Star Wars Conversions-Hit me with your best shot...

[spiderman2k1]

I might be crazy and nut's in the head but I want these there so rare. So I bought them on ebay. The Ewok movie's LOL

[vhelp]

hay, I remember seeing a special.. oh, some 10+ years ago or so. I think
it was on channel 5 (fox) and they had the same teddy-bears.. oh, I mean,
ewoks hehe.. :P

I didn't think it was half bad either. It was interesting. I think they did a
short sereies ?? ..maybe ??
-vhelp

[geek rock]

in the new "empire" magazine (UK film magazine) it says that greedo's subtitles are in this font:

ITC Franklin Gothic Demi Bold

hope that was of some help to you all..

-Mark

[dphirschler]

Nice. Thanks for that. I matched the font with something called "Alt Gothic" from the Corel Draw fonts. It is likely the same font, but the name is different. Font names are oftentimes trademarked. I had to stretch it vertically to get a perfect match.


Darryl

[dphirschler]

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=598&e=6&u=/nm/film_starwars_dc

Still no word of whether or not it will be the SE or the Original Trilogy. Let's hope for the best!


Darryl

[MJPollard]

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=598&e=6&u=/nm/film_starwars_dc

Still no word of whether or not it will be the SE or the Original Trilogy. Let's hope for the best!

For those of you who don't know what he's talking about , 20th Century Fox and Lucasfilm have officially confirmed that Star Wars Episodes IV-VI will be released on DVD in September 2004. It'll be three discs plus a fourth bonus disc, packaged similarly to the Indiana Jones Trilogy released last year.

And yes, given Lucas' statements over the years, I think we can be pretty certain that it'll be the Special Edition versions, which means our quest to put our Original Edition versions onto DVD lives on!

[mysticgohan17]

The original version of the Greedo scene better be on the bonus features dvd. And no Jabba unless they redo him in A new hope and Return of The Jedi.

[Gary Lightfoot]

I'm really looking forwrd to these SE versions on DVD - the quality should be excellent of course, and even if the rumoured etra changes are on there I wouldn't mind.

I would still like to see the trilogy in original untouched form though, so our quest continues..

Gary.

[vhelp]

Hi guys.

Just when I thought I had it down.. I guess I don't.

First, everyone is talking about "this" or "that" as being the best quality, when it comes to Laser Disks sets.., then I hear that there is hope that we
live on w/ our "Original Edition" encoding processes, (so that we can do these
forever and ever :P ) while the DVD of the XX version comes out, and we
can do these forever and ever too.
.
.
I mean, in this case, it makes no sense to get the SE version of the LD's and
then get the SE on DVD's too

The reason for all this, is because I'm fianlly getting my LD player. After
countless e-bay out-bids, I finally won a player. Ok, I took the easy way
out hehe.. But, it's my endeavor and hobby :P
.
.
But, my next step is to obtain the Laser dicks set. But, I don't want to get
the same ones that will be on the DVD's to be released soon. Which one
of the LD triligy's should I be getting, or should I get them individually ??
.
.
The only one I have is on VHS (ANH) and this is the SE version.

-vhelp

[FulciLives]

In my opinion you don't want the big huge box set but the individual THX versions of the THEATRICAL CUTS

I have STAR WARS and EMPIRE but not JEDI but a long "lost" friend has JEDI ... I think. I have to give him a call sometime.

- John "FulciLives" Coleman

[Gary Lightfoot]

Yes, apparently the THX 'Faces' set are the ones to get, as they are the same quality, but CAV and not CLV like the Definitive Edition. If you can get the DE at a good price, then you get more extras, but quality wise, I think they're the same.

This is what they look like so you know what you're after:

http://www.blam1.com/StarWars/8763-85.htm

http://www.blam1.com/StarWars/8764-85.htm

http://www.blam1.com/StarWars/8765-85.htm

http://www.blam1.com/StarWars/0693-84.htm

What player did you get? I'm thinking of getting a Pioneer 925 for the comb filter which might eliminate the dot crawl in solid colours that you can see occasionaly. The quest for quality never ends!!


Gary.

[vhelp]

Well, money is tight, but not too tight for my hobby. I did a lot of
researching (from a newbie point of view) and weighted them all. And, because
I heared (read) that Pioneer makes the best players, my aim was such.

Actually I almost got the 925. Yes, its a good machine, but there are too
many shiesters on e-bay, and they cut you off w/ a higher bid. I kept getting
knocked off the bid-list

I was close to nabbing the 703, but I got shot down fast on that one. Then,
I was close to getting the S104 (and others higher, for the 425 lines) but
I realized that the V2600 has 425 lines too :P and is newer.

