I’ve been refining the starfield more. I found that the old pan & scan PAL LD had the intro squished. Althor1138 very graciously gave me a copy. So far, it has the most complete starfield, with the exception of some cut off on the left. I was able to find enough pieces in TESB that I stitched something together to cover that area. The problem is, while these old sources do show the position of the stars, the stars themselves are distorted and unusable. Even the TESB starfields are inconsistent. So, since I was able to pull the brightest stars directly off the SSE bonus 81 crawl, I have gone ahead and recreated the rest of the starfield manually. I could pull most of it from TESB, but the stars really don’t line up (probably a slightly different angle of shooting). Since none of them are usable directly, recreating the starfield seems like the best option.

I also did some preliminary examination of the various flyover sources and while the quality of the SSE 77 flyover and the blu-ray flyover are excellent, there are noticeable differences, especially in the engine flares (and in the case of the blu-ray - the engine cowlings themselves). The blu-ray would also require fixing the laser blasts to match the 77 and 81 versions. So that leaves the SSE bonus 81 sequence as the only one that will work and look right. I still will need to create a steller version of that final frame (in the above video it is adequate). But the rest of the frames are going to require a lot of manual work to get it right. It’s only 410 frames. But if I do it that way, I can use some better tools and I won’t have to rotoscope the elements in Vegas. I also won’t need a separate blue glow layer. The goal will be to get as close to the blu-ray quality as possible. I might even need to use some sections of the blu-ray star destroyer to restore details that are obscured. We’ll see how much effort I want to put into it. But first, stabilizing.