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

[Mythos2002]

Thanks for the advice. The only reason I was concerned about my colors and brightness was due to this picture someone has over at www.originaltrilogy.com of a set they have. It looks like it came from the Special Edition, but they claim it came from the Definitive Collection LD's.



I didn't do anything with the colors. However, I did reverse my ADVC setting. I captured in IRE 0 instead of 7.5. It seemed to look better at the time.

I did notice a problem with the black bars at one time and I can't remember if it happened when I used IRE 7.5 or when I clicked the option in TMPENGEnc Plus Output YUV data as basic YCbCR not CCIR601. I noticed that my black bars each had two shades. They were pure black from the top and bottom edges of the TV all the way up to just a few lines (maybe 1/4 inch) before the video image. I would say this 1/4 inch of the black bars looked more like light gray instead of black. I think I should be able to work it out. I'm positive I clipped all of the LD black bars off though.

I hope my AC-3 problem might improve once I get my Turtle Beach soundcard. I went with it instead of a Creative Labs because I have a VIA KT333 chipset and the two don't play nicely together. I also bought a 250 GB hard drive, so now I can keep all of my captures.

I use WinDV to capture with. Do you think I should stick with it or use Scenalyzer?

Thanks

Mythos

[FulciLives]

I didn't do anything with the colors. However, I did reverse my ADVC setting. I captured in IRE 0 instead of 7.5. It seemed to look better at the time.

Well ... you do realize that IRE 7.5 is for USA/CANADIAN NTSC whereas IRE 0.0 is for Japanese NTSC and PAL

Although I thought the original picture looked OK I have to admit that the one you just posted looks better and now your picture looks too light.

- John "FulciLives" Coleman

P.S.
Have you burned your project to a DVD to watch on a TV and if so do you have a stand alone DVD player that has selectable "black" level? Some call it "enhanced black" and some simply call it lighter/darker.

[dphirschler]

The question about image quality in relation to brightness raises an interesting question. Personally, I think it looks great. But that is only one scene. It's hard to guage brightess with a space scene in my opinion. However, you can get a good look at the black levels. Also, if the stars disappear, then it's too dark.

The scene I like to look at for brightness is the scene with Leia confronting Darth Vader at the beginning of the movie ("Darth Vader, only you could be so bold..."). I try to get it as white as possible without losing detail. Or in other words, that is a great scene to check to see if it is set too bright.

I used to set gamma up to about 1.1, but I've since left it alone. I thought it washed out some of the flesh tones. I tried upping the saturation to correct it, but I eventually decided that I was tinkering with it too much and it should be just left alone. My only setting now is on capture and it's the brightness setting (126 instead of the default 128).

But your image looks pretty good. I looked at it on both an LCD and regular PC monitor. In comparison to mine, it looks brighter. Check the Leia/Vader scene I referred to to see if you are losing any detail.


Darryl

[Mythos2002]

Thanks for all of the information. I watched the scene I have a picture posted of on my TV and it looks much better than it does here. I believe the other person's picture has a little more detail, but there's is 4:3 and not 16:9. Maybe my 16:9 conversion is causing a little loss of detail.

As far as filters go, the only ones I used were TMPNGEnc's IVTC and Clip Frame.

My Pioneer DV-525 Player has three settings for the image. Theatrical, Animation, and General. Theatrical looks the best and is what I leave it set to.

What are you other guys with Canopus capture devices using for capture software?

I just got my Turtle Beach sound card yesterday and there are a lot of settings in on it to look it. I was wondering how my sound card can affect captures if I'm using the Canopus ADVC-100 to capture with instead of the sound card. Does the ADVC-100 ignore the sound card? Whenever I capture, I don't have sound since I don't have anything hooked to the sound card from my LD Player or ADVC-100. I have to view my captures back before I can hear the audio. I just want to make sure I don't have crazy things set that on the sound card that will have a detrimental affect on my captures like echo, reverb, have the equalizer set inproperly, etc.

I'm glad to get some new hardware, but the bad thing is that it gives me more things to take in consideration.

Thanks.

Mythos

[Gary Lightfoot]

Does this guy speek Botchee (or is it Botchie)?

