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The Empire Strikes Back - The Vintage Edit (Released)

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 (Edited)

A friend of mine is president of the film club at our school, and next Wednesday we’re showing Ocp’s Classic Edition of Star Wars. People are freaking and it’s likely a lot are going to show. Posters are everywhere, a trailer I made was played on the morning announcements. It’s going to rock. Ocp will be given full credit, no worries. Anyway we were going to do the other two original Classic Editions, but by 2.0’s standards they’re a little dated.

Anyway, if Ocp went back and did a 2.0 Classic Edition for Empire I know it would probably blow this out of the water, but he’s not, but Ocp’s method I thought was on the right track for a whole genre of “preservations/fanedits” of Star Wars, but no one followed up on his work, which as good as it was, is succumbing to new sources and techniques.

Using both discs from the 2006 release of The Empire Strikes Back, auto-correction histograms developed in this thread, and a few sharpen filters here and there I have my own De-Se’ing project.

http://i52.photobucket.com/albums/g40/DledRhapsody/logo.jpg

http://i52.photobucket.com/albums/g40/DledRhapsody/luke.jpg

http://i52.photobucket.com/albums/g40/DledRhapsody/han.jpg

http://i52.photobucket.com/albums/g40/DledRhapsody/chewie.jpg

http://i52.photobucket.com/albums/g40/DledRhapsody/speeder.jpg

http://i52.photobucket.com/albums/g40/DledRhapsody/r22.jpg

DVD quality, but R2’s dome is back in black!

http://i52.photobucket.com/albums/g40/DledRhapsody/dagobah.jpg

http://i52.photobucket.com/albums/g40/DledRhapsody/dagobah2.jpg

http://i52.photobucket.com/albums/g40/DledRhapsody/yoda.jpg

Yoda without neon green skin.

http://i52.photobucket.com/albums/g40/DledRhapsody/cloudcity.jpg

Cloud city with a more natural yellow color to it.

http://i52.photobucket.com/albums/g40/DledRhapsody/cloudcity2.jpg

Laserdisc footage just dropped into timeline, sharpened a little and color corrected to match surrounding shots. I did this with most all the changes, it looks fine. Ocp’s fixes have a terrible jerkiness to them, something fixed in his 2.0, and here too.

http://i52.photobucket.com/albums/g40/DledRhapsody/vadersaber.jpg

Vader’s saber more red than pink, I can’t remember if this is a shot I actually corrected, cause some shots were fine and others weren’t, they’re all generally consistent now. I basically color replaced the pink core with white, and also brought up the reds in those particular shots a little.

http://i52.photobucket.com/albums/g40/DledRhapsody/cloudcity3.jpg

The shaft looking gray instead of cartooney blue.

All in all I like the look I get from these histograms. It looks kinda like a crisp and clear print of an 80s movie instead of something trying to look like the prequel trilogy. Also, Ocp’s edits never had a 5.1 mix, so I wanted this one to be a 5.1 mix that pretty accurately reflected the original sound mix, or the one we’re used to anyway. The only changes I think I left alone were the few cockpit shots of the falcon that were zoomed in a little.

This version is to be shown at my school in about a week, so that’s when the DVD should be about done.

Final DVD specs:
-DL Mpeg2 Video avg 7.5 mbps
-5.1 Dolby Surround
-2.0 Dolby Stereo
-Isolated score (I’d like to, but maybe not)
-Animated menus

Spaced Out - A Stoner Odyssey (five minute sneak peek)

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OOhhh white snow, I'm liking that.

“I love Darth Editous and I’m not ashamed to admit it.” ~ADigitalMan

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Wow looks spectacular!

I'm a little confused. Are you showing OCP's CE for your film club or this new one? You mention showing the CE and then you mention showing this new edit. Or is this one based on OCP's?

Any way fantastic work. I look forward to seeing more of this.

"Well here's a big bag of rock salt" - Patton Oswalt

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Originally posted by: see you auntie
Wow looks spectacular!

I'm a little confused. Are you showing OCP's CE for your film club or this new one? You mention showing the CE and then you mention showing this new edit. Or is this one based on OCP's?

Any way fantastic work. I look forward to seeing more of this.


Showing OCP's ANH CE v2
Showing this version of Empire, not OCP's

http://hulk.osd.wednet.edu/~cherrykr/trillstatus/status.php
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Ive been waiting for someone to color correct ESB for a while it looks awesome, great work so far.

Have you considered re painting the lightsabers, I know they look better than before but vaders saber still has a pink look to it

Marv showed me a great program that allows you repaint lightsabers really easily and quickly, let me know if your interested

"The Empire can't stop us now..now its our turn" -Luke-

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Originally posted by: iSamurai

Showing OCP's ANH CE v2
Showing this version of Empire, not OCP's


Duh! stupid me. It's makes complete sense now. Sometimes you just need things spelt out to you.