I settled w/ the CLD-V2600. I heared (read) this machine was great and also
sports an S-Video. This unit came out in '94. About the only thing that
confuses me is how do these guys toss the pizza ??
I mean, the unit is flat. Does it pop upon the door and toss it, then
close the door, or are their little Jedi or Yoda's inside doing the
work of the force ?? .. I don't know. I don't think that the V2600 has
flipping capabilities, though I was wishing for one, but in any case, I
don't care too much. This is my first LD player, and I thought I would
start out sort of on the cheap side, though this is STILL a great player
brand/make/model or however you phrase it :P

I also learned another thing about LD players. That they can be high-jacked
w/ AC3 (home-brew) w/ a little electronics background (and very little I
do have) But, I'm not too sure of the final results of this effort. I'm
still confused about this feature, and then you need some other demuliplier
or gadjet for it to work. I'm all over this, and just said, for
get about it !!

It's funny how you said, individuals, as I was assuming that this is the
best way to go, in quality. But, what do I know. it's just a hobby of
mind, like my "stamp" collection.

I learned a lot on ebay. People know a newbie (seller) and can sniff
them out in one pass. buy their idem real cheap, and then resell it for
a much higher price (min. reserve) Sharks I tell ya, real sharks!!
I'm pretty sure that the unit I am getting is one of those that I lost
out to, and am now buying from such a Shark!! oh well. Sometimes,
you just gotta stop the madness and give in - it ain't worth it sometimes.

When I get the unit, I'll do some test clips and post the results. Hopefully,
no one here has this model, but if they do, that is ok too :P

-vhelp

[Gary Lightfoot]

Here's a little info:

http://www.laserdiscarchive.co.uk/laserdisc_archive/pioneer/pioneer_cld-v2600/pioneer_cld-v2600.htm

Gary.

[vhelp]

..I'm thinking of getting a Pioneer 925 for the comb filter which might eliminate the dot crawl in solid colours that you can see occasionaly.

That's right. You got the 515 (1997, good year) model.

My V2600 is an un-comfirmed 1994 model. I'm not sure of any Comb Filters
used in this model.. but who knows.. its my first, and for my needs, I think
that's all I really need for the time being

The quest for quality never ends!!

Yes, I know what you mean.
-vhelp 2400

[Mythos2002]

Congratulations vhelp. I'm glad you are joining in on the LD mania. I'm pretty happy with my CLD-D703. It paid $220 for it back in 2002 on Ebay. A lot of money, but well worth it. I hope I can get a good deal back if I sell it. It came with the original manual, remote, and box.

I hope you will be very happy with your player.

It looks like we are all going to need to keep this up considering Lucas' idiotic press release today. What a blankhole that man is.

Mythos

[FulciLives]

I hope you will be very happy with your player.

It looks like we are all going to need to keep this up considering Lucas' idiotic press release today. What a blankhole that man is.

Mythos

What press release?

- John "FulciLives" Coleman

[geek rock]

I hope you will be very happy with your player.

It looks like we are all going to need to keep this up considering Lucas' idiotic press release today. What a blankhole that man is.

Mythos

What press release?

- John "FulciLives" Coleman

what was this, mythos?

all i could find was this:

http://www.starwars.com/episode-iv/news/2004/02/news20040210.html

[Gary Lightfoot]

Well, looks like my dot crawl problems could be solved..

Out of curiosity, I used WinDVD Creator 2 to convert the .avi to mpg2. In doing that, the dot crawl has dissapeared!

The image looks slightly different, perhaps a little brighter, but the problems I had all seem to have gone.

In theory, all I have to do is get TMPG to output a telecined 3:2 .avi which has ben cropped etc, then get WinDVD C" to convert to mpg. I'll lose the automatic 16:9 switching, but I'm wiling to forgo that for the picture quality I'm gaining.

I'll have to have a better look at the reults to see if I'm missing out on anything, but this could be the solution..

Gary.

[vhelp]

Hi guys,

Perhaps Mythos ment "in general" w/ respect to all the previous press releases
that Lucas has influence us all with :P

But, I do hope that he's only doing one version, and not all of them, cause
I don't want to have to do them (finally) and then he's got the same ones
I just finished. Sheesh

@ Gary,

About your "Best Shot.." process..

I'm not sure how you are going about with this process and WinDVD. I still
believe that the "dot crawl" is something else to do w/ the DV Codec and/or
the 411 bug in DV colorspace. I can't see how it could be your LD player
though. It has to be something in your video transfer that is causing you
this "dot crawl" thing. But, I really think its related to 411. Anyways..

