Star Wars OT & 1997 Special Edition - Various Projects Info (Released) — Page 139

Gomu69 said:

Is there any chance of passing on this project to anyone equally capable in precision and passion or does the future of it rest on the shoulders of you and DJ?

AntcuFaalb actually came up with the idea of revisiting this project later using an alternative method to clean things up. We'll see what happens but at this time it strongly points at just cleaning up color errors and then release it. I'm currently discussing it with DJ.

djchaseb said:

Personally the glue marks and imperfections never bothered me much, whatever you guys decide to do it's going to look world's better than what we have now! All the hard work is very much appreciated.

Actually it's never bothered me either. But when I joined DJ when he was about to start this project, he told me about some glue marks and stuff which adywan had helped him clean up, and that he had a list of such frames for ESB. That made me interested in doing such a full-scale cleanup project and it ended up with me analyzing the films completely for such things. And working extremely hard in photoshop to clean them up.

While we might take a step back in that sense, we have still taken many steps ahead on the way. For example, if we had just released our raw renders back then, we hadn't found out about the chroma shift in ESB that msycamore pointed out. We hadn't known about some of the color errors and other things that really needed to be fixed. And I've developed our scripts further along the way, to make the colors look even better and balanced.

Ok, looks like a double post but I just wanted to tell you that DJ has put up a sample of the 97 SE on myspleen.

The look of the sample is most likely final, and the audio used is the cinema DTS. DJ is working hard to synch it, and he said if anybody has trouble with the audio or has some valuable feedback, please post it.

Oh, and once again the sample is compressed so it might not look as clean as the full bitrate render will.

Have the 97 sample downloaded, just haven't had time to watch yet. My expectations aren't high, but it will be nice to have these versions alongside the originals as it's hard to watch my VHS versions on an HDTV lol

SS4DarthPayne said:

Well no one else has posted, so here goes. I just grabbed the 97 sample and watched it. I think it's pretty much what you'd expect it to look like, an upscaled version of one of the broadcasts (that's the TB, right..?) Visuals-wise, that's exactly what it looks like. Let's be honest here, it isn't miracle-level like what you guys have done with the GOUT, but from what I can understand you've put in 5% (10%? Less?) of the effort in on it as you have put in on cleaning up the GOUT. 

Yeah, it's the TB since that was the cleanest version. Flunk was oversharpened and had crushed shadow detail, Gkar had edge enhancement and hardcoded german subs, Reivax had the frames blended into each other.

And yeah, it's a pretty simple upscale but with the same upscale-treatment as the GOUT, making sure all detail is preserved. And no miracle-level on the color correction either (actually that wasn't possible because the colors were pretty screwed up) but seeing the raw TB together with ours, it does look a bit better. Especially the Mos Eisley part since I did some additional correction there. Here are some comparison samples:

EDIT: Sorry for the pixellated reds, that's media player classic's fault.

Very noticeable improvements!!

A small update: Since the 97 SE cinema DTS was in 44100hz and synched to its original 24fps source, we had to convert it to 23,976fps and 48000hz. This was done by using the command line tool eac3to, which did it very nicely and it still sounds great.

After that, DJ has already synched both ANH and ESB. He synched the audio to the 2004 SE versions, since we use those as our reference to synch both video and audio.

Since all conversions and synching alters the audio in some way, we decided to go with encoding it to DTS-HD MA 5.1 for the blu-rays, to keep any loss in quality as minimal as possible.

Very nice! What software is used to encode the audio if I may ask?

I'll ask DJ what software he used.

SS4DarthPayne said:

How is the sorting out missing frames process coming along?

I've made a script where I have the 2004 SE image on top and the 97 SE on bottom. (Only for ANH so far) I'm going to try and see exactly which frames are missing and either replace them with frames from other versions or recreate them somehow.

But I'm going to finish some color correction on the original SW first.

Ok, another little update on what I did today. Like you know if you've read the last couple pages of this thread, me and DJ decided to focus on only correcting color errors in the GOUT, instead of a full cleanup.

As some of you might know, there's been discussions before about Luke's lightsaber in the wide shot inside the Falcon right after Alderaan's explosion.

There's been a discussion over at Mike Verta's forum as well, where he stated that the lightsaber was in fact blue in the original. It was also proved by a screening photo he posted in some other thread around here sometime.

There are two of these wide shots, and while the lightsaber color is faded in both, in the second shot the whole tint of the picture is wrong. The second shot is purple/pink in its tint and blue colors are shifted to magenta.

We decided to fix both of those shots and I've finished the first one today.

With the GOUT being sourced from an interpositive that was quite faded when they scanned it, the lightsaber color in that shot was very faded, appearing as white in the raw GOUT, and as "dollar-green" when increasing the saturation.

I've fixed the lightsaber in the first shot, by handpainting it in two passes. The first pass being the color of the blade and the second pass being the hue of the glow around it. I chose the color by sampling Luke's lightsaber in the "It controls your actions?" shot. Most sources point against the saber in this wide shot being as saturated as in that other shot.

Here's a comparison of what it would've looked like in our release had I not done this, and how it looks now:

Harmy said:

That looks great, You_Too :-) One thing I noticed switching between the two is that the target is a very similar color as the sabre in the pre-adjustment picture - wouldn't it have been affected by the fading the same way as the sabre?

Thanks! And yeah, maybe you're right. The little orb is kind of green-ish throughout this whole shot. About the same hue as the saber like you say.

The weird thing is that this isn't true for the second shot, where Luke is hit by the laser from the orb. In that shot the orb has the same color as the Falcon's walls.

Anyway, I guess I'll do a third pass and fix the orb too.

Harmy said:

Sorry about that, I know that recoloring the target separately will be a pain in the ass :-)

Actually it will be much easier than doing the saber. I do it frame by frame in photoshop and painting that orb with the correct hue won't be that hard. I'm glad you pointed this out.

In a way it might sound complicated, but it gives me complete control over how each frame looks.

You know 3PO's oil bath scene, in that one I handpainted the lights behind him, the blinking light behind Luke when he's playing with his spaceship toy, and R2's light since they all had the wrong color. Compared to that scene, this one's a walk in the park.

AntcuFaalb said:

IIRC, this shot is absurdly dirty in GOUT.

It's so bad that I chose to use it for teaching myself PFClean.

The second wide shot of Luke with the saber is. It just has to be from a different print.

By the way, it's quite interesting when looking at this shot from the JSC:

Apparently the interpositive used for the JSC was made in 1985, (and was one of the last interpositives made for home releases) so by then the negative had already faded a bit over 8 years. Then, assuming it was the same interpositive used for the DC, they let that IP fade for 8 years too before scanning it. That would explain why the lightsaber looks green already in the JSC, and a very desaturated greenish-white in the GOUT.

The IP used for the JSC was not made in 1985. It was made, at the very latest, in 1982, because it is the same source used for the early video releases.

Also, the JSC IP and Technidisc/GOUT IP can't be the same, because the latter source lacks the glue marks at almost every cut.

Finally, wouldn't an IP made in 1985 have been on some kind of low-fade stock? Supposedly, the 97 SEs of Empire and Jedi came from interpositives, and if they were usable in 1997, that must mean that they hadn't faded. (Remember, the original was the only big restoration project of the three.)