Throw away your laserdiscs.
Throw away your '04 DVDs.
This is the only version of The Empire Strikes Back you’ll ever need.
THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK
Classic Edition
by ocpmovie
From the creator of Deleted Magic and Star Wars Classic Edition comes the ultimate restoration of what many believe to be the best film in the Star Wars saga.
It looks exactly as good as the real 2004 DVDs.
Because it’s made from the 2004 DVDs.
But this is the original 1980 version of the film. No special edition material to be found here.
The definitive preservation of this classic film.
I finished all my video editing today, and looked at a test burn of the DVD. I was actually blown away. It’s hard to overstate how well this worked out.
95% of it looks exactly as good as the official DVD (because it IS the official DVD), and the other 5% looks basically exactly as good as the official DVD, and it’s very very hard to tell the difference.
I am not posting screen grabs from the normal parts of the film. I’ll just post the parts where I merged bad quality stuff with better quality stuff. 95% of the film looks better than these screen grabs - if you want screen grabs from those, just screen grab your official DVDs. There, you’ve got it.
I learned a lot from doing the Classic Edition edit of the first Star Wars. One thing that people noticed were the DV artifacts - the miniDV format has trouble with highly saturated reds and blues, and they develop jagged edges visible on a computer monitor.
Although that disc looked great, I was convinced that I could do better.
I wanted to try to actually use the real official DVD encode for as much of the film as possible. This time round, I only rendered the portions of the film that needed to be edited. Any stretch of the film that was to stay unchanged, I didn’t touch. I then actually merged my little bite-sized chunks that I’d edited myself along with the actual 2004 Lucasfilm DVD files, making any change from one to the other completely seamless.
This means that for 90% of the film, I haven’t even touched it. In any way. It’s the 2004 DVD that you’re watching. This was a bit tricky to do, but resulted in a DVD of shocking clarity.
As for the scenes which have been reedited, these look equally great. The Cowclops V2 laserdisc transfer came in very handy here, and so did a DVD of the 1997 Special Edition.
It also saved some work in the long run, so I was able to spend more time on just the parts that needed editing, and finish the entire edit in a day or two - about 5 times faster than the first Classic Edition.
You’ll find I’ve learned some new tricks.
You’ll find I’m full of surprises.
I actually created a digital matte painting of the old grey corridor to replace the special edition corridor with its big pink windows. When Leia fires, I painted the gunshots back in frame by frame. The corridor is from the laserdisc, Leia and Lando from the DVD.
The “hatch” shots are my favorite. That is actually Lando and Luke from the DVD, but the white hatch is from the laserdisc. How is that possible unless I painstakingly painted out the CGI hatchway (added in 1997) frame by frame?
There’s a deadly clever trick to this shot. I used the “Lumakey” function in FCP, telling it to blot out everything from the laserdisc except for bright whites. So then I pasted the bright whites from the original shot over the 2004 DVD. Suddenly I’m back to the 1980 version of the shot, but in 2004 clarity. Now that is cool.
Luke hangs upside down. A tiny bit of laserdisc footage of Luke was used to merge two 2004 DVD shots into one 1980 shot. It’s so well hidden that it all looks like a 2004 shot. I defy you to notice it without watching it many times over and over with me there to tell you where the join is.
The middle of this shot is from 2004, the edges around the Falcon from 1980.
A brighter starfield has been added to the 2004 crawl, to make it look like the 1980 original.
Again, a brighter starfield.
The castmembers are from 2004, the background from 1980. This was an interesting shot to restore because in the 1997 version, the animators added a pan-down - the shot moves and you see more of them at the bottom of the screen. So I match-moved the moving version of the shot carefully until it was staying still again.
In truth, a lot of the special edition changes to Empire were very clever, and I hated to remove them, but the film does work better without them. Otherwise this site wouldn’t exist.
The 1997 version of Empire was definitely the best of the Special Editions. Apart from changing the sound mix back to the 70mm version, which resulted in at least one annoying line change, it was a good edit of the film. Particularly compared to the horrors committed on all the other films.
On the other hand, the 2004 DVD is a travesty - thanks to just one thing. Replacing Boba Fett’s voice with a horrible performance by Temuera Morrison? Way to ruin one of the best characters in the film.
The sound mix here is the 35mm one from 1980. The one we love.
Note the window – Some laserdisc footage is carefully pasted in frame by frame over the clearer DVD image. The result is seamless.
More original 1980 architecture at the end of that hallway, pasted in carefully over the 2004 image, frame by frame.
Ditto - check that door at the end of the corridor. That’s not there in 1997/2004.
More fun with 1980 architecture in Cloud City.
Han gets his classic vest look back, restoring a popular continuity error otherwise fixed in '04.
(I liked doing this, but it did force me to actually edit the entire “I love you/I know” scene, rather than just take it straight from the DVD, which is a shame for the very very very slight loss of clarity that entails. For that reason I am still undecided on whether to put the imperial insignia on Piett and the other guy back on the wrong way at the end of the film, when they’re talking to Vader and the scene is flopped. They fixed it for the 2004 DVDs with some clever CGI, and I may or may not unfix it. You may or may not know what I’m talking about.)
The first appearance of the Emperor! Before the wonderful Ian McDiarmid was cast for Jedi. This scene appears here in DVD quality thanks to the 1997 special editions. It’s nice that Lucas filmed McDiarmid for the '04 DVDs, but the new scene is slow-paced and kind of vaguely awful (lots of closeups of Vader looking confused). And the emperor in it looks like the Scarecrow from the Wizard of Oz. It’s nice to bring back the original, just for old time’s sake. Even if he isn’t the “real” Emperor, this is very definitely the “real” scene.
So there you have it. I don’t want to blow my own horn here and say I’ve done it again, but, well, I’ve done it again. I can’t overstate this, this is the only version of The Empire Strikes Back you need.
It also only took me like a day or two to do, which is nice. A definite improvement on Star Wars Classic Edition, which took forever and lots of tries to get the shots right. This one was perfect on the first try. The sound isn’t all in sync yet, I’ll figure that out tomorrow.
To save room on the disc for the improved picture quality of this version, I won’t be really including any extras. Also because I’m really busy and don’t have time to create a great commentary track like for ANH (and I don’t have the interviews to do it with anyway). The isolated score will be included, and a few nice menus.
As always, you can email me at *****.
And before you ask will there be a Classic Edition of Return of the Jedi, the answer is maybe. (I get the feeling I’ll be answering this question ten times a day now too, along with the Deleted Magic sequel question.)
Enjoy this folks. You don’t need to throw your other versions away, but you can let 'em gather dust a little. You won’t be watching them much.
It’s the original version of The Empire Strikes Back, in quality so clear it’s just like George had bothered to restore it and release it himself.
You’ll love it.
I know.