regrading/editing original trilogy using blu-rays and german hdtv streams to remove bad but not all specialised/blu-ray changes (* unfinished project *)

Okay, this is a project I started a few months back with one goal in mind really, after having first seen the dvds and then the blu-rays when they came out:

1. To get rid of the blue tint running throughout the three films in the original trilogy

From the very beginning of the project though, the scope kept on increasing as I discovered all the unnecessary changes made to the original trilogy by GL over the years, due in no small part to the treasure trove of info about all the changes to be found here. The more I read about the changes on this forum, the more I realised that I had to try and do something about these totally unnecessary scenes/changes that really detracted from these great films for no real purpose. This led me to the second and what has turned out to be far more complex goal of this project:

2. To edit out certain awful scenes/changes that have been added to these films since their theatrical releases, while keeping all the ‘good’ specialised changes

From there I realised that i’d have to try and do something about the inconsistent lightsaber colours and all the unnecessary changes that were added to the blu-ray as well, like the creepy blinking eyes of certain ewoks, all the shining light when Han is defrozen that looks really tacky and it really just went on from there…

In order to try and maintain as high quality as possible, I have been using the blu-rays and german hdtv streams,  that are the highest quality hdtv streams that I am aware of. I am very close to completion of this project (I hope) and some have voiced interest in a ‘partly despecialised’ version of the original trilogy that maintains all the ‘good’ specialised changes but removes all the bad ones, so I thought that I should share what I have done to date with you guys. If there’s any interest in this project, I can upload these films when i’ve finished so you can get your hands on them.
 

Here are the changes to the three films I’ve applied:
 

Star Wars

1. Overall regrading to remove the blue tint

2. Selective regrading scene by scene in the blockade section at the beginning to make the colour grading more consistent

3. Increased brightness of whole film a little while maintaining black levels

4. Removing the rocks placed in front of R2D2 (blu-ray change) in the scene with the sandpeople

5. Removed Ben’s laughably bad Krayt Dragon call from the blu-ray and reinstated the great original one (GL, what were you thinking…)

6. Removed silly droid hitting/jawa swinging antics when they enter mos eisley

7. Removed the unnecessary Jabba scene completely

8. Han shoots first

9. Made the training lightsaber on the falcon consistently white (I always liked it being white, like its a special training lightsaber that Ben gives Luke to train with, rather than his father’s lightsaber, also provides more lightsaber variety IMHO)

10. Desaturated many scenes with Tarkin that were overly saturated, making his ears very red and noticable

11. Made Vader and Ben’s lightsaber colours consistent and increased their intensity (always thought the lightsaber colours in the star wars lightsaber fight were a little dull, unlike ESB and ROTJ where they are more intense and scarier)
     

Empire Strikes Back:

1. Overall regrading to remove the blue tint, so Hoth is white again

2. Removed very noticable black spot (at least for me) on bottom left corner of image in the scene when Luke is riding the tauntaun at the start of the film and when he gets attacks by the wampa, where the spot is constantly appearing and disappearing between shots

3. Reinserted original emperor scene

4. Made lightsabers consistent and Vader’s lightsaber red all the time rather than pink or sometimes even orange…

5. Got rid of the OTT sparks added to the blu-ray during the scene where Chewie is trying to get C3PO off the dwarfs

6. Reinstated original Bobba Fett voice and Vader’s ‘bring me my shuttle’ line

7. Reinstated Luke’s ‘you’re lucky you don’t taste so good’ in the swamp

8. Removed all shots showing Vader going back to his shuttle so the Millenium Falcon escape is one continuous scene like it was in the original theatrical release

9. Luke falls silently

10. Increased brightness of whole film a little while maintaining black levels
     

Changes to Return of the Jedi:

1. Overall regrading to remove the blue tint

2. Increased brightness of whole film a little while maintaining black levels

3. Unneccessary pan of Jabba Palace’s door removed and replaced with original shot

4. Jedi Rocks removed and Lapti Nek reinstated

5. Han’s cheesy light filled defreezing from the blu-ray removed and the original cut reinstated

6. Prequel CG creature coming down the stairs of Jabba’s Palace just before Luke arrives removed and original cut without CG character reinstated

7. All shots of Wicket and ewok baby’s creepy blinking eyes replaced with original shots sans blinking eyes and CG irises

8. R2D2 OTT malfunction from blu-ray removed and replaced with original cut

9. Made lightsabers consistent and Vader’s lightsaber red all the time

10. Removed Vader’s ‘Noooooooooooooooo!’

11. Cheesy OTT CG celebrations with thousands on the streets on naboo (bye bye Jar Jar saying ‘Weesa Free!!!’, tattoine and corusant removed, cloud city celebrations remain

12. Hayden Christensen removed and Sebastian Shaw reinstated

I’ll be back very soon with listings of the changes to Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi. In the meantime, here’s a little clip from the sand people scene in Star Wars, where the rocks in front of R2D2 from the blu-ray have been removed and its back to how it was before the blu-ray release.

