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

[Gary Lightfoot]

They looked like off-air captures from tv or similar, as they look too clean and high res to be the Non SEs. They're probably 16:9 too - cropped from 2.35:1 though (they were when they were broadcast here in the UK as anamorphic). Still by far the best quality until the SEs come out on DVD this year though.

Great looking pictures I have to say.

Gary.

[dphirschler]

PAL looks better because there are almost 100 lines of extra resolution. That means a PAL LD can produce an anamorphic NTSC DVD. That's why I want to borrow a PAL set from somebody.


Darryl

[vhelp]

..why not just buy a PAL set (or just one ep disk) on ebay ??

Does you LD player play both pal/ntsc ??

Wait.. If your LD can play both, wouldn't that take a PAL 576 line and convert
(or chop) off lines and produce 480 lines instead ??

-vhelp

[geek rock]

vhelp, there's no such thing as a PAL or NTSC computer monitor.. monitors will work worldwide, and the resolution and framerate depends on the graphics settings of your computer.

and on the topic of the PAL discs giving more resolution - yes, that's true, but it won't be a significant amount. remember that SW is shot in 2.35:1, which requires letterboxing on both 4:3 and 16:9 screens.

if the discs are anamorphic you might get an extra 50 lines or so.

if they're non-anamorphic, an extra 30 lines..

-Mark

[Gary Lightfoot]

I don't believe the captures are from laserdisc because of the reasons given (16:9 instead of 2.35:1 is a giveaway).

Specs for NTSC and PAL laserdisc are only around 15 lines of res difference IIRC. 425 for NTSC and 440 for PAL being typical.

You'll hardly notice the difference with laserdisc, but with DVD the res is far closer to the tv standards of 480 NTSC and 576 PAL visible lines (the rest are teletext and other data).

Gary.

[geek rock]

yeah, sorry gary, i should have been more clear - when i was talking about extra lines, i was talking in terms of DVD specifications, not laserdisc ones.

[Karyudo]

Gary's (partly) right: these aren't LD caps. I have *all* the recent NTSC LDs available (DC, Faces, SE, Japanese SE, and Collector's Set), and you're *never* going to get quality like the shots I posted from LD. NEVER. Not even from PAL, and not even with a cap card like mine (FlyVideo 3000) that has excellent specs -- 9 bit ADC -- but (sadly) flaky drivers.

But Gary is wrong when he says he can tell because the caps aren't 2.35:1 -- as a matter of fact, they *are*. They're just anamorphic. Stretch them horizontally by the correct amount (hmm... that'd be 1.78/1.25 = 142.4%) and you're lookin' at a correctly-framed 2.35:1 AR picture. The crap broadcasts in Britain may have been cropped to 16:9, but not every broadcast everywhere has been wrecked the same way.

BTW, I'm not in PAL-land; I just have an excellent network of sources!

[geek rock]

so where are those caps from, karyudo?

[duhmez]

Read this: It may be of interest.

http://www.betas-online.com/neterz/modules.php?name=News&new_topic=4

[Cannonball888]

Why go through all that just for Star Wars? Just dowload this and you've about got it.

[Karyudo]

I'm not entirely sure of the original source; I didn't do the capping. But my extensive Internet research (Google has no bigger fan than I) shows that various European countries broadcast the SE trilogy in 2001 sometime.

ESB and RotJ have been broadcast (and capped...) digitally in North America, too, but there were glitches here and there, and the last few minutes of Jedi was left 4:3 P&S by the network.

[mysticgohan17]

I bought the new Star Wars Rebel Strike game for Gamecube, anyone know how to rip the cutscenes, they look amazing. Almost perfect transfers.

[MJPollard]

Read this: It may be of interest.

http://www.betas-online.com/neterz/modules.php?name=News&new_topic=4

The original trilogy coming out on DVD in September is kinda old news by now, but the notice is appreciated. However, Lucasfilm is releasing the Special Edition versions, while this thread is concerned mainly with putting the Original Edition versions from various sources onto DVD. Besides, doing it yourself is a good exercise in video capturing, editing, and DVD authoring.

(Am I going to get the SE trilogy on DVD when it's released? Absolutely. Aside from a few glaring problems, I like the SE versions, and I think that many of the changes are for the better. Plus, the video quality is undoubtedly going to be better than anything we amateurs can do, if the Ep1 and Ep2 DVDs are any indication. But I'm still going to capture the OE versions from laserdisc and put them onto DVD, so that I can have both the originals and the SE versions in an easy-to-use form.)

