CED VideoDisc and Player Discussion

[CEDatum]

Stars Wars was issued on CED as 24543-11309 ( NTSC) and 24543-38381 ( PAL ). The entire movie is on one Videodisc and the running time listed on the caddy cover is 118 mins.

The first trail mastering for this title was a 2 disc set. This was 24534-07005. The running time on disc one was S1, 41 mins and S2, 53 mins and for the second disc S3, 28 mins. This is a total of 122 mins.

A small production run was made of the 2 disc set and samples in plain caddies were reviewed by Fox/Lucas films and RCA marketing. It was decided to edit the movie and sell it as a single disc.

What scenes were removed from the original movie ? The writer has one of the S3 discs.

[cedmagic]

The two-disc CED master of Stars Wars is probably identical in content to the one-disc version of the movie, as this is the case with the one-disc and two-disc LaserDisc versions of the movie. This was achieved by using time compression to shave a few minutes off the total length of the movie.

Back in the early 1990s I joined Columbia House LaserDisc just to get the Star Wars Trilogy as the three "free" titles and did a side-by-side comparison between the Star Wars CED and the two-disc LaserDisc. The time compression on the CED was obvious, as the LaserDisc had to be slightly fast-forwarded every few seconds to keep them in sync. That comparison revealed the CED and LaserDisc were identical in content.

If the first disc of the two-disc CED could be found, it would be worthwhile to look at the "Grappling Hook" scene. This is 85 minutes into the movie, and there's a legend that Luke originally threw the hook across the chasm in the Death Star twice (having missed the first time):

http://www.cedmagic.com/featured/star-wars.html

--Tom Howe

[Disclord]

Star Wars was originally a 2-disc set on LaserDisc too - but, just like the CED, got sped-up to a single disc... on both the CED and LD, you can hear the time compression kick in during the Fox logo - the pitch suddenly jumps up. Fox kept the price of the time-compressed LaserDisc the same as the 2-disc would have been! Back in the day, the only way to have Star Wars on disc at its proper speed was to import the Japanese LaserDisc, which was always a 2 disc, non-time-compressed, release... it was on the "Magnetic Video" label there too! The Japanese wouldn't stand for time-compression. My partner, Tony Cook, used to write for a LaserDisc & CED newsletter/magazine called "Disc Deals" and wrote an article about the 'prototype' 2-disc Star Wars. He also wrote under the name "Philip Stevens" when reviewing MCA DiscoVision titles for Disc Deals.

One thing about the CED release of Star Wars - it was a STUNNER! The disc just 'looked' better than other (even other stereo) CED releases at that time - like special, low-noise, plastics were used to make the disc or something. It looked amazing - was it pressed by RCA or CBS?

As a side-note, usually time-compressed discs cannot be properly deinterlaced to recover the original film frames because the fields are often 'mixed', disrupting the original 3:2 pull-down. Depending on how it was done (digitally or analog), it also cuts the vertical resolution in half, to a single field. It's amazing how proper deinterlacing exposes the nasty things done to video back in the early days.

I remember an article written by an RCA VideoDisc mastering tech about how he removed frames from Saturday Night Fever to make it fit on a single disc - while the film is only 118 minutes long, he didn't want to 'fill' the CED disc that much so frames during black fades, etc... were removed to shorten it a bit without time-compressing it. They later went back and transfered it 'un-cut', but with no packaging change. MCA DiscoVision did the same thing to the optical release of "Flash Gordon", but in this case, they removed certain scenes completely and the beginning and endings of scenes - the DiscoVision release of Xanadu had a whole 3 minute sequence cut out of it. (the "Tuesday's Wednesday" scequence) Neither Flash... nor Xanadu were ever repressed on DiscoVision to fix those 'errors'.

BTW, were the PAL versions of CED titles 'sped up' 4% to 25 frames or did RCA do proper 13/12 pulldown, which eliminates the speed up when going from 24 film frames to 25 PAL TV frames? I HATE the fact that the 4% speed up is used to convert film to PAL/SECAM... especially when there is a truly proper way (13/12 pulldown) to do it without any speed change.

[negative1]

hello,

i just got my first CED player in September [rca sft 100], along
with the discs for star wars (fox), the empire strikes
back, and return of the jedi...

i'm a star wars collector, who has usually bought things
on laserdisc first, and then dvd.. but someone mentioned
these versions so i was interested in getting these also..

i highly doubt there are any extra scenes on any of these
discs...but who knows?

the thing that gets me, i have the NTSC versions and it looks
like theres about a 3% (or 2.54%) on star wars (121min/118min).

and a 3.33% speedup on the empire strikes back (124min/120min),
and finally a 1.51% speedup on return of the jedi (135min/132min).

Why was Jedi spedup? I thought there was plenty of room left
on the third disc. Although these percentages seem small, the
voices ARE affected to me at least. I've done some comparisons
to the laserdiscs / dvds of the originals, and though they aren't
as fast as the PAL speedup, still it does affect them.

For now, i'm capturing the video through a capture card to
computer, and then burning that to DVD, so i don't have to
keep playing the discs....

i've had a terrible time, as i didn't have an RCA jack on the capture
device, and bought one, but didn't realize it had to be tuned to
channel 3/4.... i then found a VCR player that someone threw away,
but works perfectly fine in converting the signal to RCA outputs..

i coudn't split the audio to stereo, so i'm only getting mono right
now. maybe i just didn't set the audio output correctly?

the discs i have are in average condition, i'm getting some skipping
and artifacts, although its probably a combination of both the
player needing adjustment, and the discs being old..

that said, i've transferred about 95% of all three movies, and
the quality is very good...

i could post some video samples if anyones interested..

heres a sample from star wars ep4 (and yes leia is blue,
every 10sec or so, the color 'glitches', and then returns to normal).



later
-1

[negative1]

here's a 7 minute preview of episode 4:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gBtPDAbAkPE

note the opening and crawl have the dropouts every so often..

the second scene with the ship members smuggling themselves
is much much better.

later
-1