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=ZB1Q8D7S

 
Please feel free to comment, especially on the increase in brightness relative to the blu-ray release. Harmy and many others, myself included, find the blu-ray releases of the original trilogy to be a little underexposed, so i’ve increased the brightness of the three films. Do you think its too bright/not bright enough or just about right? The problem is that increasing the brightness too much blows out white highlights in other parts of the film, so its a bit of a balancing act… I’m still in two minds about this issue so all thoughts on this issue would be greatly appreciated!

Cobra Kai said:

OMEN, I would be very interested in your project.  I just want the Trilogy in the best available quality, but without all the really offensive special edition changes.  There are some minor changes that aren't distracting for me and which do not alter the original intention of the story. 

In a perfect world, yes I would obviously prefer to have the unaltered originals in all their glory, but it does not have to be a true 100% theatrical version for me to enjoy the movies as I did when I was a kid.  Here are my thoughts on each film:

STAR WARS:  The only big SE changes that I wouldn't mind keeping are the new death star attack shots.  They blend very well with the original scene, in my opinion.  Everything else, though, has to go.  All the new cg creatures on tatooine, greedo shooting first, jabba, etc.

EMPIRE: Basically, change everything back to the original except maybe the new Cloud City shots where they added windows revealing parts of the city outside.  This is much less distracting to me, than inserting backgrounds from an inferior quality source and rotoscoping movement around the old backgrounds.   This was really my only problem with Harmy and Adywan's Empire restoration, as it was really noticeable.

- Obviously the old emperor scene MUST be restored.  I'm surprised more people dont talk about this more, as it is one of the most harmful changes that Lucas did to his movies: 

From the opening title crawl we learn that Vader is "obsessed" with finding Luke.  Then later during his conversation with the emperor we hear Vader almost defending Luke:  "He's just a boy.  Obi-wan can no longer help him."  He also expresses reluctantance to kill Luke and offers an alternative - "If he could be turned."  It becomes clear that Vader's "obsession" has to do with the fact that Luke is his son.  His dialogue in the emperor scene starts to reveal that Vader still has a small piece of his humanity left.  Later of course in Jedi we learn that Luke was in fact correct about this as Vader redeems himself in the end and is able to save his "soul".

The new emperor scene removes all of this cool character development and even implies that Vader didn't know Luke was his son: "How is this possible?".  Not to mention the fact that the new dialogue is simply horrible and is the same ridiculous, wooden, lifeless nonsense that plagued the prequels.

- Also, the new shuttle scene during the climax has to be taken out and restored so that we hear the classic "bring my shuttle" line.  That new scene only breaks up the action anyway, and is completely useless.

- Original wampa scene:  I'm "ok" with the new wampa scene but I much prefer the original.

- Restore the original Jeremy Bulloch / Boba Fett audio

JEDI:  I'm ok with the '97 SE ending.  To me the new John Williams score combined with the new shots are a more fitting way to end the Star Wars saga than the original "yub-yub" song.  Still I'm completely happy with the original ending, and yub-yub brings back memories from my childhood, so either way... 

- Jedi Rocks must go.

- original sarlaac.

- Hayden Christiansen - please make him go away. 

- Vader does not yell "Noooooooo!" when he throws the emperor down the shaft.  Seriously, George? What the hell were you thinking?

 

I'm sure there are more abominations that need to be restored - I'm just going off my memory of the last time i watched the 06 dvd's several years ago.  I refuse to watch them today.  I also don't like the new over-saturated color correction from the new versions. 

All this being said, yes I can't wait for Harmy's new version 2.0.  I would just like to have these "mostly-despecialized" versions, as another option.

 

 

Hey Cobra, i'm pretty much with you on most of those changes. 95% of those video changes are included in this version and 100% of the audio changes you suggested. There are some changes like the original Sarlaac pit that would be too jarring to insert though IMHO because there is no high definition source that has the original sarlacc without all the CG tentacles, so you would either have to have the whole scene in uprezed GOUT quality or be constantly cutting between blu-ray quality and GOUT quality that would be very distracting to say the least. I personally don't mind the new Sarlacc pit all that much anyway, the tentacles make it more of an active participant in the scene. The only footage i've used from the GOUT for my version is Lapti Nek to replace Jedi Rocks and Sebastian Shaw replacing Hayden Christensen at the end of ROTJ. Lapti Nek is one continuous scene taken from the GOUT, so its far less noticable because its not constantly jumping between GOUT quality and blu-ray quality, just at the start and end of the scene. Everything else is either from the blu-ray or german hdtv streams to maintain as high quality as possible.

