Info: Star Wars - open matte

https://vimeo.com/196835947

Discuss! 😄

Thanks! If you think I did all during an afternoon, it’s not that bad!
I wonder if someone crazy enough would like to even think about a project like this…

Just so people know, Star Wars was shot on anamorphic so there are no mattes to open. These shots are artificially opened up.

How exactly did you achieve this?

Yep, of course - as it was stated in the video, “open matte creation”; I used avisynth to clone existing parts to fill the blanks, and carefully choose the best part (of all frame) to use as “mask” to add to the black borders; it will work (almost?) perfectly just for few shots perfectly (where there are sky, space, desert, snow, rocks etc.) and somehow good for other static shots, depending one each one.

Don’t know how many footage is possible to use for recreation, but a quick estimation could be around few minutes for each movie; there are of course other possible techniques to use, but let this discussion for another post for the moment… 😉

Very interesting. I created some custom mattes for certain shots in my recreation (some I didn’t even end up using), so they might be useful in a project like this.

Great, thanks! Sadly, this is just a nice idea for the moment, because, even if I could be able to recreate some shots, they will be not enough I think to justify a whole project… unless someone shows interest anyway, or would like to help with other ways to “fill” the missing parts.

Still, some shots could “maybe” used for the extended edition.

MWilson said:
Have you tried seam carving? There are a couple of plugins for avisynth (both by V.C. Mohan).

Thanks for the tip; I tried it and, despite the fact it does a very good job doing liquid resize, it is suitable just for images, because using video, frames are wildly different between one and the next (and previous), making its result unusable.

I wonder if there is a good inpaint filer that uses the texture synthesis. I would add my thought: probably in ten years the neural net and deep learning computing will do this kind of things perfectly, like video upscale, black and white colorize, inpaint, color matching bewteen two clips… we’ll see!

MWilson said:
Fingers crossed! 😄

For upscale and colorize, results are really promising, so I bet it will happen, sooner or later, that a software, or an hardware device like a display, will upscale perfectly a low resolution image (probably it will happen when 8K will be widespread) or colorize a black and white image to look like the real deal!