Wow. Just wow.
Well, not just wow, I guess. Please bear with me for this long-winded post.
Kudos, Harmy, for all your work on these restorations. It's sad that it takes fans on underpowered hardware and off-the-shelf software to deliver something that Lucas and his billions refuses to.
When you get a chance could you PM me with a link to you Despecialized TESB? I'm really looking forward to seeing this.
So it's 2am last night, and I'm surfing the web on my new iPad in bed in the dark, my wife sleeping next to me. I scan through all my old Safari bookmarks and see one for originaltrilogy.com, something I bookmarked six or seven years ago. I go to the home page. The latest news is over a year old, so nothing to see here, moving on. But before I go, let's see whether the forums are as barren as the home page. Hmm, there's a lot of recent activity; I wonder what's going on.
Are you kidding me? People are creating HD versions of the original trilogy (or GOUT or whatever they're called now)? How are they doing that? These look great!
For years I'd harbored a desire to assemble an up-rezed version of GOUT, ripping the SE DVDs to get anamorphic WS and upscaling and inserting sections from my OOT CAV laserdiscs to create a complete movie. It wouldn't have looked that great, but it would be better than the abominations that are the SEs (none of which I've ever purchased, and I won't be buying the BluRays either). I use After Effects and Final Cut Pro professionally, so this wouldn't have been impossible, but I just never found time to do it. As such, I haven't watched any of the original films in over a decade, which is kind of sad. I was 16 when Star Wars came out. I saw it in Dayton, Ohio on summer vacation, and needless to say, I was blown away. I still can remember the excitement of the summer of 1977. I soaked up everything I could find about Star Wars. The Dayton paper serialized the novel and ran it on the FRONT PAGE with pictures. I still have the Time magazine from that summer with a Star Wars spread.
And yet, Lucas refuses to acknowledge those teenage memories, the memories of millions of people who fell in love with those movies in the 70s and 80s. The people who made him a billionaire. In fact, he's going out of his way to wipe out those memories. I've read The Making of Star Wars and am reading The Making of TESB, and the George Lucas of 1975 wouldn't recognize the Lucas of 2011. It's too bad he and Marcia split up; I think she kept him grounded.
Keep up the great work.
Shawn Marshall
Portland, OR