DGIndexNV, Avisynth, and VDub is all you need to make a lossless avi from BD.

But if you do not use Lagarith or Huffyuv lossless codecs, these files will be HUGE.

I'm expecting a file size around 300GB. Do you think it'll be bigger? And could you please point me to some tutorial on how to use those programs to do it?

Well, yeah, I played around with the colours a little. To be honest, I think I will actually be changing your colours quite a bit, especially in the Tantive IV sequence. But with your corrections already applied, I can do a much better job than on v1.0.

It's more that your settings are the same for the whole film, so where the colour changes between shots differently in the SE than in the original, yours follows the SE. For example, in the original (judging by the GOUT and some scans I saw etc.) in the first shoot-out, when it cuts between the rebel soldiers and the stormtroopers, the shots of the stormtroopers are darker and more blue than those of the rebels (which I suppose is because of the smoke). Also the over-all colour of the walls should be less white-with-a-slight-cyan-tint and more white-with-a-slight-dark-blue-tint.

Yeah, the 2004 master is full of stuff like this.

Also, I figured out, that if I remux the file as m2ts instead of mp4, it renders ok. But the m2ts file doesn't work properly when editing - whenever I try to move to another frame, the whole program freezes for like a minute before showing the frame, so it is unusable that way. But I was able to just import it on the timeline and render the first five minutes of it as lossless avi and then use that to edit the first five minutes of v2.0, so I should be able to simply use the m2ts in Premiere to render the lossless AVI that I should be able to work with perfectly and its size should stop being a problem soon, thanks to Troyig88.

Oh and Pheran, thanks for that nice post earlier. I was so preoccupied with this whole rendering problem, that I completely forgot to answer :-)

And here are those first five minutes of the edit - the bitrate is lower than what I plan to have for the final version but you can already see a big quality improvement compared to v1.0.

http://www.uloz.to/10978270/1st-5-minutes-mp4

I'll post a megaupload link as soon as the upload's finished, but it took about 20 seconds to upload to uloz.to and it's taking 40 minutes to upload the same file to MU.

EDIT: OK, here it is:

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=RSFM5UQ2

awesome job as always harmy.  will you be color correcting the despecialized footage to fit with the bluray footage?

how long before we can see the first 120 minutes ;-)

also if you are interested in some suggestions i noticed that the shot at around 2:27 has a lot of mosquito noise amongst the stars.

is that supposed to be there?

Yeah, in this clip, there's a lot of detail loss due to compression, which I hope to avoid in the final encode. I actually plan to release a DVD9 AVCHD and then also a 15 or so GB mkv. I was even thinking about a BD25 release but since I don't have a BD burner, I don't think I'll do that.

And I'm glad you like the colours, You_Too :-)

Harmy said:

Yeah, in this clip, there's a lot of detail loss due to compression, which I hope to avoid in the final encode. I actually plan to release a DVD9 AVCHD and then also a 15 or so GB mkv. I was even thinking about a BD25 release but since I don't have a BD burner, I don't think I'll do that.

And I'm glad you like the colours, You_Too :-)

An MKV sounds great.  Those of us who want a BD25 can demux/remux it ourselves.

What is a MKV? I assume it is some kind of format?

I noticed in that clip that the rebel soldiers outfits change colors from time to time.

At 2:44 it looks like there is too much magenta in the image.

Then with the troops passing by when 3PO says, "They've shut down the main reactor, we'll be destroyed for sure!", they look normal again.

At 2:51, again they look too magenta

Now compare 3:08 and 3:09 - the part when the ship is being pulled in and the soldiers are looking around... Their outfits keep changing color!

PS: What source is the image at the top left of the clip?

Harmy said:

I actually plan to release a DVD9 AVCHD and then also a 15 or so GB mkv. I was even thinking about a BD25 release but since I don't have a BD burner, I don't think I'll do that.

A 1080p mkv in the 15-20GB range would be fantastic! With multiAVCHD, I could combine the movie with the 2.6GB "Making of Star Wars" from the Blu-ray set, together with a simple main menu.

This could actually be done with all three of the movies -- each with their respective classic documentaries. And they'd all fit comfortably on a BD25. I love it!

The top left image is GOUT. As to the colours of the soldiers outfits, it is impossible to keep all the colours consistent, it is either the walls or the soldiers. In order to fix the soldiers, the walls have to get totally fucked up, in order to keep the walls pretty much consistent, the soldiers have to be fucked up just a little bit. It is unfortunately a necessary compromise.

To the door explosion, I'm probably gonna change that. The thing is that in the '04SE the explosion was absolutely overblown and I tried to tone it down but that unfortunately darkened the few remaining shadows way too much.

Harmy said:

And the mkv is definitely not going to be 1080p, because since all my current sources are 720p, I don't see any good reason to upscale everything to 1080p.

Somewhat disappointing, but any higher bitrate is greatly appreciated. My plans will still work at 720p as long as it truly is 720p with intact black bars as your other encodes have been and not 542p.

And with high bitrate 720p, compression artifacts will be even less apparent than at 1080p. So, thank you, regardless... for all your efforts.

Harmy said:

The top left image is GOUT. As to the colours of the soldiers outfits, it is impossible to keep all the colours consistent, it is either the walls or the soldiers. In order to fix the soldiers, the walls have to get totally fucked up, in order to keep the walls pretty much consistent, the soldiers have to be fucked up just a little bit. It is unfortunately a necessary compromise.

was this compromise necessary when you were using the hdtv footage?

can you just color correct a portion of a shot?  sorry i am inexperienced with video editing.