althor1138

Since there is already a couple of transfers of the SWE Technidisc floating around in the ether I'm currently more interested in the PAL releases atm because they offer better y/c separation and a bit more detail than the ntsc releases. Also, like Antcufaalb says the rainbowing is baked in.  I think Mysycamore also posted some screens where there was substantial crosstalk happening too. Maybe that was just his pressing/ld player though.

Granted, my capture card has some issues with scene changes that have similar luma values but other than that it works quite well on PAL material it seems. Unless you do a stop-frame inspection it's pretty hard to catch with the eye even knowing that it happens.

EDIT:  Luma low-passing also seems to have benefits from what I've seen.  It definitely reduces noise and dot crawl without losing detail until you go below 420 tvl.  Pal theoretically should be ok at 440 tvl but I notice detail loss at anything under 500 so I don't go under that. 

It is a 5 capture average and has been upscaled to 720p whereas the BD25 was a single capture and 480i. It also includes the japanese subtitles in the bottom black bar.

schorman13 said:

Most PAL sources were not pitch corrected.  Are you sure you can't just slow down the audio?

"source.AssumeSampleRate(42294).ResampleAudio(44100)"

 I'm not sure.  I just know that this release has been dubbed in french so I just assumed that they have recorded it at 25fps because of that.

To be honest, I have a hard time hearing the difference between the pitch adjusted version and the normal slowed down version but I know that other people have much more discerning ears than me so I figure I'd better try to get it right.

I'm in the middle of the french thx release and have a question about audio. I'm assuming that for this release the audio needs to be slowed down to 24fps but retain the same pitch as 25fps.  What is the best/easiest way to achieve this?  Is it possible in avisynth?

I'm truly sorry for your loss.

I'm glad you were able to solve it. I know I'd have still been stuck counting fields.

I'm all about strict conformance so I guess there will be some black frames introduced to make it all fit right. It will be the same situation with the Japanese P&S releases since they have seemingly replaced the binocular shots with 29.97 fps binocular overlays onto the 24fps film footage for whatever reason.

I will definitely enjoy being able to finally watch the time-compressed version without stuttering or interlacing though that's for sure.  Thanks again for your time and effort!  I'll try to get it all put together and on usenet asap!

Okay, I'm not disputing the fact that video is stored on laserdiscs as composite video. 

I'm aware of the basic signal flow inside of a typical laserdisc player. The fact remains that the x0,x9, and r7g will pretty much always produce the best real world results when capturing via the s-video input as long as you have the comb filter settings right when capturing.

I'm not sure that you understood that when I say that the rf signal is captured from a test point using Happycube's method that this means you are intercepting the signal after it has left the pickup but before it hits any analog filters much less the digital tbc/comb.

If you come up with some good results please feel to share them here with us.  I know there was a guy on another forum that had posted the exact same method you describe of tapping the digital tbc output on a player and running it into a sdi converter then to a pc.

He never posted any results though and that kind of soldering is typically beyond the average joe such as myself so that kind of mod will probably not be attempted by me unless it turns out to be the absolute best possible way of capturing a laserdisc lol.

On another note: Rotj-1478-85 is gout-synced. I just need to figure out how to crop the subtitles and include them in the black bars of the final encode.  I've been working a lot lately or this would have already been done.  Hopefully by next week it'll be on usenet.

RandomHajile said:

Hi there, first post but wanted to say that would it not be better if the capture from which ever LD player is made from the COMPOSITE video output...

and not the SVHS/S-Video output.

as in the video stored on laserdiscs is composite video.

and using the S-Video outputs are just the composite video being processed by the LD players late 80s/early 90s comb-filter tech...

so the best capture chain would be the composite video direct from the player (ideally modded with a true 75ohm BNC video connection) instead of capturing a processed S-Video output that will be processed again??

i have a 925 (and 909 and theta player) and as good as those S-Video outputs were, it all depended on if your TV had a weaker Composite video comb filter.

thanks tho for this thread as watching SW on laser ticks some boxes for old timers like myself :)  

There are many other individuals here who are much more qualified to talk about this than I but I'll try to answer you the best I can based upon what I've learned over the past few years.

