zombie84 said:
Actually, the issue I have more than anything is the color correction. Well, the image characteristics, anyway. The colors are fantastic. Hoth is white, but I'm glad to see that there is some blue in there, because there should be a tiny bit of blue in some of the shadows in certain scenes as far as I can tell, same with some of the Bespin duel. The issue really is one of contrast. The image is way too punchy. It looks like its the 2004 DI with balanced colors but nothing else. Usually it looks quite nice and makes the image seem sharper, but the black levels gobble up detail, the contrast is about 10-20% higher than it should be, and certain scenes have strange balances, for instance Dagobah seems to be a lot brighter (and blue/green-er, compared with the GOUT, which I still hold as the most reliable color reference; strangely some scenes here looks LESS contrasty than the GOUT). I'm being extremely nitpicky here, of course--this transfer is so good that any complaints have to be! If there ever is a 2.0 version of this done, it would be nice to have the midrange a tad brighter in most scenes to reflect the original photography. ESB was always the most contrasty in its lighting, but it was never quite this extreme.
Yeh, this is a major problem with the 2004 transfer. For some reason they brightened up ESB way too much and in many shots completely destroyed details in the brighter areas. Same problem with the crushed blacks. Unfortunately there really isn't anything that can be done with these transfers to rectify this. trying to bring out detail in the darker areas just brings out more problems with very bad video noise in these areas, which is something that OCP's classic editions suffered with badly. The GOUT also isn't a very good indication of the true colouring, but is a lot closer than the crappy 2004 colours. The GOUT has a red shift, whereas the 2004 has a cyan.
msycamore said:
I'm sure you already know this and you've also said yourself it wasn't a 100% reconstruction but I just wanted to point these small things out if you consider to improve it sometime.
Also...which movie is the old Fox logo taken from? It looks great.
Anyway, thanks for a wonderful reconstruction!
This was always going to be more of a representation more than a restoration. I started this thing around May 5th and has just over 2 weeks to get this all the work done and ready for the 30th anniversary, which really gave me no time at all. So some of the smaller changes and the fonts weren't one of the top priority when doing this. Some of the FX work took a lot longer than i had hoped which meant i had no time to do some of the smaller stuff, but i wasn't really too bothered about that to be honest.
The Fox logo was taken from Movealong's "the story of the Empire Strikes Back" DVD and i think he may have got this from the film Bus Stop, but i'm not 100% on that