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Harmy's THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK Despecialized Edition HD - V2.0 - MKV & AVCHD (Released) — Page 15

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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

 

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PM sent ;-)

PS. GOUT stands for George's Original Unaltered Trilogy and it specifically refers to the 2006 bonus disc DVD, which contained a non-anamorphic transfer sourced from 1993 LD masters. Read more here.

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Harmy:

Thanks for the PM; I appreciate it.

Once I've downloaded and assembled the files is there any reason I wouldn't be able to just play it off my hard drive (instead of burning a DVD)?  I have a Mac Mini hooked up to my entertainment center.  If you don't know, don't worry; I'll figure it out.

I have that 1993 CAV laserdisc Star Wars Trilogy set.  I think it was around $150 back then.  I also have the letterboxed CLV versions released earlier, and those retailed for around $80 each.  Unfortunately, I disconnected my laserdisc player from my entertainment center five years ago.

The sad thing is, I'd pay $80 each for official BluRay versions of GOUT, but Lucas doesn't want my money.  I'm sure he doesn't care.

Keep up the good work.  I'm really looking forward to Star Wars (A New Hope).

Shawn

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You should be able to play it from your computer (although I'm not 100% sure with mac but I don't see any reason why not).

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Harmy said:

PM sent :-)

Many thanks Harmy - much appreciated :)

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Been away from the forum for awhile and just checked back... this looks awesome. Harmy, I'd appreciate a PM with links to the most current HD versions of the despecialized trilogy. Thanks!

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Just watched through. Great work!

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Top work on Empire! Any chance of another PM fix? Need to get my paws on that DVD5!

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looks absolutely amazing... any chance of a link for the standard definition version? would be greatly appreciated. :)

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Can I please get the links to the HD & SD versions?  Thanks!

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Harmy said:

PM sent :-)

Just got around to watching this on my system and it was a thing of beauty. Very well done, and this will be my only playing of ESB from now on for the original theatrical cut. I love it! Thanks again!

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Would love to have this.  Please send PM with the links!

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Any chance of a link to the HD of this? ta

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I just got caught up on all 15 pages of this thread - I had been following Adywan's Epire Revisited thread, and someone pointed me over here.  Looks amazing - any chance I could get a link to the HD download?

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I've yet to check out the HD project, can I get the appropriate link/s please Harmy?

"Well here's a big bag of rock salt" - Patton Oswalt