These screen grabs are heavily JPEG-compressed, hence the mediocre quality (but nice file size for the web!) and taken from FCP rather than the actual DVD (FCP's screen capturing is not the best). They are intended to show some of the restoration work I did on the film, NOT to show the quality of 90% of the film. As I said, 90% of the film here is taken directly from the actual DVD in great quality, and is not worth screen grabbing.
(Anyone who's seen my other work knows I don't lie about quality.)
I could go to the actual DVD and make some screen grabs if you're gonna be pedantic.
I used Final Cut Pro for editing, and DVD Studio Pro to put it all together. Yes, as I said, most of the film is taken directly from the M2V files of the official 2004 DVD, and has not been reencoded in any way. So the quality of the 2004 DVD is kept exactly.
Basically, I ripped and demuxed the entire 2004 DVD on a scene by scene basis, resulting in about 50 bite sized chunks of the film in M2V format. I only reencoded those sections which needed to be reedited, and made sure that my reedited versions matched up with the 2004 versions. I put them all together in DVD Studio Pro 3.
The sound mix is from the Definitive Collection, this is the Cowclops v2 mix. So this is the 1980 35mm sound mix, where Artoo doesn't taste so good. However, I am having to make small edits to it all over the place to sync it to this new version. The 2004 DVDs cut out a lot of random frames to remove splice marks, so you always have to reedit the sound to keep it in sync.
The disc is 16x9 of course.
I am editing it in dual layer format (about 6 gigs large), but I will release it as a shrunk single layer disc. There is honestly no real difference between the dual and single layer versions. (Even the official DVD's encode could fit comfortably on a single layer very easily actually, I think the video was 3.5 gigs ish.) I can't afford to buy dual layer discs. I'll probably save the dual layer version on two discs just to have it.
Vader's lightsaber will be the version from the 2004 DVD. The low-contrast pinkness only shows up in the second part of the duel. Oh well.
I will not be redoing this when the XO project comes out, there's no reason to. This project doesn't rely much on laserdisc footage, but when it does, the excellent Cowclops version 2 transfer was definitely good enough.
I had wanted to use dark_jedi's fullscreen versions of the trilogy to improve the picture quality of the laserdisc bits, but they're 60i rather than 24p and I still haven't learned how to do an inverse telecine. And his ANH and ESB aren't the best quality - his ROTJ is excellent though and I'd like to learn how to do an inverse telecine on it if I'm gonna go ahead and do ROTJ. Anyone know how to do an inverse telecine well in Final Cut Pro?
I won't be redoing ANH - ANH I did exactly how I wanted/needed to do it for that particular film. Doing ESB this way really relied on the fact that ESB had the least changes made to it of any of the films, so I could use the original encode for most of it. Different strokes for different films.
Early on it felt like a shame in some ways to use the 2004 transfer, because they've heavily tinted the first part of the movie blue, and tinted other parts red, losing some of the quality of the original film, they really went overboard .... but upon seeing how it worked out to use the 2004 transfer with all the clarity that entails, all my misgivings went out the window. Party on, Wayne.