althor1138

This would be pretty awesome to have access to the vbi data. I mean, yeah, if you were to auto-ivtc using this method you'd end up with a few bad frames here and there but for auto-ivtc of a time-compressed ld wouldn't it be the best possible way to get rid of the frames you don't need? Oh wait. CLV discs don't have white flags do they? Well, it would still be a pretty easy way to ivtc CAV discs even if you ended up with some wonky frames from bad mastering.

Haha. Yeah I didn't even think about that. 

Sorry about the white level. If you compare the histograms between the HF9G and R7G it seems evident that the R7G is the winner by a mile. The checkerboarding is pretty minimal compared to most captures I've seen and even the Theater750 checkerboards  on a scene once in a while. I'll bet the 5 capture average will alleviate most of it.  Once the reference disc gets here I'll run both machines through the tests but I can already tell that the R7G is superior.

The 2000 Japanese SE has LD-G so I'll at least grab the subtitles off of it. Interesting that the frames match the TB and G'kar.  I did notice while IVTC'ing the US 97SE that there were a couple of oddities.

Once it gets here I'll do a quick cap of the Episode II preview and put it on usenet for you. Maybe even with sound since I have a bit-perfect setup now!

The Pioneer Reference Disc is in the mail and should be here soon but in the meantime I decided to share a 4 minute sample of what the R7G looks like. This is a single pass s-video capture with the comb filter set to 50% strength that is getting fed into the Theater750HD.

I haven't had much time to look it over but it seems like there is much less noise or interference on this player/output combo than on the hf9g composite output. The picture seems sharper. There is some checkerboarding on the first frame of a scene change. Overall, I think this is a bit better than the previous setup and with the 5 capture average method it might be a lot better. Thoughts?

BTW, I just did a quick manual IVTC so there might be cadence changes throughout, if only for a frame or two.  Also, i forgot to extend the luma white point while capturing so yeah there is some blown out whites but this should give a general idea of what the player's output is like.

R7G TEST SW JSC

I hear that there's an Australian guy around here that takes these worthless things off of people's hands without charging much :).

Thanks for the feedback guys. Also, thanks for confirming that the new posts are downloadable. 

With that being said, at this point, I have to halt all capturing because I've just acquired an R7G and I feel like it might be better for capturing than the HF9G. I want to figure out which machine is best for capturing before going any further.

I believe that capturing with the s-video from this unit might be the way to go actually. I have a copy of ggv1069 on the way.  Let's hope I get this one. The last two times I tried to get it off LDDB and got ripped off.  This time I had my sister order it from pioneer and she's going to forward it to me here in Europe.

Once it gets here I'm going to do some tests and then post some clips here and with the help of some expert eyes we can determine which settings/player to use for future captures. I plan on doing 3 captures for each output(composite/s-video) on each machine using 0%,50%, and 100% as the comb filter strength. The Y/C dnr and the sharpening will always be turned off during these test captures. 

For the raw captures I will always leave the laser rot alone but for future BD releases I was thinking about doing a 1 pass manual "dirt" removal and target not dirt but laser rot.  I can pretty easily make it through about 5-10 minutes of footage a night just flipping through frames.  Of course with 1 pass and 1 set of eyes I might miss the occasional  blip but it won't erase any buttons or pupils, etc.

EDIT: BTW, will soon be adding THX-1138 to the list on the first post as long as it arrives here safely.

EDIT2: The 2000 Japanese pressing of the 97 SE's is on the way as well. I don't know if this has anything to offer but I've never heard of anybody preserving it and I figure a 2000 pressing might be better than a '97 pressing.

The 97SE trilogy raw files are now available.  I'm moving to another apartment in December so I might not be around for a few weeks.

JSC is next up in the chute.  It should be simple since Mallwalker has already IVTC'ed it.  My new captures will just have to be aligned up with my old ones and then I can just feed it to his ivtc script. That's the theory anyway.

BTW. I understand that the '92 Mitsubishi pressing of the SWE has DVNR.  Could somebody point out to me a scene or scenes where this is most egregiously present?

I'm scared to ask.  How big will this be in it's entirety?

Alright, I'll continue then. SW97SE should be ready for transmission tomorrow or so.

althor1138 said:

EDIT: These are raw files with no audio btw.

OK, as a test, I've made esb97se available at absw.  It is all 5 captures averaged together, manually ivtc'ed, and cropped to 720x288.

The sides are posted individually instead of lumped together in 1 massive rar set. Each side has it's own header name and par set.  Nzbindex seems to not care about filenames or headernames so I'd suggest getting it elsewhere unless you want to just nab it all at once anyway.

Since each side stays around 10GB this way, there should not be any par problems like the 50GB rar sets I was trying to post last year. Somewhere over the 30GB mark the par's get screwed up.

Anyway, if everybody is positive about this method I can continue with it.

 Is anybody interested in this? I'm done with sw97se now as well but I'm not going to up all of these if nobody wants them lol.

