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Do It Yourself!
- Star Wars original trilogy laserdiscs
- These are easily found in great abundance on Ebay (do a search). Don't get caught up in auction fever and pay a bundle for them! These are very common items and not difficult to collect, so don't let anyone fool you that these are "rare" or that their pristine condition makes a big difference. Find an auction in good condition at a reasonable price, bid on it, and if the price gets too high, simply move on to the next auction - you're in no rush, and there will always be more auctions. Let someone else be the sucker.
- A laserdisc player
- A pretty beefy computer system with
DVD write and video capture capabilities:
- According to PC World, you'll need at least a 2-GHz Pentium 4 or a 2.13-GHz Athlon XP 2600+ processor for video editing tasks. Mine is a 2.8-GHz Pentium 4 from Alienware.
- For RAM, 512MB is enough, but 1GB is better.
- At least 30GB of hard disk storage. Per movie.
- A DVD writeable drive. I recommend the Sony DRU-500A, which can write in both DVD-R and DVD+R format (a good thing, since we don't know which standard is going to eventually win out).
- A video capture card. I recommend the ATI All In Wonder Radeon 9800 Pro. You could alternatively use a digital video camcorder, transferring the laserdiscs first to digital tape and then directly to your computer, but a dedicated video capture card will give you better quality and more options.
- Video editing and DVD authoring software. I recommend Pinnacle Studio 8, which offers an abundance of features at a great price. Ignore the negative customer reviews at Amazon.com, which I frankly find mystifying. I found the product to be rock-solid (with the latest patch) and quite powerful, and it's regularly reviewed as the best software of its type: PC Magazine, ComputerVideo.net, Graphics Unleashed, IT Reviews, TechTV, ZDNet, and PCQuest all agree on the excellence of this product. How can so many customers be wrong? I don't know, but maybe they just don't know what they're doing. I'd put more credibility with the professional reviewers, and my own personal experience concurs. Studio 8 rocks, and can't be beat for the price.
- PC World has an excellent article in the May 2003 issue on DVD authoring hardware and software. Check it out for more tips and reviews.
You will also need some technical aptitude. Though I'll try to make instructions as thorough as I can, I assume you have general computer literacy skills and are able to carry on a relatively technical level of dialogue. If you had trouble understanding any of the requirements listed above, you're apt to have trouble understanding many of the instructions below. Get yourself educated, then come on back to take on a fun project!
Charles Fraser is my first correspondent to complete a Star Wars DVD project for himself. He used a Sony DCR-TRV530 digital camcorder as a passthrough from the laserdisc player to the computer. I've seen his results, and they are terrific! There is one niggling caveat regarding the laserdisc side changes, which you can read about below, but aside from that these are the best versions of Star Wars on DVD that I've ever seen. Here is how he did it, in his own words:
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To create the Star Wars DVDs I plugged the audio connectors from the special cable that Sony gave me for the DCR-TRV530 camcorder into the audio outs of the Laserdisc player. I used an S-Video cable from the Laserdisc to the camcorder. I connected the camcorder to the computer with firewire, or iLink as Sony calls it. I used Pinnacle Studio 8 to capture the video. Without a tape in the camcorder the camcorder will act as a pass-through for the Laserdisc player. In Pinnacle Studio 8 I set the capture quality to DV, which is the highest. You will need some serious hard drive space for all this. An 80GB drive was fine for one movie but two wouldn't go. The second would capture but not render due to space limitations. Start up the Laserdisc and put it on pause. Start capturing in Pinnacle, wait a few seconds and then unpause the Laserdisc. This is because there is a delay between when you click "capture" and when the capturing actually starts. Capture the video. If you want to stay and keep an eye on it, set it to the maximum length of capture and when the side is done just click stop capturing, Or, if you want to go make a sandwich or take the dog for a walk you can tell Pinnacle Studio to stop capturing after 120 minutes. I'd actually go with 125 or so. This actually depends on your Laserdisc player. Mine has auto flip and will automatically play the other side of the disk. It takes a minute or so to do the flipping. If your player doesn't auto flip, you can tell Pinnacle Studio to stop after 61 minutes. From what I hear a Laserdisc will only hold 60 minutes so 61 should be safe. Always record a little bit past the ends of the sides. Give some extra space at the beginning of each capture too. Even just a few seconds. Another thing to mention is that you must use the NTFS file system, available only on Windows NT, 2000 and XP. Not sure if this will work on NT because I'm not sure if NT supports firewire. I'd recommend Windows 2000 or XP. If you use the FAT32 file system the longest movie you can capture will be about 17 minutes. This is due to FAT32 having a maximum file size of 4GB, which is apparently 17 minutes of video. I would recommend sticking around while the capture is happening and stopping the capture when the side is finished. This way you aren’t wasting hard drive space capturing a blank screen. Moving on... After you capture the video you will need to edit the sides together. I’m not going to go into mega detail on how to edit the clips. Read the manual or look in the help section. Here are some suggestions: In the original movies scenes go right into each other. Because the Laserdisc has “sides” they had to split the movie up. For the most part the scenes they chose to split the sides up at are good for editing. The only problem is that they do a little fade out. So when editing side 1 and side 2 of Star Wars A New Hope this is how it went: Side 1 ends with Luke, Ben and Threepio walking down the stairs into the Mos Isley cantina, with a slight fade out. Side 2 starts with an alien’s head popping up in the cantina and the Cantina Band playing that famous song. What I did was trim off the last few frames from Side 1 where the fade out was so it shows Luke and everyone going down the stairs and then the alien head popping up one right after the other. If you leave the fade out in there it looks bad. Also, if you leave any black space between the two scenes it also looks bad. Edit all your sides together and add menus and Titles if you like. I have a title screen that has two buttons. One goes directly to Chapter one and shows the 20th Century Fox logo and plays the movie. The other button goes to the chapter menu in case you want to skip to a specific chapter. Star Wars A New Hope fits on one disk with normal audio at about 39% of the original quality. This sounds low but looks really good. I wanted to see how much of a quality gain I would get by eliminating the credits and it only came up to 40%. 1% wasn’t enough for me to kill the credits. The Empire Strikes Back is a bit of a pain. Apparently Pinnacle Studio will only decrease the picture quality so much before it says “No, I won’t go any further”. Empire came out at 37% quality, since it’s longer than A New Hope, but is still 23 seconds too long. 23 seconds! Damn! So, to get around this you can, A) cut out the 20th Century Fox thing, B) Cut out some of the credits, or C) change the audio options to MPEG audio. I chose C, change the audio. This actually brought the video quality up to 53%. But you lose some audio quality. I played the disk and it sounds fine to me. I haven’t done Jedi yet but I believe it is slightly longer than Empire so you may have to use option B or C, since I don’t think removing the 20th Century Fox thing will be enough. I don’t know though. I’ll edit this document when I know for sure. Good luck! |