I read the first post over and over and still didn't get it.

Cool... 4 hours of SW goodness.

"Well here's a big bag of rock salt" - Patton Oswalt

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Wow! This looks to be an utterly superb presentation of The Empire Strikes Back. I can't wait to see it!

Any chance you could release the raw, unaltered DVD version with color correction too? That would be great fodder for fan edits.

Regardless, this looks astounding!

My stance on revising fan edits.

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Looks absolutely incredible. I love the white snow and the red saber

Episode II: Shroud of the Dark Side

Emperor Jar-Jar
“Back when we made Star Wars, we just couldn’t make Palpatine as evil as we intended. Now, thanks to the miracles of technology, it is finally possible. Finally, I’ve created the movies that I originally imagined.” -George Lucas on the 2007 Extra Extra Special HD-DVD Edition

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Does some one Still have the Hostograms, the Downloads in the other Tread are Down...

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Edit: Marv beat me

"The Empire can't stop us now..now its our turn" -Luke-

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PaulisDead2221, I was wondering what sharpen filters you used?


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Noise is pretty minimal at least with these histograms. Essentially what this filter does is take the SE video and combines it with the color from another video source. In this case the Pan and Scan laserdisc of ESB.


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Hal9000: Any chance you could release the raw, unaltered DVD version with color correction too? That would be great fodder for fan edits.

Well somebody beat me to reposting the original histograms for the avisynth colourlike function, but for those who don't use avisynth I guess it wouldn't be hard at all to accommodate. I wouldn't release it (maybe that falls under the category of not being a fan edit, moderators?), but I could supply it to those in need definitely.

Andy_k_250: That shot of the Falcon in Cloud City - when you say it is from laserdisc, do you mean it is from the 2006 OUT, or from actual laserdisc?

Oh yeah, I meant 2006 OUT, but in terms of terminology and in a community where laserdisc transfers are abound and when we know the difference between a real DVD and a shoddy third generation laserdisc transfer, I ended up calling it a laserdisc, lol.

Marvolo: PaulisDead2221, I was wondering what sharpen filters you used?


I used the ones that come with Premiere, I was real careful with them I think, just to help blend the footage with the surrounding shots a little better. Here's a comparison I put together real quick:

Before

http://i52.photobucket.com/albums/g40/DledRhapsody/lando2006.jpg

After.

http://i52.photobucket.com/albums/g40/DledRhapsody/lando2007.jpg

Wow actually I think I'll bring the sharpening down just a little. There aren't too many halos except along to top of the frame, but I can crop off those couple pixels, they're outside the DVDs letterboxing anyway.

Hal9000: Any plans for ROTJ? Or ANH? After all, ocp didn't color correct ANH either.


I had three weeks to work on ESB in time for it's showing next week, but ROTJ I will have one week. I'll need to capture my Special Edition VHS of ROTJ for a good color pallet. Ouch, maybe if I stop sleeping entirely I'll make it in time, I definitely want to release it around the forums for the 5.1 mix.

I'm still not sure about ANH. I'm aware of Ocp's 2.0's flaws, ah hell maybe I'll have my technique down by then. Making proper 5.1 mix for ANH will be a challenge. It's funny when any preservation/de-seing projects start with ANH, it's the hardest one to do! But everybody starts there for chronology's sake! Anyway.

andy_k_250: Are you working on a Mac or PC? Also, does the video in this have the same noise that OCP's videos did?


PC. And Thundercracker's right, the noise isn't bad at all, but every now and then it comes up. The only real problem with these histograms (and I was warned about these before I used them) is that sometimes they diminish explosions a little. The worst shot (and the only bad shot really) right now is the explosion of the shield generator, absolutely white:

http://i52.photobucket.com/albums/g40/DledRhapsody/shieldgenerator.jpg

Once I come up with a half-baked solution for this, and maybe work with Vader's saber a little more, I think it'll be done. Just trying to think over a DVD menu and all that over the next week. Glad for the positive feedback . I feel bad for stepping into the limelight with desree's histogram work, but dammit he disappeared on us.

Deadline: 19 March 2007

Spaced Out - A Stoner Odyssey (five minute sneak peek)

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EDIT: never mind, different frames

A Goon in a Gaggle of 'em

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Quick question. The Emperor scene. Gout or digital broadcast of the '97 SE?

Again I'm really impressed by your work.

