The First Star Wars Trilogy Limited Editions
A friend of mine has a laserdisc player. He also has the original Star Wars Trilogy (yes, I capitalized the “T”) on laserdisc. Recently he supersampled the laserdisc output, digitized it, and created and MPEG4 version of the movies for his own personal use. (I’m sure he’ll correct me if I got any of that wrong.)
I wonder how that compares to Fox’s versions, where they had to do something similar? Yup, Fox released the original Star Wars movies on DVD, finally, and they came from laserdisc sources. How do they look? Not bad, but not really all that great either. Nor is the sound anything to write home about - it’s not even 5.1 (just like the original!).
Home Theater Magazine had a look, at this is what they had to say:
“The video is listed as 2.35:1, but is not anamorphic, so be sure to set your DVD player and display accordingly. The movies do vary slightly, and they all actually measure out a bit narrower than the full Panavision aspect ratio. As the resources at Fox and Lucasfilm are behind these releases, I can honestly say that they look better than any of the bootlegs I have ever seen—which were generated from the laserdiscs, the best-ever renditions of the original films. The colors are truer to the theatrical presentations, and the discs have an overall more filmic look than the reinvented 2004 special editions, even if they are a bit soft, dirty, grainy, and artifacty. The Dolby Surround audio is a hybrid mix of different soundtracks from over the years, with respectable fidelity and directionality. Extras are simply an Xbox-playable demo and a trailer for the fun Lego Star Wars II video game from Lucasarts.”
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November 14th, 2006 at 10:51 pm
I ended up buying them because I couldn’t help myself. Of course I needed my 5th copy of the Trilogy! In the end, getting them at $15 apiece for a chance to own the theatrical versions was worth it, even if the sound us only Dolby 2.o and the video is letterboxed. I hate that the DVDs are letterboxed instead of anamorphic, but I had to have the originals…if for nothing else than the much better Jabba’s Palace musical number!
November 23rd, 2006 at 11:19 am
“they look better than any of the bootlegs I have ever seen”
He obviously hasn’t seen *my* bootlegs.
Henning’s description is pretty accurate. More precisely, I oversampled the video to reduce sampling noise (that only works because the discs were pressed in CAV, which means one frame per track, which means the player will repeat the frame directly from the disc in slow-speed mode rather than digitally sampling it internally and repeating the sample), ran the result through a custom inverse telecine filter to recover the original 24 fps film frame rate while also cutting off the black bars at the top and bottom, and added in the digitally-transferred audio. Since the subtitling had been done in the black bars I had to redo that too. The result was compressed to MPEG-4. Each frame is a faithful representation of the original film frame - no interlacing artifacts or anything. (And not because the interlacing artifacts were removed by a cheesy heuristic averaging/deinterlacing filter, either, which is the typical process in NTSC video capture. In my process, NTSC frames that consist of fields from different film frames are thrown away before being de-oversampled - only NTSC frames consisting of fields from the same film frame are used. There is no averaging or guessing involved.)
The result is the cleanest 24 fps video you can imagine, suffering only from MPEG-4 compression artifacts in the lowest-contrast areas (star fields and Darth Vader’s suit being two of the more prominent examples). The lack of flicker and rock-solid image registration are kind of spooky! Somehow you just don’t expect images to stay that steady on the screen.
It took me nearly a year to do the transfer, the bottleneck being mostly CPU time, and to a lesser extent disk space. But I think the result is worth it.
November 29th, 2006 at 12:32 pm
Hi Henning,
When you say ‘First Star Wars Trilogy Limited Editions’ do you mean the *original* versions of Star Wars episodes IV to VI, or the ‘Special Editions’ released by George Lucas in 1997?
Both versions were available on laserdisc. The first version was (I think) just Dolby Stereo, but the Special Edition (which was available as a box set) had Dolby AC-3 Digital (i.e. true 5.1) encoding, as well as a much cleaner picture + extra scenes added by George Lucas.
Movie Trivia:
Do you know what the only difference is between the laserdisc Star Wars Trilogy (IV-VI) SE box set and the DVD boxset of the SE versions which were release shortly after Episode I? At the end of Return of the Jedi movie, in the celebrations of the defeat of the Empire, the apparition of Anakin Skywalker is the original Skywalker/Vader character on the laserdisc, but on the DVD version it is Hayden Christensen.
Paul
November 29th, 2006 at 12:48 pm
Hi paul -
Actually - there are various changes to the dvd releases. Ian McDermid now in the empire strikes back, for example.
In Return of the Jedi on the dvd - they have also added a stormtrooper being torn limb from limb by the crowd in coruscant during the final celebrations…and if you listen very carefully…you can hear jar jar cheering.
Do i win the geek prize now?