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.
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.
Norman, you would make my day if you capped a "Return of the Musketeers" LD!!
team_negative1 said:
Again, we know it is the SE version. But the frames don't match up. Are they missing completely.
From the looks of it, the Tie Fighters path seems to match the original, so we're not sure what the comparison was for.
Team Negative1
They don't match at all, that's my point. I'm pretty sure the last frame I posted was the same frame in both versions, but in any case this one certainly IS - it's the 3rd last frame of the shot before the interior:
They're a bit harder to see in that frame, so I've highlighted them:
Here's a pic of the difference:
Evidently they left out two red glows as well when they re-did the shot from the camera elements.
team_negative1 said:
Yes, the original matte lines and boxes are visible in a lot of the shots.
==========================================
You can see a lot more in the ESB deconstructed raw version.
Team Negative1
And also, Harmy's despcialized was based on the SE. In some scenes he recreated matte-lines, but usually the SE composting was used. In this scene, for instance, the placement of the tie fighters is quite different between the theatrical version and the SE. In the SE the two the the left are more level, and the other one is placed further to the right than in the original theatrical version. This would have been one of the changes made for the 1997 edition that the director agreed to (although how much involvement he had in Lucas's decision making is debatable).
There's only one LD release of TPM though.
Yes but the Z-VCD clearly cuts out earlier than the LD - and you can tell this is the case by the position of the arch in the foreground. The LD has about 11 more frames than the Z-VCD.
That should would work fine as it is, yes. Just as the crowd shot does - it doesn't look out of place at all (have a look at this comparison to the true HD version!). The senate is one of the lower quality ones. Although, it doesn't look that bad in motion either.
But if I could comment on your earlier reply where you said "the best result ever" - perhaps from the sources I have, yes. But sometime in the future someone will scan those scenes in true HD from a print, and that will be the best result.
It should work for Empire. Not sure if DrDre has gone and tuned the script frame-by-frame, but Empire is pretty much the same quality T/C. Jedi is a much better T/C (doesn't have aliasing), so I'd be doubtful that the SR plugin will get much from it, but you never know. I actually have another film who's DVD would probably benefit from greatly with this script, so when DrDre's done and releases the script I'll have a look at that. As we've discussed, you really need a DVD that has considerable aliasing to benefit from it.
The drive-through in the Mos Eisley sequence posted above never looked great because it had something like 5 or 6 generations of optical composites in it. The SE version got rid of the old version entirely, and Lucas had ILM or whoever recomposite it from the original elements (hence why MikeV's doesn't resolve the detail in the SE of that shot).
That's already as detailed as it gets, thorr. Just sit at least 6 feet back from TV set to enjoy properly.
Have a look if you like, here are all the scenes with just a crop and quick transcode (CRF-10). I've also put uncompressed AVIs up.
LINKS MOVED (see the op).
I can't get SR to find meaningful detail in there, but perhaps DrDre can.
I've just cleaned-up the op now as well. All these links and more are in the op.
As DrDre already discovered, the Infognition plugin probably isn't suitable for this source:
Geometrical SR reconstruction algorithms are possible if and only if the input low resolution images have been under-sampled and therefore contain aliasing. Because of this aliasing, the high-frequency content of the desired reconstruction image is embedded in the low-frequency content of each of the observed images. Given a sufficient number of observation images, and if the set of observations vary in their phase (i.e. if the images of the scene are shifted by a sub-pixel amount), then the phase information can be used to separate the aliased high-frequency content from the true low-frequency content, and the full-resolution image can be accurately reconstructed.[12]
In practice, this frequency-based approach is not used for reconstruction, but even in the case of spatial approaches (e.g. shift-add fusion[13]), the presence of aliasing is still a necessary condition for SR reconstruction.
The reason why it works for the GOUT is because of how it was transferred to video. The aliasing is necessary as there is meaningful information missing between the scan-lines that can be recovered from from other frames. It'd be nice if Infognition was more forthcoming with this information.
In any case, to use SR you would need to do the upscale first and then the alignment.
Your later versions are worlds apart from the original you posted a couple of months back.
And just a quick note on SR - I do know how it usually looks. On most sources when compared to a simple script using NNEDI3 it has little (if any) benefit, and introduces its own interesting type of noise. DrDre's script overcomes this nicely, and proves that the SR plugin can be used to create a greater result than it yields on its own.
I used to think DCPs were actual video files *facepalm*. Nope - just a few thousand JPEG2000 files (yeah of course in a MXF container), uncompressed audio, a subtitle file if you need one, and a XML document. On a USB stick.
Check out this very special version of the trailer:
Thanks. I wish it looked better though. The crowd shot is one of the better looking ones. Andrea has kindly offered to provide better quality caps of the LD scenes, so once I have those the scenes may look a bit better than they presently do.
Since I haven't posted one in a while, here's a preview clip. It shows the LD+DVB upscaled crowd shot and the DVD-extras sourced "Sebulba" scene with Watto and Warwick Davis cheering Sebulba.
Also, if you're curious you can download the Sebulba scenes and compare them.
Downloads:
Preview clip (52.3MB).
Sebulba scene - DVD version:
1. Uncompressed AVI (96.8MB)
2. x264 crf16 (2.56MB)
Sebulba scene - LD+DVB version:
1. Uncompressed AVI (96.8MB)
2. x264 crf16 (2.34MB)
You'll notice that the version in the preview clip has been softened slightly and has a grain-plate added, compared to the raw version.
Upscaling...
As I mentioned earlier in the thread, it wasn't easy designing an upscale script for this film. Not only that, but the upscale itself is now extremely slow - making progressing it further difficult. Here's a comparison to my old upscale script from last year (there are two scenes in that link).
Here's the links for LD and TB:
Laserdisc vs Upscale (4 scenes in the link)
TB vs upscale (4 scenes in the link)
Yes it is good, one thing you have to be mindful of though is that the method (and in fact just about any really aggressive method like this) wants to bring everything in the frame into focus, and you can lose picture depth. For instance in this screenshot the door frames in the background have been brought into focus, as has some of the stormtrooper on the left of frame, and the stormtrooper on the right is also brought into focus. It is what it is. :)
Harmy said:
I don't think pan and scan VHS has better resolution than widescreen LD, let alone digital PAL anamorphic broadcast.
Oh the vertical resolution would be better, but the horizontal fidelity would probably be no better. The thing with all analogue video is that they all have distinct lines of resolution - NTSC is 480 lines* regardless of whether it's VHS, Betamax, or LD. Note there is actually 525 lines of resolution in the NTSC standard, but the picture window is 480 lines.
The horizontal information is compressed, when decompressed it yields 720 pixels (or whatever amount your TV can handle). The actual amount stored on VHS is said to be only around 320 distinct points (pixels) or so. Also expressed as 240 lines per picture height (240 * 1.33333 = 320). Laserdisc, I believe, yields perhaps 80-90% more horizontal fidelity. And DVD yields more still (no horizontal compression).
And that's just luma - chroma is compressed even more.
And then there's the noise. VHS is noisier than LD which is noisier than DVD (no analogue noise).
I've never seen the officially released HK TPM VCD, I'd be curious to see it though (so if anyone has it - spleen it!!) VCD has only 50% of the vertical resolution, and its horizontal resolution is comparable to VHS (Luma that is, Chroma is better).
