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ocpmovie

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22-Sep-2004
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10-Mar-2008
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Post
#145044
Topic
Classic Edition: The Empire Strikes Back by Ocpmovie (Released)
Link
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/145044/action/topic#145044
Time
CALL FOR HELP

Re: Return of the Jedi


Looking for a good quality, preferably PAL transfer of Jedi. Moth3r and Citizen haven't gotten to Jedi yet, and of course the XO project is gonna take a while ...

But I need a laserdisc transfer of Moth3r quality for whenever I do Jedi, sometime in the future. I want to do it right, using the best quality laserdisc footage available.

Some of those I've mentioned above may be reading this. You probably have rough encodes of Jedi going, or have done SOME work on it. I will accept a rough version, as I'm doing my own editing anyway, I just want good source material. Any help that anyone could provide would be a positive thing.

And, yeah, I probably should have gotten hold of the Moth3r Empire before going ahead with this project. If anyone here in the States sends me a copy of the Moth3r Empire by tomorrow, I'll sneak it in and use it. =)

Anyway, any help you can provide would be much appreciated. There is no timeline for a Classic Jedi right now, nothing's in the works and I'll be waiting a bit before doing it probably ... but when I do ...

Garrett Gilchrist
1736 Kilbourn St.
Los Angeles, CA 90065
Post
#145015
Topic
Classic Edition: The Empire Strikes Back by Ocpmovie (Released)
Link
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/145015/action/topic#145015
Time
Thanks Bespin!


Regarding the quality issue.

I'm giving this another shot - trying a new setting on Nattress Nicer. I'm setting the color sharpness to zero (instead of 90) to try and zap out those awful artifacts in the carbon freezing chamber scenes.

Results are promising so far.

That's the problem with Empire - this is going to be a better quality Classic Edition, but when watching Empire you really expect perfection. With ANH (or even ROTJ) the film is much messier, and in ANH especially people don't mind a low quality shot or a junky effect as long as it's within reason and looks ANH-like. With Empire, every little lapse in quality stands out and looks shocking. This is certainly why the Special Edition was done in a much more subtle and classy manner for this film - you can't get away with screwing Empire up.

The FCP scenes are a bit softer than the official DVD scenes (with more "full" color saturation in the unsaturated areas), but that won't be a huge issue if I can remove all these artifacts. The quality will be good enough to stand by.

Wish me luck.
Post
#144667
Topic
Classic Edition: The Empire Strikes Back by Ocpmovie (Released)
Link
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/144667/action/topic#144667
Time
Sound is still out of sync despite my best efforts, the sync of the version in DVD Studio Pro is completely different from the version in Final Cut - lots of mysterious vanishing frames in the latter.
DV artifacts present. I'm annoyed that I had to bring the quality of the thing down to DV quality for so much of the ending just for fairly stupid last-minute changes = Vader's red saber, Han's freezing "vest" and the flopped insignia on the imperials. It might have been better to just leave these damn changes in and keep it full original DVD quality.

Hm. Oh well.
Post
#144648
Topic
Star Wars: Classic Edition by Ocpmovie (Released)
Link
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/144648/action/topic#144648
Time
Hi there BH!

The laserdisc footage was darkened a bit, but not super heavily. It was very hard to match the oversaturated colors and darkness of the official DVDs, the 2004 was a very odd print created through digital messing-with-ness.

The entire 2004 print was brightened up for my release, and when you create DVDs, well, black levels are the bane of a DVD creator's existence. When you encode something, certain programs (FCP) loooove to suddenly raise your black levels an incredible amount. To create Classic Edition I actually had to bring the black levels DOWN so the encoder could bring them up again. Perfect black was hard to create without losing picture information. Looked fine on my TV but then my TV does crush blacks down a bit.

I find a lot of newer TVs bring black levels WAY up, tune 'em down folks. =) Do adjust your set?