As for the colours, I've left the colours as they are, albeit with the blue tint removed, because I always felt the original star wars was a little too desaturated and didn't want to start messing around more with the blu-ray's colour scheme but that really is easy for anybody to fix, you just lower your colour setting on your tv and problem solved, star wars as desaturated as you want.

Hey Funcha, yeah my plan from the outset was to encode these with as high quality as possible and write each of the three films onto single dual layer blu-rays, so all my encodes have been at full 1080p resolution and pretty much identical in terms of grain/PQ to the blu-rays themselves. You could definately call that going the 'ultra-high bitrate for maximum quality' route as you suggested. :)

Of course, I have all the sources still perfectly intact so I can also create 720p and 1080p encodes that can fit a dual layer dvd no problem for those that aren't interested in downloading something so large.

As for audio, i've read comments by Adywan and others that the DTS-HD audio of the blu-rays are a little sound effects centric to the detriment of the fantastic musical score by John Williams, particularly during the space battles, so I was planning to use Hairy_Hen's awesome 70mm sound mix recreations that bring the music back to front stage and take any specialised audio changes that I want to keep from either the DTS-HD Master Audio Track from the blu-ray or as a last resort, the 5.1 tracks from the 2004 dvds. Having put the audio track together, I planned to encode it to uncompressed pcm to maintain as high quality audio as possible.

One problem that i've run into is that the program i'm using cannot recognise dts-hd audio, so I was wondering whether you know how to convert the dts-hd audio of the blu-rays to pcm without any audio quality loss, because my program can recognise and manipulate pcm and that would be incredibly useful.

Okay, for those interested in this project, here's a clip from when Luke gets attacked by the Wampa on Hoth. The brightness has been boosted by exactly the same amount as the sandpeople clip I posted before and the blue tint has been removed relative to the blu-ray release:

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=KZ38M9W1

Here are a comparison, the top from the blu-ray, the bottom from the regraded encode:

http://img812.imageshack.us/img812/1070/wampacomparison.jpg

And here are the two screencaps seperately:

blu-ray: http://img827.imageshack.us/img827/1696/wampabluray.jpg

regrade: http://img827.imageshack.us/img827/605/wamparegrade.jpg

Sorry about the low picture quality of the encode, my upload speed is currently very slow (soon to change) so I try to keep files as small as possible. The quality of the clip is in no way representative of the quality that the final encode will be. Let me know what you think about the extra brightness and any other changes you see.

Cheers for the feedback Harmy! I'm glad that you liked the brightness of the sand people clip. I think i'm just going to go with that same brightness setting for the whole film. I've encoded 75% of the film with this brightness setting and i'm pretty happy, definately a clear improvement on the blu-ray in that regard and removes that 'underexposed' look for the most part. Yeah, I know that there are certain variations in brightness throughout the film/s but i'm not the cinematographer/director so I can't really make a valid assessment on whether these brightness variations were intentional or not IMHO. I'm certainly not planning to start brightening and darkening the films on a scene by scene basis to fit my personal preferences.

Man, as far as the Hoth clip is concerned, its times like this where i wish i could ask the cinematographer of ESB how he intended this scene to look. Your despecialised screencap to me looks too dark on my monitor, like the scene is playing out at dusk when i'm pretty sure its still meant to be full daylight and thereby brighter. Your despecialised screencap is definately a fair bit darker than even the blu-ray. I personally prefer the colours and brightness in my screencap, Luke's bluish fleshtone seem more accurate to the freezing conditions on Hoth while Luke's face in your screencap looks a little too dark and orange IMHO. What does everyone else think? Man, colour grading is a real tricky business...

Cheers for the feedback CatBus! Unfortunately any sort of brightening causes blown out whites, so by your argument one should simply leave the brightness as it is in the blu-ray (or do you think it should be darkened like in Harmy's screencap?). The only problem with that is that the three original trilogy films have an 'underexposed' look to them IHMO that can only be fixed my increasing the brightness slightly, so slighly blown out whites is a necessary evil IMO. Harmy agrees with me in that regard that extra brightness is necessary, at least with the first film, Star Wars. The reason I posted this clip of Hoth outdoors was exactly because I knew that it would create blown out whites when the blu-ray was brightened by any amount. So which of the three screencaps do you prefer in terms of brightness and general image dynamics (not colour), the blu-ray one, my one or Harmy despecialised one?

Thanks for the feedback CatBus. I think you may very well be right about lowry pushing the contrast to the very limit of the highlights. I may have to reconsider my approach to ESB in terms of increasing brightness. I should probably transfer this clip and that same bit from Harmy's despecialised edition to my ps3 so I can see how the different brightness settings look on my TV.

