A NEW DIRECTION

When I started this project over four years ago, my intention was to preserve the Star Wars Original Trilogy in its original unaltered form. At the time, the best source available was the Definitive Edition laserdisc set. In 2006 the Star Wars Special Edition DVD included the Original Trilogy as a set of bonus discs, which represents the first time these movies have been released on DVD. The 2006 set was criticized by fans, myself included, for not being anamorphic and for using the Definitive Edition laserdiscs as the source. I never bought it until just recently. After all, I already had the LD and the 2004 DVD. When I finally got around to viewing the frames on my PC, I was impressed! I'd heard they utterly sucked, but I was quite pleased. Of course you cannot compare it to the SE version, but it's at least twice as good as my best LD captures.

See for yourself (LD source is on the left, DVD on the right):




I now consider the 2006 DVD Original Trilogy to be the best source that is available to consumers world-wide. As a result, my project has shifted gears from capturing and preserving the laserdiscs to working from the 2006 DVD. So the the plan has changed, but the mission remains the same: preserving the Original Trilogy on DVD. I will document my progress, make freely available any of my work, and I will be doing it all with free tools.

You can choose to read about this project from the beginning, jump to the beginning of the 2006 DVD section, or to the most recent entry.


THE SAGA BEGINS

Jan.3.2004

I managed to borrow the "Special Widescreen Edition" Star Wars LDs from a friend (thanks, Jonathan) as well as a Pioneer CLD-990 player (a good mid-line player). And so the saga begins...

Jan.4.2004

My first DVD encode bombed when I (foolishly) ran out of harddrive space. I still made a test DVD from the incomplete video and it looks great! I can't tell the difference from the LD. However, I thought it should have been better. The DVD looks identical to the LD, but I thought the LD should have looked better. There was more grainy noise in the picture than I expected. Is it the player or the LD? If it only gets this good, then I will be satisfied since it is easily better than my VHS.

Here is a screen capture:


more captures

I am extremely interested in several peculiar aspects about this LD. First of all, the movie shrinks vertically (in steps at various places in the film) by about 30 pixels. Secondly, at several places, the last frame before a cut has ovals drawn on them near the bottom (presumably for editing purposes). These kinds of anomolies will not be corrected.

Jan.5.2004

Great news, I just arranged to borrow another friend's LDs of "The Definitive Collection" (thanks, Glenn). I should pick it up this week.

Jan.6.2004

I watched my test disc again last night. It's very enjoyable to watch even though the disc ends (with an error) before the movie is done. One thing I noticed that I hope to correct is that the stars in the space scenes seem to shimmer. I am hoping this corrects itself with the Definitive Collection. Other than that, I am very happy with the color balance and the picture quality.

Here are the specs on my first DVD test disc:

  • resolution: encoded frame size=704x480, film frame size=704x278
  • encode: 24 fps progressive
  • bitrate: min=0, avg=4700, max=8800
  • audio: 384kb ac3 stereo

I noticed when I watched it that the subtitles were very large. I reasoned that since it was designed to be watched on TV, Lucas enlarged them. I shrunk them 25% since I plan to watch this movie on my big 8' projector. They still do not overlay the movie (which they should as it did in the theater), but at least it more closely resembles the theatrical version.

I am currently encoding a new version right now (it takes two days to encode the movie). The new one will have slightly modified subtitles. I will post results when it is ready.

Jan.7.2004

My second attempt at encoding the video is complete. It looks great and is just a hair over 4 gigs.

Jan.8.2004

I scrapped all my work on the previous "Special Widescreen Edition" and started capturing "The Definitive Collection". The picture quality is amazing! I doubt I will have to use any filters at all. It's just so clean. It made me realize that the previous version had too much contrast in the picture. This is what I expected from laserdisc - superb quality!

Here is a screen capture:


more captures

Jan.9.2004

Finished capturing the movie. I also captured (seperately) the FOX video logo and the THX Laserdisc logo. And I captured Greedo's subtitles so I can properly place back in the movie where they belong. I am halfway through capturing the commentary track. And I still have to capture the Closed Captioning so I can construct subtitles. After that, I will have to capture a VHS reference so I can properly edit the disc changes. The VHS will help me time it just right. As for Greedo's subtitles, I plan to put them back into the frame (overlaying the movie) where they appeared in the theater. This will also make it easier to watch on a 16x9 TV or widescreen projector. And then I have to capture all the extras. So still a lot of work to do.

Jan.10.2004

I now have a Pioneer DVL-909 LD/DVD combo player (thanks, Steve). This one is a top-of-the-line player featuring digital audio outs, svideo out, and auto flipping. I recaptured the video and audio using this player. I think the picture is slightly sharper and the audio is cleaner since it remains digital.

Jan.11.2004

I edited the captured video to clean up where the discs change. It now flows very well just like the VHS (which I used as a reference). Currently, the video is encoding (which will take approx 22 hours). I had to change my VBR rates because the last encode did not fit on the disc. My current stats (this time using a bitrate calculator) are: avg=3728, max=9013, min=0.