Thought you guys might like a little humour (though I'm sure some won't see the funny side)....

I never noticed it before, but the guy that I ringed is speeking to the Taun Taun - it sounds like a Swedish dialect or something.



When I first heard it, I thought he sounded like UK Comedien Vic Reeves doing Club Style.

Who knows what movie, and what scene it's from?

Gary.

[Mythos2002]

That's pretty funny Gary. I noticed that too when I saw the scene and was wondering what he was saying.

I'm going to recapture all of the LD's and preserve my LD Player. Below are a few pictures that I wanted your opinions on. I DVD's were captured in IRE0 using S-Video, but I captured using IRE7.5 and composite video. I know S-Video is supposed to be better, but I don't get the dot crawl with composite. I experimented with 16:9 and 4:3 as well as the setting in TMPNGEnc (Output YUV data as Basic YCbCR.....) checked and unchecked.

The pictures labelled a have the Output YUV data as Basic YCbCR..... setting checked and the ones labelled b have that setting unchecked.

This one is 16x9 Output YUV data as Basic YCbCR..... turned on.


This one is 16x9 Output YUV data as Basic YCbCR..... turned off.


This one is 4x3 Output YUV data as Basic YCbCR..... turned on.


This one is 4x3 Output YUV data as Basic YCbCR..... turned off.


Let me know which one looks best. Thanks.

Mythos

[Gary Lightfoot]

The bottom 3 pictures don't appear, but I'll tell you what settings I used - I captured via composite too btw.

I tick the 'output yuv data as basicYCbCr' in order to get the full range of black to white - 255 levels. The other method uses 235 IIRC and you get grey blacks and reduced contrast.

I then use the colour controls (I'm using TMPGenc) to increase the gamma by 30. I do this so that the brightness matches the same brightness the player gives on my tv when playing straight from the laserdisc. Otherwise the dark scenes hide too much detail.

I also increased the brightness and contrast by 10, and reduced the red by 25. I used a little noise reduction too - 20 1 20.

0 ire is 0milivolts from your player to depict black, and is the PAL standard. 7.5ire is 0.49mv IIRC, and is the NTSC standard. Using 0 for NTSC means blacker than black and then calibrating your display for white and black levels might be an idea if you want to see all the shadow detail etc as anything below 0.49mv will be black, instead of grey shades down to 0 which should be black. The PC seems to do something diferent again, so maybe you should capture as NTSC and 7.5 ire with the settings above. I haven't fully read what others have said or done with that, so I'm just giving my opinion.

If you can get the other pics up, that would be handy, and also try my settings and see what you think. Let me know how you get on.

Gary.

[Mythos2002]

Thanks Gary. I'll have to try those settings. I think my IRE 7.5 captures look better than my IRE 0 ones, but I haven't tried any color correction yet. I like how my composite captures don't have dot crawl. I believe dphirschler is right about the LD's being stored composite as I didn't notice a loss of detail. Do you notice any loss of detail in my 16:9 pictures?


dphirschler,

Do you have a an avisynth script like the one for you posted for ANH for ESB and ROTJ?

Thanks.

Mythos

[FulciLives]

The pictures labeled "Output YUV data as Basic YCbCR..... turned on" definately look better than the other pics were you did NOT turn on that option.

This makes sense since most DV codecs (including the Canopus DV codec) should have that option checked on.

I think the 16x9 image looks good. I would go that way. Even if you don't have a 16x9 TV now you might eventually.

Although since this whole SW thing is so ummm obsessive based ... you might want to do one 4:3 and one 16x9 if you only have a 4:3 TV at the moment

- John "FulciLives" Coleman

[Mythos2002]

Thanks for the advice. The only thing I worry about with that Output Basic YUV option turned on is that you can't see quite as many stars in the background. The color looks better though.

I think I've finally found a fix for my AC-3 problems and my Pioneer DVD Player. I've been reading that the AC-3 Plugin for TMPNG DVD Author is fully compliant and that you don't have to have DVD Author to use it. Someone tested it with a Pioneer DV525 (same model as mine) and they didn't have any problems. I also believe ffmpeg is supposed to be fixed now. The AC-3 Plugin is signed off by Dolby, so I may just buy it.

