g-force said:
This is all very exciting, csd79! Unfortunately, there is so much compression on that dropbox clip, it's hard to gauge any quality from it.
I compressed that clip with x264 crf 17, so the final DVD will not look any better I'm afraid.
Other than the last frame of side B, I found the following problems:
- the first frame on side C is out of cadence
- there are two mixed frames (consisting of fields from different frames) in the Yavin battle
- my copy has a problem on side C where Vader is chasing the Y-Wings in the trench: there are 10 or so frames with one field shifted vertically. Not all problematic fields show up in every capture.
M. Verta questioned whether the GOUT crawl was genuine. I think there are no such concerns about Team-1's scan.
Also, this way the final product will be GOUT-free.
msycamore said:
Yeah, that's the spirit! :) And no, this won't discourage me sharing the improved one I did. It will perhaps even encourage me to finally making that color corrected version I also had my plans on, if only to make it different from csd79's upcoming upload.
...
Btw, is that herringbone pattern talked about in my thread something you have seen on your copy? I've yet to get any confirmation if this issue is player related or not.
Nice to hear that you'll finish your own color corrected version. The samples you posted looked nice.
I haven't seen the herringbone artifact in my captures. Here is a frame comparison (probably not the same frame, but I've checked the whole shot).
Msycamore:
this:
Chewtobacca said: May I ask what you plan to do about the Tantive orange errors? I absolutely hate them, but some people don't mind them, so it's no big deal if they're staying. (The JSC doesn't have them, as you probably know.)
They are already gone.
Feallan: Actually, Msycamore's capture is the very reason I'm doing this. When it was released it was the first time that the look of SW on video really resonated with me, so I owe him. But I knew it could be better if captured with color calibration in mind etc. I've never even saw a real-life LD player before I bought one this year to do this. So he'll get credit when I'm releasing this capture. I'm also looking forward for his v2.
Chewtobacca: if you were refering to Andreas pan-up idea, AFAIK the JSC and this pressing are two different transfers, so they need to be registered first.
I'll add some details about the equipment and method used to the first post.
Also, TeamNegative1 kindly allowed me to use their transfer of the original crawl, so the preview is already obsolete. :)
I’m working on a preservation of the 1993 widescreen LD of Star Wars (Technidisc). Video processing is done by two passes of Avisynth and one round in After Effects. The Avisynth part is basically done, as is some of the AE work, and I’d need someone to check the video for bad frames, IVTC errors and such. Below is a link to a preview in final candidate state. Anyone who is interested in the ‘beta test’ please drop me a pm.
I’m expecting the final release by the end of June, via spleen.
Thanks!
https://www.dropbox.com/s/pzqgp6sbj9d6m8p/sw-preview.mkv
Some technical details:
LD player: Pioneer CLD-2950, connected via s-video
TV tuner: Hauppauge WinTV HVR-1250
5 captures were made using the Lagarith codec. In the first Avisynth pass, the captures were averaged, and the following were applied to the whole material:
The second phase consisted of filters with different setting for different parts of the film:
In the final phase, I’m doing scene-specific color tweaks and manual cleanup and damage removal in After Effects.
Some parts of the Avisynth scripts were inspired by G-force’s GOUT scripts. Also, I used Msycamore’s observations about the changing aspect ratio.
For audio, I’ll use the theatrical stereo from the Japanese P&S LD (from Schorman’s LD Audio Archive)
I've been searching for these as well since that Jedi-recording appeared on a hungarian torrent site. There was a sample from the narrated version of Empire on YouTube but it isn't available anymore. (I saw it in the 80's, never owned it).
Have you tried playing the extracted videos in iTunes? It requires authorization which seems logical, but even then I wasn't able to play them. Which is sad, as Requiem (ab)uses iTunes itself to make a DRM-free copy.
Oh I see, that perhaps means that they are from a ProRes-encoded source.
Unfortunatelly all available options for DRM removal seem to include re-encoding the videos. Have you tried to do it on a Mac?
I thought the videos in the iTunes version are compressed with mpeg4, what does ProRes have to do with it? That is an intermediate codec with low compression.
A possible way to simle it down would be to export all your settings as a single 3D color lookup table. The HALD lookup table is a simple image, and I believe you can apply it when you encode a video with FFMpeg.
The funny thing is, the books are available in the US iBooks Store, but I cannot buy them with my UK-bound AppleID. They are not available in the UK store.
As the Kindle format uses non-standard parameters in the <audio> and <video> tags to designate the source file, I had to change those to actual paths. I apologize if some of the embeded stuff is not playable in the browser, as I edited the latter two books half-asleep (after 2 shifts of work). Strangely enough, Chrome has a bug that prevents it from play some of the shorter audio clips. If one of the clips does not play, it sometimes helps if you refresh the page in the browser and click play again.
