Yeah, I'm going to try and recreate the original wipe where Jabba is in the SE but if I can't pull it off convincingly, I'll just leave it.

As to Ben's lightsabre, I didn't rotoscope it, I just increased brightness and contrast, just like I did to fix the lightsabres in ROTJ.

Like most of the other shots, rotoscoping the SE part out of the HD scene using GOUT and various other different sources.

Erikstormtrooper said:

Harmy, the latest clip is awesome! I'm glad you posted it, since I was starting to have withdrawals.

Thanks :-)

In the scene where the stormtroopers are looking for the droids behind the locked door, will you be tweaking that any more? The background around the corner (where people are walking) seems a bit blurry. I understand it may be as good as it gets though.

Yeah, that shot was actually quite a challenge and I'm afraid there's not much more I can do about that, because the droid sort of hovers up and down in front of that area, so it's either replace the whole background with GOUT like I did, or have a blurry blob hover up and down all over the place.

I'm also quite proud of the shot where Falcon leaves the dock, because there was a camera movement added to it, so I had to undo the movement, stabilize it, replace the whole background and add the bottom part that was missing due to the camera movement and add the original Falcon and also reconstruct first 5 frames, which were cut off in the SE.

This was a test to see how the shots work when put in the film and it helped me find out which shots still need some tweaking but over-all I think it works pretty well.

hairy_hen said:

What sort of colour correction will you be doing?  Since from the Technicolor photos we know about the Death Star interiors actually being blue in some shots, it would be good to see that preserved, but I do think the '04 is the often the wrong shade of blue and makes it too strong sometimes.  And then of course there's the other rubbish like heavily oversaturated reds, dark/weird skin tones, laser blasts being too pink or missing colour altogether, and all that.  (And the crushed blacks, but those aren't fixable.)

I'll be doing the same kind of colour correction as I did on Empire i.e. I'll be using colour boosted GOUT as a reference (with some restraint of course, as the GOUT colours are not completely accurate either). I'll also use the technicolour print photos wherever possible.

Mike Verta's site has a lot of good notes on colour correcting the opening scenes of the movie.  (This is where I first learned exactly why the image looked so messed up--before I couldn't really describe what I was seeing.)  http://www.starwarslegacy.com/

I checked that out and there definitely is some interesting input there.

I'm also wondering whether you'll be using the G-force'd GOUT for the beginning crawl and Star Destroyer or not

I'm not quite decided on that yet. I think I'll try using the GOUT crawl but rotoscope in the SE stardestroyer and Tantive IV and see how that works.

along with msycamore's subtitles (since they are very accurate to the originals).

Not sure about that one either. I managed to erase the yellow subs from the HD footage of the Greedo scene using the 04DVD and I'll definitely try making more screen accurate subs. I'm just not sure if I'll be able to use msycamore's subs. It would actually be awesome if someone could encode a video with msycamore's subs on plain green background

The Mos Eisley test looks quite good.  I'm really looking forward to this.  :)

Thanks, I'm working on some more tweaks right now to make it even better. Also, did you notice that the NTSC DVD version of Empire is now available?

I think I already figured out how to do it using the HD footage only but I'll have to test it to confirm. I want to avoid using the GOUT footage as much as possible but slowing the footage down considerably seems even worse, so if it doesn't work, I think I'll just keep the straight cut.

Yeah, I'm most definitely cutting Jabba out.

@msycamore: I tried, but unfortunately the graininess of the V8 made the transition look even worse. And also it's one thing looking at it as separate clips and then watching it as a movie, that way these things don't seem to stand out far as much as when you're specifically looking for them. And in most shots, the GForced GOUT that I'm getting from DJ is the closest to HD I'm gonna get.

@joshdv: I don't know yet, didn't get that far.

Thanks. I quite understand your stance as well, I'd also prefer a proper restoration of the original but for the time being this is better then nothing for me because it bothers me that the shit SE version is out there in HD and I couldn't watch SW in that quality because it's ruined by CGI.