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Original Trilogy On DVD

Having the original (non-Special Edition) Star Wars Trilogy on DVD is ever-increasing in demand, and fans have to wonder if these versions will ever see their way to a digital medium. I have decided to make my own set, transfered from the best analog source available -- laserdisc.

Don't get me wrong, I'm a big fan of all six Star Wars films. I can also understand (and for the most part like) the changes that have been made to the DVD versions of "A New Hope", "The Empire Strikes Back", and "Return of the Jedi". But I'm certainly not alone in wanting to have the originals resurrected and preserved.

The plan is simple. Using top-notch equipment and software, I will create the best possible transfer of the films from laserdisc.

 

PROJECT UPDATE

My personal DVD project has been put on hold indefinitely due to my work on The X0 Project. I plan on using the X0 source footage for my project as it is leaps and bounds ahead of my own material. As a result, my previous captures and screenshots will not be used, but should give you a good idea of what I'm capable of doing. If you haven't yet seen what we're doing with The X0 Project, it stands to be the best ever laserdisc transfer of the original OT. Check out the official web site or the the official OT.com discussion thread for details.

Special Thanks

I want to take the opportunity to thank a few people that have helped me out so far with this project. Jeremy, Jeff, and Richard: thanks again for letting me borrow your LD's. You guys are all awesome and your generosity is greatly appreciated.

Progress

19 June 2005

Again, quite a while without an update. But then again, if you've kept up with the X0 Project at all, you'd know I'm not doing much with my own project right now. I've spent the past few months working with the X0 Team and have become the webmaster for x0project.com. This is just an update to say that this place won't be updated regularly at least until I can concentrate my efforts on my own project again. In the mean time, check out the awesome stuff we've got up on the X0 web site, like this screenshot on the right which demonstrates the X0's LD capturing superiority.

Oh, and the Menus page has been updated.

 

3 January 2005

Yeah, it's been a while since I've posted an update. There are several reasons why, including the recent holiday season and things getting pretty hectic at work the past two months. Now that things have finally calmed down and I can get back to my project, I've had time to figure things out and make some decisions on the future of this project. Unfortunately, my new LD player is not working out. It has a significant advantage in video quality over my old one, but it has some smearing issues that cannot be fixed. I'm going to have to get rid of it. Instead of going back to my old player or finding another one, I'm going to be acquiring some excellent quality capture footage from Laserman.

Enter the X0 project.
As you can see from this raw capture footage, Laserman's capture is much much better than what I have been able to get with my equipment. And judging by what I've already been able to do with raw capture footage, I'm sure this will result in some outstanding DVD's that look better than the LD source. I'm very excited about working with this footage and getting some screencaps and video clips up to show you guys. Stay tuned.

 

30 October 2004

New capture is up. This time around detail has been improved due to more neutral capture settings, as opposed to the darker levels I was using previously. I have also spent much more time on the color correction. I am now correcting each shot individually.

Known issues: Dot crawl filtering was not done on this capture. Also, there are a lot less stars in some of the space shots than I would like. Not to worry though, I will eventually be fixing these shots by editing in new starfields via After Effects and Premiere.

26 October 2004

I can stare at this stuff all day and make my own opinion on it, but as I've said in the past, a second opinion is invaluable. Feedback from you guys over at originaltrilogy has been invaluable to my progress on this project thus far. A few things were brought to my attention after I put up my last batch of screencaps. Among these were the red halo effects that resulted from the de-ghosting process, and the over-saturated colors. It also looks like I'm losing a bit of detail at the dark end of the spectrum since I've been capturing a little darker.

What I've come to realize is that the ghosting and the amount of noise in the raw capture is directly related to my capturing hardware. My capture card is great, but since I have to hook my monster video cable up to it's crappy multi-in cable, the signal transfer suffers. Additionally, the composite video jack on my player is loose and I have no doubt it is causing the ghosting. To remedy this, I have purchased some new equipment. Coming my way this week are the following:

  • Pioneer CLD-D704 Laserdisc Player
  • Seagate Baracuda 200GB SATA hard drive
  • MSI TV @nywhere capture card (same quality as my current one, but has video connectors right on the card)
  • Monster Cable THX certified composite video cables
  • Sima SCC color corrector (thanks again Kevin!)

This equipment will make my capturing a lot more efficient. I can't wait to see what kind of results I can get. Until then, it's back to work on the ESB menu...

19 October 2004

I created a test DVD of a few scenes from ANH and burned a copy to play on a few different systems. I took it over to a friend's house and was very dissapointed at how dark the video looked. It was a bit sharper than the other anamorphic transfer I have, but I couldn't get past how dark it was. I proceeded to open the capture back up in Premiere and tweak my color correction process to fix the issue. A few hours later, I came up with a video that is not only brighter and more detailed, but has much more vivid color as well. Damn, sometimes I amaze even myself....
Latest Capture

18 October 2004

I worked a little more on my ESB menu over the last few days. I have a rough cut of the main menu, and a transition leading to the options menu, which at this point is just a still image with temporary audio.
Check it out on the Menus page.

