Hey Ady! Glad to hear you are on the mend!
Have you ever considered restoring the Han versus the Stormtroopers with the original 1977 version?
Part of the comedic charm of the original version is the Stormtroopers realizing “Hey… we out number him! Why are we running?”
But then in the 1997 and onward edits, they just bait him into running towards a big room filled with more goons. In my opinion, it loses a bit of the humor that the original had.
Just curious!
(The screengrab does use the recomposited shot from SW:R)
Oh this is a shot that i’ve always hated in the SE. Not only are the added stormtroopers wearing ROTJ helmets, but the compositing is horrendous. The original footage just doesn’t blend in at all with the new. No shadows or floor reflections, the new foreground stormtroopers look very soft/ blurry, yet the troops in the background on the gantry are sharper and in focus. The problem was i just couldn’t replace it with a shot from 4k77 because it stands out as being a different source and lower quality, even with grain reduction ( which to eliminate the grain to a point needed for it to match the blu-ray sources would destroy so much detail). But there’s a lot more software that can be used lately that has enabled me to enhance the 4k77 footage to get it to the quality of the blu-rays. I did try using topaz video enhance AI , which is a great starter to use to help with the grain problem, but that just couldn’t handle it without giving it a weird effect. But splitting the scene into an image sequence i was able to run them through Topaz photo AI and this worked so much better. Of course this was only used as a starting point and can’t be solely used because of anomalies these AI software introduce to the image ( you only have to look at the latest so called restorations of James Cameron’s films for the 4K releases to know what i’m talking about). So there was still a lot more work to do , like dust/ scratch repair, but i have now been able to swap out the SE shot for the original.
Imo, Han his panic screaming reaction does seem a bit more justified when walking into a full hangar of troops. Pretty sure he and Chewie never stopped to look back and count how many followed after they bolted it. For me personally, the full hangar is one of the better changes in the SE…
Han’s screaming stopped when he came face to face with the troopers. The screaming was more scare tactics as he was chasing them rather than fear. And Han looks back to shoot at the following troopers as they run away. The origina IMO works so much better.
Some good ideas here-
Star Wars: Inside the Death Star During Its Destruction-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lF5cOg8-ZFQ
It’s scary just how fast this AI Video generation is progressing. While its pretty cool to see , there’s nothing in there that would work in the film. The Death Star needs to explode in an instant. Seeing a progression like this just ruins the tension in the scene.