I have a taping of this from a Norwegian TV broadcast in 1988 (And a copy of the LD on it's way. Thanks for the heads-up).
I don't remember the specifics of the Star Wars clips, but there was a segment on sound design for ESB, IIRC.
Once I have the LD I'll do a DVD capture and share it here.
The Aluminum Falcon said:
Yay then! Thanks Lee. I'll start uploading it tomorrow.
Good on ya, Mate!
Preferably to a non-invite site, please.
Thanks.
The Aluminum Falcon said:
Wait. Really? I printed your Star Wars Original Trilogy cover and it looked fine on my Blu-Ray case. Perfectly centered. Thanks for the update though.
Good to know. I said slightly :-)
NOTICE REGARDING MY COVERS:
Due to the unfortunate fact that I messed up, most of my covers have the spine slightly off-center. It had slipped in my original template and I only caught the screw-up yesterday.
This affects my Star Wars covers (both series), my Superman covers, Punisher, Chaplin and Rocketeer.
The Conans (all four of them), The Shadow, Cyborg and Captain America are NOT affected.
All covers have been fixed and the new versions uploaded. Those of you who downloaded my affected covers should do so again. You'll find them in the usual place.
I apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.
Fritz
The Aluminum Falcon said:
Video Collector said:
Yeah, and you're welcome by the way. A simple thank you goes a long way towards covering cross-atlantic postage.
Thank you for sharing this, Video Collector. Also, it's interesting to know that this bootleg went Transatlantic. Since it has PAL conversion artifacts I suppose that does mean it was originally a N. American boot.
That was more directed at Link343, but thanks anyway. :-)
link343 said:
So Video Collector sent me a copy of his Z version a few weeks back. Good news is that it's full. Bad news (if you want to call it that) is that he combined the two mpg files into one. Quality is the same as the VCD circulating on a.b.starwars.
If you want a specific screen capture, just ask.
Here's some thumbnails to tide you over until the upload finishes.
Yeah, and you're welcome by the way. A simple thank you goes a long way towards covering cross-atlantic postage.
I still have the original VCD discs for the Z-version, and they are still readable. I also have Nero Image files of the two discs archived on my harddisk.
Funny thing, if you play them in a PC they autostart a small VCD player program from Sony.
It was just for convenience sake I edited the two files into one for easy access on my computer. In the process I also edited out the +/- 30 seconds of overlapping footage between disc 1 and 2.
The source for this VCD is PAL* VHS SP recording. During the climactic battle over the droid control ship, the VCR's display shows up for a few seconds accompanied by a small jumpcut, just as the ship starts to explode.
*It has an awful amount of ghosting, which may indicate a NTSC to PAL conversion somewhere along the line.
The Z-version is the only one I ever encountered, so going by that I'd say it was the most proliferated boot.
Okay, so I wasn't completely done with Star Wars after all :-)
These are inspired by the mock-up covers that were used as placeholders on Amazon etc. when the Blu-rays were just announced.
I thought they looked okay and found it a pity they weren't used, so I just made some myself. I tried soooo hard to make a cover with a simple background colour, but in the end I just couldn't resist adding some texture to it. I'm a slave to textures :-)
This is as simple a cover as I'm ever likely to make. I didn't even sign them.
They'll fit a regular 3-disc case, so anyone who wants them can PM me for High Rez files.
That's it. I'm done with Star Wars.
Supplement Case (3-disc) now added. I used the info from Bartlett's custom for the contents of the bonus discs. Special thanks to Greg Masciola from Blu-ray Forum for the poster image.
My mother asked me yesterday what I'd been doing the past week. I told her I'd made custom Star Wars covers for a Blu-Ray set that's coming out this autumn. She just looked at me for a second and said, in confused disbelief, simply "Why?".
How do you explain stuff like this to a 65-year old?:) There must have been at least three words in that sentence she didn't know.
Everyone who knows why, PM me for the High-Rez version.
This sounds very sensible to me, guys. Ewoks will be a lot of work by itself, and it will be nice just to get something out there.
There isn't really a better source for the Ewoks series than the PAL tapes, is there?
If Pittrek will send RetardedTed the Great Heep, I won't have to.
RetardedTed, do you still want those Ewoks/Droids bumpers?
Moth3r said:
I've not given up investigating options for dealing with the PAL sources, because 1) there is no NTSC source for Great Heap, and 2) I don't want to admit defeat!
