Video Collector

Update on availability. See first post.

Andrea.

Just finished downloading this today (took over a week as there was only one seeder).

I have taken a look at different scenes and had a listen to the DTS track and I must say I am mightily impressed. This is very watchable, and a worthy preservation of what Laserdisc has to offer.

I look forward to your other Laserdisc projects.

I still watch my colorised King Kong laserdisc from time to time. I remember Doug Pratt of the Laserdisc Newsletter prefaced his review of it with "Purists need not apply." Ha ha. KK and the Sony Blus of Harryhausen's colorized films are a pleasure, but I'd balk at a colorised Citizen Kane.

I have been thinking a lot lately about combining the chroma from the KK LD with the Warner BD. Unfortunately the cropping is different between the two so it would entail a lot of manual repositiong of the colours to really make it work. There are probably differences in the frame count between the two to also account for.

Not that I am in any way technically competent to do this, but the theory is sound. I was hoping dark_jedi and his team would tackle this, but as I understand it they need another project like they need a third ear :-)

I just took a look and listen, and I think this is as good as it needs to be. I noticed the minute difference in the cymbal crashes that you noted, but the Kostal recording is so different who's to say it wasn't always so.

Looking through all of your uploaded videos, I remain impressed with what you've accomplished, and it goes a long way in explaining why Disney didn't include this recording as an alternate track. The 1982 edit must have been quite different to the one we are used to seeing, and it's too bad we don't have a bootleg of it to reference.

Instead of filling in the gaps in the 1982 CD, perhaps you're better off just taking the missing parts out of the video entirely. Would that be too jarring, storywise I mean?

ww12345 said:

Either way, it is not going to be fun. I'm having the same issues with Night on Bald Mountain...

Keep up the good work. If it was easy, someone else would have done it by now :-)

I think there's every reason to keep the BD as the main source for this project. Though the colours are different to what I'm used to from my laserdisc from the 90s, there's no denying the superior detail and clarity of the Blu-ray transfer.

While an uncensored version of the Beethoven segment would be ideal, I wouldn't want it to trip up or delay the project.

Regarding my cover, my client is undecided about whether he wants the final series shared or not. He's usually good about these things, so he probably will.

Oh, and definitely interested in SotS :-)

Ah, good to know this isn't another orphaned project. I have watched Fantasia to death over the last 20 years and seeing it with the Kostal score will give it a new lease of life for me. I appreciate your efforts immensely.

The Fantasia cover is part of a vintage-inspired series of covers I'm doing for a client. Nothing very elaborate.

Just thought of this project today while doing a cover for Fantasia. Any updates?

I for one would appreciate any release, even it if wasn't perfect.

DL'ing now, but seeders are MIA at the moment.

Will give feedback once I've seen it, but from the samples and the screencaps I'd say this is a top-notch LD preservation.

dark_jedi said:

of that 26.9 the video is 21.3, now to start work on it.

These images are raw, they have not even been made 1080p yet, click thumb for full rez.

 

 

I applaud all your efforts. Definitely interested in seeing this project finished and released.

Andrea.

I've sampled both the AVCHD and the Blu and they both look great! Do they both have the same image encode?

You and I have discussed the use of noise-reduction briefly, and I think you've struck a good balance here. I was a little sceptical of the whole upconvert to 720p idea, but consider me wowed! I think it makes for a very pleasing picture to watch, and even though it makes the image look a little soft I am sure there is no detail lost as it probably wasn't in the laserdiscs in the first place. Excellent work.

(I must admit I missed the intense colours and the warmer hues of the original laserdiscs, but recognize that your version is more accurate to the GOUT.)

I really liked the inclusion of the theater DTS track. You will include that on the sequels too?

Go on man, get cracking on ESB and ROTJ and JP!!!

_,,,^..^,,,_ said:

Happy to know that someone is interested in this project... as nobody has posted any comment, I don't know if I 've done a decent job, or at the contrary a bad job...

Hope someone (who actually has downloaded and watched it) will post some feedback about this project, or about the OUT [ruLes] project, so I could know if I must continue with them, and release EP V and EP VI, or definitely stop here...

Downloading both the AVCHD and the Blu now. Will comment as soon as I have checked them out.

I'm definitely interested in you doing the rest of them as well (but don't forget Jurassic Park!:-)

AntcuFaalb said:

dvdmike said:

AntcuFaalb said:

dark_jedi said:

What would you guys like to see on this for extras, not T2, just asking about T1 for now, we want to keep it to extras not yet released on BD, and just rare cool shit, see we are trying to figure out if this really needs to be a BD50, the encode now is at 30 Mbps AVG and is only 19.5 GB's, so if there is not much for extras then we should be able to encode it a just a little less and use a BD25 instead, so please share your thoughts and suggestions.

Thanks

*right now all we have is  the video, 2 audio tracks(LD PCM and DTS-HD MA 5.1) and the making of documentary, I am tossing around the idea of possibly making a custom Iso Score, but sometimes it is very hard to figure out where the tracks go lol, so I am not real sure on this.

Do you plan to include all the extras from the 2001 DVD? There's a ton of stuff on there.

Also, what did you think of the Drew Cummings "The Making of: Terminator" documentary I sent to you and You_Too? Was the quality good enough?

That one's never been officially released with any Terminator set. It also seems to focus on the special effects, unlike the two documentaries on the 2001 DVD.

