Harmy's STAR WARS Despecialized Edition HD - V2.7 - MKV (Released) — Page 58

hey harmy, don't mean to be a nag but do you have any new youtube clips to entice us with? :-)

Hate to ask for an ETA, but there's a fella I'm trying to get into fanedits and theatrical restorations and I said I'd probably just wait until you were done with the version you're working on before I sent anything. I mean, I could send ESB and ROTJ separately, but if you tell me it's not gonna be very long, I'll send him the trilogy all at once. :p Thanks.

Yeah, I'd say it may be up to a month still.

@joshdv: Patience, Luke... I'm working on it...

Both was already done in v1.0.

Leadingman said:

I've downloaded Jedi and Star Wars so far. I'm truly impressed with your work. If you're still tinkering with Star Wars, which I believe I read that you are, then I wanted to give some constructive criticism.

1) The blue saber fix in the training on the falcon scene has some black flicker towards the hilt in several shots.

2) I'm curious why you left Vader's saber as white as he approaches the door after he's "killed" Obi Wan. I know this was an original mistake but in Hi Def, it really sticks out, and you seemed to have no problem fixing the other saber shots. All in the name of original preservation I suppose.

3) During the trench run, several shots of Luke have a blue hue to them from the bluescreen.

That's it. I'm really happy with everything and very much admire your passion and dedication to these restorations. Is there a fund where we can donate charity contributions for all of your hard work?

Ginge said:

I definitely would prefer a version with "fixes" that were obviously errors in the original. Things such as Vader's white saber, R2's blue panels in space, the revised guards at the end ceremony in Star Wars always look "off" to me. However, it's Harmy's project and I respect his decisions. I would also "fix" the imperial badges in Empire, etc.. but I guess we could always insert that stuff ourselves if we really need to see them that badly.

Star Wars was a product of the ingenuity of Lucas and others working under the constraints of limited technology, limited resources, limited money, and limited time.  What was produced under those limitations was nothing short of miraculous. Of course there were glitches as a result - many of them. Harmy's version fills a major gap in that it shows us exactly what was possible at the time, given the technology, funds, resources, and tight schedule.  Earlier SW home releases sorta did, but not so close to the quality seen on the big screen in 1977.  Asking him to "fix" things misses the point.  It's a preservation, not an edit.

If you want an "improved" version, then go for it!  Make one! I'd enjoy watching yours too. If you don't want to make one yourself, you might like Adywan's purist version. Everyone has their own idea of what the "perfect" edit would be.

To Puggo you listen!!!

Also, that is quite funny reading that Ady's ESB Reconstruction thread now, 005, thanks for the link :-)

Ginge, I'm quite sure 005 linked to that to illustrate the "you can do it yourself" point, no to point out Ady's reconstruction. Also I'm pretty sure that you're thinking Revisited, as Ady's reconstruction didn't take any creative  liberties, it was basically the same as Despecialized, only in SD and some of the minor fixes of the kind you ask for left in (like the shadows on Han's shoulders).

Harmy said:

Also, that is quite funny reading that Ady's ESB Reconstruction thread now, 005, thanks for the link :-)

Ginge, I'm quite sure 005 linked to that to illustrate the "you can do it yourself" point, no to point out Ady's reconstruction. Also I'm pretty sure that you're thinking Revisited, as Ady's reconstruction didn't take any creative  liberties, it was basically the same as Despecialized, only in SD and some of the minor fixes of the kind you ask for left in (like the shadows on Han's shoulders).

Check this out, guys :-)

http://www.screened.com/news/behind-the-scenes-of-harmys-star-wars-despecialized-edition/2917/

Very cool! Congratulations.

Cool Harmy.  That article is a very nice overview of the Despecialized editions.  I like that it's informative while still being accessible to non-SW fans.

So

awesome!!!!!

If anyone's interested in the full interview, here it is:

(Sorry about the formatting, I couldn't do anything about it)

Let's start at the beginning. What first gave you the idea to piece together a restoration of the Star Wars trilogy from sources all over the web? Was it a project you had in mind for a long time before actually working on it?

A big part of why I wanted to make an edit like this was being able to introduce new people to SW without having to decide whether to show them a butchered version in high quality or an original version from an mpeg2 encoded 1993 LD master with motion smearing, washed out colours and all the other problems (2006 “GOUT” DVD) - I think I actually first got the idea when I was showing SW to my ex-girlfriend who's never seen it before and had to face that problem. I ended up showing her the 2006 DVD but I wasn't very happy about it. Also, my little brother is 3 now and I want to show him the original versions when the time comes.