Trust in Moth3r :-)
I said to myself, I'm not gonna do a Star Wars set. Everyone else is doing it. And if I WAS gonna do a Star Wars set, I certainly wasn't doing a Drew set. Everyone is doing a Drew set...
*sigh*
Seeing as I am the biggest Star Wars nerd on the Northern Hemisphere (check out my Star Wars Video collection at www.swonvideo.com) I just couldn't help myself.
It HAD to be the Drew Struzan posters. For one thing, that's about the only set that unifies all six movies. Mixing and matching posters from several different artists makes it difficult to make a cohesive set. Then there's the fact that the Drew posters are bloody excellent (almost, but I'll get to that later).
I usually start off these ramblings by complaining there's a lack of available Hi-rez images on the net for my projects. Well, for Star Wars there's a tonne of it. Still, I wanted to have textless versions of the posters to work with, and I needed to modify them so I wanted as much resolution as possible. I cracked open my Drew artbooks and scanned the posters myself. Some of them didn't fit the scanner so I had to scan in segments and stitch them together afterwards. I also wanted the original, unaltered version of Drew's Ep.3 poster and that is nowhere to be found online. It took me a day (out of three working on this project), but in the end I had pristine, 600dpi scans of the posters to sink my teeth into.
The challenge with the Drew posters is that they are formatted to fit a rectangular theatrical poster, which doesn't really fit the almost square front of a Blu-Ray cover. I see a lot of custom conversions of the Drew posters struggle with this, so I first had to modify all six posters to fit the proportions of Blu-Ray. Luckily, Drew included a rectangular frame in all the posters' design, so I used that as a starting point. I had to cut off some ships and characters from the bottoms of all the posters, and move the bottom frame up. I formatted all six posters to have an identical frame size, doing my best to preserve as much of the original compositions as possible. (Lopping of the bottom third of all the posters throws them somewhat out of whack, the center being lost, but they still work.) I discovered that Drew had been somewhat inconsistent with the size of those frames, especially between the original trilogy and the prequel trilogy posters, so that proved quite a challenge. To cap off the artwork and make it seem like it was originally finished at the bottom, I added a gold frame. This frame also replaced all the different frames between the posters, thus making them more of a unified whole.
As has been mentioned elsewhere, the Episode 3 poster does not have the same, obvious frame around it as the other posters do. Well, not the commercially released posters anyway. I had to go back to Drew's original version for Ep.3's poster, predating the hackjob the marketing gerbils did on it to squeeze a larger Darth Vader in there. Drew's version of the poster had the frame just fine.
Originally I was doing black covers for these, because black is the only single colour that goes with all six posters. The prequels are rendered in warm, golden tones while the original trilogy posters are colder. I found the black background to be bland in the extreme, so I decided to do a textured, coloured background instead. I tried to make all the covers crimson/gold, but ultimately I had to split up the set in two sections using blue as a background for eps. 4-6. I would have preferred them all to be the same base colour since it brings all the spines together beautifully, but I wasn't going to settle for black. No way.
For the background I used a NASA still of a Nova, tilted it on it's side and duplicated it back and front. To give it some texture I overlaid a leather texture image I googled. The Nova already had the red/golden hues I was looking for so I didn't need to modify that for the prequels. For the OT, I shifted the hue and saturation of the Nova towards a pale blue.
The one-sheets had to be isolated from their background to seamlessly fit on the covers. I used the colour-selection tool to isolate most of the blacks, then touched up the finished mask by hand. A lot of work, and I bet everyone takes it for granted. This removed Drew's signature for all the paintings, and I wanted to retain that, so I isolated his signature from the Ep.4 poster and put it on a separate layer from the artwork. That way it is consistent between all the posters. I found myself masking out most of Drew's paint-splatter stars, as they were conflicting with the stars from the Nova background, and frankly some of them just look like schmutz.
I mentioned a reservation about these posters' greatness earlier, and to me, the posters for Eps 1, 2 and 4 are just too hot, colourwise. It may just be in the way they are printed, but I toned down the redish skin on all of them. I still couldn't approximate anything approaching natural skin tones for Qui Gon on the first poster. I know it irks Drew when someone second guesses his choices (as would any artist) but I took that liberty. For Obi-Wan's lightsaber on the Ep.1 poster I replaced it with the one from the Ep.2 poster. It's still all Drew artwork, but that feeble, anemic, pointy lightsaber from the Ep.1 poster had to go. :)
When making a set, as opposed to a single cover, I want to remain as consistent between covers as possible. This poses certain challenges when the artwork on all is going to be different. When placing the Star Wars logo on the front, I had to find a position that would remain the same across all covers, yet not obscure anything important on the different posters. I was largely successful, but poor Boba Fett got shafted on the Jedi cover. It just couldn't be helped. (Actually it could, I could have moved him to a different part of the painting, but I am just too knackered to perform that kind of precision surgery.)
