canofhumdingers said:
Getting to the point, I'm wondering, are you recreating the drop shadow on the credits like what mverta posted? I ask b/c, while I have no intention of arguing whether those are authentic of not (as I don't know for certain what his source is) I DO know for certain that not all prints had that. I've seen the end credits of a 1977 35mm print that absolutely did not have the drop shadow. Anyway, sorry if I'm late to the game. I was just curious about this. Can't WAIT for ver. 1.2 or 2.0 or whatever it is now, the stuff you've posted recently looks AWESOME!

I'm pretty sure his source is a 35mm print, and that what we're seeing is a slight misalignment in the layers of the text. The letters had one layer of blue and another in cyan creating a nice blue halo around the letters, the A long time ago - subs was done in the same way with a blue layer underneath.

Harmy said:

The subtitles in PG are cropped at the bottom and there were never any official 16mm releases, so the subs weren't added to the print, they were copied onto it along with the rest of the picture. Period.

It's quite possible that there were different versions of the subs as well as the credits but at first glance these seem the same to me, only a bit underexposed (like the rest of the picture). 

The PG subs are definitely the real thing, Harmy. It's like you say, difference in exposure.

Ginge said:

the video isn't reliable since the camera itself shakes, so it doesn't "conclusively" show anything either way sadly.

Harmy said:

Anyway, here's a part of the video from Baltimore, !!!stabilized!!! and with the shake on the subtitles tracked a transferred onto a red square in blue field, to make it more visible.

Ginge said: I guess you're gonna leave it this way, and that's fair... I would just like a shakeless version of that scene if it's at all possible Harmy. I would be very appreciate as it would look the way I remember seeing it last year.

I will consider rendering a shake-less version for you but not right now.

People who claim that Luke through the grappling hook twice also trust their memory over all evidence ;-)

And this is evidence - if everything else is stabilized to remain stationary and the subs are still moving, that means they were moving in the screening, there's no two ways about it - unless you think that the camera somehow extracted the subs from the background and added extra shake to them.

TheHutt said:

Why not meet somewhere in the middle? I mean, to reduce the amount of the shake so it doesn't jump into one's eyes (then it'd be just right).

That would be wrong because the result would be neither entirely stable, nor true to the original.

I support Harmy's decision to apply the shake from PG, which is to me a pretty reliable source. I honestly doubt anyone who saw the original print of the movie would try to notice and remember how much the subtitles shake in this particular scene.

I really like that Harmy is leaning more and more towards restoring the original to a great detail, while the viewing experience comes second. I personally can't wait for this version of despecialised edition, even though I had my problems with the first version (very minor nitpicks, I hate myself for that), most of which will apparently be fixed for this one.

But Ginge, he didn't apply a shake to the video from the recent screening - he removed the shake from the main image so that the original shake could be revealed.

I wonder how stable the original image really is.  If the entire frame on a projected typical movie in a typical theater often has some small amount of bobble, it could certainly make other smaller shakes within it less noticeable, meaning that a rock-solid unwavering main image would make internal shakes more visible.

For example, I considered stabilizing the Puggo Grande, but I concluded that it was wobbly relative to its own sprocket holes, and even relative to its own framing.  Meaning that either the original film was wobbly, or the reduction to 16mm was wobbly.  So I left it alone for fear that there was some possibility that I would be removing wobble that was in the original film, or that I could introduce new wobble by using the sprocket holes.  The truth is, there's no way of knowing how stable the original frame is without careful analysis of an original 35mm print.

Harmy, if you have time to render a version without the shake, it could be useful for other projects (like a sort of deleted scene).  But I agree that your version should have the shake because it sounds like it was there relative to the original image behind it.  It also preserves history because it shows that people could expect to see subs that drifted on top of the image in the 1970s.

I think what we should be asking ourselves is how stabilized the PG is compared to Harmy's picture source? Obviously, if the PG's overall picture is very shaky and you just superimpose the subtitles over a more stable source... There is obviously going to be an exagerated amount of gate weave.

All composited elements in Star Wars weave independently of each other; there are no exceptions.

Subtitles move independently of the background.  Starfields move independently of the titles composited on top of them.  The sandcrawler matte painting moves independently of the plate it's composited on to.  If you stabilize one, you exacerbate the motion of the other. This is because optical compositing required multiple passes through the optical printer, and even the most accurate pin-registered gate cannot maintain absolute alignment. Each pass weaves differently. On an exposure area as small as film, the tiniest movement is obvious.  That it worked at all is miraculous, but is also why there are so many edge and fringing errors in composites from that era.

The aggregate motion of multiple items moving independently sort of cancels each other out to a certain degree, and you don't really notice it, but as I said, if you lock one, you suddenly can't miss the other.  I stabilize every single shot in the film as I'm working on it, temporarily, and I have yet to see an exception to this rule.  And every frame of Star Wars moves around in the gate to one degree or another.  There are no stable shots in the film.

Hope that helps.

_Mike

Absolutely possible.  What's curious is I've seen it on 4 4k sources with identical offset.

_Mike

mverta said:

Absolutely possible.  What's curious is I've seen it on 4 4k sources with identical offset.

 

 

_Mike

mverta said:

Absolutely possible.  What's curious is I've seen it on 4 4k sources with identical offset.

_Mike

 Hmm, then I don't know what to believe.

Just a little update:

I finally managed to get the BD footage to work (had to remux it to mp4,) so a new subtitles video with a few little tweak and using the BD footage is coming soon :-)

That hallway looks so much worse/better!

Yeah, I used the 97SE and it was cropped so close that I decided to do it this way for v1.0 rather than cropping it so much. Now I figured why don't I just mirror it :-)

OK, here's the video: http://www.megaupload.com/?d=3BK11GXI

There is a glitch where the frame freezes for a second just before Han shoots, which obviously won't be in the final film.