I have another question concerning the encode modes. I used 2 pass VBR on my first discs because the video had a few jumps in it here and there when I used CQ and played it on my stand alone player. If I use CQ, any idea of what bitrates and q setting would be optimal if I do a single disc version with AC-3. Also, which AC-3 level should I use? I was thinking of 224kbps. Thanks.

Mythos

[FulciLives]

Thanks for the advice. The only thing I worry about with that Output Basic YUV option turned on is that you can't see quite as many stars in the background. The color looks better though.

I think I've finally found a fix for my AC-3 problems and my Pioneer DVD Player. I've been reading that the AC-3 Plugin for TMPNG DVD Author is fully compliant and that you don't have to have DVD Author to use it. Someone tested it with a Pioneer DV525 (same model as mine) and they didn't have any problems. I also believe ffmpeg is supposed to be fixed now. The AC-3 Plugin is signed off by Dolby, so I may just buy it.

I have another question concerning the encode modes. I used 2 pass VBR on my first discs because the video had a few jumps in it here and there when I used CQ and played it on my stand alone player. If I use CQ, any idea of what bitrates and q setting would be optimal if I do a single disc version with AC-3. Also, which AC-3 level should I use? I was thinking of 224kbps. Thanks.

Mythos

I too have heard good things about the AC-3 plug-in for TMPGEnc DVD Author but I have no need for it myself so I haven't tried it.

Not sure what to tell you about CQ mode. I never use that myself. I just do straight CBR or multi-pass VBR. In fact these days I barely use TMPGEnc Plus anymore. I'm a big fan of CINEMA CRAFT ENCODER.

As for the AC-3 I generall use 256kbps but 224kbps should be fine. Most commercial made DVD discs use 192kbps for 2.0 AC-3

In any event you would never need to go above 256kbps for 2.0 AC-3 and never less than 192kbps

So it is up to you which of the three to use. Like I said I prefer to use 256kbps if for nothing else than it is on the high side (I'm a quality freak) and also that I noticed that most stand alone DVD recorders also use 256kbps although that might have to do with the fact that they are recording 2.0 AC-3 in real time because like I said almost all commercial DVD discs use 192kbps although I have seen some use 224kbps and 256kbps but that is rather rare to see on a commercial DVD.

- John "FulciLives" Coleman

[Gary Lightfoot]

The pics look just as good as mine do from what I can see here, so you're doing OK. Show us a few pics with flesh tones in as well.

The dot crawl I see is in the red buttons and opening Lucasfilm titling - little dots at the edge of things that seem to be moving. Do you see those too? I'm using a Pioneer 515 and it doesn't have any form of comb filtering, so I'm wondering if that's why.

I cropped the black parts out using TMPGs crop feature, and set the display as 16:9, so it stretches the image, and puts the switching flag in so that the software or DVD player will send the signal to the tv.

Play the laserdisc into your tv, and then use a DVD-RW to put a short sequence onto a disk and play that. Then try to get the image to look as similar as possible. I reduced the red a little on mine as it seemed too red. Not sure if all players were like that though.

Gary.

[wingnut]

Afternoon all,

reading this epic thread made me decide to get round to converting my original starwars - a new hope VHS, yes VHS ,
the tapes I have are the 90's re-issue THX widescreen PAL ones and are pretty prestine.

My procedure was:

captured from a new Sharp 6 head VHS onto my EMR 50 panasonic DVD Recorder onto RAM
RAM brought onto the PC (using mediaalbum copytool)
VRO run through DVD2AVI to extract the AC3 audio
VRO run through pvastrumento to check stream and extract M2V
M2v brought into virtualdubmod
Virtualdubmod used to:
- crop letterbox
- rmpal filter
- vhs filter (lightly used the EMR50 has good filtering already)
- smart deinterlace
- subtitle filter (substation alpha used to create Greedo subtitles onto movie area)
- frameserve to tmpgenc

tmpgenc encoded into 16:9 anamorphic widescreen PAL

Below are some examples of the raw capture, the cropped/filtered video and the final anamorphic encode, I'd love some
feedback from you guys. The pictures are all jpgs to keep file size down but you should find links to bitmap versions for
those of you who don't mind > 1MB downloads.