With the 16:9 issue, I'm not sure where you're at w/ this. But, if you are
attempting to 16:9 it, and if somewhere's in the middle of your process, the
16:9 gets falled up, you can use DVD Patcher to fix it up a bit. I'm
actaully using it in other projects and it works great so far.

-vhelp 2401

[Perro Grande]

VHelp -- the LaserDisc AC3 thing is a bit of a kludge...

A player with Optical outputs will play the Digital STEREO audio track. If it happens to be ProLogic encoded, that will be there, too.

All players have Analog outputs. These outputs will play either the analog STEREO soundtrack or, in some cases, special commentary tracks, etc.

The 5.1 Dolby Digital track is hidden in with the right analog sound track. The bitstream modulates an RF carrier. This then must be demultiplexed with an RF-Demultiplexer which will give an Optical or Coaxial digital output that is the true 5.1 stream. The players capable of this will have an AC3 RF output.

The cool thing about this is that ANY player, even the oldest of the old, can be tinkered with to produce the AC-3 RF output that the later, fancier players have. I've seen some how-to guides that are brand/model specific, but they are certainly not complicated in the least. The demodulators are where the expense lies. These things still fetch between $125 and $200 on e-bay.

So, depending on how in-depth you want to get with your audio capture really determines what you need to get/do to your player. If you're fine with a ProLogic Stereo soundtrack, then you can just capture the analog (or digital) stereo. If you want 5.1, then you need to have the RF output, a demodulator, and a way to record the bitstream.

[Note: there are also some rare DTS-Encoded Laser Discs. I have not investigated how to record a DTS stream yet]

===========

As far as LD players go -- there really are only a handful of OEM's. Pioneer and Sony actually made most of the LD mechanisms out there. For example, Mitsubishi players are re-badged Pioneers, as are some others. Sometimes knowing this information can save you some $$ on your LD player purchase. The Laser Disc Archive link that was posted is a great source for this.

In my opinion, the Pioneer DVL-700, DVL-909, and DVL-919 offer the best performance for the buck. They have most of the features of the Elite series and don't cost as much.

===========

From the best I can tell, only the Star Wars Special Edition contains a true 5.1 soundtrack. All of the other ones I've looked at contain either a basic Stereo soundtrack or ProLogic surround soundtrack. My latest insane project is to make an LD capture of the Definitive or Faces discs with the SE 5.1 soundtrack, edited to match the old dialog, etc, of course....

[Gary Lightfoot]

vhelp,

the dot crawl is part of the capture process I think. I can remove it with tmpg but that involves softening the whole image which isn't what I want to do, but I found that if I use WinDVD Creator to convert the avi to mpg, the dot crawl is gone. I tried the 411 helper but it made no difference, which is why I had to try other things. I'm not capturing as DV, but as uncompressed avi, which is why 411 isn't helping.

The only thing with WinDVD Creator is that it has no 16:9 support, so although tmpg will convert to mpg2 and add the 16:9 switching flag for tvs to squish the video, this can't be done with WinDVD. The way around it is to use tmpg to output the file as an avi - 16:9 high so that when squished by the widescreen tv, the image is the correct 2.35:1 ratio. WinDVD Creator will simply render the avi as an mpg file which will not have the 16:9 flag with it, so you'll have to manualy select 16:9 on the tv and everything will be the correct ratio.

The advantage of having everything 16:9 is that if you have 4:3 menus, and use zoom to make the letterboxed image fill the widescreen tv, you lose the tops and bottoms of parts of the menu system, unless you make it all fit with a 16:9 area of the 4:3 image, which looks a little odd.

I can still go back to tmpg for mpg2 encoding if I wish, but I'm going to see how they turn out with WinDVD. WinDVD will also automatically convert the audio into Dolby Digital, which is handy too..

Forgot to say - thanks for the DVD patcher tip - I'll try to get that and see what I can do with it - much appreciated.

Gary.

[Gary Lightfoot]

DVD Patcher - great little utility!!

Although I can now make the WinDVD Creator mpg2 files have the 16:9 flag and switch accordingly, I've found the motion has problems, It seems TMPG is the only program able to give the correct motion with double frame effect.

Even though I output the avi file from tmpg, it doesn't seem to be telecined for WinDVD C to correctly convert to mpg.

Any ideas on that?

I'm thinking I might just use WinDVD C for the odd few sequences and TMPG for the rest. lol.

Gary.

[spiderman2k1]

I was on ebay and was loking at CED format kindof funny might buy some for the hell of it LOL

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=3077743027&category=298

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=3385595514&category=41676

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=3383673203&category=41676

My Dad best friend had one of these and said it was alot better then VHS. Any one ever have CED player?

