Aces High Bulletin Board
General Forums => The O' Club => Topic started by: Sandman on September 29, 2004, 03:30:13 PM
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Happened to run across a review of the new Star Wars Trilogy DVD, and then started reading others.
It looks like a useful resource.
http://www.dvdverdict.com/index.php
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I do not care for what GL did to the release. I created my own from my two laser disc releases.
Used the original and replaced the sound track of it (Dolby Pro Logic) with the one from the SE release (5.1 Digital), touched up the black levels and fixed some visible effects errors and am a happy camper.
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http://www.dvdverdict.com/reviews/starwarstrilogy.php
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Pretty much echoes my gripes. I hand massaged each frame to get the black levels back.
My goal was to keep it true to the original while correcting some of the blatant errors. Like no star field in the opening sequence behind Leia's ship when it explodes. Oddly, it is one of the original scenes that had good black levels.
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My lord Skuzzy! Next thing you'll do is colorize "Grapes of Wrath"!!
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Originally posted by Skuzzy
Used the original and replaced the sound track of it (Dolby Pro Logic) with the one from the SE release (5.1 Digital), touched up the black levels and fixed some visible effects errors and am a happy camper.
How did you synch the sound? I'd think the extra scenes (like Jabba in ANH) would mess it up. Same with the sounds of Greedo firing first, etc. Then there's the baffling change in Empire where Vader tells Luke to join him or die, then Luke lets go and falls. In the SE, they added a scream as he fell, making the viewer wonder if he actually chose death over the darkside or just... slipped.
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The nice thing about the SE version is most everything was added, making it easy to remove for melding in with the original.
I did not use the DVD versions at all. Only the two original LD versions.
I used a Bryston 5.1 preamp decoder to get the 5.1 digital recorded into Adobe Premier 1.5 from my Pioneer CLD97 LD player (creating 6 discrete channels of sound). I used Premier to correct the black levels and the missing star field in the opening scene.
Syncing the sound was simple enough. I retained the original sound in Premier and matched it to the newly added sound track, then removed the original sound once that was all synced.
Once I was happy with that, I used Adobe Encore 1.5 to burn the DVD and mix the sound back into DD 5.1 (it can encode DD, but cannot decode it).
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Originally posted by midnight Target
My lord Skuzzy! Next thing you'll do is colorize "Grapes of Wrath"!!
Actually MT, I have spent some time un-colorizing a couple of films. Frank Capra films should have never been colorized.
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This reviewer is ****ing high.
There's a scene in Return of the Jedi that gives me chills every time I see it. It's really small, a throwaway almost. I don't even think about it except when I see it (or when I'm writing a review, but that's another matter). It's during the forest battle when the Bantha poodoo really hits the fan. Two furry little Ewoks are desperately running away from the AT-ST walkers. A cannon blast knocks them to the ground. One gets up and shakes his companion, trying to revive him. It's pointless. He's dead, and his companion softly cries over his fallen comrade.
That small moment demonstrates all that is right with Return of the Jedi. Sure, it's easy to knock it for starting Lucas's trend toward kiddie-fying the Star Wars films, but there's an undercurrent of love that you don't find in just any sci-fi film. The love of friends. Romantic love. Familial love. Love of freedom. There's also notes of melancholy as that love is lost—the little Ewok who dies next to his friend, the redemption of Anakin Skywalker (and reunion with his son) just moments before his death. But that's life, even in a galaxy far, far away. You live, you love, you lose. It gives Return of the Jedi some depth and meaning that I never really noticed until now, nearing thirty years old, watching the film for the millionth time, yet for the first time since it was in the theaters for the 1997 special edition release.
The only good Ewok is a dead Ewok.
Charon
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Hehe Charon. Dunt hold back,..tell us how you really feel.
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In the new edition, I think all blasters have been replaced with flashlights.
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How long did this take you skuzzy?
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LMAO Chairboy.
When is ET due out with all those Cellphone toting government agents...
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Originally posted by GScholz
Skuzzy, what sort of lossless compression do you use, or do you just use sequential bitmaps? I've been using Huffyuv, but I'm not sure if that's the best codec for storing raw footage for editing.
Sounds like you have a nice setup there. :)
YUV is the most accurate, instead of RGB. I used YUV for all the editing work. The HuffYUV is a good utility. Premier has its own YUV codec and it works really well (I think they licensed it from Pinnacle).
I captured (Premier) to AVI from the LD using the S-VHS port connected to a Canopus DVC300 (?) unit which fed the firewire.
Premier allows each frame to be edited. It uses the Photoshop CS engine for editing the frames individually.