"Raw" captures from the EMR50





Bitmap version links (over 1MB dial up users !)
http://www.reebus.demon.co.uk/Guides/VHStoDVD/newhope/framegrabs/RAWVHSCAP-1.bmp
http://www.reebus.demon.co.uk/Guides/VHStoDVD/newhope/framegrabs/RAWVHSCAP-2.bmp
http://www.reebus.demon.co.uk/Guides/VHStoDVD/newhope/framegrabs/RAWVHSCAP-3.bmp

------------------------------

Processed through VDUB





Bitmap version links (over 1MB dial up users !)
http://www.reebus.demon.co.uk/Guides/VHStoDVD/newhope/framegrabs/CROPSUBVHSCAP-1.bmp
http://www.reebus.demon.co.uk/Guides/VHStoDVD/newhope/framegrabs/CROPSUBVHSCAP-2.bmp
http://www.reebus.demon.co.uk/Guides/VHStoDVD/newhope/framegrabs/CROPSUBVHSCAP-3.bmp


------------------------------


After re-encoding in TMPGENC





Bitmap version links (over 1MB dial up users !)
http://www.reebus.demon.co.uk/Guides/VHStoDVD/newhope/framegrabs/ANAMENCVHSCAP-1.bmp
http://www.reebus.demon.co.uk/Guides/VHStoDVD/newhope/framegrabs/ANEMENCVHSCAP-2.bmp
http://www.reebus.demon.co.uk/Guides/VHStoDVD/newhope/framegrabs/ANEMENCVHSCAP-3.bmp

[Gary Lightfoot]

I must say they look pretty good for VHS. Probably better than the original tape.

The subtitles look nice and sharp too. How does it look on the tv, otr haven't you burnt it to DVD yet?

I've just finished my first attempt with Empire, and will now try ANH.

Will keep you all posted of course. :P

Gary.

[Mythos2002]

I'm really confused now. I'll either host or post some picts of what I am talking about soon. I went back and made a test DVD-RW of various clips and settings. I hope my ADVC-100 isn't broke because the settings that look the closest to the LD's are IRE0 with Output YUV...... unchecked. I did a comparison between the LD's and my DVD-RW on the TV. I haven't tried any color correction or noise reduction filters yet.

I also noticed a little visual noise or actually fuzz that is not in the LD's, so the picture doesn't quite look as good as the LD's. I believe I've read that capturing does introduce some slight noise or that slight degradation occurs with capturing. I wonder if it is possible to fully duplicate the picture quality of the LD's without some seriously expensive equipment.

Back to the colors. I'm having a tough time deciding. IRE0 with Output YUV.... to my eye on the TV are the settings that are the closest match to the colors on the LD's. However, I've also read somewhere that color reproduction on these LD's wasn't the greatest. Even though the colors are a little different, I actually prefer the way IRE7.5 with Output YUV.... unchecked looks. If I check Output YUV...., most of the stars in the background are not visible during the space scenes. Maybe there is a happy medium with Gary's settings, IRE7.5 and Output YUV... checked.


Mythos

[Gary Lightfoot]

Hi Mythos,

I had the same dilema - blacks were too black, and a lot of shadow detail seemed to be missing.

I remembered that I could see the matting from the bluescreen in the space spfx shots (from the movie and VHS/TV versions I'd seen previously), so in the end I used the yuv checked, raised gamma by 30 and brightness and contrast by 10. I reduced the red by about 25.

To my eye, those settings looked similar to the laserdisc on my tv, and the bluscreen matts were now visible. In the snowspeeder ATAT attack, you didn't lose a lot of bright detail like you do in the Malasian 5Star SE pirate disks, so I'm reasonably pleased with the results.

I did try raising the saturation to negate what the increased gamma had robbed from the picture, but didn't want unatural lokung skin tones etc. You may find you prefer a slight increase though.