I saw Interstellar last night.  I admit that when I walked in that I thought matthew mcconaughey would ruin it for me but I rather quickly was able to suspend disbelief. For me, the story was quite interesting.  It was the quietest theater I think I have ever sat in (it was packed).  Not a peep for the whole 3 hours. This is maybe the first sci-fi film that I've really enjoyed in a very long time. Anybody else seen it yet?

I'm not sure. I just know that for me it was very prominent on the tantive.

Here is a  couple random shots.

Gout on the top. DC on the bottom.

It is not present in the DC.  I can't say for sure about the faces.  I only own esb(faces).

Can anybody explain the crazy amount of grain present in the tantive hallway shootout scenes on the gout?  It's not present on any other release afaik.

@ Hairy_Hen.  PM sent.

EDIT: These are raw files with no audio btw.

OK, as a test, I've made esb97se available at absw.  It is all 5 captures averaged together, manually ivtc'ed, and cropped to 720x288.

The sides are posted individually instead of lumped together in 1 massive rar set. Each side has it's own header name and par set.  Nzbindex seems to not care about filenames or headernames so I'd suggest getting it elsewhere unless you want to just nab it all at once anyway.

Since each side stays around 10GB this way, there should not be any par problems like the 50GB rar sets I was trying to post last year. Somewhere over the 30GB mark the par's get screwed up.

Anyway, if everybody is positive about this method I can continue with it.

Does anybody know what the red stuff might be that is covering the m in Imperial?  I thought it looked like a drop of blood maybe. First time I've noticed it. It's only there for a single frame.

The audio sizes work out to be this size in pcm/ac3:

2.0 mix     1.25 GB

5.1 DTS     4.1 GB

5.1 AC3     around 350 MB

That's around 5.5 gigabytes for audio.

The menus,etc. should be under 1gb

This should leave at least 18gb available for the x264 encode, so it seems like 720p should be totally ok. I guess re-encoding the 5.1 ac3 to pcm would be a bad idea.

This is for esb97se but should be comparable for the other 2 films.

Ok, I'm going to scratch the tcomb method and go with the 5 capture average method to alleviate most of the dot crawl. The results are way more reliable and better looking. Thankfully I didn't sell the laserdisc player like I planned to. I might go back and apply this to the JSC set too now that I've got it figured out.

Since the 97se will be a 1 film per disc kind of thing, would it be better to have 480p or 720p? If done at 480p I think I could fit the LD 2.0, LD 5.1, and the theatrical 5.1 DTS all as PCM which I believe should provide the best quality.

@Hair_Hen, I've figured out how to sum to mono but could you explain to me how to figure out if the summing process maintains unity or causes gain increase? 

Thanks for the tips guys.  I've now tried both methods and repal seems to do the best in this situation but it's not perfect.

After some deliberation, I've decided to just leave it as it is.  I'm going to be encoding these and putting them on blu ray so I think leaving them in an NTSC format will be best for compatibility and it doesn't look bad during playback to me. If the fields weren't blended I'd probably invest the time into converting them back to PAL.

Btw, I noticed a couple of scenes with really high motion that QTGMC couldn't handle with default settings.  I changed search to search=5 and searchparam to searchparam=32 and it worked just fine so it seems the default motion analysis settings for mvtools isn't quite robust enough to catch really high motion. You can get search=5 if you use the placebo preset but searchparam never goes over 2 unless you set it manually.  To me this means if something moves more than 2 blocks in between frames, then it is not processed properly and you get ghosting or blurring.  Maybe I'm misunderstanding the documentation. Otherwise, qtgmc is a really great tool imo.

Here is a 100 frame sample. I didn't see any blending but I could be wrong.

EDIT: I don't know. I believe there is blending going on.  I'm just not that familiar enough to say yes for sure.

This is somewhat related so I thought i'd ask here.  I have some violin concerto's on laserdisc that were assumedly filmed in 25i because they are mostly all German.  They have however been converted to 29.97i for the laserdisc release. I don't see any blending just interlacing. 

My question is how could I get back to 25i? Basically, can I do this:

25i --> 29.97i --> 25i  ?

Well, it's weighed in dollars in the states which makes it almost infintessimely light since dollars are basically only of imaginary worth nowadays.

I have the 2002 7 disc boxset. It claims to have been digitally remastered but it has some terrible dot crawl baked into some scenes.  Most notably, the opening credits and something terrible has been done to the end credits as well.  

I've just recently found out there was a 2009 5 disc boxset released by Fremantle media which is a British company.  Apparently, this boxset is PAL and has been digitally remastered and restored. Whatever that means. 

Does anybody have any information on this 2009 release? Is the quality better than the 2002 release or is it the same thing in a different box?  Is it PAL or just region0 NTSC? Does the 2009 contain more up to date science updates? ETC.

Any information would be greatly appreciated.  If it is determined that the 2009 boxset is of greater quality I will definitely purchase it because it's only 13 pounds on Amazon and it's one of my favorite TV shows ever.