The logo I opted for is one I first saw a year or so back, a slightly modernized version of the standard logo. I can't for the life of me find out who made it, but I see it used on the wallpaper sites everywhere. Anyone recognize it? It had to be a stacked version for the front, a horizontal version would obscure too many elements on the posters. For the spine I split it up and modified the leg of the "R" to follow the lines of the following "W". It's just a small thing, but it seemed in keeping with the other letters. I redrew the entire logo with the same gold/brown I used for the poster borders. I put in some shadow and highlight effects by hand to make it a little richer looking. I used that same colour for other elements on the spine and back, to tie the whole thing together.
For the actual titles of the films, I used a sans-serif font to complement the logo. It had to be readable against the logo, so I used a black glow effect to make it stand out more. I use the glow effect a lot when I need the text to be legible against a busy background. I find using a glow is more flexible than a standard stroke around the letters. The same font was then used for the text on the spines. Consistency is the word.
The roman numerals on the spine are rendered with the Emboss and Satin blending options from the layer pallette, as is the word "Episode". The titles themselves are so wordy, there's hardly room for much else on the spines.
The backs would be identical for all six, so once I established that template, it was just a matter of plopping in the images in their assigned placement and size. I still struggle with the backs, so I made three versions of them before I was satisfied. They're still a bit "boxy", and I am ambivalent about the gold frame I used, but it ties the back and front together so beautifully. The gold and crimson theme I used made the covers seem a bit excessively ornamental, sort of like baroque art. This called for a slightly elegant font for the specs (I believe I used Bangle, don't quote me on that because I can't be bothered opening the PSD files to check). For the summary I used a narrow sans-serif font ("TW Cent" something...) to set it apart from the other text on the back. Typography doesn't come naturally to me, so maybe these mixes clash to a more trained eye. Let me know, OK?
BTW, where do you guys take the summary blurb from? I always use what's on the official releases, in this case the DVDs, and just add or subtract text to fit my needs (and remove the worst spoilers). This is where typos creep in, so if there are any, do let me know. Good thing a scan of the actual Blu-Ray back surfaced, so I could get the specs and running times right.
When choosing images for the back I wanted to, like I always do, feature as many different characters as possible. I made a point of including Jar-Jar for the first one. It's kind of tongue-in-cheek, but also that I feel sorry for the guy getting the short end of the stick from everyone. I like him just fine, and if there was room I'd have put him on the spine just to spite the haters. That's also why the Ewoks are centered on the Jedi cover. Come on, who doesn't love the Ewoks? Really. I mixed some lesser known photos with the same, stale PR photos we've seen in every article about Star Wars for the last thirty years. Usually I'd avoid them like the plague, but that Falcon cockpit shot from ANH is pure nostalgia.
As always I used Illest Villains template for this, but for once I redid the legal copy to reflect the actual Star Wars property. I added the artwork credit for Drew Stuzan, as well as a Package Design credit for myself.
That's it. Took me three whole days. A custom three-disc for the bonus discs is forthcoming, but for now this is all I have. If you appreciate these long write-ups for my covers, let me know. I enjoy writing about them just as much as making them. I'd love to read about other designers' processes as well.
Okay, High Rez JPEGs of these are available by PM.
retartedted said:
Do you have the Ewoks 'On the Run' DVD set? All I want off of that is the 'Ewoks and Droids Adventure Hour' Intro. Kind of hard to spend 30 bucks just for that though.
No problem. Would you like my PAL capture of Great Heep as well?
PM me.
MattMahdi said:
retartedted said:
Do you have the Ewoks 'On the Run' DVD set? All I want off of that is the 'Ewoks and Droids Adventure Hour' Intro. Kind of hard to spend 30 bucks just for that though.
Interjection from a lurker: I'd never heard of the "On the Run" DVDs. Just found them via Google. Is it in any way a legitimate outfit?
I assume that the answer is NO, otherwise you folks wouldn't be doing all this work (which, from the samples, looks just amazing).
Just pondering...
I was trying to be discreet about them, since they are in no way official, and I do not in any way support or condone those releases.
