Had a chance to look at some of the first half, and as requested on the 'noid, wanted to make some observations, PaulisDead2221. First, overall the colour looks MUCH much better than the Official DVD release, it doesn't feel so much like a screwed-up mastering of the film. And thank you so much for keeping this as a DL release! There are a couple of little things though which I noticed while watching on the PC through VLC. First, the title card and opening crawl seems a bit dark and red to me. I guess it's open to interpretation what colour the text actaully is, but it SEEMS to me like it should be more yellow. similarly the establishing shot of the stardestroyer after the pan down seems very dark. Not sure whether this is due to the source or not, as I haven't opened up the LFL release of Empire in a while. I don't think it's a player issue, as the Hoth stuff immediately after looks great - nice, bright and overall white! There's a couple of shots at twilight and evening which I was a little suspicious of being a little "LFL creative-decsision blue", but I guess you can always argue that it's night time. The first shot of the Imperial fleet has some weird black crush issues which renders parts of the BG ships BLACK. Don't know if you guys pushed the contrast on these, or brightened up badly contrasty source material which just revealed the problem, but I don't rememeber it being there before. The shot of the transport and Xwings leaving Hoth looks really desaturated, almost to the point of being grayscale. Again, is that the LFL DVD which has caused the problem, or the histograms - who knows? The other issue which I'm kind of on the fence about is the cut and paste of LD material into the edit to replace altered scenes. I love to see the original stuff back, but the grain suddenly jumps out at you like crazy, since Lowry pretty much destroyed the film grain in the film. It's probably a choice between grain or some combination of blurs and softer, less detailed replacement footage, so I can see the dilema. OCP's approach of creating mattes of just the needed areas of each shot was I think a little better, if not as "authentic" and certainly more time consuming. Lastly, I guess we're just going to have to come to terms with the fact that the lightsabres are more or less totally fucked in the carbon chamber. You guys have fixed the pink, but they remain a little dirty-orange, and witthout creating CC mattes for each blade for each shot, I think they may not be salvageable.
Anyways, after all that niggling and nitpicking, overall a really nice job, the best of the released colour correction projects, and a great addition to the few real restorations which have been done. Thanks for sharing this with the community, and bring on ANH and RotJ!