Great! Then we should be covered with high quality audio either way once I find out which version of the trailer I have. I can use the DVD bonus disc audio or the DTS audio. Is the DTS version stereo or 5.1? If it is in 5.1, can you send the wav's in that format?
Thanks, and looking forward to hearing the .wav's. :-)
Thanks - I have been using the 2004 DVD Bonus disc for my audio source. It sounds good, except a few things... I have a feeling that I have the other Jabba version of the trailer, so when I get to that spot, this audio source won't work anymore and I will have to either mix in the other Jabba part, or use the audio source from youtube instead. Also, it is stereo, and DTS in 5.1 would be awesome. I am looking forward to hearing what you have!
Awesome, thanks! I am looking forward to hearing more about them. Do you know if they are stereo or 5.1? Currently, I don't know which version of the trailer that I have. I am a long way away from the Jabba part.
Tonight I scanned 151 frames (redoing some from before that got messed up) and a bunch of new ones. I am about 1/3 of the way done so far (working backwards from the end). I just scanned the "move closer" part on the speeder bikes right after the Return of the Jedi logo. I also post processed all of the scenes after the speeder bike scene, so it is moving along.
Hi You_Too. Thanks for your interest. No, it's not done yet. I tend to do it in waves when I feel like it. It takes a lot of time. Sometimes something happens that demotivates me because I have to redo something, and so I stop for awhile. Since you showed some interest, I might start again soon. When do you plan to release the 97 SE blu-ray set?
Jetrell Fo - I am very interested in the DTS trailer audio. There are two versions of this trailer. Do you know which one you have, or both? If anything would really get me motivated, it would be having an awesome soundtrack to go with this.
Here are the two versions I am aware of. The part where Jabba is talking to Han is different.
Sorry to momentarily derail this thread, but the pic at this link is too funny:
http://money.cnn.com/2012/10/30/technology/disney-buys-lucasfilm/index.html?hpt=hp_t2
Yeah, I came to this thread wondering when Episode VII Revisited was coming out. ;-)
Maybe they can get Adywan to work for them on the original VII so no revisited will be necessary.
Fox still owns the other 6 movies until the contracts run out.
http://www.aintitcool.com/node/59381
So, I am not sure how much Disney can do or would do with regards to releasing the original unaltered trilogy or suing people over them.
Amazing job! This is really great work!
I definitely didn't do any research, but I am thinking that the AES/EBU on my soundcard is capable of handling a stereo uncompressed signal and the db25 handles up to something like 16 stereo uncompressed signals. Theoretically, if the device that decodes the DTS signal sends it to a db25 output, these outputs are in uncompressed digital format. My soundcard could theoretically record two channels at a time. Also, to take it a step further, I think you can convert from AES/EBU to S/PDIF. So you wouldn't even need my sound card. You could hook up to the correct two pins on the DB 25 connector and have an rca cable on the other end (maybe with some electronics in between if necessary) and record the digital signal on a sound card two channels at a time. Just do it 3 times to get all 6 channels, time sync them, and combine them into one big file.
Again, all theory. Just wanted to share it before doing any research.
Edit: After a quick search, I am at least partially right: http://tcsupport.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/1305/~/interfacing-aes%2Febu-to-s%2Fpdif
I know my RME soundcard can handle the bits mentioned in the article. I am not sure about standard cheapy ones for PC's.
So this could be done fairly simply in theory.
Edit2: Another interesting link http://taperssection.com/index.php?topic=153934.0
Make the cable in the first link (or just use something like my soundcard that already works with AES/EBU) and attach it to the cable in the second link and voila - record 2 channels at a time and move the S/PDIF cable to each AES/EBU output in the other cable and start over until you get all of the channels recorded.
I happen to have one. It is an RME Digi96/8 Pro. It works with Windows XP. I am not sure if it helps. Let me know if I can be of assistance somehow.
Mike
Great job -1. The contraption you are using to do this is pretty amazing! As Harmy mentioned, the video is interlaced for some reason, but otherwise looks great!
Regarding higher than 1920x1080 resolution, on my 2560x1600 monitor, my WQHD version of my trailer is slightly noticeably better (just a bit clearer looking), but it is fairly minor. If it was on 70mm film, that would probably make a big difference (70mm does make a difference with blu-ray movies such as the Sound of Music which is stunning looking).
Thanks!
Here is the new version with the corrected black levels. There is no new footage, but it looks better than the old clip (blacks are black instead of gray which also enriches the color a bit making it look less drab, and I corrected a bunch more tiny blemishes). Also, I created the directory structure that you can burn to DVD using ImgBurn and UDF 2.5 and be able to play it on Blu-ray players. If you want to just play the clip on your PC, go into the BDMV\Stream directory and play the file in there. Enjoy the 763 frames of madness!
Solved it! The 1920x1080 clip I provided works, but use multiAVCHD to create the AVCHD directory structure and use Imgburn with UDF 2.5 to burn the contents of the directory structure to disk. Before, I used tsmuxer to create the directory structure, but this does not work correctly.
Edit: I just tried it on my Panasonic Blu-Ray player and it works there too. That was the first time I saw the clip on my Plasma TV. Holy crap, it looked nice! I love my Plasma! I am really motivated to keep going now. I have a 3 week trip to Europe coming up later in July, so that will slow me down, but I definitely want to keep going now and get this done.