The space shots always did look a bit grey IIRC, and apparently Lucas has said he wanted it that way. Being able to see the asteroid belt through the cockpit of the Millenium Falcon is quite a nice view! Having the blacks too dark will lose a lot of those visual effects, so if Lucas had wanted the blacks grey, I can understand why.

HTH

Gary.

[Mythos2002]

Thanks Gary. I tried the settings you suggested and so far the colors do seem to match those of the LD's. I'll have to burn a test RW and see how they look on the TV.

How is your project coming? I'm mainly worried about getting them recaptured in the best possible way and also having all of my settings figured out so I don't have to rely on the LD Player anymore. Hopefully, those dual layer DVD Writers will prove themselves worthy when they come out.

Mythos

[wingnut]

I must say they look pretty good for VHS. Probably better than the original tape.

The subtitles look nice and sharp too. How does it look on the tv, otr haven't you burnt it to DVD yet?

I've just finished my first attempt with Empire, and will now try ANH.

Will keep you all posted of course. :P

Gary.

Afternoon all,

sorry for the delay in posting back my PC is currently ghosting its o/s hard disk after my maxtor o/s drive started to bring up SMART warnings telling of impending disk failure

Anyhoo, after making PC world that little bit richer, (dont have time to wait for mail order delivery of a hard disk including the usual FUN FILLED adventure of missing the postman and then being able to pick up my parcel between 9:15 and 9:15:37 if lucky), I have replaced the drive and with a big thank you to norton ghost have now got the pc back up.

What's this got to do with star wars...err....oh yes! I've now burned the movie to disk along with the thx cavalcade intro. Its chaptered over 35 chapters, (roughly analagous to some of the laserdisc chapters).

Quality wise its obviously not as clean as a prestine DVD or even a laserdisc picture but in anamorphic stretch on my 32" widescreen it looks SOOO much better than the original VHS. Especially since I've been able to move the subtitles into the picture area so I don't need to scroll down in zoom mode. May be brave enough to try it on the projector next weekend and see if it survives a 7 foot screen :P

Now to continue with Empire and Jedi.. oh and all 26 seasons of Dr Who, Star Trek TOS and several hundred other VHS tapes.....

Cheers all

Edz

[Mythos2002]

Wingnut,

I think you have just brought up something important. Do you mean that if you leave the subtitles in the black area and have a 4:3 transfer that the subtitles will go off of the bottom of the screen when you use the TV's zoom? If so, I think that is very important information to know.

I know people who are buying 4:3 transfers from someone. I bet they never thought about it. I'm glad I did mine and will do my improved versions in 16:9.

I was wondering if anyone knows in detail how Hollywood makes Anamorphic Transfers. I would like to know in great detail just out of curiosity. The reason I ask is because I think those of us doing 16:9 conversions are not necessarily making Anamorphic transfers since I know Hollywood probably uses a whole different process. Can anyone point me to any in depth articles? I've read the articles at The Digital Bits, but they don't get into it very deeply since it was supposed to be a layman's guide to Anamorphic Widescreen.

Mythos

[wingnut]

Morning,

Wingnut,

I think you have just brought up something important. Do you mean that if you leave the subtitles in the black area and have a 4:3 transfer that the subtitles will go off of the bottom of the screen when you use the TV's zoom? If so, I think that is very important information to know.

Yup that's exactly the situation. When I watched my New Hope THX VHS I had to select "subtitle" mode. This zooms the image up but moves the letterboxed picture to the top of the screen so that there is no top black bar just a very long black bar under the film. This is ok but with VHS you can get some distortion as head switching noise and other vhs artifacts that are normally hidden by overscan are sometimes revealed.

Since I cropped and then regeerated the subtitles and then encoded in anamorphic ratio and flagged it as such on the DVD. I can play the movie back on my widescreen set / projector or set the player to 4:3 mode and have it re-letterbox the image for a 4:3 set.

I know people who are buying 4:3 transfers from someone. I bet they never thought about it. I'm glad I did mine and will do my improved versions in 16:9.

