95% of the lost shots are now finished. Most of the problem shots have been sorted and things are almost back on track. So i'm back onto the FX work now and hopefully soon i'll have the last drive which will give me the flexibility in need to finish the edit a lot sooner.
There was something that i was hoping to fix in ANH that has bothered me for a while but after many attempts i just couldn't get it to look right. I'm talking about R2's dome lights. In ANH they are totally different than in the rest of the saga. In ANH the front mostly stays red or half red, half blue, but in the other movies it flashes from red to light blue. Also the rear one changes from yellow to green but again not in ANH. Well i've finally been able to come up with a way to fix this so it looks natural and not painted on. Problem is that there is approximately 130+ shots of R2 that need fixing, including shots that his lights have no colour. So its going to be a lot of sleepless nights to finish his lights without pushing the release date even further back but after seeing the first finished shots its going to be worth it.
And now onto another fix that i need a bit of help with....
In the cantina we see a wide shot of the inside of the cantina but there is something missing from the shot... the band. Where the hell are they? I want to add the band in the background but all shots in ANh are closeup shots. If i remember correctly the Holiday Special has a sequence featuring the cantina band & Bea Arthur. I did have a copy of this but i just can't find it anywhere and it was the version that has the highest quality transfer too. Can anyone who has this please post the complete cantina sequence in its original mpeg2 format please or point me in the right direction where i can obtain a copy as fast as possible. I'm pretty sure it was called the KCCI version and is hell of a lot better quality to work with than all the other versions. Any help would be greatly appreciated for this.
Some more fixes i have finished:
1..The wobbly holo chess table as luke gets up to head for the gunport is now a solid fixed table.
2..Just as the stormtroopers spot Leia aboard the falcon you can see what appears to be a foot or leg appear in the bottom left hand side of the shot. I've removed this.
3.. Just prior to Ben's death when R2 & 3PO head for the falcon there is a support bar in one shot that appears on R2 to stabilize his legs. I've removed the bar.
4.. When 3PO is talking to Luke as they are under fire in the detention cell corridor, in the background there are only 3 guns, but when we next see the control room as the stormtroopers burst in there are 4. There are now 4 in Both shots (even though there should really only be 3 because they take one as they head for the detention block but it was easier to add one than take one away)
5.. (may have mentioned this one already but i haven't got the time to check all the pages to see if i have) There are 2 shots of officers being shot that were censored for the SE releases. These have been added back in. I had to use the GOUt for this but only for the few trimmed frames of the officers. backgrounds and have been matted in from the 2004 DVDs so its almost impossible to see where the GOUT frames & 2004 frames merge and it looks like it was taken from the DVDs instead of the GOUT so no bad quality GOUT footage jumping out at you. lol
6.. Fixed the shots in Vader's TIE cockpit where you can see Dave Prowse's face behind the mask
7.. Fixed the shots where, inside Vader's cockpit, you see a window behind Vader where there shouldn't be. I've blocked out the window.
8.. In the sequence in the Death Star battle when the TIE's first attack, the rebel that gets blown away first has his helmet change from dark red to a flame red between the 2 shots. Fixed this so in both shots he now has a dark red helmet.
there is a few more but i can't think of them at the moment.