Even so, both RetardedTed and Pittrek's releases will be superior.
retartedted said:
Video Collector, what are you guys using for the Coby episode?
The "missing" Ewoks and Droids episodes are all sourced from the On the run NTSC DVDs. They are markedly inferior to the PAL captures, but better than nothing. *shrug*
What are you using for Great Heep?
darth_ender said:
I really look forward to this. Any timeline?
Speaking for the PAL set; All episodes are captured and forwarded to Pittrek for post-processing and DVD mastering.
Moth3r has kindly agreed to help sort out the blended frames from the PAL tapes.
Bearing in mind there are 26 epsiodes of Ewoks and 14 of Droids this is going to take some time. Pittrek has warned me he doesn't have as much time available as he'd like, but he will make this work a priority. Right now all we can do is cheer him on.
Moth3r said:
AnimeIVTC(mode=2) removed most of the blending, but there are still occasional blends left behind.
Quick 5-minute job at improvement:
MPEG2Source("Composite_20110704_2251.d2v")
animeivtc(mode=2)
levels(17,1,190,0,255,false)
Crop(8, 4, -16, -10)
spline16resize(720,576)Results: http://www.sendspace.com/file/n4xap7
Yeah, Moth3r, the thing is, NOONE has been able to crack that PAL blending completely. There seems to be no predictable rhythm to it.
Would you be willing to work with my man Pittrek to eliminate as much as possible of it from the PAL captures?
Those are really good, RetardedTed. I'm so glad to see that ghosting gone.
When I stack your Japanese and my PAL caps on top of each other, mine still has the edge in detail, but the ghosting is just not acceptable. If there was a way to eliminate the ghosting completely I'd say go for PAL, but for now I feel your Japanese tapes are the best compromise.
I prefer the more muted colour of the PAL captures, but I'm sure there's some happy medium between yours and mine, easily fixed in Avisynth.
We're still sure the PAL tapes are from an NTSC master, anyway?
Re: Great Heep. The captures are comparable to the others. I would happily provide you with it. Would you change that to NTSC, then? To match the rest of the set?
Yeah, I can see why so many of these attempts have stalled :-) Pittrek and I are doing both Droids and Ewoks, so we have our work cut out for us. Ours will be a PAL only set, and I think will nicely complement yours.
RetardedTed, I took the liberty of downloading your sample to compare it to my captures. As you can see the ghosting is identical in mine, and is wholly source related. Our captures are different, however. Mine have more muted colours, but seem sharper than yours. You say they are PAL, but they look like NTSC colours to me. Are you sure they haven't been through an NTSC step before being outputted?
There seems to be some difference in the MPEG2 encoding as well. Yours seem to have more artifacts. Mine were captured at +9 Mbps with on-the-fly encoding to MPEG2. Bear in mind the images I have enclosed here are JPG-compressed so I can't deduce anything conclusive.
It would also seem that my playback device (a native PAL Philips VCR) was better than whatever machine your provider used. Look at the noise at the bottom and allround cropping.
I feel somewhat vindicated that the time I spent capturing both Droids and Ewoks wasn't for nought.
Yours:
Mine:
Yours:
Mine:
Yours:
Mine:
pittrek said:
I am not unfortunately in contact with Video Collector anymore :-( I received last mail from him in March.
Yeah, I'm still here :-)
What happened was that I was waiting on an Australian Droids tape that got lost in the mail. The b'stard wouldn't refund me anything so that's $71 out the window. This soured me on the entire deal, as you can imagine.
The project also lost some steam there, when Retardedted & Co. announced they were buying professional transfers of their UK tapes. That made my efforts pointless.
I still have the transfers that I did from the UK VHS tapes, and I'll send them to you sometime soon (summer holidays may delay somewhat). I still think they knock the socks off even the commercial DVDs.
Any words of encouragment from the community at large would be most welcome at this point.
First off: Garbage in, garbage out. The DVD-R sold by the director himself (signed, even!) is a dub of his personal VHS copy. He makes no attempt to deceive anyone about the quality of this tape, there's even clips of it on the homepage to make sure people know what they're getting. That being the case, the constantly changing aspect ratios were just too much. I'm considering sending him a copy of my reworked DVD for him to use as master for further customers.
I took this as an opportunity to familiarize myself with VirtualDub and AVIsynth (although AVIsynth was eventually not used).
Here follows a general description of my processes.
(These framegrabs (from MPC) are in square pixels, so they look a bit off. They're correct when displayed anamorphically.)
