Hey Harmy do you think you'll have ESB done by next September 2013 or is that going to take you the full year and ROTJ all of 2014 and TPM 2015?

Just watched the sunset, wow.....just wow.

^   yeah!

Not sure what's up with the slightly less than round sun on left, but I do not care. The overall scene is nice. Every little thing looks more and more like a truly excellent achievement.

Very curious what this team negative project is all about though. Fresh telecine project?

I too love the color changes. The (unintentional) added noise is a tad distracting though. Any plans to filter out some of the grain?

Loving the new colour on the latest tweaks, Harmy!  R2 particuarly is great to see, as it was a bit oddly muted before.  One teeny-tiny question...did you comp in the homestead separately from the rest of the frame in the sunset shot?  It seems to wobble ever so slightly against the BG.

Gotcha - I'll chalk it up to either my crappy-ass default work player/codec, or compression for web.  Regardless, I don't remember seeing it in v2.0 so would've been surpirsed. 

Off topic a little bit, I was just realizing I remember seeing the original post someone had long long ago for a 'partly-despecialized' version of SW.  It's stunning to see how that more modest project has grown to represent the absolutely unquestionable BEST possible version of the films as they originally existed yet available, concerning itself with every last minute detail of putting these films back together the way they are supposed to look.  Like so many others have said, thank you again for making your work public and letting me watch the movies I grew up with, and see them with my kids the way they were meant to be.

box said:

I think you're missing something fundamental. You don't need a program that will "burn multiple audio tracks". All those well known programs will burn multiple audio tracks fine. They may have trouble burning if you're passing them a bunch of files that approximate a DVD folder hierarchy. But if a DVD has been properly authored with multiple tracks and exists as a single image file (iso, etc.) these programs will burn that fine. At that pont it's just the binary representation and they have no idea if it's a data DVD or a video DVD or what - they simple burn the bits to the disc. End of story.

Not from what I have been messin with. I made a DVD of the mkv file of v2.0 about a month or two ago with Burn and it only incorporated one audio track. I tried looking more into it with Nero and other programs. From what I've read Nero does not support multiple audio tracks. And everytime I try opening the file in Toast the program freezes. So I'm sorry to say that most of the programs I'm using do not work to my satisfaction. I hate to keep coming back with all this but this has not been easy for me and all I seek are some tips.

So Macs suck, what's new?  Alternatively just go buy a blu player that does mkv...or a media streamer that also will.  Either will run you less than a hundred bucks and will serve you well in the future.  If you're having this much trouble it's a route worth exploring.

Harmy said:

And here's another one:

I was actually hoping to use this shot from the B&W deleted scene from the BD set but unfortunately after some tests I found it was way too blown out to be of any use.

Would it be possible to use the b/w version to restore some of the detail to the head on that one guy standing next to the Dewback? The fact that his body is sharp and his head is blurry just seems to stand out.

Maybe it looks different when output to a HDTV but on my monitor the flattening of the blown highlights has also removed the specular highlights from Artoo's dome and Threepio's shoulder in that shot.

snicker said:

Maybe it looks different when output to a HDTV but on my monitor the flattening of the blown highlights has also removed the specular highlights from Artoo's dome and Threepio's shoulder in that shot.

I can tell you from experience of comparing many sources and working a lot on different versions of this movie that the 2.0 there actually has too dark highlights. Star Wars was very bright in those scenes originally. The pushing down of highlights was something Lucasfilm did to the video releases, especially in the 2004/2011 SE.

2.1 represents more what it should look like.

Sorry, You_Too, I think we're talking about different things. My point is that the specular highlights which should look, more-or-less, as they do in v2.0 are now smoothly blended into the diffuse highlights in v2.1.

@snicker: That's what I meant. Except the opposite. They should be blended like in 2.1. What you see in 2.0 is the result of Lucasfilm's bad balancing of the contrast in their special editions.

The problem is that the contrast in the highlights has been compressed and they now appear somewhat flat. You can see that the specular highlights (which should have a noticeable edge) have merged with the surrounding highlights. Have a look also at the Stormtrooper's helmet, the bubble window below Threepio's shoulder, and the threading on his neck for further examples of loss of highlight detail. With selective channel replacement those specular highlights can be even better defined. Not trying to piss on anyone's work here, just pointing out something that stood out to me. The rest of it looks phenomenal.

Raw Blu-ray (top), Raw adjusted (middle), DE v2.1 (bottom)