protovack

I appreciate the work involved in splicing together the episodes into film cuts, it’s well done! I have a few suggestions though. First and most important, the brightness and color are way off. You can see this best in the episode “overlords” where that shining woman on the planet meets anakin…she is so bright that it hurts your eyes and washes out the entire picture. But you can see it throughout the entire project…it’s just much brighter than the x264 files i’ve had for years, and the colors are too saturated. I noticed it within a few minutes of watching and i couldn’t un-see it.

Second, it’s x265. x265 was designed for streaming and to be acceptable quality at very low bit rates. when storage capacity isn’t an issue, x264 is much faster to decode, and higher quality. this means you can use very small media PCs with slower less power consuming processors to watch video, as long as you have the hard disk space. I’ve got a handful of 4tb SSDs now. Why would I care about using a video codec focused on saving space and using processing power to make up for it through compression? You can tell the x265 doesn’t look as good. Pull it up on a large TV and look at the edges between solid objects. With x265 there is noise and blockiness every time. x264 never has that. These releases really should have a x264 edition. And x264 should always be used for archival/master copies beyond the original source.

Third, quality control…there are multiple examples where there is a noticeable drop in detail level, in certain scenes, in certain episodes, as well as the feature film. In the feature film there are many instances of this…where a certain scene will just be straight up blurry and terrible quality, then it goes back to normal quality. It’s not my player, i checked. this is encoded into the files. It’s not super common and only in certain episodes, but still, not something I’d like to bother with, especially when my 7yo yells “DAD, it’s BLURRY again!”. Why go to all the work to make a release like this only to ruin it with spotty quality control? It needs to be 100%.

4th, no lossless audio? maybe a minor point, but if this is supposed to be an archival “forever” copy of Clone Wars, it needs lossless audio. Why not?

Again, awesome work on the editing and this is a MUCH needed product, however, I’d recommend that you re-do the edits from a master source and encode with x264, lossless audio, make sure it’s 100% done, and you’d have a perfect 10/10 release.