=)
Let me get technical a moment.
I've said plainly that I'm not planning to do Empire or Jedi, but that I'd love it if someone else was inspired by this project and restored them in a similar way. Restoring the complete O-OT with no Special Edition material, and the original laserdisc soundtrack, from the 2004 DVD and the laserdiscs.
I was talking to Gene Ragan today, who works for Macintosh. He was working on his own version of ANH, and stopped when he saw that I'd already done it! But I gave him a little bit of advice on things I'd learned doing my own version of ANH, that he might want to use in Empire.
So, here you are:
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You work for Apple, eh? Points. I'm a Mac man myself. I did Classic Edition in FCP and DVDSP3.
When you edit together the laserdisc and DVD footage, you'll find that sharpening the laserdisc shots at about a level of 23, and color correcting them a bit, does wonders in making them register to the eye the same as the DVD shots.
Normally you wouldn't do this of course, but since the laserdisc shots go by so quickly, and need to look, in passing, the same as the DVD shots, it's definitely necessary to sharpen them, and that makes the whole trick work.
It is also sometimes necessary to try and use both LD footage and DVD footage in the same shot. If you color correct and sharpen the LD shot to match, put the feather up to a nice degree on the LD or DVD stuff and crop it carefully, the effect can be astonishingly good.
Add black bars separately over these combined images as a new layer.
You'll often need to apply a slight fisheye effect (.5) to the DVD, or sometimes the laserdisc, to make the new transfer look like the old one. You might also need to do distortion and change the aspect ratio slightly to make the DVD and laserdisc match up as exactly as you can. This takes practice. Place the images over one another with the top image at 50% opacity, and then futz with it until the part of the image you need to match matches.
If the DVD or laserdisc section you're adding moves, you move your crop points using keyframing to match it - you may also have to alter your color correcting with keyframing to make this less obvious. Watch the shot a few times and make alterations or add layers until the difference is no longer obvious.
You will want to go back to the Special Editions for certain shots. In Empire, a lot of the film has been overly blue tinted in the DVD version. Luke in the bacta tank and the surrounding scenes come to mind (visible on Wookiee Groomer's cuts). And you need the original SE anyway to restore the original Emperor and Sebastian Shaw. Sven Brooke collects the Special Editions in DVD quality from satellite TV airings - slbrooke at tiscali.co.uk - and so does my good friend Russ Dawson - Russs15 at originaltrilogy.com.
Hope that helps! Cheers ...