nightstalkerpoet

Okay…

Film was really good.

Just a few personal qualms…

-silence up until “Star Wars” appears. I like the additional intro music. The hack job they did for the digital release was still better than silence. I look forward to edits inserting the Fox fanfare.

-BB8 should have rolled in at the END of the Von Sydow conversation, with a quick few last words and goodbye. The pace in that initial sequence seemed really off to me.
–side note: why B-B-8. Every time a character says it, it throws off the cadence of their speech.
Say AB8 and BB8 out loud to yourself and you’ll hear what I mean, how the BB is jarring to say.

-Music too loud on Jakku. Some of the best Tatooine moments in ANH were sound effect/silence driven.

-Poor editing on conversations with Leia. Oddly, it wasn’t just the delivery I found jarring - the camera seems closer to her face than to Han’s. It throws off that one on one interaction and feels as if all of her shots were done alone in reshoots. She does seem far less comfortable in her lines, but her dialogue was the most poorly written in my opinion. Her “it was Snokes fault” was the weakest line in the film, and considering she’s speaking to the man who abandoned her after their son left, there should have been a little bit more sting in her words, reminiscent of SW and ESB. Here, I feel like she is suffering from the same dumbing down and weakening that the writers handed her in RotJ, the same way Padme (ignoring the deleted scenes) was handled in RotS.

-R2 waking up was just stupid and seemed overly coincidental. At the least it should have been intercut with Rey and Leia hugging to show that Rey’s arrival is what did it.

-Was I the only one waiting for Luke to crack the slightest of grins and force pull the lightsaber into his metallic hand? I liked the long hair though 😃

Rey may well be Kylo Rens twin - sure lots of people might find it stupid but it’s perfectly logical considering that twins pass through the female line in families.

Just a heads up that in the US, I’m finding that people who bought too many tickets trying to resell them and make money are starting to return them. I was looking at a tuesday next week showing, and now will be heading to the theater around 11pm tonight. So make sure to check.

@Timoty
Are you just making standard DVDs for your dad? If so, I’d suggest using Dark_Jedi’s GOUT V3 releases, especially for RotJ. It will provide you the best in consistent DVD quality since it’s all from one source. (nothing against Harmy’s, Despecialized is the way to go for HD).

I don’t mind the plot really - i think it helps tie together new fans with old fans after years of the PT forcing them into separate camps.

This sets up 8 and 9 to have complete plot freedom because 7 introduced us to the new characters with an almost overwhelming star wars feel.

Just wanted to let everyone know that I’m doing a BD encode of this for my SW marathon before TFA, and intend to be a proper organ donor. I love the colors on this, but will say that for some reason the audio on it didn’t hit my surround sound system well (no clue why, but it just plays a bit tinny). As such, I’ve constructed a stereo track for this as well. The BD I release will have only the stereo track muxed, but I’ll include newguy’s original surround track separately in case you want to remux yourself. (I create my BDs in BDtoAVCHD with Placebo speed and grain preset, but it limits you to a single audio track).

Did you download the torrent off the page on spleen and set the download location to where you already have the file?

just for a slightly registered, histogram matched version of that comparison:
http://screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/154019

^I approve this message 😄

Just letting everyone know I put a lossless re-encode of this up on myspleen - it an 18GB mkv. Combined the parts in virtualdub and output to YV12 Lagarith. Then ran through BDtoAVCHD with x264 CRF 0, grain preset and placebo speed settings. Also output the pcm capture as flac. Audio appears to be slightly out of sync, but considering the processing power needed to watch this I figured it’s more likely people will be using it as a source rather than standard viewing.

Happy Holidays 😃

Awww… That really is too bad.

I’d just like to suggest that you capture the entire tape. The one last time commercial and the Leonard Maltin interview are part of what makes faces amazing.

Depending on what’s done… and I know that the PT only has so much bearing, but the precedent was set with Qui-Gonn that it didn’t have to happen right away.

Yes, yes - to Catbus you listen.

In all seriousness, a stickied thread with current estimated release dates of projects would be nice to see. Even if the answer reported there is “Unknown” or “Unlikely for 2016” or “Project on Hiatus”.

Grabbing the preview right now. Would LOVE a high quality audio capture. Even if you just got me the raw wav files I could put it together.