It's a big hobby of mine GS. I use a Audigy 2 ZS Platinum for all the sound captures. Very nice card.
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Nilsen, I am not sure how long it took to get it all done. I did not track it. A few weeks in the evenings and weekends (sporatically) is about how long.
Premier has tools to expedite changes. You can group frames and do masked changes to color, which I used for a lot of the black level work (space stuff made it easy and Lucas used a shade of blue that was easy to mask without effecting other parts of the image).
Fixing the light saber fight between Obe and Darth was another matter. Each frame needed to be hand touched up.
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Next step is to convert it to HDTV, when that is all finalized. I hope to make use of some of the overscan for adding more image to the screen at that time.
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Ewoks are like uber-gophers. They can talk, but still should be trapped for the bounty on their tails.
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Originally posted by Charon
The only good Ewok is a dead Ewok.
Agreed. Someone get me a kleenex.
Skuzzy--isn't it better to go straight to mpeg2 by hardware (e.g. ADS products), than to introduce DV artifacts?
BTW, on topic...I'm not touching those "special editions" with a 10 foot pole. What an bellybutton he is...why can't he just release the originals like everyone wants.
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BTW, on topic...I'm not touching those "special editions" with a 10 foot pole. What an bellybutton he is...why can't he just release the originals like everyone wants.
Yeah, I see no reason to reward him on this. The whole Gweedo shoots first thing is just...stupid. Next thing you know, the Death Star will be shoorting a flower ray that covers Alderaan in daisies and the central cast will be replaced by teletubbies.
Skuzzy has the right idea, but all I have to work with are the SVHS versions.
Charon
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Originally posted by Skuzzy
Pretty much echoes my gripes. I hand massaged each frame to get the black levels back.
My goal was to keep it true to the original while correcting some of the blatant errors. Like no star field in the opening sequence behind Leia's ship when it explodes. Oddly, it is one of the original scenes that had good black levels.
Wow I think Skuzzy just one-up'd Ripsnorts carpeted garage.
So umm Skuzzy do you hang around the front of movie theatres wearing a Storm Trooper rig by any chance? :D
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Originally posted by phookat
Skuzzy--isn't it better to go straight to mpeg2 by hardware (e.g. ADS products), than to introduce DV artifacts?
If you are taking the MPEG file straight to DVD, then yes, sort of. It depends on the encoder. Some MPEG2 encoders are lousy.
If you need to edit the work, then it is best not to have in already in MPEG2 format or you go through the decode/encode phase for each edit.
Originally posted by Vulcan
Wow I think Skuzzy just one-up'd Ripsnorts carpeted garage.
So umm Skuzzy do you hang around the front of movie theatres wearing a Storm Trooper rig by any chance? :D
Not me. I am just a movie fan. I just hated to see what Lucas was doing to the original work.
It's one thing to correct visual anomalies, which they needed badly, but it is another thing to add/change content of the work which can alter the viewers only perception of the film.
Originally posted by GScholz
Really? I use Premiere Pro 7.0, and the only native codec I can find is the DV avi codec. Is that the one you meant? Is it completely lossless, or just very little lossy like Huffyuv?
I am using Premier Pro 1.5. I think you are using the previous version. Although I do not recall when the YUV codec was made available, it is in my list.
Hmmm....you know, that codec might befrom the Pinnacle software I was using.
Originally posted by GScholz
How do you go about doing that? You've already converted the LD video to DVD which has about 50% more resolution. HDTV again has about 50% more resolution than DVD, so I can't see how you would improve the definition of the video. Crap in, crap out (not that LD is crap by anyone's standards).
Whoa there. LD has 420 lines of resolution in the native recording. Through the S-VHS port you get 405 lines. DVD has 480 lines of resolution. Not quite 50%.
I want to see if I can get to 1024p on the resolution. Using the overscan, I can reclaim some video information, which should help sharpen the transfer, but it will be a test.
The video transfers from the LD player have looked excellent. Very sharp and clean. The audio takes some work, but its fun to do.
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How many cases of beer do these reworked DVDs cost?
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$10 says skuzzy turned back on ubb codes just for this thread :D
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Originally posted by Vulcan
$10 says skuzzy turned back on ubb codes just for this thread :D
I think he did it for the burgers. ;)
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Skuzzy, the next George Lucas.
Ive often thought about redoing some of my favorites, editing them and the likes, not enough free time and not enough Disk Space. :D
At the Art Insitiute I redid the Title and Opening Credits, for Das Boot and created a new DVD menu, but no feature length effort like the Skuzz miester on Star Wars. WTG! Skuzz, how did you do it? It apparently was before you started at HTC ;)
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Originally posted by GScholz
Yes NTSC DVD has 480 lines, PAL has 576, however DVD has close to twice the horisontal resolution of LD. You seem to be far more experienced in this sort of thing though, I mostly use Premiere and After Effects for my rendered video clips.
