Darth Editous

You’re right, the X-wing should be darker than I’ve made it. The trouble is that that would mean keying around more of the stuff on the underside, which is fiddly.

The trouble with compositing anything in from the GOUT is that the composited elements are in completely different positions. Also what little additional detail may be there is low resolution and quite smeared by compression.

The change in the last video is Yoda.

With one more little change:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uVkZoUQfXlo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-7Yi0TbnYQQ

This is the shot of Luke’s X-wing floating over the swamp, which they really messed up for the Special Edition. The original shows light filtering through the trees on Dagobah; for the Special Edition, they darkened that light almost to nothing, which not only means you can’t see most of the matte painting, but also makes it look like night above and daytime below (so unless Yoda has a floodlight system installed in the trees, it makes no sense).

Luckily the matte painting is still there, it’s just very dark. I brought the levels back up, but then the X-wing was a bit blown out and needed rotoscoping so it could be brought back down. I ended up writing my own rotoscoping software, because the outline of the X-wing isn’t clear enough for any of the normal solutions to work.

As the work-in-progress had some interesting looking graphics, I thought I’d try and make a little breakdown of it, which is linked at the top.

n/m

I wrote a filter for Avisynth for distorting videos. It’s useful for aligning Bluray footage with DVD footage, or Bluray footage with Negative One’s release, etc.

https://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=176031

Demo/tutorial (using DVD and Bluray footage): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SG1eex7HmLM

Thanks! 4k would be awesome. I might just replace the whole shot instead of trying to de-Special it (the explosion doesn’t even line up with the Death Star’s on-screen position in the SE).

Hi all,

I hope this is the right place to ask - I’ve been gone a long time…

I’m recreating my favourite Star Wars trailer in HD using the Blu-rays, but two shots have been too Special Editioned, and I’m hoping someone could help me get hold of the original versions of these shots in as high a quality as possible.

They are:

1. The wide shot of Luke’s X-Wing floating towards him after Yoda lifts it out of the swamp (https://www.scifibloggers.com/wp-content/uploads/empire-Xwing_l-300x225.jpg)

2. The final explosion of the ROTJ Death Star (with the Falcon flying towards the camera in front of it)

Can anyone help me with either where to look, or with actual files of the shots in question?

Thanks,

DE

It’s only just occurred to me that there are more than a few Doctor Who fans on here who might be interested to see a montage I made last year from the first six seasons of “New Who.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZfU9olGiiE

(why I can’t linkify it, I don’t know)

It was edited entirely with Avisynth with perhaps just a couple of bits of Photoshop to alter one or two things (points to anyone who spots those).

DE

DavidMerrick said:

I remember years ago, shortly after the release of the GOUT DVDs, a member of some other forum saying that one day a really dedicated Star Wars fan would get his hands on a 35mm print or two and go about making his own restoration. I never thought I would actually see that but, shit, here we are.

For what it's worth I've taped together more than a few VHS tapes in my time, and never had a problem. Obviously you'll lose whatever you've lost, and tracking will probably go awry for a second or too, but as long as you've been neat there shouldn't be a problem when it goes past the head.

CatBus said:

red5-626 said:
...is there a chance of getting
Lapti Nek and Yub Nub cleaned up
 early so Harmy can use them?

And Vader's eyebrows.

Well it also depends which matrix (if they went through a conversion to RGB at all) the frames were initially decoded with, of course. What you tell the encoder doesn't make any difference to the encoded video data if it's being fed YUV (as most are); it's just a hint stored in the container which will hopefully be taken by any eventual decoder. I've always got expected results out of YouTube if the video encoded was matrixed from RGB with rec.709, incorrect results with rec.601, and no knowledge of any other way to confuse colours.

Out of curiousity, are any of the wrongly-coloured ones (with a corresponding correct version on Vimeo/Facebook) still up on YouTube?

That image still looks nice though. I like how sharper it is comparing to original.

Okay this is with the proper color space and just the detail enhancement. No grain or sharpening.

emanswfan said:

Well, I usually edit from lagarith avi converted directly from the raw m2ts file, but here I just used VLC to take snapshots, as this isn't a project I'm directly working on right now.  That might be the issue, if it's not how do I make sure it's rec.709?

And yes, there is actually more detail there...
...the edges are crisp because of added detail...

It looks to me, based on the unaltered screenshots, like you've started off with video decoded using the wrong colour matrix. See this:

http://screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/40082

The "over" image is the raw BD correctly decoded with the rec.709 matrix.

Possibly not a massive deal if you're colour correcting everything anyway, but HD material should always be decoded to RGB with rec.709, not rec.601.

I sometimes wonder if a small part of the complaints about the colour of the blu-rays is down to this.

It's also why Ady's videos were the wrong colour on YouTube. YouTube always uses rec709, both for SD and HD (it should only really be used for HD). My guess is his videos were (incorrectly) encoded with rec601, which would then look fine on his player (some, again, incorrectly use rec601) but would be wrong on YouTube.

DE

Fang Zei said:

How appropriate that the youtube commenter put DVD in all caps.

Davnes007 said:

It's over 20,000!

DuracellEnergizer said:

I've waited since 2000 to see them finally change the name to 21st Century Fox, and they do so, but in the worst way possible.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/21st_Century_Fox_%28company%29

21st Century Fox will be the legal successor to the current News Corporation, from which a new News Corporation will be spun off.

The 21st Century Fox brand will not extend to the existing 20th Century Fox division, which will remain under its current name.

Ronster said:

I want to see your Wampa don't get me wrong...

SilverWook said:

So they're cutting up a perfectly good 35mm print for this?

go-motion before which is the new techniques of adding motion blur to improve the quality of the stop motion either by flicking the model or creating vibration on the surface it was being shot on or the computer controlled rod puppet

If there was to be a v4 it would now be sourced from the blu-rays, so everything would need to be redone. Therefore it should not be inferred from my non-possession of previous versions that there would not be a future project of a similar nature.

DE

To reply to a few PMs which, despite my general lazy failure to reply to, I am heartened to receive, I don't have a copy either.

DE

When 98 years old you reach, have been as awesome, you will not.