Star Wars LD to DVD project - solutions

[dphirschler]

I've been reading (a quite lengthy post) about capturing the Star Wars laserdiscs and encoding DVDs. Several people had problems with certain parts of the film. Here are my solutions to them.

How to handle Greedo's subtitles?

I captured the LD in a cropped frame. In other words, the avi file captured and written to my harddrive is 704x278. Many other people suggested this, but the problem comes in when Han Sol meets Greedo in the cantina bar. The subtitles in the black area gets cropped.

My reason for cropping was twofold. One, the black area will encode better if I crop it and make a solid black area in its place. Two, the file written to my harddrive is much smaller with the black bars cropped.

My solution for the greedo subtitles was to capture that section again and take one frame of each subtitle. The frames are cropped to only the subtitle area and no bigger. I saved each subtitle in a bmp. Then I used the logo filter in VirtualDub to add the subtitles back in on just the frames I want them.

Why not anamorphic (enhanced for 16x9)?

My reason was because the LD is only 480 lines. Minus the black bars, it was only 278 line. By my calculations, I would have had to stretch the film to 360 lines with 120 lines of black bars (55 on top and 65 on bottom). Since no extra detail is gained, there was no sence in doing the conversion. Now if I get a PAL LD to borrow, I may try an anamorphic encode.


Darryl

[dphirschler]

Update on Greedo's subtitles:

I actually resized the subtitles 75% since they seemed too large. My opinion was that since it was designed for television viewing, the subtitles were made large. Since I will be viewing this movie on my big screen projector, I didn't want to be overwhelmed with the huge subtitles.

I will eventually put the subtitles over the movie image itself, but first I want to get a good capture from the actual film so I can position them in the right place. The goal is to make closer to the theatrical version, but also to make it enjoyable for viewing on a 16x9 TV (where the subtitles in their current position would be cut off).

Does anybody know what font that is? It sort of looks like the Pepsi font.


Darryl