Actually, there’s quite a long history to these edits. I already did a version of ESB like 3 years ago but it was just splicing 2006 DVD footage into a 720p HDTV capture in Windows Movie Maker, so it wasn’t very good and I never shared it with anyone and don't even have it any more (though parts of it survive in my old parody edit, as I used it as a basis for the ESB part).

Then Adywan released his DVD Theatrical Reconstruction of ESB in 2010 for its 30^th anniversary, which was basically the same thing I am doing now but in SD. I was pleading with him to make an HD version but he wouldn’t (he had good reasons I’m sure). So I decided to take Ady’s edit and use the footage from it to remove some of the worst additions from it in the 1080p SE, thus creating the Partly Despecialized Edition. I later used the 2006 DVD to make PDEs of the other two films.

The PDEs were really only known to the originaltrilogy.com community and ROTJ was probably the best of them and some people were asking me to make an SD DVD version available, so I decided to follow Ady’s example and despecialize ROTJ completely for the DVD version. In this DVD Theatrical Reconstruction of ROTJ, I first tried to use Photoshop and After Effects to remove a few of these additions and saw that it worked pretty well.

So I decided to go back to the PDEs and remove some of the SE additions that still bothered me in the old version and as I was deciding to remove more and more changes, this project evolved into what is the Despecialized Edition today.

What's your first or most treasured moment of Star Wars--seeing it in a cinema as a kid? Owning the VHS copies? Watching Return of the Jedi over and over again (okay, that one's mine)?

I’m 23, so I never had a chance to see the original SW in cinemas but I used to have a copy of a copy of an old VHS (the original version) which I watched so much as a kid that I totally wore it out. Actually in the case of TESB and ROTJ I saw the Special Editions first and it took a lot of effort to find the original versions on VHS here in the Czech Republic. And it was one of the awesomest STAR WARS moments for me when I finally got to watch the original versions of these films ( though it also made me pretty angry when I realized that some of the Special FX shots I was admiring so much were actually recomposited and thus lost much of their historical value).

How long did it take you to complete the edits of each film? Did the process end up being easier or more difficult than you expected?

I started with ESB and finished with ROTJ and the post about starting work on ESB at the originaltrilogy.com forum is from February 17^th 2011 and the post about ROTJ being finished is from August 15^th, so it took about seven month to finish all 3.

So I guess it did take a bit longer than I expected but not substantially, as I had to fit working on the edits in with my school work.

Explain the overall goals of your Despecialized edits--cutting out the special edition scenes is the obvious element, but you've also restored audio and worked extensively with the color of the film, correct?

Yes, it is my opinion that the original versions are very important historical cultural artefacts people should be able to view them in high quality alongside Mr Lucas’ latest original vision, so the over-all goal was to bring these films as close to their original presentation as possible while maintaining reasonably high quality. This of course included the original audio mixes and colour palette as well.

I never did any audio work on these myself (I’m really bad with audio), I just used some of the awesome restorations done by other originaltrilogy.com members. Just to give some examples:

http://originaltrilogy.com/forum/topic.cfm/Star-Wars-1977-70mm-sound-mix-recreation-stereo-and-51-versions-now-available/topic/11348/

http://originaltrilogy.com/forum/topic.cfm/The-Mono-Mix-Restoration-Project/post/497642/

Another part of this was trying to recreate the theatrical alien subtitles as closely as possible:

https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-mom-dSfyjjE/Th7yuWvvA1I/AAAAAAAAAng/rGaa6c0UbO0/Jabba%252520subs%252520comparison%252520LR.jpg

A lot of your edits look very painstaking and time-consuming. Do you find the editing process fun, or are you just driven to complete a project and make it available to fans?

I’m actually a very lazy person, so if I didn’t find it fun to work on these, I most likely would have never finished them. There were of course some things where the work itself was quite boring and tedious but I was really looking forward to seeing the results. And whenever the work got a bit frustrating, it was the support and enthusiasm of the people over at originaltrilogy.com that kept me going.

What changes are you particularly proud of? What was the most challenging portion of one of the films for you to edit?

If I was to say which change I’m particularly proud of, it would be these shots:

STAR WARS:

https://picasaweb.google.com/109609428403596349302/HarmySStarWarsDespecializedEditionComparisons#5615986508136471970

https://picasaweb.google.com/109609428403596349302/HarmySStarWarsDespecializedEditionComparisons#5615987219375629826

https://picasaweb.google.com/109609428403596349302/HarmySStarWarsDespecializedEditionComparisons#5615987235468163474

https://picasaweb.google.com/109609428403596349302/HarmySStarWarsDespecializedEditionComparisons#5615986854564680930

