Ok, it's finally time for an update! I know some people have really waited for it.
Like we said earlier, we took a break for some weeks after the not so successful last renders with the color bleeding, flickering etc. After that, I changed our script a lot and also found what caused the bleeding and managed to find a safe method for us to do this with the result coming out perfect.
The script is now using a motion-compensated antialiasing which also reduces the flicker a lot. It digs up even more detail from within the grain than the old script so what comes out is about as good as the GOUT can possibly look.
There's some other stuff included too like stabilization of the gate weave and some slight automatic dirt removal. Before the older script I spent weeks on finding the best setting for the dirt removal, since not only did it's default settings remove stars in space-scenes, it also caused even more smearing. Now it's set to only remove dark dirt, which means it leaves the stars and other bright stuff intact. It's also very careful with what dirt it removes so it's not all removed, only some of the worst. This especially works great in scenes where most of the picture isn't moving. And yes, it is carefully tested in all kinds of scenes so no worries!
What we're currently working on is what we called cleanup of bad frames. We've been going through the films frame by frame, writing down every point where there's something very distracting like glue marks, burn marks, big dirt spots, dirt in people's faces or other points of focus, sudden scene-shift flashes etc. DJ then extracts these parts as image files and I clean them up in photoshop.
Naturally, this means a lot of work for both DJ and me since there's hundreds of these frames in each film, but we both agreed that it will be worth it in the end. (I even tried making a script that did this automatically but it looked horrible compared to doing it manually.)
Note that we won't clean up color errors, (such as Vader's green lights being red) DVNR errors, (like blaster bolts being completely removed from some frames) or stuff like the 4-eyed trooper. All those things would take an eternity to fix and require even more frame by frame analyzing work.
Anyway, here are some samples for you of before and after cleanup. (Click the pics for full size)
Glue marks in the bottom of the frame:
Dirt and smearing after a scene-shift:
Dirt and colored flash before an angle-shift: (This one was extremely tough to clean up properly)
As you probably understand, this process will take months to complete and we can't possibly tell when it will be finished. Once the cleanup is done, DJ has some huge script work to do to reinsert all the extracted parts.
We hope that all who are interested in this project will wait, no matter how long it takes, because we believe it will be worth it.