Hi all, this is my first post, but I’ve been an admirer of Harmy’s work for some time. I really enjoy Star Wars Despecialized Edition, but I had one problem with it that was really bothering me: I think that for all of the mistakes Lucas made when he was creating the special editions, his decision to include the scene of Luke and Biggs meeting in the hangar was a good one. Up until that point we had only ever heard passing references to Biggs, and other than a brief line later on mentioning “beggar’s canyon back home”, there is really no indication that the Biggs who is flying as Luke’s wingman is the same Biggs he grew up with on Tatooine. The scene in the hanger firmly establishes that this is indeed the same Biggs, and it shows us how close the two of them really are as friends (this is even more important seeing as all of Biggs’ scenes from the beginning of the movie got cut in post-production).
The reason this scene is so vital is because it gives emotional weight to Biggs’ subsequent death during the Battle of Yavin, which otherwise does not have much more of an impact than the deaths of the many others who died during that battle. Remember that Luke grew up as an only child, and Biggs was the closest thing he had to a younger brother; by making us see Biggs as a close friend of Luke’s with whom he looks forward to spending a bright future fighting alongside, it becomes all the more tragic when that life is suddenly cut short so close to the end of the battle. I am firmly of the opinion that not only was it a good idea to add this scene back into the Special Edition, but that the scene should never have been cut in the first place.
I decided I wanted to do something about this, so I ripped the scene from the 2011 Blu-Ray version and went about editing it back into Harmy’s Despecialized Edition. This actually took longer than I expected, as I had to make a lot of adjustments to get the color to match with the rest of the film. In spite of this, and after a few hours of tinkering with the color balance, gamma, contrast, and various filters (and a few more hours of trying to get my cheap editing software to export properly without introducing any glitches or artifacts), I think I got it just right. It isn’t “archival quality”, as due to disk space restraints I was working with a 720p down-scaled version of Harmy’s original (which also helped to speed up the rendering time somewhat). However, it still looks great and is a reasonable enough size for anyone to be able to download. Below I have included a Google Drive link for a before-and-after screenshot, as well as a link for the file itself. Since I imagine that the mods would not be happy with me directly linking to the entire movie, I will instead link to a page on pastebin where the direct link can be found.
Screenshot: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1UarulnvFCf3-esqwC_BSp1h0rQjuDDHM/view?usp=drivesdk
Movie: link deleted by moderator.
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One problem with that scene is if I remember correctly, I believe Lucas had to edit out Biggs talking about Luke’s father or something. And so that scene in the Blu-Ray’s has R2-D2 looks like he jumps up when he is being raised up due to part of it being edited out. I’m sure though that could have probably been fixed by them isolating R2-D2 and his lift and rotoscoping it in so R2-D2 doesn’t have that jump up effect. I’ve not looked at it in a while, so don’t know if they’d have to CGI in some parts of R2-D2 depending on if actors are covering up part of R2-D2 to make that fix not work without CGI fixing it.