analog

Williarob said:

Not to belabor the point further, but if I may…

This site is called “Original Trilogy” and while as a community we disagree on many minor points about a lot of things, I thought the one thing we did all agree on, at least in this section of the site, was that we were all striving to obtain the Original versions of these three films. Well, the original theatrical version of Return of the Jedi has these two “extra” frames in it. Therefore, in my opinion, since we now have every single frame from Return of the Jedi in 4K, from this point on if you are deliberately cutting frames out of the middle of the film for any reason, then you are clearly creating a fan edit, and not a preservation of the original theatrical film.

That said, I have huge respect for CatBus and all he does for this community, project Threepio is fantastic, and I really hope I haven’t pushed this lively discussion too far.

I’m happy to agree to disagree on the audio syncing front, as he noted above it is something we can revisit in the future. And more to the point, I’m happy CatBus (and many others) are content with Despecialized. Harmy did an amazing job on all three films, and I think they’re awesome. In fact I’m actually more excited to see what Harmy can do with 4K77 than I was with the original project.

And ultimately, that’s the best thing about this community. With every official version of a Star Wars film, the fans are split a little further apart. Some loved the prequels, some hated them, some love the sequels, some hate them, some people love film grain, others hate it… There are just so many versions of each OT film now, and members of this site are responsible for a great many of them - maybe even more than Lucas! But unlike Lucas, we shouldn’t try to force everyone to watch just one particular version.

We can all watch whichever version of the films we enjoy the most.

This is cool.

My goodness. Totally floored by these latest color corrections. Life’s been busy. Really looking forward to sitting down with these! Such cool work to see collaboration on this with the color correction and having it be based on the actual source vs. re-encoded.

On the topic of audio, I think this is a good point.
“Many of the Despecialized tracks have already been conformed for 4K83”

I think that makes the most sense for the future but also get why the other version exists now.

Just incredible to see this finally realized in such great form.

Williarob said:

I already rendered out the project in 4K and 1080p from the original source. I don’t think it’s made it out into the wild yet but you can find it on the forums at thestarwarstrilogy.com

That’s great news! Very much look forward to getting a chance to see it!

Thought the originals were pretty darn good, but could see a few places that might’ve had room for some different choices.

Thanks for the reply and all the hard work on all of this. Still need to donate a bit more to the '83 when I get a good opportunity to do so.

Agreed.

Any chance this correction will be done on the original source? I’m sure the 1080 looks great, but I’d be interested in seeing it applied to the source material and rendered out from that. I guess for the sake of it being more direct than re rendered from the “lossy” format.

Either way, will have to track this down. Haven’t seen it hit spleen or newsgroups yet.

There we have it. 21TB. That’s awesome.

I think it’s more than just color space. Most video algorithms are using a huge amount of tricks to get file sizes down. Hence why we have hardware acceleration to decode in many cases. It’s fairly complicated to do, and still has to send a massive amount of data on actual output to appear to be of good quality.

(In basic terms) video encoding is using differences between frames, not only reusing color bit info, but everything else. Distances between pixels between frames, and so forth. The very early mpeg4 stuff was really interesting and they’ve improved a lot over the years. Even mpeg2 is doing more than most people realize. Neither is lossless. It always surprises me that people don’t grasp this. That OTA TV, for example, isn’t lossless. It’s just that it hasn’t been re-encoded by your provider. Same with Blu Ray, even at 4k. It’s still lossy, it’s just at the highest they can get for the length of content. Similar to a 320kbps mp3. They do, however, have room for awesome lossless audio on Blu Ray these days, which is very nice.

Thank you for pointing out what true lossless compression is about. I’ve dealt with it in the audio world more over the years but also understand video decently. As with rar, zip, flac audio is another easily understood example.

H.264 is lossy. True lossless video is crazy huge. If we had true lossless video it would take many orders of magnitude more storage.

Williarob has the real files. They are too large to share anywhere unless you want stacks of hard drives. Literally. Big ones. We’re talking about loading this kind of stuff into decently large SANs.

Each frame has been said to be about 100MB. I don’t know the frame count, but let’s say 150,000. That’s 15TB. That’s not going to fit on a Blu Ray.

H.264 is to video what mp3 is to audio. Or jpeg vs raw. They use many tricks to compress the original source.

Point is, he’s got the lossless scan of film frames. It’s a totally different ballgame to work with that stuff. Not something most people work with outside of serious pro video and movie setups. This stuff is seriously pro level.

So is just the 1080 going up?

Wouldn’t waiting for the “original” files being regraded first be a better way? That way it’s not just based on the 1080 mkv? Either way, great that this is happening and thank you all for the work on all this!

Neat!

Really excited to see another take on colorizing this.