Yup, if the source of those transfers is the same as my VHS source and they cant shift the whole letterbox up the screen they are going to get confused when Greedo comes on the screen

I was wondering if anyone knows in detail how Hollywood makes Anamorphic Transfers. I would like to know in great detail just out of curiosity. The reason I ask is because I think those of us doing 16:9 conversions are not necessarily making Anamorphic transfers since I know Hollywood probably uses a whole different process. Can anyone point me to any in depth articles? I've read the articles at The Digital Bits, but they don't get into it very deeply since it was supposed to be a layman's guide to Anamorphic Widescreen.

Mythos

Hmm I had a quick look this morning, (at work so not an exhaustive search), my guestimate of the process would be as follows:

I would imagine each frame is scanned in R-G-B before being combined into a high quality uncompressed format. Since this is a scan of the original frame the aspect ratio should be the same. This is why the review sites normally make such a big issue out of the quality of the print (interpositive?), that is used for the transfer. Assuming the print is anamorphically squeezed so will the scanned frames. I don't know if the black bars inherant in a 16:9 anamorphically squeezed version of a 2.35:1 ratio film would be clipped or whether the whole frame would be scanned. At this point any digital correction / restoration could take place.

Once the uncompressed original is completed it is passed for MPEG encoding on non-realtime hardware encoders.

I will try to find some URLs to find someone who actually KNOWS this rather than guessing and post back as soon as I can.


Cheers

Edz

[flaninacupboard]

films that are shot on 2.35:1 use 35mm film, but anamorphically. i.e. if you look at one 35mm frame from a 2.35:1 movie there will be no black bars, but a very streched image. obviously this needs to be resized so it's at 1.7777*:1 with black bars for DVD release.

[dphirschler]

It's been a while since I last updated you guys on my progress, so here goes. Here's an update on my progress on the LD conversion:

Things to do:

1. double-check glitched frames up to disc-2
The glithced frames comes from the capture process. I've noticed that ocassionally, a little data is left over from previous frames. I rectify this by capturing it twice and just swapping out the glitched frames with good ones from the second capture. I am almost done. I finished going through the whole movie once. I just need to go back through and do a thorough check on the first two LD sides since I was not so strict at first. I got real picky by about mid-way through side-2.

2. finish movie subtitles (not Greedo's)
I will be working on that this week. It's looking great so far. I am about twenty minutes into the move. I need to double-check my capitalization by comparing the Closed Captions to the movie script (which if completely formatted). In fact, I may switch to using the movie script for my text instead of the CC capture. I don't know yet.

3. ramp up volume in commentary track during empty sections
I added the movie audio in the background. It was a little too low during the no talking sections. Do you think I should ramp the volume up to full level when no talking is happening or keep it lower than the actual movie audio channel, like say about 75%?

4. create a soundtrack-only audio channel
This will be fun. All I have to do is rip the soundtrack CD I have and sync it up to the movie audio. Should be interesting to listen to while watching the movie.

5. design and create menus
This will be a lot of work just working out the logistics. After I get that part figured out, then I will design some real nice looking menus. Until then, it will be pretty basic. I need to figure out which font is being used for the serif text. I want to use that same font. Most likely there will only be a main menu and a "chapters" menu. I don't think I can make a menu for the audio. I will look into it though.

I am so close! I will probably make another encode as soon as I get the video double-checked. I already have the new chapters entry points done. I may tweak the gamma and saturation settings a little too before I do a final encode. I am getting psyched now that this first movie is almost done. I am so ready to start "Empire"!

BTW, I discovered while going through frame by frame that Obi-Wan's and Vader's light sabers switch colors briefly a couple of times. It usually happens when they strike each other and their hands are close together. The special effects editor must've gotten confused.


Darryl

[Gary Lightfoot]

Hmmm - menus!

I've finished the movie, and I've done the main menu, it's the chapter menus and the transitions to them that are bothering me now.

It can be quite time consuming to find out what works, and what doesn't, and what looks good overall. Very tricky....

Does anyone have any links to some high res images from the Empire Strikes Back? I may use those for the menu backgrounds combined with various music form the CD.

TIA

Gary.