GS, LD has 420 lines of resolution on the media. Through the S-VHS port you can get 405 lines, although you only get 240 lines through the composite video port. Look up the Pioneer CLD-97 LD player.
As the output is analog, the horizontal resolution is not directly comparable. In viewing, I find most LD material to play better than the corresponding DVD.
It does depend on the material as LD's are not lossy encoded. High speed action films look better from the CLD-97 than the corresponding DVD due to the MPEG2 encoding of the DVD.
Originally posted by Nefarious
Skuzzy, the next George Lucas.
Ive often thought about redoing some of my favorites, editing them and the likes, not enough free time and not enough Disk Space. :D
At the Art Insitiute I redid the Title and Opening Credits, for Das Boot and created a new DVD menu, but no feature length effort like the Skuzz miester on Star Wars. WTG! Skuzz, how did you do it? It apparently was before you started at HTC ;)
I did it a couple of months ago. Like I said, it is a hobby of mine. Right now I am in the middle of getting Dragonheart moved over to DVD from LD, then I have some VHS stuff to get transfered. VHS stuff takes some work.
Originally posted by Torque
How many cases of beer do these reworked DVDs cost?
I have a problem handing out copies of this stuff. Copyrights and all.
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Skuzzy how hard is it to record a VHS tape onto DVD?
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I did a cheesy Light saber, In my Compositing class. We learned advanced effects in After Effects and Combustion, We had footage of two former students battling it out with broomsticks in front of a Green Screen. We had to do two different colored Light sabres and add a background that was supplied to us.
I remember getting the assignment, I grabbed all the Files of the Students and the Background, And took it home after the lecture and demo, I told my girlfriend I would be on the computer for a while, and grabbed a case of beer from the Package Store, After nearly all night of looking at Filmstrip files in After Effects, and a few sorties of Aces High in between, I had a pretty kick bellybutton fight scene with two dweebs, fighting with pretty broomsticks!
Good times in College.
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Originally posted by Skuzzy
I do not care for what GL did to the release. I created my own from my two laser disc releases.
Used the original and replaced the sound track of it (Dolby Pro Logic) with the one from the SE release (5.1 Digital), touched up the black levels and fixed some visible effects errors and am a happy camper.
You will die a virgin.
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A slightly related question:
I have a ton of HI8 tapes with skiing shots that ive made over the years, and when i get my new puter financed id like to import them to my puter for some editing. Does anyone know aprox how much harddrive space one hour of imported movie from my cam will use?
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Originally posted by GRUNHERZ
Skuzzy how hard is it to record a VHS tape onto DVD?
I bought a DVD Recorder, not the one for the PC's, it looks like this;
(http://www.avdeals.com/dvdrecorders/largeimages/DVR-W2U.jpg)
I connect my old VHS tape to it, press play, and on the DVD i press Record :D
It records on DVD-R & DVD+RW. I also record from my PC TV OUT in realtime.
Very Easy.
R
Gh0stFT
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Originally posted by GRUNHERZ
Skuzzy how hard is it to record a VHS tape onto DVD?
There a number of ways to accomplish this. It all depends on how much effort you are willing to put into it and how much money you want to throw at it.
Definately, the easiest and cheapest way is to use a dedicated DVD recorder and directly connect the VHS machine to it.
You can spend a lot of money on this, but it all depends on what you want to accomplish.
Originally posted by GScholz
Ok, if LD is analogue then that changes the equation. Thanks for your insight. :)
Yes, the video is recorded on the LD in a raw analog format (no comrepssion whatsoever). The audio is digital (CD quality) and there are analog tracks as well.
Originally posted by Nilsen
A slightly related question:
I have a ton of HI8 tapes with skiing shots that ive made over the years, and when i get my new puter financed id like to import them to my puter for some editing. Does anyone know aprox how much harddrive space one hour of imported movie from my cam will use?
DV output to a firewire port requires about 3.6MB/s of storage. You need to use an NTFS filesystem as FAT has a maximum storage limit of 4GB per file.
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Thx Skuzzy!
And LD was great! Long live LD, especially the new LD smell.. :)
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Originally posted by Skuzzy
DV output to a firewire port requires about 3.6MB/s of storage. You need to use an NTFS filesystem as FAT has a maximum storage limit of 4GB per file.