Dang. I guess that’s how things go. No surprise it’s time to get some bucks together for this.

I think enough folks could and would donate to keep a year or two in action. Maybe that would work for a few year.

Maybe longer term, someone with the good will, hardware, the means, and the longevity needs to host this from their own place. Someone with an established place that could let it exist.
Someone out there with a little good will who would be a good host. Surely someone out there could do this without much trouble.

Personally, I don’t visit super often, but have been coming here for many years.
Certainly others who have invested a LOT more into the work that’s gone into the many, many, many great projects would also be a little more sad to see it all go.

At this point, I’d say throw a donate button up in the place. Just put a PayPal button wherever it can go. No need for annoying pop ups, just a donate button some places that are obvious. Worst case, you get some bucks. Better case, enough bucks to cover at least a year up front.

Wow! Haven’t visited in some time.
Get nostalgic around this time of year.

Should’ve visited somewhere besides spleen, but can’t wait to fully check these out on a recently acquired plasma. One of the last best ones.
On that note, thanks very much for the quality 1080 downscales for us who haven’t jumped on the 4k bandwagon yet.

The older version of this looked good (sse), but this is another level. Really great work. Floored. Floored that this exists. Can’t imagine the time and work involved. DNR looks great so far. It translates well on plasma, which I think has a totally different “life” to it than most any other kind of flat panel.

Excited to watch this, and the 83 one! Will donate a little when I can for all the work. Thank you. Seriously. Means a lot to have this for future generations. I hope my kid will know and appreciate the differences.

Still reading through this thread over the next …while. Right now, I don’t know if I’ll find a better quote than this

“It wasn’t so long ago that the best version we had was the GOUT.”

How very true. That’s where I started here. Wondering if anyone else already made a proper anamorphic version when I finally had a high definition TV. Then team blue. Then Harmy’s adventures from 1.0 on. Now this project. All of it great. I still dig some of the colors Harmy’s has. Still dig all the work on those over the years, and like many, greatly appreciate the efforts.

While I’m sitting here trying the DNR version on a big plasma, I am impressed. Yeah, I could nitpick a few spots or wonder about some color choices here and there that I’m sure others already have. Overall, it’s just beautiful that this is “done.” To see a quality scan like this, even with some bits added to imitate grain, it’s just unreal to see the level of quality here. Restoration from real film. A few bits cut in from disc, but who cares. It’s so nice to see such a glorious transfer like this.

Again, will donate a little when I can, soon.

Sorry for the rambling post. Lots to catch up on here, and just wanted to write a little thank you here, as it’s the least I can do at the moment. Can’t wait to also enjoy the non DNR version. May the force be with you all.

Harmy said:

For Star Wars, yes. I will make some adjustments to it (I think he left some scenes a tad too dark) but mostly it will stay as is in Neverar’s version.
For ESB and Jedi, I will be starting from scratch but I will probably be sticking to similar CC as the previous versions.

This is really cool to hear 😃

Quite an interesting workflow. Reminds me of some other software out there for completely unrelated tasks (process automation). Makes sense to see such concepts applied in this realm of working with video. Kind of wild to see it in action. Looks like it will take a lot of time to work through each scene, and then work on rendering so many pieces.

That’s great news 😃

Harmy said:

Please, I don’t want anyone to feel the slightest bit guilty for not donating for any reason!!!
And anyway, I posted the request to FB and we’re already half-way there! 😃

Waiting on an eBay sale to clear, and will be glad to donate!

Bummer to hear about Adobe, but understand the struggle.

Wish I could help with the sheet, but way too much going on right now. Kudos to those chipping in with the help there.

Wow. Didn’t know it’d been taken off. Kind of a bummer but I understand.
This is a reason that it took so long to happen. Nobody wanted it out there like this. It has always been one of those things everyone knew would happen (some idiot selling copies).

yoda-sama said:

Harmy said:

I’m sorry to say I’ve been so busy with work that I had no time or energy to do any work on Star Wars.
We have some big projects ending in September, so I’m hoping that then I could start doing some work on Despecialized.

We’re probably mostly all just glad that you’re well and still keeping the project in mind. We’d all be thrilled to see this quickly come to fruition, but obviously you need to get the important stuff in your life done first. Still, come the end of some work projects in September, perhaps it is a good time to take a little vacation time to focus on …other… activities. 😉

Haven’t stopped in for ages it seems like. Life gets busy for all of us! Also glad it’s still “in mind.” Been very happy with the last rounds of these editions. Even if a new ESB version doesn’t come along soon, pretty content with the version we do have.

Harmy said:

Handman said:

Harmy, your “Introducing the Despecialized Editions and its Sources” video has been taken down by Fox recently. It must have been recently, because I’ve seen it in my recommended videos until just about a week or so ago.