Oddly, I haven't had this problem with ESB Classic, the black levels seem fine without tweaking, not sure why. I'm sure now somebody's gonna come in and say the black levels on ESB Classic are awful. =) But certainly black levels are the hardest thing, and many DVD players (like my current one) have options to change the black level during playback which just makes things more confusing!

Glad you liked the edit - all the best. Enjoy Empire Classic too if it comes round your way.

Keep circulating the discs people.
Post
#144646
Topic
Classic Edition: The Empire Strikes Back by Ocpmovie (Released)
Link
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/144646/action/topic#144646
Time
Wow, a cover already. Geez. Thanks Mark.


So, lemme think. I never liked the back cover being done in that "Impact" type font, the fonts used need to be pretty classy and, well, classic. Have an old-fashioned, timeless feel about them. Nothing too insane or dramatic or cheesy.

Right below or next to The Empire Strikes Back, let's put in Classic Edition, slanted to match the Empire logo, if that looks all right, or just put Classic Edition ...

On the back cover, well, it's not written and directed by George Lucas. =) I don't think there will be any special features to note. Sound mix from the original 35mm theatrical presentation. Just put basic notes on the presentation and preservation of the film as seen in 1980, but mainly a description of the plot, the official descrip should do.

The starfield is dodgy in your mockup, it looks cloned and pasted, put a proper one in there, and we're good ...

Thanks for doing a cover already - exciting!
Post
#144267
Topic
Classic Edition: The Empire Strikes Back by Ocpmovie (Released)
Link
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/144267/action/topic#144267
Time
Heh. Beats me, nobody's actually torrented any of my releases apart from Deleted Magic, which is a huge shame. I and many others have lobbied for 'em at myspleen, but no goin'.


So, I let the thing render for nearly 3 days to try out this new FCP plugin that supposedly cleans up DV color artifacts.

No go. It worked much better on interlaced DV video - working from this DVD, I don't know if it actually did anything. The artifacts are still there. I don't think they're worse, but they're there.

So okay, this is the best quality we're getting. And it looks good. I like Vader with the red saber, it makes it feel a lot more "Star Wars" somehow.

I've synced up the sound and am reencoding all the video.

What's left? Well, thinking about menus.


The original theatrical poster is my desired poster for this release - unlike ANH where there are many nice alternate covers, the alternate ESBs are merely "interesting" to me.

Rock on ...
Post
#143598
Topic
DVD: Return of the Ewok and Other Little Films (Released)
Link
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/143598/action/topic#143598
Time
Professional DVDs have 2 layers to play with and can waste space all they want. Also, they're working with higher-quality masters, which require a higher bitrate and which people expect to be "perfect" on the pro DVD. Many of us are transferring VHS or laserdisc material, which definitely doesn't require a high bitrate because of the sotfness of the image. The idea of wasting a bitrate of 9 on a laserdisc or VHS is ... well, wasteful.

Clearly we're talking about different things, and I would prefer this "discussion" to end right now as I find it pointless and insulting.


I'm on a Mac and I encode directly from Final Cut Pro usually, and I've also been known to use Compressor. A.Pack is used for sound.
Post
#143386
Topic
Classic Edition: The Empire Strikes Back by Ocpmovie (Released)
Link
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/143386/action/topic#143386
Time
Citizen seems to be doing very nice and complicated work, yeah.



Speaking of complicated, with all my worries about DV artifacting, I've decided to let this one encode for another day and try out some new tricks on it.

Nattress has an FCP plugin which is supposed to remove most DV artifacting, or at least greatly lessen it. This might result in a much better looking version of the Luke/Vader duel and other bits I've been worried about the artifacting in. It takes forever to render, but I'll let it run today and see how it all looks.

It's supposed to work by intelligently smoothing out the color information and combining it with what it can glean from the brightness information.


Nattress also has some decent frame rate converting plugins which I'm trying out on other projects.