TESB:

https://picasaweb.google.com/109609428403596349302/HarmySTheEmpireStrikesBackDespecializedEditionComparisons#5608774096413890706

https://picasaweb.google.com/109609428403596349302/HarmySTheEmpireStrikesBackDespecializedEditionComparisons#5608774145119584466

And basically the whole entering the Cloud City sequence.

https://picasaweb.google.com/109609428403596349302/HarmySTheEmpireStrikesBackDespecializedEditionComparisons#5608774286510372258

https://picasaweb.google.com/109609428403596349302/HarmySTheEmpireStrikesBackDespecializedEditionComparisons#5608774304890165970

ROTJ:

https://picasaweb.google.com/109609428403596349302/HarmySRetunOfTheJediDespecializedEditionComparisons#5648925381319959394

https://picasaweb.google.com/109609428403596349302/HarmySRetunOfTheJediDespecializedEditionComparisons#5648925647682744194

https://picasaweb.google.com/109609428403596349302/HarmySRetunOfTheJediDespecializedEditionComparisons#5648926534513802786

and pretty much the whole Sarlacc scene.

https://picasaweb.google.com/109609428403596349302/HarmySRetunOfTheJediDespecializedEditionComparisons#5648927644825121634

These of course were also amongst the most challenging. Maybe I’d also add these:

https://picasaweb.google.com/109609428403596349302/HarmySStarWarsDespecializedEditionComparisons#5616631465565673090

https://picasaweb.google.com/109609428403596349302/HarmySStarWarsDespecializedEditionComparisons#5616630898749295378

https://picasaweb.google.com/109609428403596349302/HarmySStarWarsDespecializedEditionComparisons#5615986670621680338

https://picasaweb.google.com/109609428403596349302/HarmySTheEmpireStrikesBackDespecializedEditionComparisons#5608774038838970898

https://picasaweb.google.com/109609428403596349302/HarmySRetunOfTheJediDespecializedEditionComparisons#5648925492291089490

https://picasaweb.google.com/109609428403596349302/HarmySRetunOfTheJediDespecializedEditionComparisons#5648927113856842514

In terms of colour correction it was particuarly chalenging to recolour all the blaster flash frames in SW, like the one seen here:

https://picasaweb.google.com/109609428403596349302/HarmySStarWarsDespecializedEditionComparisons#5615987098732144946

The over-all colouring was also quite difficult, as it is hard to find accurate reference sources.

Out of the three movies, which proved easiest to edit? The Empire Strikes Back has the least egregious added CG of the special editions, but that might just mean the changes are more subtle and thus harder to erase.

It was definitely ESB, for those exact reasons. The hardest was obviously SW with close to 200 shots to despecialize.

Did you learn tricks and techniques while editing Empire that you applied to Star Wars and Return of the Jedi?

Absolutely, now that I’m working on a new version of SW, I’m able to redo some of the shots better using some of the knowledge I gained working on Jedi.

What kind of equipment (hardware, software) are you using to work on the trilogy? Have you run into limits of what you can do without more powerful tools?

Yeah, my equipment is very limited, which is one of the reasons why my edits are only 720p - my computer couldn't handle video editing in 1080p and it is hellishly slow even with 720p. I use a consumer grade editing software and a very old version of After Effects on an old laptop and it certainly slows the work down quite a bit.

I am also completely self taught, so there are probably easier and perhaps more effective ways of doing some of the things I’m doing.

What do you have planned for future edits to the trilogy? You have new versions in mind for each one, right?

Yeah, as I already mentioned, I’m working on a new version of SW with some glitches fixed, some shots re-despecialized and some additional changes (for example I’m currently working on restoring the original lightsabers in the Ben vs. Vader duel or the original hologram of Leia, both of which were recomposited in the SE and given a very different look in the process).

Then I’m going to do some further tweaks to ESB (some more changes were recently discovered and added to Doubleofive’s comprehensive SE change lists: SW, ESB, ROTJ, Blu-Ray).

I have no plan of re-doing ROTJ though, as it was the last done and I don’t think it needs a redo.

I also decided against using the Blu-Rays as a source for the new versions, as I’d still have to work in 720p and from the comparisons I've seen between the Blu-Rays and the highest quality HDTV captures, the difference is so small (being the same resolution from the same master) that it wouldn't be worth it.

What would you do to get your hands on that very special Technicolor dye-transfer print of the original Star Wars?

Well the problem with that is that 35mm equipment is too expensive for normal mortals to buy and no scanning company will touch a copyrighted 35mm print with a 10ft pole, so I would personally have no use for it. But judging from the beautiful pictures of it, using it for a professional HD preservation/restoration would definitely be possible.

Anyway, I would like to thank everyone who helped me with these projects and say that I am really happy that people are enjoying them :-)

Thanks for the mention!