STAR WARS
STAGE 2
TOOLS: Photoshop and Sony Vegas

This stage is very straightforward. Photoshop was used to recreate the subtitles for alien-speak. In Sony Vegas, all three pieces of video from Stage 1 were edited together (according to Rebellion to preserve the audio).

The Opening Fox logo came from Stage 1-A. The dissolves for the Lucasfilm and "A Long Time Ago" text also came from Stage 1-A. However, still images were spliced in for those two text screens because of the remaining jagged-edges and alias flicker.

The text scroll was Stage 1-B, with a 2 second dissolve into Stage 1-C for the first space battle shot. Then, back to Stage 1-A for the remainder of the film.

The alien subtitles were timed and overlaid in the appropriate areas. A Quickblur: 0.750 filter was also applied to the subtitles.

STAGE 3
TOOLS: AviSynth and VirtualDub

Finally, back to VirtualDub and Avisynth to create the final master AVI file. Here's the script:

fft3dfilter (sigma=2, bt=1, sharpen=0.0, plane=0)
fft3dfilter (sigma=3, bt=1, sharpen=0.0, plane=3)
fft3dfilter (sigma=3, bt=-1, sharpen=0.5, plane=0)

crop (14,88,-8,-88,align=true)
addborders (11,88,11,88)

Once the master AVI was complete, Star Wars was rendered into an H264 file using MeGUI and the AVCHD was created with TSMuxerGUI.

Details on Empire will be posted tomorrow.