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Harmy's STAR WARS TRILOGY "Partly Despecialized Edition" HD. !!! These version are now obsolete - Look for Despecialized Editions instead!!! — Page 16

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 (Edited)

I believe that V3 will look much better than GOUT currently does and therefore when used for compositing such as in this video posted above, it should be better. Don't worry, I was going to ask permission, but now it is all on a theoretical/experimental stage :-)

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The scene looks really great!

 

I don't have such a big problem with a jump of quality from scene to scene (HD to SD), since it is still way better, than watching the whole GUOT in shoddy SD. But with the new material it's almost seemless.

I think when the official Blu-Ray's come out it will be one of the most important projects, having a "real" as good as possible version of the UT in HD.

Looking foreward to the developments...

Topper

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I'm glad you just said that, cuz here's another taster. Again, it's just an experiment and is far from perfect but there you have it...

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As far as I can see, you integrated some HD-Elements from the SE, like one of the poles in the background, etc.

That's a lot of effort, but I believe it can come off, looking a bit odd... because one sees the picture as a whole, and when certain elements have more definition, it makes the background (like the building) appear even more blurry...

And also the perfect clean up of the old picture is dangerous, since it can take all life out.

For a movie I did, were I had to uprez certain shots I experimented with grain, and it works quite well for the eye.. in this example, if you try to integrate an SD shot into an HD film.. and this shot is very clean, you could put a little bit grain on it, but in HD.. so the grain parts and their movement will be very small and work in 1920x1080 and make the picture appear more detailed than it really is.

But an effect like that will get lost on youtube, since the compression cleans it up again. But for a Blu-Ray file it could work..

So my personal feeling is: rather take the whole shot in SD, and rezise it, maybe with a little bit grain in HD, before putting in single HD elements, that stand out.

But maybe others see it differently?

 

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Topper Harley said:

 

1).. so the grain parts and their movement will be very small and work in 1920x1080 and make the picture appear more detailed than it really is.

2)But an effect like that will get lost on youtube, since the compression cleans it up again. 

I'm glad you said that too, because no.1 is exactly what I did in this clip and no.2 is exactly what happened.

But like I said, it was just a test of concept, which was done really qickly, so the final clip would look better. The problem here is, that there is a lot of ghosting caused by DVNR in GOUT in this shot (the speeder leaves a trail of artefacts behind it) and removing that was my main goal in this clip. And I figured that as I was adding a static background anyway, I'd photoshop some of the HD parts into it and that was done really quickly too, so it should look better.

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Harmy said:


Thanks guys. I can tell you, after the flyby, I thought rotoscoping the ronto (rontoscoping?) out of that last shot would be a piece of cake but it was a bitch... I don't know how Ady did all the rontoscoping in ANH:R, it looks amazing.
Erik actually archived the answer:

http://www.erikstormtrooper.com/adywan-anh/mos_eisley_mixdown_layers.zip

It's a PSD (photoshop) file of all of the layers he had to use in ONE FRAME of "rontoscoping" the butt out.

Star Wars Revisited Wordpress

Star Wars Visual Comparisons WordPress

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doubleofive said:

 

Erik actually archived the answer:

http://www.erikstormtrooper.com/adywan-anh/mos_eisley_mixdown_layers.zip

It's a PSD (photoshop) file of all of the layers he had to use in ONE FRAME of "rontoscoping" the butt out.

 

Wow, did he actually do it like that, frame by frame in photoshop, and not end up in an asylum? That is incredible!!! 

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Harmy said:


Wow, did he actually do it like that, frame by frame in photoshop, and not end up in an asylum? That is incredible!!! 
I think he exported a frame from AfterEffects into Photoshop, but now you can see why ARSE is such a huge deal, because unless the original footage is on the Blu, he'd have to do all of that again.

Star Wars Revisited Wordpress

Star Wars Visual Comparisons WordPress

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doubleofive said:

 

ARSE

 

Still funny :-)

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Harmy said:

I'm glad you said that too, because no.1 is exactly what I did in this clip and no.2 is exactly what happened.

 

I see ;)

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Harmy, these are getting better and better.

You know of the rebellion against the Empire?

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Harmy, could I please get a PM with links for your PDE trilogy? I'm anxious to check them out. Many thanks!

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Harmy, do you do all that work in Power Director?

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No, I just cut video in PD, for the ro(n)toscoping I use After Effects.

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 (Edited)

OK, to give credit, where credit is due, I have to say that some of it is partially Adywan's work. Let's break it down, shall we?

For this shot I had to remake the wipe and in order to make it fit better with the HD footage and get rid of the horrible DVNR ghosting in GOUT, I used photoshop to recreate the original background as a still picture using the GOUT and the parts from the SE that were the same as the original and then rotoscoping in the speeder and it's shadow in from GOUT.

 

This shot is the only one for which I had to use just upscaled GOUT, because it was altered beyond recognition in the SE.

 

This shot was masterfully recreated by Adywan for his ANH: Revisited, but sadly only in SD, so I only used the part where the Ronto walks in front of the camera from Revisited and used this guy in the grey cape as a transition between the SD and HD footage. In this still picture you can see there is a slight difference in the colours but in movement it all happens so quickly that it is pretty seamless.

 

This shot was the toughest one. I originally thought that I would just use Revisited for it but Ady seems to have used the background from GOUT and rotoscope the stormy in from the SE, but the GOUT shot is pretty bad and he probably had to match the grain on the stormtrooper and also, and that I don't understand, it is cropped even more than the GOUT shot is, so it doesn't look so great in ANH:R and especially when put together with HD footage. First I tried rotoscoping the flying droid out using GOUT but the quality difference was just too noticeable, so I ended up using photoshop to recreate an empty HD background plate which goes to the very edge of the camera movement on both sides and then animating its movement in AE to follow the camera movement in the shot and rotoscoping the stormtrooper into it in detail. When this was done, I exported the whole shot as a sequence of BMP pictures and fixed the little details in Photoshop. It's still not perfect but I think it looks pretty good, especially when put back into the film.

 

Once again this shot was already done by Adywan in SD but because it was the same transfer, it was quite easy (as in: it only took about two hours) for me  to rotoscope the ANH:R footage into the HD transfer.

 

This shot was done by rotoscoping the SE HD footage and GOUT together. I used three different masks: one for the Ronto, one for the shadow under the speeder and one for the R2 droid when the speeder passes it. It was really dificult to match the colours of the two different sources and although I used a few different filters on the GOUT, the transition is still quite noticeable. But I think that overall the shot looks better than in the GOUT.

I rotoscoped the Ronto out of this shot using the GOUT. It was quite an undertaking to rotoscope around the foreground characters but as the quality of this shot isn't so bad in the GOUT, the result is IMO quite satisfactory.