[Mythos2002]

It's been a while since I last updated you guys on my progress, so here goes. Here's an update on my progress on the LD conversion:

Things to do:

1. double-check glitched frames up to disc-2
The glithced frames comes from the capture process. I've noticed that ocassionally, a little data is left over from previous frames. I rectify this by capturing it twice and just swapping out the glitched frames with good ones from the second capture. I am almost done. I finished going through the whole movie once. I just need to go back through and do a thorough check on the first two LD sides since I was not so strict at first. I got real picky by about mid-way through side-2.

Darryl

Darryl,

Does this mean that you don't need to use the AVI Synth script that you posted before? So the glitch frames aren't dropped frames? Did you capture the whole LD side a second time or just the area with the glitched frames? I may try what you did. I don't know if I will have different results or not since I'm using an ADVC-100.

Thanks.

Mythos

[flaninacupboard]

myth,

I'd be VERY suprised if you got any of these glitched frames with your canopus - i used to use a bt878 card and got these glitched frames, but since using my canopus adapter have seen none.

Feel free to prove me wrong though

[dphirschler]

The glitched frames are not drops. I didn't drop a single frame. But sometimes when the harddrive is having a time keeping up, there will be a little data left over in a frame now and then. It's usually a horizontal line, sometimes two. I'll try to post an example tonight.

Anyways, they happen randomly. So I capture the movie twice. Then I wrote a function into my script which I run called 'swapframe'. It basically swaps the glitched frame for the same frame out of the other capture. But I have to find it. That means I have to watch the film frame by frame and identify the glitches so I can remove them.


Darryl

[dphirschler]

Here is an example of a glitched frame that I mentioned eariler:

http://pigseye.kennesaw.edu/~dhirschl/starwars/glitch.jpg

Also, I found the serif font I was looking for. It's called "Episode I". I have it on my webpage for download.

http://pigseye.kennesaw.edu/~dhirschl/starwars/episode1.zip


Darryl

[Gary Lightfoot]

talking of glitched frames, there are a few frames at the beginning of new scenes that have what look like chemical staines on them - blobs and the like.

I haven't looked at the SE disks yet, but I wonder if they've cleaned those up. In one scene where the first transport passes the damage Star Detstroyer, ther's a strange purple artefact that ripples for a few frames on the middle to tail end of the craft as it passes from middle to right of the frame. That's still there in the SE IIRC.

Gary.

[MJPollard]

Also, I found the serif font I was looking for. It's called "Episode I". I have it on my webpage for download.

http://pigseye.kennesaw.edu/~dhirschl/starwars/episode1.zip

I've been doing a little research on the whole font issue. I've seen this font in other places (such as the credits for the three Law & Order TV series), so I knew it had to have a more official name than just "Episode I," and once my curiosity is piqued...

As it turns out, what we know as the Episode I font (created by someone named Boba Font) appears to be a combination of two different yet similar fonts: Trajan (the uppercase letters in the Episode I font, used for the SE "number" logos) and Albertus MT (the lowercase letters in the Episode I font, used for other lettering on the Episode I and II DVD slipcases). You can tell the difference by examining various letters in the font, specifically the uppercase and lowercase "N" (the top of the angle has a little "flare" in Albertus MT).

One drawback to the Episode I font is that some punctuation symbols (notably the #, %, and &) are used as logo-making symbols. You'll have to get creative if you need to use those symbols in your text.

For the alien language subtitles in ANH and ROTJ, according to the official site (and dredged up by Google), the font used is ITC Franklin Gothic Demi Bold. Alt Gothic No. 2 is a good substitute, as it appears to match almost exactly (not surprising, given that both fonts are of the Gothic family).

So, the complete list of "official" fonts would be:

- Logo text: Trajan Bold
- DVD slipcase lettering: Albertus MT Bold
- Subtitle text: ITC Franklin Gothic Demi Bold

If anyone wants to buy these fonts, you can obtain them from MyFonts.com. They offer online purchases, and their prices seem to be pretty reasonable. Note that the bold versions of these fonts seem to work best (the non-bold ones are too thin, even when you make them bold).

The Episode I and Alt Gothic No. 2 fonts can be downloaded from Darryl's site.

[SquirrelXss]

darn, this thread is still alive? you guys must REALLY love star wars. Kudos if you do.