[tito13kfm]

i asked my dad about it, and he remembers his brother (my uncle) having one, and how everybody was all jealous of it until my dad got a LaserDisc player (brotherly feud). As far as the quality goes, by only looking at the specifications of it I would say it would be marginally better than VHS, but not as good as laserdisc. but you wouldn't have laser-rot or dot-crawl to deal with.

It would definately be worth getting just for the nostalgia factor in it. It would almost be as impressive as listening to Major Tom on 8-track in Quadraphonic sound

This is Major Tom to ground control.. I'm (KER-CHUNK, switch tracks) stepping through the dooor and i'm floating in a most parculiar waaayy.

[nickel]

This is one long thread to go through and not really see someone just spell out all the steps in one post. I know that's hard to do because of all the different hardware and software set-ups we all have. Once I get results I'm happy with, I'll let you all know the precise details of the tools and settings I used. It'd be like a guide so that anyone can take an NTSC DV AVI cap of the Def Col LDs and get similar results using the same software.

How about this, can someone who has had success with converting a DV AVI in TMPGEnc upload a template of the TMPGEnc settings? It would include the IVTC and GOP stuff that someone has found to work well. I'm going crazy doing a ton of test encodes on 5 minutes of ANH (from Def Coll LD) and I'm guessing there are others who've already done this. I'm a complete idiot when it comes to IVTC, framerates, 3:2 pulldown and interlace vs. progressive (I've never used AVISynth and I don't know diddly about VirtualDub). I seem to have the aspect ratio and the subtitles figured out... but my output looks like crap. Thanks!

btw, for aspect ratio, I'm using 16:9 Display; arrange Fullscreen (Keep Aspect Ratio); Clip 101 top and 99 bottom with no mask; author as 16:9 in DVD Maestro. For subtitles, I've tested two methods and haven't decided which I'll use. One is to burn them on in Pinnacle Studio or Premiere using title overlays and then resave the DV AVI. The other is to use "Individual Subtitles" in DVD Maestro for DVD subs. A lot of people don't like the look of those, but in DVD Maestro, you can control the font, the color, the shadowing, the position and, of course, the duration to make a very nice match. A benefit to this is that it leaves the source material untouched in case you ever would want a clean copy to play with later when the next big video tech comes along. Another side benefit is that you can make multiple sub tracks and have a little fun... my test DVD subs have Greedo saying "He has no time for smugglers who drop their pants at the first sign of an Imperial Cruiser". I know that's stupid but it made me laugh to see that up on my big 16:9 set.

[Karyudo]

widescreen idea
I have an idea about the widescreen. Short of borrowing somebody's PAL LD set, I think it may be possible to get a nice digital highres widescreen capture if you have the right hardware. First of all, you have to wait until a station that broadcasts HDTV airs Star Wars. Then, you have to be able to capture or record digitally, and in high-res (HDTV format). If you can do that, then you have a great source to work from.

Great idea! However, it has never happened. There have been *no* HDTV broadcasts of the original SW trilogy (SE or otherwise) anywhere in the world, ever.

The best you can do is this:






Which is pretty good, but not HDTV.

[spiderman2k1]

"Karyudo" where did you get your capture those pic's look great.

[vhelp]

First of all.. I hate you PAL guys :P :P

..And, yes, you pics do look great. I love how Fishers eyes are so beatiful
to look at. Very attractive eyes in that pic. Then again, Fisher is gorgious (IMO)
I love her in Jedi though

yeah Karyudo,

Post your computer specs. I'm curious of Mobo/CPU and your Capture card
you're using. Details is always good you know.

-vhelp

[dphirschler]

Please someone... let me borrow your PAL set. I will leave a deposit and everything. Please.


Darryl

[vhelp]

First of all.. I hate you PAL guys :P :P

I think I have an idea why PAL versions of PICS and things always look so
good on our NTSC pc monitors
.
.
I believe that it is a colorspace difference on our NTSC screen, vs. PAL pc
screen. So, when we view a PAL pic on our NTSC screen, it looks great.
But, my theory is this.. that if someone were to post a sample .AVI capture
of a PAL source of s SW scene, and then any one of us do an NTSC capture
of that same scene:

A) - both will look different on our NTSC pc monitor (screen)
B) - but, when encoded, and authored to CD/DVD disk, will BOTH look the
.......same on our TV screen (colorspace-wise)

That's my theory on PAL quality. Still, it looks great on our NTSC pc monitors
though

But, I'm betting the above is true, though.
-vhelp