I completed a test of overlaying the engine glow. On one hand it worked very well and on another it was iffy. I think I need to tweak it some, but to do that I need to finish the flyover. The good thing about procrastinating is that sometimes you think of a better way. I’m going to be using the 1977 flyover after I make sure all the details match the 81 flyover. I suspect there was some difference in matting some of the effects. As the blockader runner disappears behind the Star Destroyer, the engine glow of the BR shows a matte line in the 77 version and doesn’t in the 81 version. And I thought I saw a laser bolt that was different. So as soon as I correct for everything like that, I’m going to start making my layers. I found a way to cut out the stars, planet, and moons so I can make a matte. It will require some tweaking to remove the lasers, engine glow, and any stray stars along the edge of the ships. But once I have the matte, then it is fairly easy to get the ships isolated. The way I found of making the matte also gives me fairly decent laser and engine glow elements. It is a lot less work than what I first had in mind.

So I am actually getting ready to import the 77 crawl into my Vegas project today and align it to the ships in the 81 crawl from the 35 mm scan and the 85 Widescreen LD (I need a second source because the 35 mm scan has a lot of gateweave issues and a couple of severe jerks. I think I have them accounted for but I like a second source to confirm it). Then I’ll export to png my matte master (that filters out the stars and planet) and a beauty pass of the ships with noise reduction (if I don’t clean it up, when I add the noise and grain later it won’t match the other elements). Then I clean up the matte layer, extracting the frames for the lasers and engine glow before I erase them from the matte. Then I just need to put the layers back together. If my test of adding the engine glow works like I hope, I will use two layers, one for lightness and one for color. The test came out too purple, but I’m not going to try to fix that at this stage.