The fact that your planning to knock out ROTJ in a week is impressive. Granted it'll be a sleepless week

"Well here's a big bag of rock salt" - Patton Oswalt

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Keep in mind too that although the filter does have some hiccups some of the problems are because of the SE colors. The power generator explosion that you posted is a prime example, it's already lacking color in the SE so unfortunantly anything that's slighty desaturated already in the SE won't be fixed by this filter. Another example is the first shot of Vader standing on the bridge of the Executor, it's almost completly desaturated, the little red lights on the panels, the fleshtones on the officers...gone and the filter will not replace the color.


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This looks awesome! Can't wait to see it! Please keeps us posted on how the screening went.
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Wow, that`s just.....awesome. Simply stunning.
Er, okay, first off i`m sorry for having been gone for so long. I really don`t want to go into too much detail, but unfortunately the real world got in the way and my project had to be shelved for a while, and only over the past week have i managed to start reviewing the work done to see what i can use. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on you point of view...), the nature of my own project has now changed, since in between times i`ve managed to acquire the Derran Super 8mm scope presentation of Star Wars, and Empire should be on it`s way. Of course, not relevant to this discussion, but still.
Anyway, pleased to see that the original intent of the project is still alive. Gotta say that what you`ve put up so far just looks amazing. Anyway, to the point of my post. I thought you might find these useful:

Histograms For Star Wars and Empire

Contained in this zip are all histograms that i generated for Star Wars and Empire. Sorry, nothing for Jedi since i never got that far, but i can generate these over the next week if you wish, since i have now built a secondary computer specifically for capturing video. The histograms are seperated into years- the 1985 directory represents the full screen versions already used (although star wars 1985 is currently restricted to RGB since i`ve lost the yuv versions of this. I`m currently recapturing to regenerate these), all others are taken from widescreen versions from the relevent years. The thinking behind this is that different histograms may be usable for different scenes (such as those containing explosions and sabres). I think that the best way to do this would be to create scripts for the different histograms, trim to the scene you want, then import that script to your core script as an avi (avisource("yourscript.avs")) and use combinations of trim and aligned splice to put it all together. You might also be able to work around the `applyrange` command for this, but i haven`t put much thought into that idea.
Also contained in this zip is Hue.vdf (zipped seperately). This, in conjuction with `applyrange` might provide a better solution, since you`re dealing with desaturated/oversaturated sequences. This filter works by desaturating/oversaturing different colour channels, and can be used on blue/red/green/cyan/magenta/yellow channels. The best thing to do would be to put the filter in your virtualdub plugin directory, and use that to find the optimum settings before setting in avisynth. To import into avisynth, here is the function:

############################################
# Hue/Saturation/Intensity by Donald Graft #
# #
# there is a version of this filter called #
# "Tweak11 by Donald Graft" which can be #
# used in Avisynth (directly in YUV-space) #
############################################

function DG_FloatToInt(f) { return round((default(f,1.0) - 1) * 100) }

function VD_Hue(clip clip, int "hue", bool "preserve_luma", float "sat", float "inten",
\ bool "r", bool "g", bool "b", bool "y", bool "c", bool "m")
{
LoadVirtualdubPlugin("\hue.vdf", "_VD_Hue")
hue = default(hue, 0)
sat = DG_FloatToInt(sat)
inten = DG_FloatToInt(inten)
flags = (default(r,true)?1:0)+(default(g,true)?2:0)+(default(b,true)?4:0)
\ +(default(y,true)?8:0)+(default(c,true)?16:0)+(default(m,true)?32:0)
return clip._VD_Hue(hue, default(preserve_luma,false)?1:0, sat, inten, flags)
}

To use, simply copy and paste into your script editor, put the filters` directory after the line "loadVirtualDubPlugin", and save in your avisynth plugin directory as VD_Hue.avsi (the suffix is important). It can then be called in avisynth with "VD_Hue(Sat=0,Hue=0,preserve_luma=true/false,inten=0,r=true/false,g=true/false,b=true/false,y=true/false,c=true/false,m=true/false"). Use true/false to decide which colour channels are affected, and obviously change the 0 values to the values found within virtualdub. Since different channels will need different values, you will need to call it more than once- you can only use one value for sat/hue/inten for each time you call the filter- hence the need to use the true/false command. Oh, and don`t forget that in order to use this filter in avisynth, you need to be in the RGB32() colour range, but since this conversion is already a by product of the histogram command that you`ve used, you should already be there. This will also require either `apply range` or cutting and joining scenes, since you only want it to apply to specific sequences.
I hope that this has been of some use. If you have any questions, please feel free to ask, as i should be here now permanantly. Oh, and as mentioned i`ll be more than willing to generate Jedi histograms if you like, although i don`t have the 1985 fullscreen laserdisc for this one, so it`ll be limited to the 1990, 1993 and 1997 versions. Oh and before this rather lengthy post finishes, i just want to say one more time: amazing. Simply amazing.

“Ow! It`s hot in here, the butter in my pocket is melting!”