msycamore

dark_jedi said:

I just absolutely cannot watch ANY of my old LD transfers, or anyone else's for that matter, they look WAAAY worse than the V3 DVD or the Blu that I am doing now, now does that mean that the V3 and the Blu are perfect, HELL no, but it is better than all this...... :) (Frink says I should start using these, so there was a smiley)

*edit - 1 more thing, at least I can pop in my latest Blu project, and sit down and actually enjoy what I am watching and hearing, I can't say that with any of my LD's, and I have pretty much ALL NTSC LD's.

Yeah, I do agree with you that the GOUT and most work based on it look overall much better than any LD-transfer out there as of right now, to me it's really a tie between it and your excellent JSC, look better and also worse at the same time. ;) It's the possibility of improving the GOUT by taking use of the scenes that do look better in certain transfers that really interest me.

Fantastic! thanks for posting. :)

dark_jedi said:

LOL, some of you guys really LOVE your LD's to be going through all of them like this, I am 100% with Harmy on this one, I will probably never, ever watch an LD capture again, I definitely will never capture one again, but hey, to each their own right? but to me, I think all these screens that get posted in this thread and others look like shit, especially in motion on a large HDTV screen, I do agree with captainsolo above, the 97 SE LD's do look pretty good, a lot better than all these being posted, except for the pink issue he stated.

You do realize that the screen shots that have been posted in this thread that looks like shit is what you have worked on all these months, right? :) The few LD screens posted except the last two on this page are instances were the LD transfers clearly beats the GOUT transfer.

This horrible split lightsaber syndrome in the Definitive Collection transfer of the first film confirms that something was improved when it was time for the Faces release in '95. I now remember seeing this in Dr Gonzo's ANH disc which was sourced from the DC.

Some talk about the differences between the DC and Faces in this blast from the past: http://originaltrilogy.com/forum/topic.cfm/definitive-versuses-faces/topic/2742/

Very nice! it seems the price on flash drives are starting to drop pretty rapidly. :)

Yes, what you do is incredible and very important and also very nice for most fans that just want to have a version to watch in hi-res without the damn crap intruding on their films.

As you know I asked you about the links to your edits, but I must admit that I think I'm so obsessed and purist in my mind when it comes to the first two films that I wouldn't be able to watch your edits without looking at how good you accomplished and de-specialised certain shots or not instead of loosing myself in the "original" so I gave up the thought. It's amazing but I can still lose myself in these films when I watch some of the original versions out there even though I know these films by frame, I really thought that would be impossible especially after the frame by frame obsessiveness in 005's thread. ;)

The biggest reason I cannot watch anything sourced from the 2004 transfer, is the completely destroyed cinematography, I even choose the DVNR of GOUT and low res before that shit. I also know that I am in minority in this thinking. What you do is wonderful though, I love the passion behind your work.

Darth Editous said:

Script was:

gout=imagesource("gout.tga").flipvertical.converttorgb32
cap=imagesource("jsc.tga").flipvertical.converttorgb32
mask=gout.levels(240,1,240,0,255).showgreen
stackvertical(stackhorizontal(gout,cap).reduceby2,fuse(gout,cap,mask))

Fusion plugin is here.

DE

Nice, will check it out. :) I guess it could at least realistically be done on a few short sequences that is problematic in the GOUT if you manage to make them align properly (warping). Am I right about what warping means here? 

Very nice, I always wondered if that was possible with avisynth, could you please post a script example on this? but how the heck do you solve the warping issue?

You also have the '97SE Laserdiscs for many original scenes, I've heard they shouldn't have the smearing which the broadcasts display.

It's really frustrating, the thing is that you could probably make a very solid transfer if you took the best parts of all various LD's as every transfer have its own set of problems, but there's such an massive undertaking if you would and even then you end up with just a solid transfer in LD-resolution.

Maybe George Lucas should release these films in good quality afterall, so we all can enjoy them again. I've heard some companies do such things with old classics. ;)

erri_wan said:

Ok found it. http://www.youtube.com/user/BMTPTrailerCentralV3

Would you care of contacting him Msycamore? You're better than me at these things.

He doesn't have THX trailer on youtube but sure is the same guy.

Am I? :) Don't know about that, do you need an account on youtube in order to contact him? I'll see what I can do...

erri_wan said:

Msycamore I'm watching this film and I'm amazed how much smoother it looks (is that just my impression?) and the audio sync now makes SENSE!

You did an incredible job my friend. I'll see if I can make a trailer soon

Yes, it do look much better compared to the source file, I'm glad you're happy with the improvement. Thank Leo for the VirtualDub filter suggestion.

Moth3r said:

For ESB, generally the NTSC master is better...

Ouch, I thought it wasn't even possible for a transfer to have more DVNR-artifacts than the NTSC Empire. Almost every scene on Dagobah and Cloud City is horribly affected, especially when Luke first meet Yoda and when Luke encounter Boba Fett until he leaves the city.

Moth3r said:

except for the instances where bright lights are moving at speed which results in the weird artefacts seen in the Vader's lightsabre and the Millennium Falcon's engine. The noise reduction hardware probably had different settings for concealing light scratches and dark dirt spots. 