8 October 2004

Following some suggestions made over at the originaltrilogy.com forum, I've added some new filters that get rid of that ugly ghosting effect. I've also created some new screencaps that show how the process cleans up the raw capture. In these samples, the raw capture is on the top, followed by the filtered video, and finally the color corrected video on bottom:
Sample 1 | Sample 2 | Sample 3 | Sample 4 | Sample 5

4 October 2004

I've got a new set of Faces LD's to play around with (thanks again Jeff). I'm going to mess around with the TOOT filter, which will enable me to create a rot spot-free transfer from three LD sources. I hope this thing works the way it's supposed to. I've got some new capture screenshots up. This time around, I've gotten the color-correction almost perfected and it definitely shows. My workflow is a bit less strenuous as well. At this point in time, I'm only making one additional copy of the video before encoding. Hopefully I can get premiere to stop crashing during the frameserve so I can get away with not making any copies at all.

2 October 2004

This week I've come a long way with improving the video quality. I've developed an awesome color correction filter with Adobe Premiere Pro. The washed-out feel of laserdisc is now gone. Additionally, I've found a few new VirtualDub filters to correct video noise. I am amazed at how well this denoise filter is working, it's just awesome.

After several trials and experiments, I have come up with a new workflow for processing the video:

  1. Capture in Virtual VCR
  2. VirtualDubMod (crop via AVIsynth script, IVTC, DotCrawl filter) -> Save to New AVI
  3. VirtualDubMod (Denoise & Sharpen filters) -> Save to New AVI
  4. Adobe Premiere Pro (color correction) -> Frameserve
  5. AVIsynth script (resize, add borders)
  6. TMPGenc (anamorphic widescreen Mpeg2 encode)

I'm not very happy with this workflow, mainly because it requires me to have three (or 4 if the Premiere frameserver keeps crashing) copies of the same file before I can finally encode it to mpeg. Hopefully I can figure out some way around this, but if this is the way I have to do things, I'm not going to make too much of a fuss. The end result is really all that matters here, right?

18 September 2004

I've done a bit more research and experimentation with Avisynth, and I've come up with an updated script that's a bit better than what I was using before. I also experimented with tweaking the color of the video during the capture process. I must say that my captures today are leaps and bounds above anything I've seen before -- even better than the bootleg LD caps I downloaded. ;)

I got a new set of LD's off ebay to play around with. These are the "Faces" versions of Empire and Jedi. From what I've read online, these are supposed to be the same presses as the Definitive Collection, just in CLV format and stripped of all the special features. To my eye though, these appear to have slightly better color. I'll have to investigate a bit further, but the important thing about these is that laser rot spots are a lot harder to come by.

I did a test MPEG2 encode of a scene from Empire with TMPEnc and threw it into Scenarist. The resulting test DVD I played back in PowerDVD was amazing. I'm ready to do a test encode of the full movie.

Next on Agenda:

  • Burn test encode and try out on a few TV's
  • Finish menus for Empire
  • Tackle the rot spot issue
  • Acquire second copy of Star Wars
 

30 Aug 2004

Since it seems like it'll be a while before I see any replacement discs, I've started experimenting with motion DVD menus. After a day of teaching myself Adobe After Effects, I settled on a format I think will look good for the menus on all four discs (intro with Star Wars logo similar to official DVD's). I'm still learning in the process though, as I still have issues with getting the aspect ratio correct and getting the format down for importing into Scenarist. Hopefully I'll have a full-scale menu system for ESB ready to go this week if all goes well.

I've also learned that there are inkjet printers out there capable of printing labels directly onto DVD media. I'll have to look into purchasing one of these printers so I can make my own labels.

Next on Agenda:

  • Acquire replacement LD's.
  • Learn proper format for importing psd files into Scenarist as menus.
  • Research DVD media and players, as well as label printing.

27 Jun 2004

Well, so far I've been able to teach myself how to use all the software I'll need to encode the video and burn it to DVD. I had a few audio sync problems at first, but a couple of changes to the capture settings (and a couple lines added to the AVISynth script) and it's no longer an issue. I've come to the conclusion that a couple the LD's I borrowed have laser rot and I'll need to find replacements to capture from. This either means I will have to acquire my own set (Ebay) or borrow them.

Today I got a better understanding for the filters I'll be using on the video, and ended up with a pretty decent clip to show for it. At this point, I'm using the following filters:

  • Convolution3D (noise filter)
  • decomb(for IVTC)
  • dotcrawl
  • UnDot

The results are stunning compared to the original capture and better than I would have expected.

Next on Agenda:

  • Experiment with adding two clips together in AVISynth.
  • Acquire replacement LD's.
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