When doing a traditional laserdisc capture which involves using a video output from the player plugged into a capture card it entirely depends on the type of laserdisc player you have.  If I was using an X0,X9, or R7G I would capture the s-video output because that probably is going to give better results than any capture card.

Anything less than these three players and I would use the composite output and plug it into the best capture card I could find and see what happens.

The other possibility is to use Happycube's software which basically uses a modified driver to turn some capture cards that use the Connexant cx23880 chip into a sort of software defined radio that can capture the entire rf signal directly from a test point and digitize it for later use.

He also has developed a software decoder which can take the digitized signal and decode everything entirely in the digital domain. It is currently a work in progress but already produces very good quality that rivals even the top players.  This has the most potential for making the best laserdisc preservations imo because you can use basically any laserdisc player and achieve high quality results.

Thanks for the update Mallwalker. It's always fascinating to see the quirky little things about each different release.  BTW, side2 seems to look good to me. I haven't gone through each frame of course but I did watch it through in real-time and didn't notice anything out of order.

It's a shame that side1 has some audio and chroma noise towards the end. I will probably step outside of my normal modus operandi and apply some chroma denoising to it just to reduce the flickering.  I wonder if the cbs/fox pressing has less noise than the plain old fox release that I have.

It sounds like you should go check out the wiki page for avisynth and start from the ground up.  They have tutorials etc. for you to work with there. It was confusing to me too in the beginning.

kk650 said:

althor1138, I can't thank you enough for creating these "COLD" editions, they have been incredibly helpful in working out how to go about regrading the Original Trilogy. I hope that they'll be of as much help to everybody here working on colour correcting these prints as they have been to me.

 Thanks!  I'm just glad they have been useful! They certainly do reveal some oddities amongst the releases.

So I'm kind of tinkering with manual ivtc of 1130-80(fox P&S/time compressed). Like Mallwalker says the first part can be done successfully with this:

side1.assumetff().separatefields().trim(1,0).selectevery(61,0,1,2,3,5,6,7,8,10,11,12,13,15,16,17,18,20,21,22,23,24,25,27,28,29,30,32,33,34,35,37,38,39,40,41,42,44,45,46,47,49,50,51,52,54,55,56,57,59,60).weave()

However, when I get to the point where the droids walk into the hut and it cuts to c-3p0's oil bath I can't get it back on track. I've counted up to about 120 fields and it seems to jive with the cadence up above but it's definitely not right for some reason. Is it possible that this cadence instead of being 61 fields long is maybe like 200 or 300 or more?  Is anybody willing to take a crack at it? I probably will work on it more after I get done with the swe for esb and rotj.  Something tells me this old P&S will be a bear to properly gout-sync though.

Change the numerator/denumerator values to achieve the desired output fps.  This 60000/1001 for example will give you 59.94 fps.  25/1 will give you 25 fps, etc.    Mileage might vary.

numerator=60000

denumerator=1001

source=avisource()

super=source.MSuper()

backward_vec= MAnalyse(super,isb=true)

forward_vec= MAnalyse(super,isb= false)

interpolated= source.MFlowFps(super, backward_vec, forward_vec, num=numerator, den= denumerator, ml=100)

return(interpolated)

The mitsubishi and pioneer pressings are on my to do list after p&s rotj is done. There is no time frame but manual ivtc is finished on rotj and I'll probably do the final encode this weekend.

Yeah. I had an "x" next to the ones that are done but it didn't look that great. I do plan on doing something similar to what you suggested sometime in the future.

ESB P&S 1425-84 is now available at a.b.sw.

At this point, it seems it may be awhile before ld-decode can handle digital audio although Happycube is still working on it and seems to be more and more hopeful with each update.

For the time being, I believe I will capture the video with ld-decode and use other sources for the audio.  Thanks to people like Schorman and Hairy_Hen there are many sources available that are gout sync'ed already. Schorman's laserdisc audio archive contains bit perfect audio for many of the exact ld's I'm trying preserve so most of the time the exact audio I need would be available.

ROTJ 1478-80 is next.

