Wow, I guess I've been out of it for a while... been too busy building my own R2-D2 to have paid enough attention to the state of the OT preservation art. But I got what I assume was 1.0 of the Harmy's DE and watched it last night.

I watched Star Wars last night! Not A New Hope: Special Edition, not even A New Hope... I saw Star Wars. And it was amazing! I was BLOWN away by this despecialized edition Harmy!! This was as close to Star Wars on a high def screen I've ever seen! I can't WAIT to watch ESB tonight and then JEDI!

Knowing nothing about the project before watching it, I came in skeptical... expecting to see HD video with SD band-aids and BOY was I wrong.

At each moment where every fan tenses... that moment before a jarring SE change... nothing. Things just continued along exactly as the inner five year old expected them to.

I can't imagine the work that had to go into it. But Bravo!!

I watched with a critical eye too and really only saw a couple of things (other than the occasional encoding artifacting) that bothered me at all... but ONLY because I was looking for them.

The shot with Luke and 3PO looking for R2 where you restored the darker horizon looked a little muddy. Other than that there seems to be an odd stutter in the scene with at the stormtrooper roadblock where there was an image jitter or dropped frame or doubled up frame... something was a little jarring in the scene where the droid flew behind the trooper's helmet... I can't put my finger on it exactly.

But the amazing part is that's the extent of things I really noticed and that in and of itself is high praise because I usually can tell the flaws in something from 50 paces.

Anyway, bravo... look forward to seeing 2.0. Not sure I'm on-board with things like scratches and garbage mattes being added back in per-se, but we'll see. I'm blown away with what's been done so far and can't wait to see more.

Ben

Grand Rapids, MI