I have also been a bit annoyed by some artifacting in the edited scenes that resulted when I shrunk the film from dual to single layer so I'll be playing with lowering my encoding rates to make the shrinking less necessary, or perhaps shrinking the main feature by itself before using it.
Post
#143227
Topic
DVD: Return of the Ewok and Other Little Films (Released)
Link
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/143227/action/topic#143227
Time
It is not up at myspleen. Again, I send these out via mail.


[quote]Also, the THX demo, though of good quality, is windowboxed. I have no idea why anyone would master this in 16x9 and not zoom it.[/quote]



Blame THX. They're the ones who made that bizarre encode. I used it exactly as they did.



There's no real reason for a video bitrate to hover around 9 all the time, with a good encoder really doing its work, a bitrate of 4, 5 or even 3.6 is great.

Post
#142470
Topic
DVD: Return of the Ewok and Other Little Films (Released)
Link
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/142470/action/topic#142470
Time
I should mention that there is another OCP disc that not too many people know about - because there aren't many copies circulating and I haven't talked about it here before.

It's a quick remix of the 1975 Star Wars Auditions. Rikter's version (I think it was) was good, but I thought my VHS copy (from a Con somewhere) was slightly better.

I transferred that and then stuck on real commercially-available DVD rips of the Richard Pryor cantina skit (finally, the n-word is said in a Star Wars context), and Weird Al's "The Saga Begins." Both in good quality of course, as they're from proper DVDs.

It's not a major OCP project, just something that was slapped together very quick, but it exists - ask for the Auditions Remix. (Often I just send out the regular old auditions instead.)
Post
#142462
Topic
DVD: Return of the Ewok and Other Little Films (Released)
Link
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/142462/action/topic#142462
Time
I'm pretty sure it's D3 you've got, but if you really don't know I guess I could check. Very few D2 copies are in circulation and if your copy actually has a printed cover, it's D3 you've got. Only the first couple of copies mailed were D2.



As far as "smushing" too much material on one DVD, in this case it was used to fill up the extra space on the disc, the quality of the material was NOT compromised in any way. It was all presented as originally encoded.

People seem to forget how much material really fits on a single layer DVD. If encoded properly there's usually very little reason to go double layer with a fan project, as an entire film can fit comfortably on one layer if you don't have to go overboard with alternate audio and video. Anything else like extras you just put on another disc.
Post
#142305
Topic
Classic Edition: The Empire Strikes Back by Ocpmovie (Released)
Link
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/142305/action/topic#142305
Time
I reverse telecined some shots from Making of the SE, and it was somewhat helpful for a couple of shots in the wampa cave and the entrance to Cloud City. Slight improvement, and it also helped me color correct some shots better to match Lucasfilm's official version.

The fullscreen dark_Jedi transfer shots didn't IVTC properly - it seems that the film was slightly sped up in the conversion to cheap laserdisc, and it's not a normal pulldown at all, it skips fields all the time. I am hoping that the fullscreen Jedi IVTCs properly, as that was a better laserdisc transfer.

The fact that I can't use this fullscreen version of Empire is not a huge loss, as the fullscreen transfer for Empire was kind of poor.
Post
#142281
Topic
Classic Edition: The Empire Strikes Back by Ocpmovie (Released)
Link
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/142281/action/topic#142281
Time
That's too late for this particular project as I'm otherwise done. For Jedi though, that might be of interest. Wouldn't I rather have the PAL Moth3r original rather than some NTSC conversion?

Parts of some shots I need did turn up as 60i fullscreen in the making of the SE doc, and so I'm gonna try and figure out how to IVTC them. Never done so before and there isn't much info out there for Macs, but I hear Cinematools can handle it.

There is also a plugin by nattress (nattress.com) which can try to remove ugly DV color artifacts, which is pretty remarkable, I'd like to have a look that that, but it's for sale rather than freely downloadable, and I don't see it on Acquisition P2P. If not for the DV artifacts this would be a perfect edit. Ah well.