[Gary Lightfoot]

Now that I look closer, I can see the vertical stretching.

It's a pity that no-one can broadcast the OT non SEs in true 2.35:1 anymore though. At least we'd have half a chanve to get a half decent copy to make into DVD then..

I think we're all doing the non SEs for the same reason Martin, I know I am.

Anyone used the non SE disks along with the SE disks to get the best possible quality? A mix of them both while still ensuring the results had no SE parts would give the best quality (including original audio where necessary), but it would be pretty time consuming to ensure accuracy.

Gary.

[Joel V]

Hi everyone-

I've been reading this list, utterly fascinated, for 3 days now.

I am a digital media student with a few years worth of digital audio experience, and a burgeoning interest in graphic design. I've actually designed DVD menu screens for a promotional DVD for my school, and I've been planning a Star Wars LD to DV transfer for quite a while. I'm so happy to have found a group that seems as quality-and-detail-obsessed as myself! I look forward to contributing.

For now, I have a few questions. I hope it's appropriate to this forum to ask them.

1) Can anyone help me with the ftp downloads? I've been trying to
access them with fetch (the Mac ftp client thingy), but I can't seem to connect. Is there is a post or series of posts that someone could direct me to?

2) I LOVE the idea of using anamorphic widescreen, but why use "inverse telecine"? Won't we run the risk of adding even more timing errors to the ones inherent in the original 3:2 pulldown? And can most DVD players play this type of video back, or is 24P playback a specialty/ high-end feature?

3) If I supply a PAL Laserdisc set, would someone (Darryl?) be interested in giving me a DV transfer of such? There is a Special Edition set on eBay right now....I want non-SE, too, but I am handy with editors.

4) Can anyone recommend a good video capture device for my Mac?

5) Karyuda, are the cap stills that you posted from full-motion video that you own, or do you just own the stills? I am amazed at the quality of the images.

Thanks for reading. Again, I look forward to contributing in any way possible.

-Joel

[Karyudo]

2) I LOVE the idea of using anamorphic widescreen, but why use "inverse telecine"? Won't we run the risk of adding even more timing errors to the ones inherent in the original 3:2 pulldown? And can most DVD players play this type of video back, or is 24P playback a specialty/ high-end feature?

The absolute beauty of IVTC is that you can exactly and completely reverse the timing errors of the original 3:2 pulldown, and, once properly encoded to DVD-spec MPEG-2, any DVD player will be able to play it correctly.

The troublesome part about IVTC is that in order for it to work flawlessly, you have to start with a very clean source -- no (or very few) dropped frames. You've also got to get a bit lucky, and hope that the creators of the source material didn't do a lot of editing, titling, etc., on an already-telecined source. If they did, you'll end up with a hybrid nightmare.

Luckily, the SW sources (all of them, pretty much) are purely film material, and therefore telecine pretty nicely. Also, on the PC there's a particularly excellent IVTC/de-interlacing tool for AviSynth called Decomb, by Donald Graft (aka neuron2). So a lot of the headaches go away.

I don't know if there's a decent IVTC tool for the Mac world.

5) Karyuda, are the cap stills that you posted from full-motion video that you own, or do you just own the stills? I am amazed at the quality of the images.

(Karyudo, with an 'O'...)

They're full-motion, 25fps PAL. Whole trilogy, too.

Welcome to the hobby that'll drive you nuts and consume your every waking thought for the next six months or so...

[geek rock]

Hi everyone-
I've been reading this list, utterly fascinated, for 3 days now.

i don't even own star wars on laserdisc but i still read this thread for updates and post my advice when i can. this thread is addictive!

4) Can anyone recommend a good video capture device for my Mac?

canopus advc-100. 'nuff said.. do a forum search for it, it's been discussed more than star wars!

welcome to the boards.

-Mark

[mysticgohan17]

Hi everyone-
I've been reading this list, utterly fascinated, for 3 days now.

i don't even own star wars on laserdisc but i still read this thread for updates and post my advice when i can. this thread is addictive!

And I thought I was the only one

[dphirschler]

My calculations are as follows:

SW captured from the NTSC LD has a frame size of 480 lines, 278 of which are for the image, the rest are for the black bars. If it were anamorphic, the image would be 370 lines out of 480.

The PAL LD should have a frame size of 576 lines, 334 of which are the image, the rest should be black bars. Therefore, the PAL LD is only 36 lines shy of true NTSC anamorphic.

