The Phantom Menace upscaled deleted scenes

I’ve upscaled the deleted scenes from TPM, all sourced from the original NTSC DVD. Each video is a H.264 MKV with captions, and AAC 5.1 audio.

Important notes:
No colour correction has been done; I’ll leave that for each individual editor to decide upon how they wish the video to look.
The videos on the DVD only have reasonably good quality; these upscales have improved the picture quality, however don’t expect brilliant, crystal-clear, hyper-detailed images here.

Screen-shots:
Original video:

Upscaled:

Original video:

Upscaled:

Original video:

Upscaled:

Original video:

Upscaled:

Original video:

Upscaled:

Original video:

Upscaled:

If you’re interested in these upscales, send me a PM and I’ll send you a link!

Extra videos:
These videos contain the unique shots found in two of the short documentaries on the DVD. These aren’t the entire videos – I’ve only saved a majority of the unique, useable footage.

Compared to the deleted scenes, these videos are very heavily interlaced, plus have “ghost frames”, and require much more processing to get them to look good. These issues are present on the original DVD unfortunately. Therefore, these two videos aren’t quite ready yet to share, but will be finalised soon.

When I do upload them, please note that there will be no captions or audio available for these two videos.

Original video:

Upscaled:

Original video:

Upscaled:

I have also done colour-corrected versions for my own edit of TPM; some of these are finished, however these videos haven’t been uploaded as yet.

Fantastic work as always, boss! Given the original picture quality, I think this pass is about as much quality as you can possibly squeeze out of those frames. That must have been a ton of work to get the settings right!

I’m not familiar with the extra laser sword footage. How many extra shots of Duel of the Fates are there? And do you reckon any of them in particular are worth re-inserting?

JoyOfEditing said:

Fantastic work as always, boss! Given the original picture quality, I think this pass is about as much quality as you can possibly squeeze out of those frames. That must have been a ton of work to get the settings right!

I’m not familiar with the extra laser sword footage. How many extra shots of Duel of the Fates are there? And do you reckon any of them in particular are worth re-inserting?

Thanks for the kind words!
There are several extra shots of the duel, a lot of which are definitely worth re-inserting into the film.

I’ll PM you with some more details!

Phase3 said:

JoyOfEditing said:

Fantastic work as always, boss! Given the original picture quality, I think this pass is about as much quality as you can possibly squeeze out of those frames. That must have been a ton of work to get the settings right!

I’m not familiar with the extra laser sword footage. How many extra shots of Duel of the Fates are there? And do you reckon any of them in particular are worth re-inserting?

Thanks for the kind words!
There are several extra shots of the duel, a lot of which are definitely worth re-inserting into the film.

I’ll PM you with some more details!

Include me as well please!

tjdavis1138 said:
Include me as well please!

I’ll send you a PM. 👍🏽

For anyone interested in the extra footage of the Jedi & Sith duel, I’ve had some success in removing the “ghost frames” and heavy interlacing:

Before:

After:

Once the upscaling process has finished, I’ll upload them and share them.

I’ll send you a PM. 👍🏽

DarthTzetzo said:

I remember that Dazman in his edit of PTM had restored some unused footage of the Duel of Fates from behind the scenes videos.

Yes that’s right! He’s asked me about those clips; as I’m typing this the upscaled video is being exported, so all going well I should be able to upload it soon. 😃

Phase3 said:

For anyone interested in the extra footage of the Jedi & Sith duel, I’ve had some success in removing the “ghost frames” and heavy interlacing:

Before:

After:

Once the upscaling process has finished, I’ll upload them and share them.

Bro, you just gave me flashbacks to my early days as a producer, when basically all I did was de-interlace BETACAM footage. . .

JoyOfEditing said:

Bro, you just gave me flashbacks to my early days as a producer, when basically all I did was de-interlace BETACAM footage. . .

Sorry for the flashbacks! 😅
Deinterlacing can be a real pain though haha!

An update:
JoyOfEditing sent me a message, in which he reminded me of the footage in one of the early TPM trailers, which shows the Naboo starfighter spinning out of control. I had forgotten about the trailers!

For the shot of the starfighter, I will extract the footage from the trailer and upscale it. I’m also looking through ILM VFX reels uploaded by ILM staff; hopefully I’ll find some more starfighter footage.

Here is a comparison between the DVD footage, and the 35mm trailer:
DVD:

35mm trailer:

Phase3 said:

An update:
JoyOfEditing sent me a message, in which he reminded me of the footage in one of the early TPM trailers, which shows the Naboo starfighter spinning out of control. I had forgotten about the trailers!

For the shot of the starfighter, I will extract the footage from the trailer and upscale it. I’m also looking through ILM VFX reels uploaded by ILM staff; hopefully I’ll find some more starfighter footage.

Here is a comparison between the DVD footage, and the 35mm trailer:
DVD:

35mm trailer:

I’m looking for those reels as well. . . Here’s a good list of names from the “Rebel Mac Unit” at ILM that worked on most of the fighter shots. You might have more luck searching than I currently am.

https://www.lucasfilm.com/news/digital-road-rebel-mac/

JoyOfEditing said:

I’m looking for those reels as well. . . Here’s a good list of names from the “Rebel Mac Unit” at ILM that worked on most of the fighter shots. You might have more luck searching than I currently am.

https://www.lucasfilm.com/news/digital-road-rebel-mac/

Thanks so much for the link - that helps a lot! Yesterday I found a very large amount of VFX reels online, however without the names of the staff who worked on the scene, I’d be endlessly searching through each video. Now I can narrow down my search!

Phase3 said:

JoyOfEditing said:

I’m looking for those reels as well. . . Here’s a good list of names from the “Rebel Mac Unit” at ILM that worked on most of the fighter shots. You might have more luck searching than I currently am.

https://www.lucasfilm.com/news/digital-road-rebel-mac/

Thanks so much for the link - that helps a lot! Yesterday I found a very large amount of VFX reels online, however without the names of the staff who worked on the scene, I’d be endlessly searching through each video. Now I can narrow down my search!

If you PM me some of the reel links, I’d be happy to help scan through them. Mindless work like that is great when I get stuck on an edit, lol!

JoyOfEditing said:

Phase3 said:

JoyOfEditing said:

I’m looking for those reels as well. . . Here’s a good list of names from the “Rebel Mac Unit” at ILM that worked on most of the fighter shots. You might have more luck searching than I currently am.

https://www.lucasfilm.com/news/digital-road-rebel-mac/

Thanks so much for the link - that helps a lot! Yesterday I found a very large amount of VFX reels online, however without the names of the staff who worked on the scene, I’d be endlessly searching through each video. Now I can narrow down my search!

If you PM me some of the reel links, I’d be happy to help scan through them. Mindless work like that is great when I get stuck on an edit, lol!

Okay! I’ll send you some links. 😃

Update:
The main footage of the Jedi and Sith duel from one of the DVD documentaries is ready to go, however the second documentary video, which has deleted footage of the Naboo starfighters and some more of the duel (with Maul, Obi-Wan and Qui-Gon leaping to the upper walkway), is of significantly lower quality.

I’m seeing if other upscaling settings will get the image to look good, but for now this video isn’t worth sharing as it simply doesn’t look good.

DarthTzetzo said:

Bobson Dugnutt in his expanded edition of TPM used these shots and I think they were of relatively good quality.

I’ve sent him a private message at the SW Trilogy forums. Hopefully I’ll hear back from him soon!

Amazing work as always ! Bravo 😃

Thanks for your kind words! 😃