Interesting, that also explains the faint weird dark pattern that appears whenever the sabers clash in the film other than what has been documented already. I recall that 005 thought it was dirt or something stuck in the composites in his comparison thread. (something you not notice if you don't go through it frame by frame)

I do remember that your PAL THX ANH preservation looked very nice, you need to do a comeback Moth3r. :)

That would be really nice, thanks. :)

Well, I'm one of those last few people on earth who don't have a facebook profile. ;)

No, I had problem register on that site for some reason, maybe you could give it a shot? It would be really nice to have it in better quality.

SilverWook, can you do me one last favor, how does the color look on this computer screen...

...on that LD/Beta transfer? Don't necessarily need a screenshot of it, I'm just a little curious about this one as the colors are very unstable on this particular screen. (it's bright green in the 2004 DVD) Want to rule out any possible flaw in the LD transfer.

Thanks Moth3r. These transfers are really hopeless, seems like you need to take the best looking scenes from both masters if you're even going to bother with these THX LD's.

Yeah, it's really frustrating. No idea what's causing the frame differences when I line them up against each other, maybe the IVTC plugin I used removed or added certain frames, even if it is just one frame difference, it makes it impossible to use this median script to get any good results. I'll try to line them up before IVTC, I just hoped that I would be able to avoid IVTC'ing them again.

Thanks for the report, seems they did an unusal awful job with that transfer. I noticed the squeezed computer display on your Beta, why not squeeze the end titles as well... weird. Your Beta screenshots will serve me well.

EDIT: Damn, thank you Moth3r! You're my hero. :)

Dug it out from the depth of this ancient thread: http://originaltrilogy.com/forum/topic.cfm/Film-elements-for-the-OT/post/212590/#TopicPost212590 

That DVNR-1000 from Digital Vision has caused us a lot of problem, I feel ashamed to be a swede. ;)

zombie84 said:

But the Star Wars IPs look really, really bad, especially the first few reels of Star Wars. An interpositive just shouldn't look that bad, especially since it was only run a couple times, since it was created in 1985 for home video.

Zombie, were comes this information from that the IPs was first created in 1985? Just curious.

Some interesting info from THX Technical Supervisor Dave Schnuelle regarding the process of making the Definitive Collection Laserdiscs In the September 1993 issue of Widescreen Review:

"In this case, for all three films, we used interpositive elements that had been made directly from the camera negative. Other film transfers might be done from internegatives made from the interpositive, or from low-contrast prints, but we preferred the IP's for these transfers, because that's the earliest generation usable"

"One small difference from the original films is that in letterbox transfers we prefer to put any subtitles in the black border beneath the actual picture area. Thus we didn't use the same interpositive as the theatrical one, because that one contains subtitling already. In tracking down the elements, we found that the only ones in the vault were ones with subtitles- these clearly weren't the first generation off the camera neg because they had to have the subtitles burned in. So a massive search was undertaken and the first generation IP's were found in a special vault having only opticals in Los Angeles."

"A Mark IIIC with a 4:2:2 digital output [telecine] was used."

"[We used] a noise reduction and dirt concealment device made by Digital Vision, a company in Sweden. Their DVNR-1000 is a very powerful noise reducer for reducing film grain. Especially on the two earlier movies the film grain was very high."

The subs are beautifully done, Harmy! :)

So was the level of DVNR applied manually on a scene by scene basis or was it done automatically? Seems weird the amount of DVNR differ so drastically between the video-masters. Also, have someone actually compared and confirmed that the transfers of the '93 DC and the '95 Faces releases are identical in terms of DVNR-artifacts?

THX NTSC (GOUT)

THX PAL

THX NTSC (GOUT)

THX PAL

How do these look on the PAL THX Laserdiscs:

Altough the quality on the Limited Edition 2006 DVD leave very much to be desired, it's the only official release of the original 1977 Star Wars in terms of visual content, (audio is a remix) all other releases on video so far always was in the form of the 1981 Re-release, A New Hope. The only good decision Lucasfilm have made over the past two decades.

Some bad news... I wanted to use a median script in AviSynth for all the different LD-captures in order to remove all the random noise and dropouts etc. but it proved to be impossible to align them for some reason, the frame count differ slightly between them in different parts of the video (mostly just 1 frame difference) which I found weird, even between the three captures of the same LD. Could this have something to do with me IVTC'ing them before attempting this? (I've heard this shouldn't be a problem) or does it have something to do with how these LD's were captured in the first place?

Please help me out here if you have any idea what's causing this frame count difference.

Sounds like a very nice way of doing them. :) And I must say that hat you're wearing on your avatar Harmy, if it's actually you, is really badass looking. Don't forget that you need a cane with that outfit with the head of the cane in the form of a skull. ;)

No, he will of course need to convert the SUP, SUB or whatever to SRT format first, I just misunderstood your post. But it is all easily done nevertheless.

EDIT: Just to let you know if you attempt it, all programs that do convert DVD subs to SRT format, doesn't recognize italics etc. and I often see the letter I as an l as in the word letter when converted.

Subs looking great Harmy. Is it Franklin Gothic? I could see on that clip that you didn't use the original 1983 Theatrical timings though, but I don't know how important that really is to most people. Going by that clip they look more smooth and natural than my subs for the GOUT. Good job! :)