So if I get a PAL LD, I will capture it cropping the image to 334 lines (only the image, and no black bars. I will then stretch the image to 370 lines. Finally, I would center the image on a 480 line frame (black bar = 55 pixels on top and bottom).

This is as close to anamorphic widescreen as I can hope to achieve for the original trilogy. I will gladly tackle the task if I ever get ahold of a PAL LD set. Even a PAL VHS set is worth it. Running the VHS through a TBC is likely to stabilize the picture well enough.


Darryl

[Mythos2002]

Wow. This thread has grown in my absence. I do have a question for anyone doing AC-3 audio conversions. Has anyone here found a way to get BeSweet AC-3 audio conversions to play nice on Pioneer DVD Players?


My DVD's have PCM audio, but I would really like to try AC-3 so I could fit a whole movie on 1 disc with a high bitrate.

Thanks.

Mythos

[FulciLives]

My calculations are as follows:

SW captured from the NTSC LD has a frame size of 480 lines, 278 of which are for the image, the rest are for the black bars. If it were anamorphic, the image would be 370 lines out of 480.

The PAL LD should have a frame size of 576 lines, 334 of which are the image, the rest should be black bars. Therefore, the PAL LD is only 36 lines shy of true NTSC anamorphic.

So if I get a PAL LD, I will capture it cropping the image to 334 lines (only the image, and no black bars. I will then stretch the image to 370 lines. Finally, I would center the image on a 480 line frame (black bar = 55 pixels on top and bottom).

This is as close to anamorphic widescreen as I can hope to achieve for the original trilogy. I will gladly tackle the task if I ever get ahold of a PAL LD set. Even a PAL VHS set is worth it. Running the VHS through a TBC is likely to stabilize the picture well enough.


Darryl

This assums you are starting off with a 720x480 NTSC source or a 720x576 PAL source:

When you convert 4:3 NTSC to 16x9 NTSC you chop 60 off the top and bottom. This gives you 720x360 which you then resize to 720x480

When you convert 4:3 PAL to 16x9 PAL you chop off 72 from the top and bottom. This gives you 720x432 which you then resize to 720x576

The best way though is to cut off all of the black but that can be a bit more tricky to do. I would do it in an AviSynth script ... use crop to remove all the black (eyeball it first in VirtualDub so you know how much to cut off) then add enough back to the top and bottom with the AddBorders Avisynth command to get it back to a height of 360 for NTSC or 432 for PAL then resize to 720x480 for NTSC or 720x576 for PAL.

- John "FulciLives" Coleman

[FulciLives]

Wow. This thread has grown in my absence. I do have a question for anyone doing AC-3 audio conversions. Has anyone here found a way to get BeSweet AC-3 audio conversions to play nice on Pioneer DVD Players?


My DVD's have PCM audio, but I would really like to try AC-3 so I could fit a whole movie on 1 disc with a high bitrate.

Thanks.

Mythos

I haven't purchased it myself but there is a new AC-3 plug-in for TMPGEnc DVD Author that will convert I think either MP2 and/or LPCM audio to AC-3 after you import your MPEG file or elementry streams.

As far as I know it works well but I am lucky enough to have access to the AC-3 encoder that comes with Scenarist and it is one of the best around and that is what I use. I gave up on BeSweet for AC-3 a long time ago mostly because of the Pioneer problem (a friend of mine also has a SAMSUNG DVD player that doesn't like BeSweet AC-3 audio).

If you ever need to convert a PAL DVD to NTSC or vice versa and that DVD has 5.1 AC-3 then you might be interested to know that BeSweet can convert 5.1 AC-3 to 5.1 AC-3 making the time adjustment for PAL to NTSC or vice versa and such 5.1 AC-3 tracks made by BeSweet will play back fine on Pioneer DVD players. It just seems to not work with 2.0 AC-3 files. Unfortunately there is no simple easy way to convert 2.0 to 5.1 which would be a "work-around" method if it weren't so damn impossible to do the 2.0 to 5.1 thing.

- John "FulciLives" Coleman

[MJPollard]

This assums you are starting off with a 720x480 NTSC source or a 720x576 PAL source:

When you convert 4:3 NTSC to 16x9 NTSC you chop 60 off the top and bottom. This gives you 720x360 which you then resize to 720x480

When you convert 4:3 PAL to 16x9 PAL you chop off 72 from the top and bottom. This gives you 720x432 which you then resize to 720x576

Forgive my blonde moment here , but what is the formula you used to come up with the amount to chop from the top and bottom? I've been looking for such a thing in the guides, but either it's not there or I just haven't looked hard enough. Enlightenment would be wonderful!

