I really should finish this. I’ve been wondering if there is anything else I can do to it. I should render it out at 1080p at low compression and share it.
Here is the breakdown:
The crawl text is lifted from the BR of ANH.
The Star Wars title is lifted from the BR of TESB
The ships, lasers, and engine glow are taken from a scan of the non-Ep 4 crawl/flyover that Willarob gave me
The moons and planet are also from that scan, but enhanced with a scan of the original matte painting (to reduce the grain noise).
The stars are taken from many many different frames of TESB with a handful drawn in manually to match the LD editons of the crawl. The best was the 1982 pan&scan PAL LD where the titles were squished (more vertical information).
Everything was timed and aligned to the very dark scan of the 1981 crawl that was released with the Silver Screen Edition.
I had to do a lot of frame by frame work to clean up and reposition the Blockade Runner and the Star Destroyer. In each of the three versions of the crawl/flyover, things are aligned slightly different. It took a lot of enhancing of the edge of the star destroyer to make it come out matching the 81 version. The 97 version has the right edge, but not the right engine details and I deemed that to be more work than enhancing the edge. The 77 and 81 seem to be closer connected, except for the stars.
Keep in mind this is a recreation that I hope is close enough that it would be hard to notice. I’m not sure I have the elements properly balanced. The good news is that because I lifted the lasers off as their own element, separate from the ships, I was able to use them in my BR restoration project to restore the look of the lasers to the 1997 crawl/flyover. I might share that as well. I think it came out better than the Disney+ (Which is better than the 2011 Blu-ray).
While working on this I found that the scan of the 1981 crawl has several mistakes (at least one duplicate frame) and it doesn’t match the timing of all the LD versions. It is also very much in need of stabilization. but it does have enough stars to get a good alignment of the crucial pan down. It also let me verify that the title was recycled from TESB (though it fades out earlier) and that the BR crawl is identical.