Greedo's subtitles are now done... at least for the time being. I want to put them overlaying the video image, like it was in the theater, but it was too easy to do it just below the frame. It still fits in the more narrow black bar when displayed on a 16x9 TV.

The problem will come when I code the movie subtitles. People appreciate when the subtitles are below the movie but it would be wrong if the movie subtitles and Greedo's subtitles overlapped. One possible solution is to stop subtitles during that section except for Han Solo's part. But I still think a subtitle like "Speaking Rodian" (is that the correct name for his language?) should appear during Greedo's part. But until I get the closed captioning captured and code the subtitles, it will remain below the frame.

Jan.12.2004

I can't believe it. I found a Closed Captioning transcript online! I will edit this and use it for the movie subtitles. The transcript is for the "Special Edition", so there will be major edits to certain sections. But this will be a major time saver! It is up for download to the left.

Jan.14.2004

Commentary audio is now synched up to the movie audio. Since it is commentary only, I may add the movie audio at a low volume.

Jan.20.2004

Somehow I messed up the Jan.11 encoding and had to troubleshoot it. After finding no answers for two days, I decided to encode it again using the same numbers and this time to be really careful to get all the settings just right. After two days of waiting I finally made test DVD #2 and it is near perfect. This is the first DVD I have made with two audio channels, one movie audio, the other is commentary. It worked out just fine. Now all I need to do is tweak the audio/video synch slightly and perfect the chapter stops.

Jan.22.2004

I matched the font for Greedo's subtitles. Tonight I plan to create new subs for that section of the movie with the text overlaying the video with just a slight drop shadow.

Jan.23.2004

The subtitle images are now ready to stick into the movie. I plan to work on that tonight. It will involve using the VirtualDub "Logo" filter within AVIsynth. It's not too difficult, but still something I have never done before. It should be challenging.

Here is what it looks like:

Jan.26.2004

I spent most of the weekend working on Greedo's subtitles. I could not use VirtualDub's logo filter since it was an internal filter, so I had to do it using AVIsynth's own filters. The main difficulty was that the AVIsynth "ApplyRange" function was not working properly. I finally wound up writing my own function which turned out to be very simple. Anyways, the Greedo subtitles now look perfect. My AVIsynth script is available in the download section for those that are curious.

I also captured the laserdisc while hitting the next chapter button. Then I went through and compared frames to create a new "celltimes.txt" file for the chapter stops on the DVD. They will match up perfectly to the LD.

Lastly, I am going to modify my AVIsynth script to avoid color conversions. Decomb requires either YUY2 or YV12, both of which degrade the quality of the picture. I plan tonight to check out alternate ways to inverse telecine the movie while staying in RGB mode.

Jan.27.2004

I now have it inverse telecining perfectly and without color conversions. I had to write my own "manual inverse telecine" function, which turned out to be not too difficult, but a tad tedious. The telecine pattern only changed three times. It was easy to fix simply by adding additional frames (to keep the 3:2 pattern going) and then deleting the extra frames after inverse telecining. Again, my new AVIsyth script is up in the download section.

I was amazed at the difference between this and Decomb. One of my main reasons for attempting it manually was the opening titles. They never seemed to look like they were scrolling very smoothly. After seeing it using my manual method of inverse telecining, it looks perfect. They just crawl along nice and smooth like they are supposed to.

I haven't adjusted any levels on these captures. I may not do it. I have to examine the closely first, at first glance, the Leia shot appears a little dark.

Here is a screen capture:


more captures

And for those that are wondering, yes there is the "dot crawl" pattern in the reds and some blues. I believe it is on the LD like that. I am not sure if there is anything I can do about it. I examined the channels and it appears to be in the most detailed channel. If I attempt to smooth that, then it will certainly blur the image.

Jan.31.2004

I wound up adding gamma 1.2 to the image. It still seems a little dark during the cantina scene, but I don't want to get it too bright. The bright scenes look great right now. I also went through frame by frame to verify a clean capture and perfect inverse telecine.

Lastly, I spent several hours adjusting the sound levels on the commentary track. What a mess it was. It was horrible! My guess is they used an automatic recording level when they conducted the interviews for the commentary. Not only were different speakers' volumes wildly different, but within each section certain words would be way too loud while others were way too soft. It would not have been very enjoyable to listen to. After getting the levels right, I mixed in about 10% of the movie audio. That helps pass the time during the otherwise long silent sections.

Feb.1.2004

Gamma 1.2 looks pretty good. I think the cantina scene is just fine, and the bright scenes are fine too (not too bright in other words). I viewed it on the TV and I think it's close to perfect. You can even see the stars on the opening main titles. I may tweak it just a little more. The color in bright scenes looks a little washed out. I may back gamma down to 1.15 or maybe even 1.1. Or I might tinker with the color saturation. I am loaning out my test disc to a friend for a second opinion.

