Well the good news is I’ve finished gathering all my sources and getting them to match. I’m using telecine7s version as a base which is just the 2011 blu ray but with re rotoscoped lasers and sabers, but I’ve applied a very subtle color correction to the whole to make it a little less dull looking. But I also used the hdtv captures from schorman to get rid of the new door to jabbas palace, the cgi dug in jabbas palace and restore the original effect of han thawing out. So those shots had to be matched as well, but that was easy since I could just use the sane setting I used for the blu ray footage. But I also am using harmys version to remove the sarlaac beak, and obviously restore sebastian Shaw (as if I needed to say I’d be doing that) and those took the most work to match up. Since this is an edit I didn’t so much care for matching the look of what it looked like in 1983, so I decided to keep the modern look of the blurays (with some tweaking) and harmys footage had to be processed to match. This mostly included color adjustment (harmys looked great but far, far more yellow than my taste and it didn’t mesh well with the surrounding footage, and in cases where he used 35 mm footage I’ve also used an excellent filter called MSharpen which helped the footage get the same sharpness as the blurays, also upscaled to 1080p)
Screenshots of all this to follow if you guys are interested.
Then I had to sync the film to the 93 sound mix since it still sounds the best to me. The 2011 has slightly clearer dialogue, but the music and sound effects sound much more powerful and impactful on the 93 mix, so I’m using that as a base. Although some scenes that are mostly dialogue and have a lot of editing will revert to the 2011 mix so I can take advantage of the discrete channels to silence the dialogue to create longer and seamless cuts. The final mix will be a 640 kbps 2.0 ac3 file that will largely be sourced from a lossless wav capture of the 93 mix and with a bitrate that high it will mostly be preserved. But it will be 100% dolby surround/pro logic compatible, even the scenes that use the 2011 mix I took special care to downmix properly so they could later be upmixed on a pro logic system. But I will also provide a 5.1 upmix for those without that capability, but the 2.0 track would be my recommended track due to the high bitrate only going across two channels, it will basically sound lossless.
All this took longer than it should have, because honestly it wasn’t very fun so I wasn’t super motivated. Plus after the long hiatus ive only been working on it for a few months, only a couple weeks of which were actually consistently working on it. But it’s all done now and I’ve commenced with the actual editing a few days ago.