Harmy's STAR WARS Despecialized Edition HD - V2.7 - MKV (Released) — Page 97

Harmy said:

@Slynger: Yes, there is a v2.0 planned for ESB and Jedi as well. There's a lot to do on ESB, I think it will actually be a larger project than SW v2.0; eg. many more of those zoomed in cockpit shots were recently discovered. Also, while I'll probably be keeping the recomposited shots for Falcon's cloud city approach, I'd like to recolour the ship to look more like in the original.

And while there's almost nothing I want to change on Jedi, I am now using better software, which will enable me to render it in better quality with less compression, so that alone makes it worth redoing.

Great to hear that you are planning on improving all these, but I just wanted to caution you to pace yourself doing all this work.  As much as I love what you are doing for us, I'd hate for you to burn yourself out on Star Wars in the process.

Still, it's amazing what you are doing here.  If LucasFilm didn't have their heads up their collective arses, they'd hire you as soon as you graduate.  In fact, if you are interested in doing that kind of work, you should definitely consider applying to SFX shops based on the strength of your fan projects.

In my opinion it looks great. As usual! :)

My initial feeling was that I prefered the first version you posted as it has more of that cinematic effect that You_Too described which makes it initially immersive

After a couple viewings though the new version is more subtle and natural looking

Backgrounds and sabers do appear more consistent throughout the new clip and Ben looks slightly healthier too, very nicely adjusted Harmy.

The latest preview link appears to be broken, Harmy. MU says the file is temporarily unavailable.

The others look very good, though! Nice work!

-Darth T.

Harmy,

In the latest duel clip, there is a brief section at 1m09s where Vader's lights are still blue (Vader says "You should not have come back."). I know you've gone to some trouble over this, so I thought you might want to know before going final.

Both new clips look spectacular otherwise. Great work as usual.

-DT

Oh, you fixed the button too. :)

I noticed the first shot there is mirrored. They did that for many shots in the movie I think?

Finally, the link works! I've tried all day to download the new preview clip but it has been unavailable. Megaupload is weird sometimes.

Anyway, it looks fantastic. You used my render for that part?

By the way, I found a couple other spots where Vader's button and lights are not green. In this scene it's a bit cyan-ish at some parts:

And here it's blue just like in the duel scene:

Harmy said:

Here's the latest rendition of Greedo's subs:

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=ES0LNQNV

Hi Harmy and everybody at originaltrilogy.com, this is my first post here on this forum. I've been lurking here for a while now (mostly looking for information about changes made to the star wars special editions/blu-ray) but only just got round to registering. Harmy, I'd just like to say that I and i'm sure everybody here really appreciate all the time and effort you've put into making these despecialised releases. I have been doing a similar project to yours on and off with the star wars original trilogy films myself (regrading and editting them) for the last fews months so I can really appreciate how much time and effort you've put into these!

I just watched the clip you put up of Greedo with the subtitles and a few things struck me as strange. First was the height of the subtitles relative to the bottom bar. The subtitles seem really high up in the image to me, intruding too much into the scene IMO. I'm sure that subtitles are usually a fair bit lower than that. Another thing I thought was strange was the way the subtitles fade for a frame when they appear and disappear, I found it a little distracting. Did you make them do that on purpose or is that just what the program you use does as default? As for hard-encoding the subtitles into the image, wouldn't it be better to have them as an optional subtitle track on an AVCHD so non-english speakers can have their own alien subtitles without the english subtitles being there? The scene also seems a little too yellow to me. This scene from my project is also a little yellow due to the removel of the blue tint running throughout the film but this clip seems too yellow to me IMHO.

Apologies if I come off as very presumptuous for nitpicking from my very first post. If I see something that seems strange I can't help but point it out. I liked what you did with your initial releases and I'm really looking forward to checking out the latest versions of your despecialised editions and want them to be as good as they can possibly be. If I can help in that, all the better.

He's replicated the way the subs looked, moved and where they were placed in the original theatrical print.

You_Too said:

He's replicated the way the subs looked, moved and where they were placed in the original theatrical print.

Ah, I see. Thanks for explaining that You_Too! It would make sense then seeing as he's trying to recreate the original theatrical print as closely as he can with his despecialised editions. I still think the subtitles would be better off being optional though for all non-english speakers watching his releases.

Harmy said:

Oh and the colours aren't final there but quite close, but you're probably right about it being a bit too yellow, it's a side effect of trying to make Greedo more green.

Hi Harmy, thanks for the warm welcome. :)

How do you know that Greedo is supposed to be more green though? If trying to make Greedo more green makes the flesh tones of everyone else too yellow and out of whack, surely that's counterproductive?

This is how Greedo looks in the same scene taken from my own little project:

http://img842.imageshack.us/img842/966/greedo.jpg

And this is how Han looks:

http://img52.imageshack.us/img52/2300/hanf.jpg

And this is how Han looks in your clip, with his flesh tone a little too yellow IMHO:

http://img259.imageshack.us/img259/778/handespecialised.jpg

Sorry about the size of the images, I find it easier to print screencaps in fullscreen mode on mpc with the PrtSc button and my monitor's resolution is quite large...

How does this green light/blue light thing happen in the first place? I mean, in the last pic You_Too posted, the colors look spot on (to me) and very realistic, and the lights are very obviously blue. If the lights were green IRL, then how do they come out blue when all other colors are right? Is it because the film had a natural tint to it or something along those lines? Seems like an interesting phenomenon to me, and I'd like to know more about it. Sorry if this was covered earlier.

-DT

Harmy said:

Sure, like I said, the colour are not final.

In MPC, just press ALT+i to get a screencap at the actual resolution of the video. You can save it as either JPG, BMP or PNG and choose the folder :-)

I know but in the past I've had issues with the colours changing slightly and even the ratio changing when I use the save image function in mpc, so now I always use the PrtSc button now to get exactly what I see when playing the video.

As for the colour grading, from my personal experience with these three films, i've found that its very easy to get carried away and take away too much blue (I hate the blue tint introduced in the 2004 lowry masters as well). This tends to lead to yellow overwhelming the other colours if you're not careful. Having pretty much finished regrading all six films to my satisfaction now, my experience has been that Star Wars is by far the most difficult to regrade because the 2004 dvd/hdtv/blu-ray colour grading is very erratic. I was not able to use a single regrading filter for the whole film, many scenes, especially the blockade scene at the beginning, required different grading on a shot by shot basis to make it consistent colourwise.