Converting Star Wars Original Trilogy LD to DVD.....advice?

[gitreel]

and in ep2, obi-wan is young. In ep.4 he is an old geezer.

[MJPollard]

Humble suggestion: perhaps it would be a good idea to get back to the topic of this thread, instead of turning this into yet another bitch-fest over "how Lucas raped my childhood"?

[gitreel]

ok, but he didn't ruin my childhood.

[flaninacupboard]

Have you read through this yet?

https://www.videohelp.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=102812&highlight=

i think it will take about 2 hours to read through, if not more. there's TONS of info, experience, tips, tricks, pics and clips. and as for the format itself there's a whole bunch of info out on the good old interweb. here's a great and not too complex overview http://www.laserdiscarchive.co.uk/laserdisc_archive/how_laserdiscs_are_produced.htm

[dvdguy]

cheer up. at least jar jar is not in the originals or the special editions...yet

jarjar must die

[pcexpress-guy]

jarjar

I would love to kill that bastard... you have this serious sega spanning in real time more then 25+ years... and in movie time 2 generations. The story/sega has massive galatic-political implications... and what do we have... this stupid jar-jar idiot mucking things up!

How can the balance of power have anything to do with this ill-conceived character or some of the others? what a waste to a good drama.

Also on a seperate note: G.L. needs to whipped for taking so damm long to making this thing. 3 years per movie tops... it took a decade or two vacation... well I hope he lives long enough to complete the thing.

[gitreel]

I wish he would do the last three, because originally it was nine movies total.

[pcexpress-guy]

yea... at this rate he would be dead... perhaps his grandson will get around to it? (he doesn't want to have too many movies... he doesn't want it to be like, as he said "star trek" bla bla bla... yea... how about we do it like say... lord of the rings george? is that too fast slow it down a few years... jesus!

[Hardcoreruss]

Lucas says that they are kids films, that is probably us as grown ups like them so much.

[lchiu7]

Have you read through this yet?

https://www.videohelp.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=102812&highlight=

i think it will take about 2 hours to read through, if not more. there's TONS of info, experience, tips, tricks, pics and clips. and as for the format itself there's a whole bunch of info out on the good old interweb. here's a great and not too complex overview http://www.laserdiscarchive.co.uk/laserdisc_archive/how_laserdiscs_are_produced.htm

And this is another thread that has tons of information on the process

http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=383743

[flaninacupboard]

No, it just has some people bitching about LD quality and not knowing how to use TMPGenc. and a horrible-on-the-eyes colour scheme!

[lchiu7]

Except at the end they managed to have produced a DVD which they say exceeds the quality of the original laserdisc. To save having to read the entire post here is the technical reason why



For thsoe of you very curious about the technical details, I have an explanation for our results. It will not be that easy to follow without pictures, but I'll try my best.

Films are recorded at 24 frames per second. When they are converted to video, they are slowed down to 23.976fps and then 2:3 pulldown is performed to create 60 interlaced fields per second. What results is:

Field 1A - Frame 1 (odd lines)
Field 1B - Frame 1 (even lines)
Field 2A - Frame 2 (odd lines)
Field 2B - Frame 2 (even lines)
Field 3A - Frame 2 (odd lines)
Field 3B - Frame 3 (even lines)
Field 4A - Frame 3 (odd lines)
Field 4B - Frame 4 (even lines)
Field 5A - Frame 4 (odd lines)
Field 5B - Frame 4 (even lines)

So we get 10 fields for every 4 frames of film, or 60 fields for every 24 frames of film.

I think that's something most all of us here understand, so I apologize if it's elementary.

This is the part that is often overlooked.

An HDTV (or any TV that deinterlaces) when taking a 60i signal is most times going to deinterlace it. My 40" toshiba certainly does and I think most HDTVs and projectors do too. Here's the trick though. They deinterlace it to *30* frames per second, not to 24. So remember our video version of the film? Here's what happens when viewed on a 30p deinterlacing HDTV:

Frame 1 = Original Frame 1 (odd) + Frame 1 (even)
Frame 2 = Original Frame 2 (odd) + Frame 2 (even)
Frame 3 = Original Frame 2 (odd) + Frame 3 (even) **** BAD
Frame 4 = Original Frame 3 (odd) + Frame 4 (even) **** BAD
Frame 5 = Original Frame 4 (odd) + Frame 4 (even)

So every 3rd and 4th frame is going to look terrible - hence, combing artifacts. Now, the way a deinterlacer compensates for this is usually with a little gaussian blur. But all this serves to do is soften the entire image.

This, by the way, is also an issue when deinterlacing 60i source material to 30p because the fields are temporally at different spots, and so there will also be combing artifacts.

Now, when we inverse telecine the movie back to 23.976p, all those interlacing artifacts go away. A progressive scan DVD player sends the source material to the TV in a progressive form and so the TV does no deinterlacing or gaussian blur on its own. Hence a much sharper picture. This also explains why the laserdisc looks just as good on an interlaced TV as the DVD does. But the DVD will look magnitudes better than the laserdisc on an HDTV.

Similarly, the bootlegs out there look bad because of these interlacing artifacts. Because the DVD is kept at 60i, the TV doesn't know it's getting 24p source material, and so it goes ahead and deinterlaces it as though it was originally 60i. The result is it looks just as bad as the laserdisc originally.

Here's another huge reason we have a better picture on this DVD than when zooming. If you zoom a laserdisc picture, the zoom is merely going to make the interlacing artifacts look all the worse. If the blur is performed before the zoom, the loss in sharpness is going to be horrendous. What I do is inverse telecine first, then do the zoom with the software. So no zooming happens until the picture is already perfect. The picture looks just as good as if you'd taken a 640x360 image in photoshop and stretched it to 873x480 - which looks pretty good. Vegas has an excellent interpolation function for stretching. I could probably make this DVD 4x3 and a DVD player zoom function would look just as good, but nothing is going to look better than a good video editor's zoom function.

So, that's the technical reason that this procedure results in a beautiful DVD. And it also proves the power of laserdiscs. The information is there - it's just a matter of getting it out. It's a shame, actually, that a progressive scan laserdisc player was never made.

[dphirschler]

It's a shame, actually, that a progressive scan laserdisc player was never made.

They were getting close from what I've read. Towards the end of LD, they were making players with frame memory in them so that the CLV discs could have still frame pause during side flips and frame by frame advancing. Some even used this for built-in comb filtering. But since it was written to the disc in interlaced format, it would have had to have been inverse telecined on playback. As close as they were, an adaptive inverse teleciner seems far away. When did DTV (now called DeScaler) figure it out?

And they were also starting to procude anamorphic widescreen LDs. I've never seen one, only read about it. Not many were made.

As for improving the DVD over the source LD, there is also a "dot crawl" filter that does a great job at solving that problem too. My SW DVD looks so good now.

And I am still not done. As soon as I get around to doing the PAL transfer, it will be the shiznit!


Darryl

[flaninacupboard]

grab a PAL LD and a PAL LD player. play it into a progressive device with no de-interlacing. Hey, you've got a progressive scan laserdisc player!

ok, i know you're on about NTSC, i just wanted to point it out. PAL LD's look very good on my PC with no processing at all, much better than my TV.


The things he is saying he has improved by IVTC are his own fault, you can't watch an interlaced source on a progressive system and expect to not see artifacts. all he's really done is amend his source to better the suit the playback device. and it's not exactly groundbreaking advice either, IVTC isn't exactly a new idea here, nor is an anamorphic resize.