Hi. I'm currently on vacation until August. I live in Sweden but I have the capability to capture pal and ntsc laserdiscs at the moment. I'm not sure just yet about how to capture closed captioning but with Happy³'s ld-decode software I have full access to the vbi which is where that information is stored.  I believe I have found some software that can extract closed captions from the vbi into an srt file but I have yet to test it.  I'll be back from vacation around August and can try it then.

I'd be willing to capture some discs for special reasons such as it's not available or there's something super special about the laserdisc.  I have to say that my priority at this time is to preserve all of the Star Wars laserdiscs first though. 

Yeah. Too bad that the comb filter is not adjustable because I imagine that turning the adaptivity to favor 2d a little more than 3d would probably eliminate this entirely.

LD-decode has a good 2d filter already implemented that could be used though. To be honest I'm not sure PAL really needs 3D comb filtering because the output from LD-Decode looks as good or better than this.

Are there any PAL compatible 3DCF's in avisynth?  Tcomb does not work with PAL.

YUP!  Here’s an example of the 3DCF failing. This only happens around scene changes as far as I can tell.

This is S315 -> composite out -> Theater750HD.

Here’s the raw video (104 MB). The link expires after 7 days.

I will take a look at mega.co.nz and see what they are all about.

Here’s a test of the Theater750HD comb filter with PAL material.

Pioneer dv-360 -> Composite Out -> Theater750HD-PCIE.

Here’s the raw video (390 MB).  If somebody knows of a place to host this longer please let me know.  This link dies after 7 days.

Star Wars P&S 1130-84 Laserdisc is now available at a.b.sw.  This was decoded with ld-decode. I think it looks alright for a 30 year old laserdisc.

There's a bit of rot here and there and the audio might crackle once in awhile. This is a preservation though and not a restoration so I made no attempts to clean up anything. During the gout-syncing I just added black frames if frames were missing. This laserdisc apparently had some sort of analog video noise reduction applied so the scene change artifacts are in the source.

EDIT: I'm going to start on ESB (1425-84) next but first I'm doing some comb filter testing and then I'm on vacation until August so it'll be awhile before it's ready.

@ Poita:  I glanced through the X9 service manual and it seems to have the same test point as the 5xx-6xx laserdisc players located on the main board.  It should be labeled CN106.  It has 11 pins.  Pin 3 should be RF out and pin 8 is GND. Here’s a few pictures of my modded s315.  It should be just about the same procedure for you to tap your x9.  BTW, the test point probably terminates at 50 ohms so you can use a normal BNC connector and 50 ohm coax for all of the connections.

The housing I used is a 10 pin AMP MOD II housing with 2.54mm pitch and AWG 26-22 pin connectors…

Thanks for the information.  I will give that a try. I have already installed bifrost awhile ago but haven't played with it. I do something similar with tcomb but since it doesn't have an alt clip parameter I do this:

s1d1=avisource(1d comb output from ld-decode)

s1d2=avisource(2d comb output from ld-decode)

s1d3=s1d1.tcomb(2,4,5,5,6,false,12)

s1d3mask=s1d1.tcomb(2,4,5,5,6,true,12).greyscale().invert()

s1adapt=overlay(s1d3,s1d2,mask=s1d3mask,mode="blend",opacity=1)

It's kind of a hack but works like it should.

So with bifrost it might be best to use a clip which has already been 2d combed? If so, a person could use tcomb/a good 2d comb to eliminate dot crawl and then bifrost to eliminate rainbowing.

Yes, please up it somewhere. If the LD and VHS line up pretty good the subtitles might be pretty easy to erase.  

SilverWook said:

Is the LD from a true PAL master though, and not a conversion from NTSC?

 I'm not sure.  This one seems a bit dark to me but it has more detail and less blown-out whites than the official youtube version.

It might be since all I had to do was drop the fps from 25 to 23.976 to achieve progressive frames with the correct running time.

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

AFAIR, the PAL version quality is lower than the Japanese LD... and, to wipe out subtitles, a PAL VHS tape is needed!

I just checked ebay and there are a few from the UK right now.  I'll put a bid on one but I don't actually have a vhs deck anymore.  I might be able to borrow one though.