[FulciLives]

This assums you are starting off with a 720x480 NTSC source or a 720x576 PAL source:

When you convert 4:3 NTSC to 16x9 NTSC you chop 60 off the top and bottom. This gives you 720x360 which you then resize to 720x480

When you convert 4:3 PAL to 16x9 PAL you chop off 72 from the top and bottom. This gives you 720x432 which you then resize to 720x576

Forgive my blonde moment here , but what is the formula you used to come up with the amount to chop from the top and bottom? I've been looking for such a thing in the guides, but either it's not there or I just haven't looked hard enough. Enlightenment would be wonderful!

Well I actually figured this out myself along with the help of another user a LONG time ago but if you want more details then here you should read this article by DJRumpy:

https://www.videohelp.com/forum/userguides/174200.php

Cheers!

- John "FulciLives" Coleman

[MJPollard]

Well I actually figured this out myself along with the help of another user a LONG time ago but if you want more details then here you should read this article by DJRumpy:

https://www.videohelp.com/forum/userguides/174200.php

Precisely what I was looking for! Muchos gracias, senor!

[dphirschler]

This assums you are starting off with a 720x480 NTSC source or a 720x576 PAL source:

When you convert 4:3 NTSC to 16x9 NTSC you chop 60 off the top and bottom. This gives you 720x360 which you then resize to 720x480

When you convert 4:3 PAL to 16x9 PAL you chop off 72 from the top and bottom. This gives you 720x432 which you then resize to 720x576

The best way though is to cut off all of the black but that can be a bit more tricky to do. I would do it in an AviSynth script ... use crop to remove all the black (eyeball it first in VirtualDub so you know how much to cut off) then add enough back to the top and bottom with the AddBorders Avisynth command to get it back to a height of 360 for NTSC or 432 for PAL then resize to 720x480 for NTSC or 720x576 for PAL.

- John "FulciLives" Coleman

Different means, same end. Main difference for me is I crop upon capture, thus saving much HD space. But I still need a PAL LD. Anyone want to volunteer one?


Darryl

[dphirschler]

Does a PAL LD of the original trilogy even exist? I am not finding anything in a Google search. I better get a PAL VHS.


Darryl

[nickel]

On AC-3 Conversion: There's also an excellent AC-3 encoding program I've seen called "Soft Encode" by Sonic Foundry (now owned by Sony). Not sure of the price or availability now, saw it a long time ago.

Anybody willing to throw up their TMPGEnc templates for MPEG-2 conversion from DV (with or without IVTC and other filters on) for us to download? Once I get one that doesn't produce bad results, I'll put mine up for review.

What are the pros/cons of doing IVTC in AVISynth vs. TMPGEnc?

[Karyudo]

Does a PAL LD of the original trilogy even exist? I am not finding anything in a Google search. I better get a PAL VHS.

VHS?!? No, don't do that -- OT PAL LDs exist. In fact, I can probably get a set. But I don't want them (can't do anything with them, livin' as I do in a strictly-NTSC area), so you'd have to buy them yourself, outright. If you're interested, PM me for details, and I'll get to work.

[vhelp]

Hay guys,

WAHOO !! !!

in all the excitement w/ my peronal life and other endeavors, I forgot to
mention that I got my Pioneer CLD-V2600 LD Player. It got lost in
the mail somewhere's so, it was very late arriving. But I'm happy that
it finally did arrive.

However, in all the excitement, I forgot to order LD disks (any,
for that matter) - I got no LD disk movies to play --> and -->

However, in another thread, I made mention, that I was ordering another
LD player (different model) and that I'd keep it ananimus for the time being,
until I got it, for sure :P
.
.
In this secret model, it will come w/ a few LD movies to play with. But, no
Star Wars disks.

Now that I got one, I'd like to order the Star Wars on LD disks. But, again,
I'd like to knwo which ones to order, but not the ones that will be on the
Sept 2004 planned date. Can anyone tell me which ones to get for sure,
w/out worrying about making the mistake of getting the same one's planned
for DVD ??
Show pics or links so that I know which ones to get (will try on ebay)

Hay, almost forgot.. .. The unit is in GREAT shape !! Yipee!! Its like knew.
Though, there is a slight dent on corner (due to other media devices being
left on it for years, no doubt) and a slight scutt on the red plastic lens, but
other than that, this guy is scratchless
.
.
I'll try and show a pic of mine, using my TRV-22, when I get the chance.

Thanks guys, for everything :P
-vhelp