And before the final encode, I decided to restore one bothersome scene - apparently damaged by mild laser rot on the physical disc. For about 20 frames, there is a wierd horizontal line of interference near Darth Vader as he enters the scene. I fixed it frame by frame in an image editor and will re-insert the new frames over the old.

Feb.5.2004

I put the chapter points up in the download section. I must've missed the first one for "main titles", either that or there was no chapter for that. But it was listed in the book. Anyways, I marked which chapters have commentary, and the empty lines indicate a disc change. I don't believe a DVD allows for 81 chapters, so I will most likely remove half of them. Some of them are pretty short chapters (less than one minute).

Mar.9.2004

In case you are wondering about the lack of updates, I am waiting to upgrade my system to Windows XP. Actually, I am building a new system for XP and I will move the work over to that system when it is up and running. My current system is Win98 and I have finally hit the FAT32 four gig file size limit. I've been getting around it for some time but it finally caught up to me. The DVD image files are over four gigs and there is no getting around it this time unless IFO Edit starts making image files like DVD Decrypter (which splits it up on a FAT32 file system).

Mar.22.2004

I got around the FAT32 file size issue. Turns out that ImgTool Classic saved the day by writing segmented image files. I am still building a new system, but I can continue working on this project in the mean time. So I spent the weekend working on subtitles.

I was thinking about not doing the subtitles, but I just decided to do it all of a sudden. There are a lot of things to consider such as showing the subtitle at the right moment, leaving it up long enough to read but not too long, making sure it is not longer than two lines, splitting it to two lines when necessary and splitting it at the right place, and making sure it does not get too close to the edges. So I am about 20 minutes into the movie so far. It's a lot of work, but it adds so much to the movie experience when subtitles are available.

Mar.24.2004

I thought I would share one of the reasons this project has taken me so long. I've been going through the film frame by frame and repairing glitched frames. Sometimes my capture card leaves a little data from a previous frame (presumably because my harddrive is not able to keep up). I solve this problem by capturing the film twice and then swapping out glitched frames with good ones. It's tedious work since I have to go through the film frame by frame looking for glitches.

Here is an example of a glitched frame:


Apr.7.2004

Looks like the "dot crawl" problem has been solved thanks to the new dot crawl filter for Virtual Dub.

Dot crawl significantly reduced:


Sept.12.2004

I recaptured the first movie after installing new capture drivers and tweaking my system. The result is a better capture. The black and white levels are much improved and there is more data in the frame now. I was not aware that all the previous captures were cropped a bit on the sides. I also corrected the aspect ratio. Take a look at the sample below.


Sept.15.2004

Some Definitive Collection sets are missing a seven second segment from "The Empire Strikes Back". If you happen to own one of these flawed sets, be sure to get missing segment. It's a scene with Leia welding something on the Millennium Falcon. Get it here.


PROJECT NEWS

Jun.2008

I finally broke down and bought the 2006 DVD because it came with the Original Trilogy. I got it on sale for $6.99 and I had a $5 coupon, so I only paid $1.99! I haven't gotten around to watching it yet.

Aug.8.2008

After doing nothing for months, the first thing I did with the DVD was to rip it to my hdd. After that was done, wrote a quick script to see it frame by frame. The first bit of good news was that it was progressive, so I am already ahead of the game. No need to use my Manual-IVTC function. Then, I double checked all the places where the laserdisc had to be changed or flipped. No problems so far. Hard to believe this is really the LD source. I modified my AviSynth script to stretch it anamorphically. Looks great. Better than I had hoped.


Aug.9.2008

Changed the way I am doing the subtitles. It's now completely handled by the AviSynth script. I don't have to do any Photoshop work. And I still get the nice smooth font with a little drop shadow. This also represents the first artistic decision I will have to make. Should the subtitles be included in the movie frame, be located below the frame, or be made into a forced subtitle that your DVD player must display? This was an easy decision for me. It was always my intention to include the subtitles into the movie frame, just as it was in 1977. Now with my script, it's incredibly easy to do them. Furthermore, it's easy to undo.

The big question for me is, do I have the font right? I have to use the Definitive Edition laserdisc as my guide here because I have no photos of the original movie in the theater. So I made my subtitles to match the style used in the laserdisc. Pure white was too bright, so I subdued it slightly.

Aug.10.2008

At this point, an anamorphic DVD can be made simply by ripping the DVD and plugging the script into your favorite encoding software. If there is any interest in the whole process, I will be happy to write a step-by-step tutorial so anybody can make their own anamorphic DVD of the Original Trilogy using their 2006 DVD as the source.

As time permits, I plan to eventually take scenes out of the SE version and swap them into this version. A lot of color correction will have to be made in each scene from the SE version. Everything will be done in the AviSynth script. That way it can be easily edited, tweaked, undone, or even shared with anybody with an interest to do the same thing. All anybody will need is their own DVD, the AviSynth script, and the subtitle font. And I am doing it all with FREE software. Can you believe it? See the Download section to the left and get started on your own anamorphic Original Trilogy!

Aug.11.2008

Fixed the cropping. Now I am cropping the entire black borders and drawing new ones.