I looked for that everywhere, it is elusive 

I just rented it for $1.99 from Amazon Prime and de-DRM'd it with iSkysoft.

You can order the DVD from Amazon, but it costs ~$15. o.O

Hey DJ! I have that DVD, along with The Making of Robocop that was released at the same time. If the project needs it I can get it to you somehow.

Regardless of a future Criterion Blu (which may or may not be 1:66, we don't know) I'd like to see the finished result of this upscale.

Preserving the 1:66 aspect ratio is the major plus of this project, IMO, so put me down for a copy of the MKV when it's finished. Thanks.

Hi there.

It's Nissen from AVS forum, just joining you here.

English only. Like I said, this is just a straight port of the UK tapes, not meant as an authoritative release of Droids.

Since this is a PAL source it should be possible to synch these to the German dubs.

Well, looks like it's my system causing the blocking, because I couldn't find it in timdgiggerm's captures.

His:

Mine:

Sorry about that.

I would still like a DVD9 version made from the source though. If you can manage it I'd sure appreciate it.

Hi Althor.

Great work on this LD capture, but I am seeing horrible blocking when playing this in Media Player Classic. I'm not sure which decoder my system uses, but I haven't had any problems before. Is it just a bad decoder on my system or do others experience the same on playback?

I'm including some framegrabs for comparison. Look at the blocking in the sky.

Bear in mind that the extremely grainy image on the Japanese Ep1 LD means the compression needs a much better bit-budget for transparent results compared with the average film.

I for one would line up for a "superbit" version of your capture.

Davidvcsandersen said:

Video Collector, didn't you consider switching disc 3 to 4 and 4 to 3? Just asking as I would have done it :)

I considered it, as The Great Heep is indeed a "prequel" to the last story cycle even though it was produced last.

The reason I kept The Great Heep as "Disc 4" was to avoid confusion with the established content of the PAL tapes. If I'd moved the contents of VHS tape#3 to DVD#4 that would have just been asking for trouble.

As it is, I think I took enough liberties renaming The Great Heep to Droids 4. I should probably just have left it as they did with the VHS and not assigned it a tape #. I'm not going to change it now, though.

To answer a previous question, a generous person has agreed to take care of the dissemination of these discs. Once he's set it all up it will be annonced here in this thread.

retartedted said:

Yeah, the Great Heep got a little bit more than the rest, as well as more color adjustments to look more like the rest of the NTSC episodes.  But to be honest, I really didn't apply all that much.  I think that your particular deck just has some really good sharpening capabilities. 

There is no doubt that there is more detail in the PAL tapes.  It really is a shame about the blended NTSC->PAL conversion. 

OMG, I've been referring to you as Retarded Ted when that's not what your nick is! No insult intended. I really thought that was your nick. Sorry.

Just for fun, here's a comparison of retartedted's version of Great Heep, which he had to standards convert from the same PAL release I used. I'm starting to suspect the subdued colour in my versions is just the playback characteristics of my particular VHS player (a Philips cheapo) and may not be source related after all.

Anyway, here you can see my RAW PAL captures and retartedted's noise-reduced NTSC conversion. To be fair, the noise reduction is more obvious on the Great Heep episode so I believe he applied a heavier setting than on his native NTSC transfers.

RetartedTed: Top, VideoCollector: Bottom

The aim in capturing was to do as little as possible to the original files. It was always assumed there'd be some clean-up applied later, but in the end I decided to release the transfers as-is. I just wanted to make them available.

1. The capture was done using the Packard Bell ehr2080 DVD/HD-recorder, meaning real-time MPEG2 encoding @ constant 9.5 Mbit/s.
2. Trimming of files using VideoReDo.
3. TMPEGEnc: 2-pass Re-encoding to variable bitrate with an average of 6 Mbit/s to fit the required number of episodes per disc. The masking of noisy edges was also performed at this stage. Just masking, no resizing of the original pixels. Encoded audio as well in 224kbit/s AC3.
4. DVD-authoring using TMPEG DVD-author. Simple track menu with fonts and colours corresponding to the cover artwork.

We all assume the PAL tapes are converted from NTSC due to the blended frames. They do look "different" from the NTSC versions I've seen. Just different, not necessarily better. The episodes have more subdued colour than the NTSC sources I've seen, and may just be a little sharper, but nothing major. Some of the PAL tapes have less pronounced edge-enhancement halos than the NTSC versions though. At this point it's all conjecture, as we don't know what format the animation studio delivered their masters in. Odds are it was NTSC originally and all PAL versions are standards converted.

Pictures > Words:

Here are a few grabs using MediaPlayerClassic, comparing Retardedted's MP4s to my raw MPEG2s. The added resolution of the PAL standard means those images are bigger. These are not the exact same frames but you get the idea. Note that the PALs also look horizontally squeezed compared to the NTSC versions, something we saw on the Ewoks tapes as well.

I'm including an example of the PALs blended frames too.

lpd said:

Im very interested, collector how do they hold up to retardtedted's project, picture and sound wise?

LOL, they probably don't hold up at all. Retardedted did an amazing job with noise-reducing, deinterlacing and stabilizing his NTSC sources. I'm sure a raw PAL capture can't compete.

retartedted said:

Damn, that artwork looks slick.  I like it.

Thanks Ted.

Not sure how much call there is for this set after you came out with yours, but at least I got to do the DVD thing. Ha ha. :-)