Step 1:
Ripped the DVD (actually not encrypted, so just drag'n drop the VIDEO_TS folder in Explorer.
Used TMPGEnc 4.0 Xpress "Source Wizard" to extract the .MPG file.
As you can see, the aspect ratio is all fouled up. God knows why, but the source switched between this, 4x3 in a 16:9 frame (anamorphic) and fullframe 16:9 anamorphic. Only the sections with the mangled aspect ratio had counters on it (about 2/3 of the runtime)
"Raw" video from the DVD:
Step 2:
Ran the Logoaway filter in VirtualDubMod. I had to run two Logoaway filters in succession, one for the top counter, one for the bottom. I only ran the filter in the active image area to not contaminate it with image info from the black bars. The preview function of the filter was invaluable in finding the best settings. The top and bottom filters needed different settings to look okay. I found the "UGLARM" setting at max to be the best, YMMV.
I chose to apply the filter before resizing, as I believe this was the fastest way, leaving it a smaller area to rework. If I resized the image first, the counters would take up more realestate as well, leaving a bigger area to process for the filters. Furthermore, I had hoped that the blurring would be a little less obvious if I applied it prior to resizing, and that it would blend in just a little bit better (slightly softer edges to the blurred area after resizing). Not sure it made a difference.
Output to lossless AVI from VDubMod.
Resulting image with Logoaway filter applied:
Step 3:
Cropping and resizing the uncompressed AVI in TMPGEnc 4.0 Xpress, using the built-in Lanczos3 algorithm. I could have applied the cropping and resizing in VDubMod, but I am more familiar with TMPEG and it is WYSIWYG. Resized to 720x480 anamorphic.
Then encoding to MPEG2 using the max average bitrate that would fit a 1h:22m film on a DVD5 (7100mb/s). TMPEG recompresses the sound as well, but I couldn't be bothered demuxing the original file and muxing the 193kb/s stereo AC3 sound back into my re-rendered video.
Here's the final video. It's still mushy VHS, but at least the aspect ratio is brought into check, and the counters are gone. The Logoaway filter does a good job, but I would have liked to see a softer edge to the filtered area.
Final image after cropping of the black bars and resizing to 720x480 anamorphic:
For those who feel the counters were just as well left alone, I give you this screen from my pre-logoaway treatment. Even in motion, I feel the application of the blurring was way preferable.
All in all, a great learning experience, and a big thankyou to everyone who pointed me in the right direction.
-Fritz-
Thanks everyone.
Logoaway was just what I was looking for.
The preview function for that plug-in was a godsend.
In the end, I just used Virtualdub with the Logoaway filter, saved to lossless AVI and did the cropping, scaling and encoding in TMPEG (Lanczos algorithm).
The DC of Cyborg actually looks pretty decent now. At least the aspect ratio is correct, and the blur effect is far less distracting than the counters IMO.
Sir, I am well aware of the condition of the materials I'm working with, thank you. Instead of telling me what you consider pointless, would you offer some advice on actually doing what you advocate?
The image fills the screen once I correct the aspect ratio to anamorphic 1.78:1. Therefore no need to worry about black borders. All I'm left with are two rectangles that need to be covered by a black mask.
Does anyone know how to do this with a subtitle overlay? As CompMovieGuy said, it would have to be timed to come and go as the counter comes and goes.
Thanks Moth3r.
I am a complete noob with Avisynth, but I know my way round Google :-)
I ran the script with VirtualdubMod, and found the result too distracting in motion. The filter has to cover a square block, with very little image area to sample from, so I think a simple blur effect would be less distracting. What filter would you recommend for a simple blur?
Here are the steps I need to cover in as few renders as possible.
1. Crop out the black bars.
2. Resize the remaining image to 720x480 (anamorphic)
3. Blur what's still visible of the counters.
4. Output to MPEG2 again
What would such a Avisynth script look like, and what programme do you recommend to run it?
I just want to do this with as little generational loss as possible, without having to go through lossless AVI. (If at all possible? Noob, remember.)
Any and all help is greatly appreciated.
Fritz.
Nothing fancy, I just want to blur the counters so that they aren't so distracting.
The source file is an NTSC DVD, so I need something to do the trick from the actual MPEG2 source.
Ohh, and please keep in mind my newbie status :-)
Here's a bigger comparison to better judge the image of the bootlegs.
I've blown up the size of the half-rez CD-Master edition for easier comparison, the other two are untouched apart from cropping of the black bars.
Gold edition:
Superbit edition:
DC-Master edition:
