ZigZig

AveryADiaz said:

If you’ll indulge in my stupidity for a moment. How is this possible? I know the prequels had 35mm prints for the theaters however the films had a 2K Digital Intermediate. I’m a little confused.

Actually, the first Hollywood film to utilize a digital intermediate process from beginning to end was “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” in 2000 (according to Wikipedia), one year after TPM.

I am really touched beyond words by your donation proposals, you are real gentlemen/gentlewomen!
A huge thank you.

But I don’t want to receive any money, you are not responsible for my hard drive crash, and this community has already given me a lot in terms of amazing information, learning, file sharing and friendship!

My external HD with ALL my preservation work, including the current captures of the SE 97 Laserdiscs (JP and US) just crashed. I lost everything.

I need now a couple of weeks to find the money and buy a new HD, then restart the complete capture process (all disks had been captured 3 times each, then manually detelecined)…

Sorry for this unforeseen delay, I’m pretty desperate.

Is there a moderator on this forum ?
Why are those rude idiots not banned ?

yotsuya said:

Can someone do this to the briefing room Wedge and the entire Jabba scene in ANH.

Could it be possible to replace Jabba by Jar Jar ?

Hi emanswfan,
Happy to see you in better shape!

I’m just asking you, AGAIN, to talk about your points in your own topic. Last time, and the time before last time, and the time before the time before last time, you made topics totally unreadable by continuously posting things that had nothing to do with the subject. A moderator has already asked you to stop doing that. And yet you start again.
So please, create your own topic about the radio drama, and let this “Tosche Station” topic talk about Tosche Station.

Ronster, please stop pollute a topic AGAIN. Your elucubrations have NOTHING to do with this interesting topic.

https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/1323844

oojason said:

Ronster - I suggest you give ZigZig’s post above a read through - and take it in.

I am sure everyone appreciates your earlier apologies in the thread - yet you seem to have moved on to assembly scenes since…

Again…

adywan said:

Have you even watched the deleted scene ?

Of course no…

Hi ShiftyEyes,

I did get the copy of the 2000 release.

Currently, I have finished capturing the original US version (in 3 passes) and the JP 2000 version (in 3 passes also), from my HLD-X0 via the comb filter of an ADV-7842 card.

I plan to now capture the PAL (UK and FR) versions from an LDV-4300D.

When everything is captured, I will then be able to offer an “ultimate” version with a mix of the PAL and NTSC ("PANuP) versions.

Cheers

emanswfan said:

Sadly, not really. I feel guilty every time I’m on here and I’m not showing progress, but like my mental health has been bad since the lockdowns and losing my job. At first I was happy that I had all the extra free time to work on this project, but now I’m just ready to be done with all the shit going on in the world.

But as soon as I’m feeling better and have more stability in my personal life, more samples of TPM will be available for feedback and soon after a Beta release.

And also I really need a new PC to be able to even think about doing a proper high quality HEVC 4K 10 bit render.

I Emanswfan,
I know exactly how you feel, I also go through there…

Be sure that lots of people like you, including on this forum, and that your work is admired by many.
Don’t put the pressure on yourself, these are difficult times to go through but that it will be better afterwards.

FTFY

staracipa said:

I understand buddy, you registered in 2017 and you did not take part in the Peter Harmy project but you use it! Projects Harmy’s Despecialized Edition, Laserschwert Despecialized Edition German, Yotsuba Despecialized Edition French it is only for the polite registered on the forum…

Thanks mate!

SilverWook said:

Never thought anything good could come out of this bantha poodoo year! Congrats on getting a scanner. I hope you’ll take a photo or two of it so people can see what one of these beasts looks like.

Thank you, I will definitely take a photo or two!

In fact, I was “lucky” to be fired by my employer during the Covid-related confinement, and he was ordered to pay me large severance pay.
So, in agreement with my wife (obviously), I decided to have fun with this money, in order to turn this ordeal into something positive! But it becomes clear that the Phantom Menace is an expensive adventure 😃

Here’s some news, more than a year after the start of the project …

The Parisian laboratory in charge of scanning the entire film in 4k, under professional conditions, showed a lot of slowness and encountered a lot of problems … until it was closed and unable to continue working because of the Covid-19.

As a result, at the time of writing, only one of the 7 reels has been partially scanned… and it took more than one year to achieve this weak result.

So I decided to resume scanning myself, and I just ordered a Retroscan Mark-II scanner which seems to give very good results on a fairly competitive price.

The scanner is expected to be shipped within the next couple of months, so it can be reasonably expected that everything will be scanned and shared here by the end of 2020.

My apologies for the time this all takes. It is a beautiful adventure, strewn with pitfalls!

At the same time, I’m continuing the despecialized version. A v1 was made but I prefer not to share it and wait until I have the full 35mm scan to integrate the despecialized scenes in better quality.

Hi Cgf382,
Thank you, that looks very nice!

Thanks Schorman, your opinion is, as always, valuable!
I feel the same about US and original Japanese, but I don’t have (yet) the 2000 re-release. I’ll get it in a couple of days.

About the IRE, the Japanese releases are just perfect on a Japanese player (such as the HLD-X0).
For the US releases, I set the flag “Assume NTSC pedestal” to 1 on my ADV-EVAL7842, it seems to be more accurate than using the D-EXT button of the LD player (I read somewhere that the D-EXT button works in the analog domain, and crushes the blacks). Am I doing right?

A big thank you for all your answers !

I was not at all aware that the Japanese edition of November 2000 had benefited from a better quality… I learn every day on this forum!
So I ordered this Japanese edition from November 2000, and I will capture it meticulously.
Anyway, about color accuracy, I think that the TB version is by far the most accurate we can get.

Do you have an opinion on CLD-D925 vs. LD V4300D? I can’t seem to have a clear opinion about this question…

Hi there,

As some members have asked me after my preservation of TPM laserdiscs, I am currently working on a preservation of the laserdiscs of the Special Edition (1997).
For now, I have planned to preserve and then merge the following versions that I have at home:

• NTSC US (done: average of 3 captures)
• PAL UK (ongoing: average of 3 captures)
• NTSC JP
• PAL FR (English version or French version)

But I have some questions for LD specialists:

1. Are there other laserdiscs of the SE97 worthy of interest (with better quality, SuperNTSC, different bonuses, different audio tracks, CC…)? I am thinking for example of the Japanese reeditions in 2000, which I do not own: do they represent a particular interest compared to the first edition?
2. Is there a dolby EX 6.1 or DTS version on one of the LD versions (I don’t think so)?
3. For NTSC discs, I will obviously use my Pioneer HLD-X0. But for the UK/FR PAL discs, I hesitate between the CLD-D925 and the LD-V4300D (I feel that the CLD-D925 gives more details, but also more noise - but by mixing several captures, I could reduce this noise). Your opinion?
   NB: I also have a CLD-1050 which shows a very natural image with a lot of sharpness and very little noise, but there is a lot of ghosting IMHO…
   What do you think ?

Thank you in advance for your advice which will allow me to offer the best possible preservation!

I feel that using deepfakes is more in the way of filming of George Lucas than Disney: Lucas has always tried to do without “living” actors in his films, and to replace them with image banks or CGI-characters that he could assemble at will during the film editing (IIRC, he speaks frankly about this wish in the bonuses of AotC).

I believe that he would probably use these deepfakes extensively in his new films if he had kept the license of SW. And the result wouldn’t be as ugly as CGI-Leia and CGI-Tarkin, nor as rambling as using Carrie Fisher’s old takes in TRoS and trying to make a story around them.

It’s certainly both scary and revolutionary, but IMHO, that’s the direction cinema will take, as inevitably as the arrival of DV twenty years ago.

NeverarGreat said:

This is the first time that it feels seamless to me.

Exactly!

If it can help to fix the awful CGI characters in Rogue One, it will be a good thing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=byKy9kGnyvo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bC3uH4Xw4Xo

Deepfake technology seems to be really mature now …
I still wonder how long it took to achieve this amazing result!

Hi Vladimon,

There is obviously an issue with your monitor (or with its settings). The dark areas that you don’t see on your screen (as shown on you short video) ARE yet definitely present and visible on my preservation (even they are not visible on your screen).
So yes, it seems that your contrast and colors settings are doing this.

Althor made his preservation with a Diamond Theater750HD PCI-E capture card, which is known to apply automatic levels that denature the image.
So if your monitor is not correctly calibrated, maybe you won’t see the slight “shadows” on my preservation, but you’ll see them on Althor’s one, because his capture card overdid the contrasts and levels.

As a general rule, a properly calibrated monitor is needed to compare finely colors, saturation, hue, contrasts and levels.