I'm seeding the Kindle version on spleen. This is my first upload, I hope it's working OK. It would be interesting to know if there's any difference with the iTunes versions. I'm unable to check it out as of now, as I need a new AppleID after I moved country.
I copied the files from the iPad to the Mac using the PhoneView program. Look for the file contents of the Kindle app. The audio/video content is in a separate 'Media' directory, not in the azw file itself.
I was able to save the content of the ROTJ book from an iPad to my Mac, but the videos are only SD. Is it possible that there are higher resolution versions?
Msycamore, are you using G-force's de-rainbow script on your new version?
During that time, I had a chat with the main colorist (whose name is escaping me, sorry!- it's in the DVD Easter Eggs somewhere) who did Star Wars and Jedi for the DVDs. (Someone else was in charge of Empire).
He posts in Steven Hoffman's forum as Vidiot.
AntcuFaalb said:
Harmy: Don't forget that -1's scans are missing a lot of detail due to their use of a camera with a Bayer Filter.
I believe it was stated on -1's private blog that they made the capture on a higher resolution and downconverted on the fly before cleanup.
Sorry, need to work on my acronyms. I meant Pan & Scan.
_,,,^..^,,,_: The method of extracting detail from the DeEd frames after registration is similar to what's described here. I made the first sample frames in Photoshop, and the video sample is made with this Avisynth script:
tech = ImageSource(fix\tech/04d.png", start=20, fps=23.976).Trim(0,609)
reg = ImageSource("output\test%04d.png", start=6, fps=23.976).Trim(0,609)
techblur = tech.GCBlur().GCBlur()
reg_ovl = reg.Invert().GCBlur().GCBlur()
reg_detail = Overlay(reg, reg_ovl, opaity=0.5, mode="Blend")
hardlight = Overlay(techblur, reg_detail, mode="HardLight")
softlight = Overlay(techblur, reg_detail, mode="SoftLight")
luma = Overlay(softlight, hardlight, opacity=0.75)
result = Overlay(tech.ConvertToYV12(), luma.ConvertToYV12(), mode="Luma")
return StackVertical(tech.ConvertToYV12(), result)
################
function GCBlur(clip input)
{
return input.ConvertToRGB32().GeneralConvolution(0, "
10 10 10 10 10
10 10 10 10 10
10 10 16 10 10
10 10 10 10 10
10 10 10 10 10", 256, False)
}
The GeneralConvolution function in Avisynth seems to serve this method much better than Photoshop's blur filter. Looking at the samples in my first post now, they don't look convincing at all.
msycamore: I know you are a perfectionist so I hope you don't take it as an insult when I say: I think you did a very god job with what you had. :) Seriously, your DVD shows more of what SW could or should be color-wise than any other video version, so that's what makes it valuable. The only other transfer of SW that has validity in it's color palette IMO is the early PNS with the soft skin tones (after lowering the gamma), but that is a re-interpretation of the SW look for video, while the Tech is closer to the real thing. Thanks for releasing it on DVD!
Video sample: link.
I uploaded the program itself if anyone wants to look at it. For instructions see the readme.txt. Link.
poita said:
That is interesting work, I have some registration routines I can share with you going forwards with this.
Are you attempting a super-resolution output from the result?
Two different telecines will capture details that is missed on each on its own.
Fine detail data may land on a scanline on one transfer and not on the other, and vice-versa. It should be possible to recover both lots of data and end up with a better capture than either of the originals at a higher resolution.
Registering many versions and multiplexing them in a super-resolution manner would also be possible. I went with the DeEd because it has all the details you'll ever have with this movie, and you have to do only one registration pass to get it. :)
I'll have to do a bit of a clean-up on the code, and after that I will upload it somewhere for anyone who may want to try it.
Jetrell Fo: Do you mean to detect differences in frame count between different versions? I think doing that "by hand" would be much faster.
You_Too: The final result of this experiment would only be a "Technidisc Deluxe": adding detail from a HD source to the Technidisc. I'm not sure if accumulating detail from multiple SD sources would give us any more than we have with the GOUT now, ironically. The GOUT itself could also be added to the mix of course, if we could find a way to cancel out any DVNR-plagued data.
New samples:
I re-registered this frame from Moth3r's PAL DVD, Alignment is much better. I also did some refinements in the composition phase (when the detail is added to the Technidisc frame) so it doesn't look so crude now as with some of the first batch of samples did.
Two new frames:
I'm working on a video sample now.