Thanks, guys, here's a comparison video for the cave fight:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ohQraIUc8n0

I certainly prefer the look of the sabers in your version Harmy. :D

I'm impressed that you're going to be giving v3 this level of scrutiny. Bravo!

I won't be re-doing any other lightsabres though, they can be fixed just fine by colour correction. And it was painful to do, I spent all night on it, but I'm really happy about the outcome, so it was worth it.

rockin said:

They look really good.

But I am wondering Harmy, for this next release are you going to make higher bitrate versions available and offer even more audio?

I know that for ANH, you are using Ady's AVCHD so you are limited there, but Ady has a 13gb ESB that is in .mkv format which is a much higher bitrate than his AVCHD, and for ROTJ you probably already know that there are some high quality bitrate 2004 HD broadcasts. 

Absolutely, I already said I'm going to use the 14GB MKV of Ady's ESB and higher bitrate versions of SW (I'm not using Ady's AVCHD of SW this time) and ROTJ. They will be 720p DVD9 AVCHDs; I'm absolutely decided on that, I don't want to make these Blu-Ray because I haven't got access to a BD burner and the uploads would be painful too but I want it to be playable on BD players. 720p looks great - actually I've got a 6,5GB 720p version of AOTC and it looks way better than an 8GB 1080p version because the compression took away more detail on the 1080p than what was gained by the resolution. I'll also be encoding HQ 2PASS this time to keep as much quality as possible, so don't worry. Noticing the loss of quality and detail in the previous PDE versions was actually the main reason that prompted me to make new versions, so I'll try to make these the highest possible quality given the source materials.

Also, for ROTJ will you be fixing the brightness thing at the end in the Luke Vs Vader throne room fight? I think they are a few frames in there that make the black bars white/grey from where you tweaked the brightness a bit.

Oh, absolutely, that is already fixed in the DVD reconstruction and it will be fixed in the new PDE as well.

As to the audio, I'm not sure I'll be adding anything else, each disc will definitely contain 3 audio tracks: hairy_hen's 5.1, Belbucus' 2.0 in some higher bitrate AC3 and a low bitrate Czech Dubing. And maybe some additional ones, if there's enough space, like the monomix for SW or maybe some commentary tracks.

Thanks, guys, on h_h's PM request, here's the clip in HQ mp4.

Harmy said:

Here's another taster of TESB PDE v3.0:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_RiTNXbVeAg

In this scene, I rotoscoped the original lightsabres and flashes (which were recomposited in the 2004 SE) back in.

I certainly wouldn't mind posting some frames but I don't know how to export a frame from After Effects like that, so if anyone can tell me how, I'll be happy to do it. I also just fixed the issue in the first shot where Luke activates his lightsabre and when he lifts it to his face, it gets all blurry.

Also, 005, thanks for the comparisons, they're an awesome source. I knew there was something off about the lightsabres in that scene but I would have thought it could be fixed through colour correction. Based on your comparisons, I also fixed the overblown flash when Luke cuts Vader's head off. I tried just toning down the brightness but that didn't work, so I had to rotoscope in the original flash from GOUT. It would have been better if I could have used the 97SE but I still can't find it anywhere - the only one I found was Reivax SW.

OK, figured it out myself, so here are a few frames extracted from the AE files. It's really nothing special though.

OK, try this.