Nobody is more sick of looking at shots on the Tantive than me (except possibly Dre!), believe me. Unfortunately, the process I have in place requires a lot of setup: First I copy all of the frames from each source onto a drive (and given the size I can barely manage half a reel at a time). Then I have to write an AVISynth script to sync every source to the GOUT and make a note of all the missing frame numbers in each source. Next I have another script that sorts all the frames from each source into folders based on the shot number and source. This is so that the next script, this time in Photoshop can go through and register the images, and generate the dirtmaps. Another script run in After Effects brings all of these new files into a new Composition where I can make sure they line up, color match the sources after using Dre’s tools to generate the LUTs, let the dirt map do it’s thing and output those files to yet another folder where they are picked up in PFClean and manually cleaned some more, before being rendered again. Finally, I open the cleaned shots in After Effects, apply Dre’s LUT, do some cropping and render that out again as a completed shot. Every render has to be lossless so it all takes up GB and GB of space.

Unfortunately, this means that I have to process all the shots in order. I don’t have the luxury of being able to bounce around, reel to reel, willy nilly. I just don’t have the disk space to process the whole film this way. This is also why I can’t just work on the SE shots first and get Harmy started on his project sooner.

However, I do have the next 10 shots ready for you, so you’ll get your first look at Darth Vader and Princess Leia. I’ll upload them ASAP.