Savage said:

Lookin' good, Ady.

Look! C3PO's not green anymore!

This will look fantastic just as ANHR does. The only fault I notice from being used to the '04 DVDs is the sky being less saturated, but the first pass does indeed look more like I think it should. Also, R2's dome loses some of its luster by taking out some of the blue, but not bad at all. At least the Falcon isn't blue and 3PO isn't green!

I'm thinking this whole "No really, I'm taking a break." has been a smokescreen from the beginning! :)

Yeh, the problem with the 2004 DVD's existing is that you start to get use to the over saturated colours. The second pass will bring some of the blue back but only in the shots where it is lacking & some shots where it is missing completely (even in the GOUT some shots are lacking blue colouring for the sky). For R2 i have to create a separate mask for his dome in each shot to retain his blue colouring but thats done later. The problem with the colouring of the DVDs isn't actually a blue tint. whats happened is that the cyans have been oversaturated more than other colours and became overpowering, and i'm pretty sure that the colouring was indeed added to hide some problems with missing colour during the restoration work and it seems mainly reds that are missing here.

Well i did have a short break but after 2 years of working on ANHR i just didn't know what to do with myself once the DVD-9s were finished and i was itching to start on ESB. But all i am doing at the moment is the colour correction and then i'm taking a summer break to plan out what needs to be done for the edit before i start work on the FX shots

Ziz said:

I realize you're not up to this point yet, but the sound pitch felt a bit high. I'm guessing that's because you're working from a PAL source and haven't converted it to NTSC yet, so it's a bit off because of the difference in the frame rate?

Yes it will sound higher pitched because of the PAL speed-up.

Amras Felagund said:

BTW, the Executor is also blue throughout this and ROTJ (I think). I'm assuming that's getting the grey treatment as well?

Also, I have an idea for how to have Emperor Palpatine say 'Luke Skywalker' in the transmission, instead of 'young Skywalker'. However, it's too crazy, in my opinion, to be taken seriously. Some would call it 'thinking outside the box'. If said box is the Box of Sanity, I'd agree with them.

(...Man, I'm seriously gonna make or break my credibility on this site with this suggestion. All these people reading how crazy I am...)

My idea involves getting someone to imitate Ian McDiarmid's evil Emperor voice for the phrase "Luke Skywalker", and blending the word "Luke" into the dialogue we already have of Palpatine's. If the joint between Ian McDiarmid's dialogue and the newly recorded "Luke" is too obvious, perhaps a burst of static on the hologram could mask it. Who would do the extra Emperor dialogue, I don't know. Who would take this idea seriously... well, I guess I'll find out soon, won't I?

The Executor has always been a grey-blue colour but it looks horrible on the DVDs so i will be correcting the colour to be closer to its original colouring. Also the TIES are blue in this movie but were grey in ANH. Well that's not strictly true. In ANH the models were a grey-blue colour but due to '70's blue screen techniques they had to be changed to light grey during processing (if you look at some behind the scenes footage you will see that they were a grey-blue colour originally). Now i have received a couple of emails about me changing the colouring of the TIES to grey. One mentioned that the reason they were grey in ANH was because it was to signify the Death Star squadron. well i'm afraid this is another thing that has been made up to cover up the differences in colours. And here's my proof: If this was the case how come that all the Special edition CG TIES have a blue colouring? Surely if the whole Death Star Squadron colouring was true then they would have been grey wouldn't they? Also in Empire the blue colouring has been boosted during composition to bring out the blue but not all shots of the TIES have them as blue but grey. Also in Jedi the TIEs are a light grey with a slight hint of blue & again some shots they are blue, but more grey shots exist. The logical step is to make all the TIEs Grey for continuity.

As for the idea of recording a voice over for the Emperor to say Luke then i'm pretty sure it has been mentioned before somewhere and it is a good idea if it can be pulled off convincingly. The audio is going to be one of the last things i do all apart from this scene where i need to have the dialogue complete for editing purposes. so when i get round to this scene i'll see what i can do with it. Having the original dialogue, or as much as possible, has always been something i wanted to do from the start. The new dialogue is horrible and has to go. If this idea doesn't work then it will stay as "Young Skywalker" because that line still works miles better than how its been changed for the 2004 DVDs