Purpose:
To preserve The Phantom Menace theatrical cut.
Status:
Incomplete.
Source material:
- Official DVD.
- Schorman’s HDTV prservation.
- althor1138’s LD rip.
- TB DVD (Scandnavian DVB rip)
Thanks go to:
- Schorman - who not only did beautiful work on his HDTV preservation, but also let me know about the Scandanavian cap which is now absolutely vital in providing greater quality to the Theatrical scenes.
- althor1138 - who capped the Japanese LD, which yes is superior quality to the Scandnavian cap.
- Andrea - who is also capping the Jap LD.
- DrDre - his upscale work with the GOUT proved a useful insight into improving the upscales used in this preservation.
- YouToo - for uploading the Z-VCD to the Spleen. The Z-VCD is essential for recreating theatrical subtitle placement and timing.
- grisan - for uploading the TB release to the Spleen.
Discussion:
I originally thought this would be a nice easy project… nope. It’s quite complicated!
The first thing I did, which was time consuming, was to sync the HDTV and DVD versions to the LD.
The next thing I did was colour correct the HDTV and DVD rips. I also worked out how to process the image so it comes out nicely with both versions. The DVD is upscaled in Avisynth to 1080p, and is then used to remove the HDTV’s burned-in subtitles. This was time consuming, but it’s done.
Before:
After:
Download: Early preview clip 1080p (9MB)
I had to degrain the HDTV source in order to get a seamless match between HDTV and DVD. I then add back grain, as well as boosting the grain slightly in the rest of the film.
The subtitles are then put back using my pseudo patented subtitle script, as so:
Now on to the LD upscalling. For reference, here are screenshots of the two scenes that do not appear at all on the DVD. The top is the DVB (TB DVD version), the second one is the althor1138’s LD, and the bottom is my version downsized back to SD.
The first scene is on the extras DVD, so it is upscalled from that instead of the LD+DVB mix. At the moment the upscalling is provisionally completed.
The upscale script is complicated, and slow. It needs to be done in two parts, due to only being allowed to call a certain script once in Avisynth. The scenes are pre-rendered so they can be imported into the final script.
It is mostly based on the laserdisc, although the TB source was used to boost the quality slightly. The LD resolution is 708x274 and it was not cropped any further. Getting the video to look acceptable alongside the true HD material is a very challenging endeavour. Thankfully there is only a handful of scenes where this is necessary.
Release info:
The release will be a 1080p x246 MKV file, encoded to conform with BD comparability. The audio details will be confirmed at a later stage. It will be synced to the LD version.
As should be clear if you’ve read this thread, it’s always been my intention to share the scripts, etc, that I’ve created for this project along with the final product. I have already posted some of the scripts I’ve written, and I’m happy to share information that may be useful to others. Avisynth scripting can take considerable time, and I usually don’t want to share things that are still a work in progress, but be assured that every script needed to recreate the final release will be released in the fullness of time.
I have also uploaded the non-retail SD material. This includes all the deleted scenes I intend to use. This is so everyone has an opportunity to use them for their own needs. I can also make available any of the HD upscalled scenes for the LD material - while it’s still a work in progress I have rendered the present version.
Screenshots:
Video 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)
Upscale scenes:
These are all the scenes requiring upscales. The x264 are transcoded with a crf setting of 10, or you can download the lossless AVI files (Lagarith).
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. Note that this script presently is only calibrated for Althor’s rip and not Andrea’s one.
