The 81 and 77 engine flares are identical (though in pulling them out I could end up with some artifacts that don’t quite line up, but I’m hoping they won’t be noticeable). And no, it will not look like the DeEd. That is more based on the 97 flyover from the BR. It is dressed up to look like the 77 version with the crawl, starfield, and lasers, but the engines and engine glow are form the 97 SE. The 81 and 77 engines and engine glow are distinctly different. For one thing, the engine glow is more blue and cyan on the engines and the flares are completely different. The surrounding engine glow on the stars, planet, and moon is more cobalt and not such a bright blue. I will be lifting the 77 engine glow and using it as intact as I can. I might have to manually do some editing where the moon is because the moon is in different positions in 77 and 81, but my early tests indicate that I might not need to.

I’m having some computer issues so I haven’t been able to access the software to do some batch image conversions. The flyover is 415 frames and a lot of them are going to require manual editing. I already aligned the flyover to the background (I have aligned everything to the 81 35 mm scan which I aligned to the 1985 and 1993 LD versions) so once I have the 3 elements, it should be quick to put it in the project and render it. I still haven’t decided whether I want to use Vegas to cut the matte out for the beauty pass or if I want to do that manually (where I can then clean up the edges as needed) in my photo editing software. excluding the matte, I’m going to use the lasers/engine glow under the beauty pass setting the layer to lighten and then use that same one again using a color option over the beauty pass. I’m actually getting very close to being finished. Just a lot of image manipulation to get the elements isolated.