virtually all opticals were re-done for the 1997 SE.

I can give you an Avisynth script that enhances Althor's LD rip without losing the unique characteristics of the source (contrast, colour, etc). It's watchable and only slightly below DVD quality.

And what about 5tb drives? Segate's numbers improved the higher the density...

The Blu-Ray format is good enough to be shown in a cinema projected onto a 20 foot (or larger) screen. Obviously the quality of the BD itself would determine whether you would show it in a cinema, but many cinemas do show BDs when DCPs are unavailable. DCP has better colorspace, better contrast, etc. But it's still limited - the video is limited to a maximum of 250 Mbit/s. On Bluray the video is limited to 40 Mbit/s. If you have a Dolby Digital TrueHD track than the maximum video bitrate is 29.36Mbit/s. However, it's important to note that Blu-ray can use H.262/MPEG-2 Part 2, H.264/MPEG-4 AVC, and VC-1 video encoding. DCP cannot use any video encoding - DCP files are made up of thousands of Jpeg2000 images, the images are in a container file but they're still just images. That is to say, they can't use information from other frames to represent information in the present frame the way that video encoding works.

I saw a movie last year in a cinema, and for one scene it was pixelated as if it had been up-scaled from a standard definition source. What was even stranger was the fact that the shot was non-continuous (there were a couple of shots breaking it up) but that entire specific shot, and only that shot was horribly pixelated. Obviously that can't be a result of Jpeg2000 compression, so I thought it must be in the source. Yet when I saw the Blu-Ray there was no pixelation in that scene at all. Somehow the DCP had a problem in it!

Audio is another matter. Blu-ray arguably has better quality audio than is presently possible on DCP. DCP only allows LPCM audio, the maximum sampling rate is 96 kHz. Yet the maximum Blu-ray sampling rate is 192 kHz.

Now with that said, Blu-ray has other limitations. You can have a 24fps, 25fps, 30fps, 48fps, 50fps or even 60fps DCP. Blu-ray only supports interlaced for frame-rates other than 24/23.976fps and full HD. So you have some films like Wallace & Gromit that are available in full HD, but play at the wrong speed. Thankfully all of these issues have been addressed with the Ultra-HD BD specs. It also has a maximum bitrate of 100 Mbit/s, so video quality should at least equal what is possible with current 2k DCPs.

Yes it will be a niche format compared with Digital. But high-end audio/video is always a niche format.

Parody or not, they still transferred the video from the toy.

I shared this over on AMPS, but it belongs here too. Some guys on Youtube took apart a children’s toy which contains a “rare format of unusually high quality” (Super 8mm) sequence of frames, and then transferred those frames by telecine. They also transferred audio from a record (because the 8mm film did not have a soundtrack) - and it sounds pretty good. See what you think:

https://youtu.be/oSXsvC4ZUHk

Not bad at all considering it came out of a toy!

Ah, fair enough.

What about Umart, IJK, MSY? MSY looks cheaper than Newegg (slightly)...

Potia, where do you normally get your HDDs from?

team_negative1 said:

Blu-ray has failed, because it has not replaced DVD's, or become the primary format for most releases. Digital releases have, and will overtake it.

Team Negative1

Bluray was never going to replace DVD. Had the HD-DVD format won the war then perhaps it may have, but Bluray couldn't for the simple fact that it requires publishers to use AACS encryption. I have a number of DVDs from small publishers that are not encrypted. This makes it less financially viable for a small publisher to release an obscure title on the format. This was a clear oversight, but one brought about because of the clear influence from the Hollywood stakeholders who only care about their interests and not the interests of the smaller publishers.

Digital releases are not the same quality as Bluray. It's like Laserdisc vs VHS - most consumers were happy with VHS, and those who really wanted the best quality invested in Laserdiscs. Same thing with Bluray vs Digital. Just because most consumers may prefer Digital doesn't mean that Bluray has "failed", it simply means it fits a different purpose. Whether it is fit for that purpose, however, is debatable because it will be faced with lower sales and the mandatory AACS encryption is a barrier to smaller releases.

Cheers Althor, hope you're enjoying the vacation!

