THX

Originally posted by: nin
Now, Zion, do I understand correctly that the Japanese SC capture are NOT from an HLD-X0? And in some scenes BETTER than a X0 capture? If so, I could do another capture from composite and to a BNC modified PDI card from the SC edition and see if it will look even better (lower noise, more detail?). Let me know.

Originally posted by: Rebel Scumb
Not that TPM is perfect, but I've always felt the issues with it were mostly conceptual, and not editorial. Anakin should of been older. Naboo should of been Alderaan, Obi-wan should of filled Qui-gon's role, etc.
Yes, yes and yes. Unfortunately, conceptual issues are harder to deal with than editorial. The idea of cutting Sidious altogether is a good - that way his appearances in the PT will mirror those in the OT (i.e. none/a bit/a lot). However, preserving the surprise is a moot point, since everyone already knows. Even people who don't know who Ian McDiarmid is and missed that the OT Emperor's name is Palpatine can recognize the TPM Palpatine as the OT Emperor. Nevertheless, go ahead, it's a good idea and I'm sure a lot of fans would love to see it.
Originally posted by: Wesyeed
Combine Eps 1 and 2, then you will be a man.

Originally posted by: zion
As stated before, the X0 capture footage we currently have is all in all better than the SC footage. I think the buzz around here lately for the SC discs is a little misleading in that people automatically think that a full SC capture is the only way to go. And this is simply not true. We will put up some examples in the next week or so that will show you the difference with what we are currently working on, and our experiments with the SC. Some of you may be pleasantly suprised.

Originally posted by: Citizen (in The Official Dark/Sega Special Collection Release Thread)
This trilogy has to be one of the best NTSC sourced transfers I've seen to date, despite some issues with the hue, colour bleeding & compression artefacts, the image clarity and brightness/contrast is very good, what's more this has to be the first laserdisc transfer that doesn't exhibit any of the temporal smoothing that plagues all the other widescreen SW laserdiscs (French, German, Definitive, Faces) I've seen. Nor does it appear to have the interlacing jaggies problem the Definitive and Faces collectiion has where some detail is completely lost through removal of lines.

The test results I'm getting are showing that it could really give the PAL transfers a run for their money, firstly it doesn't suffer the interlace/jaggies problem of the definitive set but the main reason being they didn't use any temporal smoothing to reduce grain, no smearing during motion!

Check this short XviD clip out, first half is from my PAL LDs, the 2nd half from the Dark/Sega SC DVD, on the Dark/Sega part you can see the rockface in detail whereas on the PAL sourced version it's badly smeared (same on the Definitive & Faces discs).

Citizen'sTestClip

Originally posted by: Laserman
You could never make the pre-THX sets look better or sound better than the THX ones, the noise floor is too high, the colour is all over the place the detail is very soft and the sound is awful - however certain scenes may be worth lifting to help deal with the temporal noise reduction on the THX sets.
That process was already underway before I left.
...
The Special Collection may be worth a look, the discs mastered for the Japanese market tended to be of a better quality, so it is worth investigating.