Well, that sucks.
Not sure if I should file a dispute, because while I do believe that the use of the footage in the video is fair use, I don’t wanna drag too much legal attention to the project itself 😕

Yeah, probably not worth poking.
Interesting that another upload is still out there 😕

solkap said:

saleri6251 said:

.

Whenever I see a " " or “.” only message, I imagine it sounds like a frustrated R2D2 beep-boop.

Then I imagine C3PO piping up and saying “Well, really R2, if you weren’t always in such a hurry, you wouldn’t have to edit so many embarrassing markdown syntax posts!”

😄

'3PO would say that it might be an Imperial code.

Been looking back and forth a little between some of the changes.
Couple thoughts.

First, WOW, poita. Thanks for all the efforts on your front! Will have to head to your thread at some point! Looks really, really good here in Harmy’s work!

Second, on the sky in the comparisons.
Blue sky on film has always done weird things, IMO. Not quite Kodachrome level weird here, but sometimes it just seems a little strange when aged, then scanned into the modern realm, and now trying to view it at home. On a not-perfect-monitor.

7th down from top screenshot comparison, for example. 2.5 sky has elements of that elusive deep, and very difficult to capture “blue” tone.
Being “direct” from the prints, it also looks quite a bit sharper, deeper, and so much better all around that it’s just not even funny. While I might prefer it “matched up” a little closer to the 2.0 blues, it’d almost be a shame to lose that specific little tone of blue here and there. I would guess that some of that tone is also a result of the film actually having had light pass through it, and giving it that “life.”

While it works well in some places, it’s just different enough from the other sources in places to throw me off just a little. I imagine getting some of these types of things just the way you want will be quite a challenge, but I know you’ll settle on something awesome and make it consistent, and cool 😃

Finally, at about 4:52 on the clip, that foot just looks badass on the “grindhouse” version. The contrast and detail seem much better than the BD.

I have doubts that a “4k version” is anything more than a 2k upscale.
Wasn’t it “2k” that the “special” editions were scanned at? …hint: yes.
http://arstechnica.com/business/2010/05/star-wars/

If “2k” was the best they had at the time, we’re looking at either an upscaled version of whatever “2k” meant back then, or a full re-scan. Probably of the “special” edition.
I don’t have high hopes for a full re-scan of the actual original. It’s far more likely that they took whatever “2k” meant back then, which could be somewhere a little past that, and simply upscaled it using whatever means to make it look nice in that format.

Harmy said:

And they should look even better when I replace them with Poita’s scans 😃

Yes!

Excited to see what comes of all this!!!

edit: nm. Got in via https (doh)
Looking forward to this!!!

WOW. I haven’t had time to read all the things posted here, but wanted to say THANKS!

I haven’t had time to come back and visit here much in the past months.

Some months ago, I’d discussed getting some of these types of things compiled, worked with another member (who subsequently seemed to vanish), had a “beta” drafted of the first disc. Anyway, that all fizzled. Other life things happened.

Really can’t wait to get a little time to check out all this great looking work. Thank you for making it all available 😃

Thanks, Harmy!
Haven’t had much time to lurk in here lately, but wanted to drop in and say thanks for letting us know about this release! Very exciting to see some more 35mm sources used, the comparisons look really nice.

Video will be slightly higher (slightly higher bitrate), but the biggest difference is audio - the MKV includes higher quality main soundtrack (lossless, I believe - at least in the cases of SW and ESB) and several more tracks for different languages.

Thanks, Harmy! Can’t wait to check this out. Probably be the weekend before I get time.
Life here has been one non-stop batch of things after another. Looking forward to taking a little time to enjoy this from start to finish.

Never did check the workprint, so it’ll be a little more “fresh” than for some folks. No matter what, I’m sure it’ll be fantastic and very enjoyable.

The splean (mis-spelling intentional) seemed all good for me. I hope others can figure it all out for themselves and enjoy as well.

Thanks for sharing the video / update on ROTJ, Harmy!

Totally understand waiting. Personally, I’m not at all sad that a 2.x won’t be ready by next month. I am very, very happy to have the versions that we do, thanks to all the hard work you’ve already done.

It will already be a far more pleasant viewing experience than my 2006 DVDs. The DarkJedi DVDs were good for their time, but it’s SO much nicer to have these versions you’ve done, for even better viewing on an HDTV set.
Random note, it was thinking to myself about making my own non-anamorphic DVDs that set me on the path of being here. I thought “surely, somebody else has fixed these DVDs up to better standards.” Sure enough, many were already very far ahead of me, haha.

It’s great news to hear that you’ll have some great scans to work from. Can totally wait for this 😄

Well poo.