Althor, you have a PM. Also... good work, carry on. :)

Ah. All good, I'll pursue this disc. Carry on!

And I agree completely about his film-making with it, it was a worthy sequel to the originals!

Yes special thanks go to poita for the posting.

And might I say thanks to the -1 team for all the preview they've shared thus far as well!! I don't always keep up with them, but we all appreciate it. Best of luck from me with the work ahead. :)

Cheers guys, that's all the versions, except for the GOUT, the TB 1997, the LD 1997, the other LD's, the HDTV, MV's Legacy Edition, the VHS and the 1977 bootleg cinema recording. ;)

Here it is compared to Harmy's (which has a blue cast)...

Poita (sub-par uncorrected Tech):

Harmy 2.5:

The sabre is corrected from green to blue (as it is on the blu-ray, which I forgot about), but not the training orb back to grey/green. Chewy's colour certainly looks more natural from the print as well. As point pointed out below, this capture was from a "sub-par print" and was not colour corrected.

However, look how much closer to that print Harmy's looks than the other versions! What a testament to the correction he did to the film.

2004 DVD:

2011 Bluray:

Team -1 pic as posted in poita's thread (note this is a diff shot, for direct compare click here):

Yeah, and also read the posts by Harmy:

http://originaltrilogy.com/forum/topic.cfm/Harmys-STAR-WARS-Despecialized-Edition-HD-V25-MKV-IS-OUT-NOW/topic/12713/page/1/

In addition to Demonoid, KAT, and TPB, you can also find them on tehparadox - all official current releases are there (mkv/avchd/dvd5).

They are also all on Demonoid, and there are versions even on TPB and KAT. For instance I see MKV release v2.5 for the first one on TPB (that's the current version FYI), as well as various encodes of ESB and ROTJ as well (I'm not sure if any of the others there are the official encodes). There is the current versions of ESB (2.0) and ROTJ (1.0) on  KAT in AVCHD format.

The least you could have done is searched other trackers before starting a thread.

How long have you been into LD's? I live in a PAL country and I have a friend who had (probably still has) two LD players, with one specifically for NTSC discs - and that was back in the 90's! At one point he might have had 3 players, I can't remember now, he was an early adopter of DVD though (back when most DVDs didn't look that much better than LDs anyway!) I've never owned a LD player myself, but I can certainly tell you that enthusiasts import players, including the Japanese-only models. For instance, Andrea has a HLD-X9 which is a player released only in Japan.

Again though, I don't want to speak for other members, you could send a message to either Andrea or Althor with your location and ask if there are any members of the community in your country who can cap the LD's. I agree with you about postage - plus you run the risk of having your discs damaged - which is why I suggested you find out if there's anyone in your area who can help.

As for ROTM, I'm a Lester fan and his films are by far the best versions of the Three Musketeers/20 Years After story I've seen. It's very sad that one of the actors (Roy Kinnear) died while filming. I know there's a DVD, but there's no BD and I'm very interested in seeing how the LD looks. Myspleen would love it too!

Oh, then I'm most interested in seeing it. Can you put it on Myspleen?

Ah, well there are certainly members who can cap LD's (not me I'm afraid) - Althor for instance, his caps look really good! I believe (although I could be wrong) that he's based in the USA. Andrea's based in Italy, and probably either of them could name other members here who could be willing to capture some of your LDs and might be located nearer to you. I'd absolutely love to see that LD capped and released!

Okay so Andrea has very kindly sent me some caps. I've done a quick manual IVTC and assembled them together. As I don't want to deprive anyone of the opportunity to have a go themselves at upscaling them, I'm posting them here - note that the alignment script needs to be modified to work with Andrea's. I don't have the time right now to do that, or to work on the upscale script. Therefore there are now 3 sources for these scenes.

These are all the scenes requiring upscales. The x264 are transcoded with a crf setting of 10, or you can download the (uncompressed) AVI files.

• DVB recording (x264) / Lossless AVI (TB source)
• LD rip (x264) / Lossless AVI (Althor)
• LD rip (x264) / Lossless AVI (Andrea)

The first part of the upscale is the alignment script, since these videos were already cropped to use it you just need to remove the first crop from each source.