Wow, I've got to say, it is really great to be back here, I literally haven't logged on in months, but I *have* been busy
(although probably not as busy as the rest of the guys on the team!)As you old timers know, I left here mainly because it had ceased to be a fun place to be, but after spending the last few hours reading all the threads, that is obviously no longer the case. The support, and spirit here is fantastic again. It has the village feel that I truly love.
I definately wouldn't have made it back here, and the project would have been lost if not for all the hard work that the members of the X0 team have put in! (My wife is happy that the other guys are sharing the expenditure as well!)
Aaaanyway, I'll try and answer some of your questions about the X0 project, a lot of it is probably answered on the www.x0project.com site, so have a read there first.
Hoichi, no we are not there yet with the 'clean' master. You will see our progress on the site.
At the moment, we have an almost complete, much cleaner master than has existed outside of Lucasfilm, and it is in lossless compression, all 80GB of it!
There is still a heap of work to do, stabilising, analysing the colour, looking frame by frame for dropouts/glitches and so on. We have been in a massive research phase for the last few months, (especially after deciding HD was a must back in February), gathering sources, experimenting with the latest advances in upsampling/resizing, doing colour analysis, noise tests, timecoding all footage to a common base and more.
As I've said before, my personal aim is to get a 'better than original laserdisc' master together for projects to be based on. It takes a lot of time (because I'm anal), but now that we have a real team together, you will see progress.
Davidian, 235,235,235 is pure white as far as NTSC video legal colours go. You are right that 8bit RGB can represent 0 - 255, but many colour combinations fall outside the SMPTE C colour field and are considered illegal (and are clipped when broadcast).
To answer a whole bunch of other questions in a single waffle, personally I see the clean master as purely a first step: total restoration is my ultimate goal.
With access to a real print to compare against, I'd like to see a slew of versions - a purely archival 'purist' one that gets as close to the original as possible, (which means it must be in hidef) and keeps all of the flaws of the originals, if for nothing other than historical reasons - i.e. this is what a cutting edge film looked like in 1976.
I'd then like to have a de-gltiched version, with fixed sabres, fixed colours and fixed glitches (like the 'jump' where the whole frame moves when a lightsabre turns on). No new effects or anything, just the errors removed so I can watch it and get lost in it like I did when I was a kid. (as I said, just a personal thing)
As for the project itself, the clean master is a necessary first step before we can move on, and we are going to take you on the journey with us!
I've read that some people are abandoning their own projects... Don't!!
Making it is half the fun, and stuff you discover and share with others is really valuable, I've had more than a decade in the film industry, and I still discover stuff here that is simply amazing, and I've been blown away by what people have managed to do.
Also, we will as much as possible, be showing you step by step *in detail* one way of making your own version of the OT. You can follow along and try it yourself whether you are coming from Laserdisc, VHS, super8, so keep those versions coming, and thanks so much for all the feedback!