Harmy's THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK Despecialized Edition HD - V2.0 - MKV & AVCHD (Released) — Page 10

Not to be a pest Harmy, but can you update the first page with the details of this release? ;-)

Will this be available as an nzb or something other than dlc? I am having trouble getting JDownloader. I tried the different links on their website to download and seem to only get pop-up advertisements and warnings from McAfee. One of them said the download contained viruses. That makes me nervous about using their software.

I've never heard of anyone having a problem getting jdownloader.

Try using jdownloader to download it. :p

So, unlike the PDE this is not an ISO image, so anyone knows what to do with these on a Mac??

Just checked the first page and this version sounds excellent Harmy - I thought the last version was good but you're always finding things to improve. :-P

Nice experiment, but don't like the out of sync.

Hi Harmy,

I just watched the Despecialized Version, and it was a great great pleasure... It looks beautiful, and most of the times the jumps from version to version are not even recognisable. Also, your work with the mattpaintings shines through and I see the effort in making the transitions as smooth as possible.

Basically, this is The Empire Strikes Back, how it is supposed to be, in a quality that makes the GOUT DVDs something of a bad nightmare...

My beamer only works at 720p, so I can't tell, if there is much loss from the 1080p versions. The picture is sometimes a bit on the soft side (also the special edition material), but overall you're decision to render in 720p seems to be right for the material, since the jumps in quality are not as big.

My only two nitpicks are more about the color correction, which is as far as I know based on Adywans version anyway: 1. Is the always discussed blue Hoth.. the problem with blue taken out of the picture shows in some shots, were the shadows of Tauntaun and Han Solo appear blue, while the background is neutral. So for my taste it's too much corrected into neutral for that kind of material. 2. The lightsabers.. everyone is so concerned about them being bright and white, that those scenes suffer in picture quality, and so the overblown "shine", doesn't look very nice. But I know, it's a compromise between having them wrong or bright..

Anyway, I am very thankful for giving us back the experience of the original Version in HD quality and am very looking foreward to your future projects!

Best,

Topper

Hey Harmy,

Just watched the Despecialized Edition of Empire and I LOVE IT! Watched it on my Plasma and it looked incredible. On first viewing, I only really noticed two things that stood out to me.

The first is when we first see Vader on the close up of the back of his head. I thought there was a bit too much blue here because when we jump back to the far shot, there isn't as much blue spill on him or his surroundings at all. In the close up, his helmet just seems a bit too blue as well as the Star Destroyer to the right.

The other thing that slightly pulled me out of the film was the far shot of Cloud City at approx. 1:24:45. The quality of this shot is unfortunately quite poor in comparison to the shots that precede and follow it, but I'm sure there's not much you can do about given the source is most likely of poor quality as well.

Other than that I was completely into it and had a blast. I didn't noticed any loss in quality by stepping down to 720p and in fact thought several scenes looked better in the 720p DE than in the 1080p PDE. 

Can't wait for ANH and ROTJ as well as when you release your list of all the changes to Empire. There were probably things I didn't even notice because they were done so seamlessly. Fantastic work.

The best method I know of would be to open the HD video through AviSynth using DGAVCIndex and create a simple script to resize to 720 x 480 (using Spline36 resize or one of those) while encoding as a 16:9 m2v with HCEnc, or another encoder of equivalent or better quality that accepts .avs scripts.

If using AviSynth isn't something you want to get involved in, I might actually be able to do this for you; the only difficulty I foresee is that DGAVCIndex requires the raw h264 stream demuxed from everything else, so I'd first have to find something to do the demuxing of AVCHD on a Mac.  There's also FFmpegSource, which is supposed to be able to able to open h264 in container formats, but that hasn't worked for me yet.

Harmy said:

Here's a little experiment of mine :-)

Nice clip, Harmy! Would you be willing to make a 1997 reconstruction after the Despecialized ones? It's nice to see bad CGI in good quality. That would be an awesome project but then again you're doing a bunch of work already. I haven't downloaded the ESB Despecialized yet but will as soon as I can.

Diego said:

So, unlike the PDE this is not an ISO image, so anyone knows what to do with these on a Mac??

I use Windows and did a search for how to burn a AVCHD to a DVD using Nero.  This worked for me just fine.  Maybe you can do a search for how to burn to DL DVD on a Mac. 

Do Mac's even use Nero?

Harmy said:

Here's a little experiment of mine :-)

Nice work! Did you do it in 1080p or just 720p? I would take it anyway, if you'd share it...

Harmy, watching this movie in its original form brings joy to my heart.  I've watched parts of it, and it looks very nice and crisp.  The cloud city parts are probably as good as they will get, unless better materials pop up.  Thanks so much for the hard work.  I hope you get to the other two.

As far as the official SE trilogy goes, I feel that the most ruinous part of the 'improved'  versions of these movies, is the addition of seeing Vader traveling back to his star destroyer in 'Empire'.  The insertion of this unnecessary sequence just crashes the pacing of, what may be, the most perfect part of the entire saga.  I can't understand in any cinematic way, why this change was made.  Was this the first sign of Lucas' space ship landing fetish, that fully manifested its self in the prequels? 

flynn2000 said:

Diego said:

So, unlike the PDE this is not an ISO image, so anyone knows what to do with these on a Mac??

I use Windows and did a search for how to burn a AVCHD to a DVD using Nero.  This worked for me just fine.  Maybe you can do a search for how to burn to DL DVD on a Mac. 

Do Mac's even use Nero?

No, there's no Nero for Mac. I did of course search before asking, but the only thing I found is a program called Toast, but it costs 80 bucks and considering I don't even have a Blu-Ray burner and that I would most likely only use it this time, plus two other times when SW and Jedi come out, it seems like a lot of money for something I wouldn't use.

The problem is not so much the burning, that's easy and I've done it before, the problem is turning the BDMV folder into an ISO image. There's a great program that turns VIDEO_TS folders into ISO and I was hoping there would be something similar, but again, the only option I've found for this is Toast.

The 1997 SE / 2004 SE hybrid with Jabba looks surprisingly good. I thought the quality of Jabba from the 1997 SE inserted into 2004 SE footage would make things look ugly, but it actually looks pretty damn good. I prefer the animations to the 1997 SE version of Jabba - his movements look more natural than the 2004 SE one, where he looks quite stiff in comparison.