Edit 2: The black levels are what really stand out on the Plasma TV. After playing the clip a bunch of times, I noticed I need to adjust the black levels on the newer material. The older material is correct already. I will work on this and release a new clip.
Ok more news. I figured out the PS3 darkness. There is a Display Settings setting called RGB Full Range (HDMI). I had this set to Full. Changing it to Limited fixed the problem. It's pretty scary because now I wonder if I watched all of my movies in the wrong way all of this time. I found this post that says you should always use Limited. http://www.avsforum.com/t/1351448/ps3-full-rgb-and-white-balance-question
I will have to check a real Blu-Ray and see if it makes any difference. If it does, I will have to rewatch all of my movies to see the improved picture quality. ;-)
I tried a bunch of other settings in After Effects, but VLC always reports 48fps. I will keep playing with it.
Edit: I tried a Blu-Ray (Star Wars Episode IV trench run scene) and the PS3 setting doesn't make any difference that I can see.
Also, my video is encoded as RGB, but Blu-Ray's are encoded as YCBCr so I will try encoding in that format and see what happens. This would explain why the RGB setting makes a difference on my video and not on Blu-Ray's.
Thanks again everyone for the very nice compliments.
There is something strange going on with the video. Here is what I have found so far:
- I encoded it as 23.976 frames per second. Media Info reports this correctly. VLC does not.
- When playing it on my PS3, the dark areas are much darker, especially the left side of the trench in the Death Star.
- I originally used After Effects to encode it. It created it with the 4.1 profile.
- I just re-encoded it with Sony Vegas Pro 9. This created it with the 4.0 profile. This time it is darker like on the PS3, and VLC reports it as 23.976 fps.
I will try 4.0 profile in After Effects next. I think the color issue has to do with 0-255 vs 16-235. My images use 0-255, but I think the PS3 and Sony Vegas are clipping those ranges.
Thanks everyone! I tried making a blu-ray disc, and on my PS3 it shows up as a data disc, but I can play the file in the stream folder just fine. Not sure what why it doesn't just show up as a avchd disc.
For anyone with a 2560x1600 resolution monitor, here is the WQHD version:
Yes, I meant the original curves. If they are consistent, then you could mask them and not lose anything. In the case of a DVD5, most likely you can use the same settings as the PG.
Thanks a lot! It is very rewarding when I finally get to the part when I encode it to a video and it looks nice. Working with all of the frames is a lot of work until then, but then at the end I get that nice reward. ;-)
Hi Puggo, I don't know about your latest version, but here is a post from earlier that shows some settings: http://originaltrilogy.com/forum/topic.cfm/Puggo-Strikes-Back/post/487463/#TopicPost487463
There is a screenshot with my xvid4psp settings based on the sample clip you provided. Each scene needed to be cropped slightly differently to get it right.
For the edges, I would leave everything exposed and crop all the way to the edge of the useful picture so you will see the curves. Maybe you could post some screenshots showing what it would look like.
Also, I think I used VirtualDub to split each scene into separate AVI files at the beginning, then resized/cropped and encoded each scene individually with xvid4psp to 1280x720 lossless avi, then I used xvid4psp to open the first scene, join all the rest, and encode to 1280x720 mp4.
Here is the video again: http://www.sendspace.com/file/lf8yq9 There is still some blue glow on the top and bottom sometimes, so I didn't crop enough in all of the scenes.
After a four month hiatus, I finally started working on this again. Here is the latest. I used sendspace because mediafire makes you login now. It should be blu-ray compatible, although I didn't test it on a blu-ray player.
http://www.sendspace.com/file/4na6aw
Enjoy!
I agree about the green look (kind of reminds me of the Lord of the Rings Blu-ray debacle). One good test is to try to find things that should be white and compare them to actual white. Do they look white or green?
I agree with not over-saturating the colors though. Good luck with the project!
http://www.sendspace.com/file/ab2uxl
These aren't the same ones (don't know where those are). This time, I just uploaded a couple of scans directly from the scanner with no processing at all. Eventually they will be cropped, bad spots removed, levels adjusted, aligned with other frames, etc. They look better after the post processing is done and they are in motion.
I haven't made any progress since my last post. I have been super busy with work and haven't been motivated lately to work on this. It will eventually be done.
Just a couple of quick (and rough) screenshots of where I am at currently
Just an update, I got about 8 seconds more done yesterday (just scanning and aligning). I am at the point where Lando's alien copilot is in Chewy's seat in the Millenium Falcon (just one frame of that so far). It looks really good in motion (as seen in the preview window during the aligning process)! I probably won't bother with screenshots or videos for awhile because it is a time consuming distraction. I would rather just focus on getting it all done. If I get sick of scanning and aligning at some point in the middle, then I might switch to post processing and might share a video at that point. What's cool about scanning and aligning is I can do about one scene of scanning at the same time as aligning the previous scene and the timing is pretty good so both keep me busy. It goes fast because I am always ready to set up the next scan since I am not overloaded with other post processing stuff. If I didn't bother fixing blemishes, the rest of the post processing would be very fast also. But alas, I am a perfectionist.
Mike
Got busy with other things and I haven't done anything with it until today, but started up again and it is going really well and fast. I decided to focus on scanning and aligning for now and I am plowing through it. Once that is all done, I will do the remaining steps (cropping, fixing blemishes, level adjustments, and resizing). If I get around to it, I will post some raw screenshots later today.
Mike