EDIT: I'm pretty much with Harmy in terms of how the colour grading is supposed to be bluish/cyan in this scene. I'm pretty sure its meant to look that way and all the sources i've seen seem to indicate that as well.

This is what came out when I took that shot into photoshop and let it auto-find the RGB mid-levels and adjusted it to that without changing the white or black balance:

OMEN,

Per your earlier post, I would be thrilled to see a DVD9 release of your work on A New Hope.  What is the likelihood that that could happen?  Best and thanks for the posts, they're very interesting. 

hi delusions_of_grandeur, thanks for the interest in this project.

In answer to your question, highly likely, it just depends on whether the interest is there. I have all the sources i've used totally intact so I can create an encode of whatever bitrate and therefore whatever size I want, so creating a dvd9 release is no trouble whatsoever. :)

You_Too said:

This is what came out when I took that shot into photoshop and let it auto-find the RGB mid-levels and adjusted it to that without changing the white or black balance:

Nice regrading there You_Too! It's like a lighter version of Harmy's screencap. The thing is, to me, just like with Harmy's version, the flesh tone is too 'normal' in this particular scene IMHO. I don't know how reliable the GOUT is as a source of regrading, but luke's warm flesh tones don't seem to fit with the extremely cold environment he's in. The whole scene just looks a little too warm and reddish IMO.

Perhaps that's why LFL decided to make it so blue in the 2004 dvds and blu-rays, to try and instil a greater sense of sheer coldness in the scene that it lacked before. Excluding the issue of which brightness is 'correct', I get more of a 'colder' feeling in my screencap, reflected in Luke's bluer 'colder' flesh tones, than I do in this one with Luke fleshtone being redder and 'warmer'.

Colour grading has got a lot less subtle over the years, so perhaps it did actually look like the GOUT when it first came out theatrically with a lot more 'neutral' palette but when LFL had the chance to regrade it again, they decided to follow the more modern trend of showing temperature more explicitly via colour grading? This is totally hypothetical of course but if this was indeed the case, which colour grading is the more 'correct' or 'valid' one, the original theatrical one with the far more subtle colour grading or the recent 2004 masters following more modern colour grading trends of showing hot or cold via colour...

Ultimately it comes down to what one's own colour grading preferences are, I suppose, whether you like more neutral palettes or more strongly graded palettes. The original theatrical fellowship of the ring colour palette comes to mind as an example of this later type of grading, where many locations feel different due to having their own unique colour grading. I personally like this type of stronger colour grading more so I see this sort of colour revisionism that LFL has done as fairly acceptable but i'm sure that the majority here with a more purist leaning will completely disagree with me. I'm not trying to recreate the GOUT/theatrical colours in this project (Adywan and Harmy are doing that much better than I possibly could with their fantastic releases) just remove the blue tint running throughout the three films on the blu-ray releases, brighten them up a touch and remove all of the bad changes made by GL to these films since the theatrical releases. I don't know whether anybody would be interested in such releases but if they are, I'll be happy to upload them.

Harmy said:

 

@OMEN: LOL, anyone here, I'm sure, will tell you that the is absolutely nothing valid about the 2004 colour timing :-)

Haha, indeed. Apart from that annoying blue tint, I'm fairly happy with the overall colour grading of the 2004 dvds/blu-rays. Now where did I leave that flame suit... ;)

OMEN!-_-! said:

Nice regrading there You_Too! It's like a lighter version of Harmy's screencap. The thing is, to me, just like with Harmy's version, the flesh tone is too 'normal' in this particular scene IMHO. I don't know how reliable the GOUT is as a source of regrading, but luke's warm flesh tones don't seem to fit with the extremely cold environment he's in. The whole scene just looks a little too warm and reddish IMO.

That's of course like you say, a taste-thing too. I just wanted to show how photoshop would balance the colors in that shot. If aiming for a neutral look, it can sometimes prove useful to do it that way. I, like you, understand though that they wanted it to look more "cold". Personally I'd prefer the original version, whatever that looks like! haha

OMEN!-_-! said:

The original theatrical fellowship of the ring colour palette comes to mind as an example of this later type of grading, where many locations feel different due to having their own unique colour grading.

Don't get me started on it! :)

I love the grading of all three Lord of the rings movies, but I get totally sick of the thought of how they could mess up Fellowship's extended blu-ray release. It had a green tint over the whole movie, especially provable by taking a color sample of the brightest whites, which had more green in them than red and blue. There were lots of other color errors in it as well.

Otherwise I love the idea of using color grading in new movies to make different scenes feel the way the director wants.