My biggest complaint with this whole release is that it appears all marathon showings are 1-6 in 2D with 7 in 3D. I just want to see all 7 in 2D 😦

I’ve found the issue… for some reason virtualdub is outputting all screwy. My resulting AVI files are incorrectly set as DV NTSC pixel aspect ratio (around .9) with a 23.98 frame rate. My computer kept crashing so I was having to render in small chunks, so when I imported to Premiere I created nested sequences for each side. Those also ended up 23.98… but when I went to interpret footage it says 23.976… ugh.

Pretty much, my workprint is a good representation of how I want things to look and sound, but I’m having to start from scratch to deal with the issue.
.
.
.
I’ll continue to work on this in my spare time, but it’s been delayed for a bit. My children’s mother attempted suicide on Monday and I am suddenly a full time single parent as opposed to 1/2 time.
.
.
.
On a happier note, I have some leads on acquiring high quality captures of AotC and RotS on Letterbox VHS. With those as well, I will probably aim to release:
2 GB H.264/AAC MP4 files for each film.
BD-5 H.264/PCM for each film

A single BD-25 with all six films. I’ll render a menu in DVD Architect with multiple Playback Options - Play All by Episode Number, Play All by Release Date, Play All Machete Order, or Select Individual Film.

I’ll replace the m2ts files in the resulting folders with lossless h.264/PCM and run through BD Rebuilder set for BD-25 at max quality settings for h.264 and 640kbps Stereo AC3.

Which country LexX? I’ve had difficulty finding a RotS case picture with a widescreen label.

yotsuya, I’d love a copy to take a look at. Any idea what the source is?

Haven’t seen anything like this released and would love to see these and potentially use them for my analog sourced saga releases.

Thanks. I actually didn’t duplicate frames… At least intentionally. Which do you mean specifically? I trimmed some from between reels to keep it in sync with the audio but don’t remember doing anything beyond that.

For cleanup, Multiple passes of Neat Video. The initial done in virtualdub to remove only the chroma blotches. Prior to this i also applied vdubs chroma smoother for 4:1:1 video.

The second done in premiere was a full dnr + some sharpening. I overlayed the original video over the top with an opacity of 27% to add back details without adding back all the noise.

Japanese subs are already cropped. Haven’t really worked with subtitles before but yes, will be including them in the final release and make them seperately available for the mp4 once completed - do people prefer forced or hard coded for a project like this?

As for AVCHD - unless I can get decent upscaling results, I’ll probably just release a VERY high quality SD version - with 1.5 GB going to audio, might as well. For anyone interested, I’m happy to compress this down as tight as possible losslessly and send it to get a proper upscale. I don’t own the SR plugin, and have always just made attempts with the demo.

The MP4 is CRF 14.

Looks like a few people have finished grabbing this - any thoughts?

Alright, it’s available now. Please give feedback. This is pretty close to how I would like it, but is also kind of a “workprint” for my entire project.

I love the look of Althor’s JSC captures - I grew up on the Faces P/S VHS tapes and for some reason I find that these captures provide more nostalgia for me that any of the GOUT work I’ve seen.

This project is just a cleanup of the 5 average 720p release - I have done my best to remove analogue interference and rainbowing without overdoing DNR and removing film grain. I’ve also tried to match color and contrast discrepancies between the different LD sides. I’ve found that skin tones are inconsistent in the JSC and have tried to find a happy medium across the board. I have left frame damage in tact as well as a few red frames just to maintain the analog source feel.

Rather than use the attached audio, I grabbed Schorman’s LD Audio Archive and compared his different GOUT synched versions to find my preferred versions - difficult since they all sound stellar.

These will be Anamorphic 720x480 releases. I’ll release an x264 MP4 with 192 KBPS AAC first, wait for reviews, make any last minute tweaks, then release a AVCHD-9 with LPCM.

My first release will be Return of the Jedi since options for that tend to be scarcer and when I was little it’s the one I watched most.

Following I’ll probably do SW then ESB, then possibly TPM just to complete. If someone can get me high quality captures of the AotC and RotS widescreen VHS tapes, I’ll release those as a part of the set for a complete 6 film Analogue to Digital set.

11/12
RotJ MP4 should be hitting your spleen this afternoon.
This uses Schorman’s 1986 US Sources.

Were you able to overcome that font obstacle? (where Avisynth couldn’t output the subtitle font correctly)

We all know Rey is Luke and Leias accident daughter from between ESB and RotJ. She just happens to be a very young looking 30 😛