Aha.. so almost 13 gig then for an hour. Thats no problem since i have over 700gb of storage. :)
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Sandman,
Thanks for checking out some of our other reviews. When a Slashdot article mentioned the SW review we got pounded with 20,000+ hits. Nice to see that someone ventured off the beaten path and checked out some other stuff. :) We have over 30 staff writers, so if you find a reviewer you don't like, try someone else. There is definitely a mix of opinions.
Charon, we gave equal time:
The trailer does a reasonable job of making you want to play the game, mostly because you get the opportunity to slaughter Ewoks. Isn't this the opportunity we've been waiting for for decades?
Peace. BTW, someone on the Digital software forum at AVS wrote a whole play-by-play of the conversion from LD to DVD. It's worth checking out:
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=383743&highlight=Star+Wars+LD+transfer+DVD
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LOL Judge Rob. Might have to check that out :)
Charon
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hehe, i got a great deal on 3 250gb external Lacie drives before the summer. 2 of them are still in the boxes. :)
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Interesting forum Judge Rob. A bit hard for me to read (pastel color-blind here), but not bad at all. How the heck did you find us?
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He used the Force.... duh.
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Hehe,..good one Urchin. I did leave the door open for that one. DOH!
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Originally posted by Skuzzy
The nice thing about the SE version is most everything was added, making it easy to remove for melding in with the original.
I did not use the DVD versions at all. Only the two original LD versions.
I used a Bryston 5.1 preamp decoder to get the 5.1 digital recorded into Adobe Premier 1.5 from my Pioneer CLD97 LD player (creating 6 discrete channels of sound). I used Premier to correct the black levels and the missing star field in the opening scene.
Syncing the sound was simple enough. I retained the original sound in Premier and matched it to the newly added sound track, then removed the original sound once that was all synced.
Once I was happy with that, I used Adobe Encore 1.5 to burn the DVD and mix the sound back into DD 5.1 (it can encode DD, but cannot decode it).
So.. you're sayin you've got the original releases of IV, V, and VI on DVD with the 5.1 sound track?
I WANT!!! Too much extraneous crap was added for the release of'em IMO.
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Originally posted by Skuzzy
Interesting forum Judge Rob. A bit hard for me to read (pastel color-blind here), but not bad at all. How the heck did you find us?
Damn it, Urchin beat me to it. The real answer is that our webmaster is a techie and he tracks the referrers for each review read. Some of you read the Star Wars review yesterday, and out of curiosity I came here to see what your forum was about. It is nice to see someone say "hey, their other reviews are pretty good too" instead of "damn, who needs another 11,000 words about Star Wars?" :)
For the record, I'm not part of AVS forum, except as a poster. I also hate the color scheme... for a home theater site, they have a bad look. I'm part of http://www.dvdverdict.com, which has an easier to read, if plain, layout.
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Well I cracked and got the boxset early (and I have some DVD pirates of the SE LD trilogy) and I just try to ignore or grimace through all the changes as best I can. Mind you the spec features disc are fantastic - the major doco all have the original release(s) scenes not the doctored ones until the end when they mention the re-releases
Originally posted by Charon
The only good Ewok is a dead Ewok.
Charon
the gag reel on the spec features disc have Boba Fett hunting Wicket through the death star
Tronsky
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Originally posted by Judge Rob
Sandman,
Thanks for checking out some of our other reviews. When a Slashdot article mentioned the SW review we got pounded with 20,000+ hits. Nice to see that someone ventured off the beaten path and checked out some other stuff. :) We have over 30 staff writers, so if you find a reviewer you don't like, try someone else. There is definitely a mix of opinions.
Charon, we gave equal time:
Peace. BTW, someone on the Digital software forum at AVS wrote a whole play-by-play of the conversion from LD to DVD. It's worth checking out:
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=383743&highlight=Star+Wars+LD+transfer+DVD
Thanx for stopping by Rob... I like the format with the mixed reviews and before I discovered the site, I never gave much thought to the quality of a DVD. I'm more into the story than anything else. Of course, if I had a really high-end home theatre system, my opinion might be different.
Found something I didn't know though... Conan the Barbarian... love the DVD, but I was really disappointed in the mono soundtrack. I just didn't realize that it was originally mono.
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Yep, that's what we focus on: The story and characters rather than technical specs, although we're also interested in discussing tech specs as well. Best of both worlds.
Thanks for reading, and please feel free to give us some feedback if we can improve.
Rob
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Originally posted by Skuzzy
I do not care for what GL did to the release. I created my own from my two laser disc releases.
Used the original and replaced the sound track of it (Dolby Pro Logic) with the one from the SE release (5.1 Digital), touched up the black levels and fixed some visible effects errors and am a happy camper.
DANG! I'm impressed:eek: