I’ll do it on monday!

Since it seems as though George Lucas will never release the theatrical originals ever again, there’s been an increasing proliferation of projects geared to preserving these for future generations. Essentially people either have the vhs or laser discs versions, capturing them to their hard drive, and either “restoring” or simply archiving them to dvd. I’ve decided to do one such project myself. Mostly because I want a dvd version of the originals, since my vhs widescreen versions are deteriorating. I went and bought me a laser disc player (not the best player, but not the most spendy either), and Star Wars Trilogy : Definitive Edition laserdiscs. I’m doing this for myself, no copies will be given or sold. And yes I own them so backup copies should be legal.

In any case, what I plan to do is to do a straight capture and burn so i can watch them. Then I plan to capture them in a lossless codec or out to an image sequence so I can play with it to my heart’s content. Removing things like jumpcuts, garbage mattes (little gray or green blocks you see around tie fighters in space scenes), matte lines, and generally cleaning it up as best I can with the resolution I got. So far though i’ve just gone through testing, trying to figure out why I get this nasty picture where the scanlines seem to be changing brightness, producing a shimmering effect on my tv, and a not so acceptable image on my computer. Here is two frames from a “paused” scene that is, i paused it recorded that chose two seperate frames, to show the difference and then reduced the contrast so you could see it better –

– Right click and “View Image” to see it at it’s full size. This is the output from the laser disc player I got on ebay. For 20 bucks it’s not that bad, however this is probably not good enough for me to preserve. I’m going to try changing cables and such, and see if I can’t get a better picture. Or maybe i’ll even buy another LD player. In any case this should prove interesting and fun.

Keith

This entry was posted on Friday, December 16th, 2005 at 11:04 am and is filed under Video Projects. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.