Harmy's STAR WARS Despecialized Edition HD - V2.7 - MKV (Released) — Page 437

deepanddark20 said:

Those words ["Episode IV: A New Hope"] were not a "Special Edition" alteration, so if your goal is to remove "Special Edition" changes, you don't have to remove those words.

I understand what you're saying. However, the goal of Harmy's Despecialized Edition is not just "to remove 'Special Edition' changes." If it were, then that means we wouldn't be concerned with the additional changes made with the Blu-ray release (which clearly doesn't make sense).

Rather, the stated goal of this project is to restore the original theatrical release in the best quality possible. This means that some things may be lost which some of us actually like. For example, I rather enjoy the clip where Luke reunites with his old friend Biggs before they take off in a desperate attempt to destroy the Death Star. It builds an emotional connection between the audience and the other Rebel fighters so that you actually care when one X-wing after another is mercilessly destroyed.

But such opinions are just that - opinions. The beauty of this project is that it's not trying to make Star Wars look as good as possible, but it seeks to restore the original version, with all its good points and any bad (though I think we all agree that the former far outweighs the latter).

deepanddark20 said:

Harmy, you are amazing. I know I've thanked you before, but it can never be said enough.

I have one little issue with Star Wars Despecialized Edition v2.5. The scene when Luke goes outside to stare at the twin sunset on Tatooine looks like it's too bright in my opinion. I've compared it with several other copies I have of the pre-special edition movie, and yours sticks out as being lighter, almost like it's earlier in the day than the other copies I've seen. 

What copies of the pre special edition do you have? Harmy is basing his color decisions on un faded film print from the 70s. If you are talking about vhs and LD copies, make no mistake, those are NOT the original colors. 

deepanddark20 said:

I suppose while I'm on this thread I'll mention one more little personal issue I have, but this next thing I'm about to mention is not specifically an issue with your despecialized edition but with a general trend I've noticed in fan preservations. It's the lack of "Episode IV A New Hope" in the opening title crawl.

I know, I know, the original theatrical presentation in 1977 didn't have those words. But surely almost everybody grew up watching copies that did, right? Those words were not a "Special Edition" alteration, so if your goal is to remove "Special Edition" changes, you don't have to remove those words.

FWIW, I also saw it more times on video than in the theatre, but every single time I saw it on video, the crawl seemed particularly wrong (not only is the name of the movie wrong, but the entire planet of Tatooine misses its musical cue).  So sheer volume of viewings isn't a good metric, many of us suffered through what we felt was the wrong crawl for decades. The reason it's such a "trend" these days is because so many of us prefer the theatrical version.

As others have said, this is a theatrical preservation.  Not only is the crawl different than your home video experience, but the colors/brightness are different than VHS (as you have noticed), the default soundtrack is different, and you can actually see most of the stars in the space scenes.  It doesn't mean the Despecialized Editions are "wrong", they just have a different goal than you'd like them to have.  Given their goal or preserving the theatrical experience, however, they are extremely successful.

But for what it's worth, not all preservations are trying to preserve the theatrical look & feel.  There are different projects here that attempt to re-create the 1980's home video experience, such as here: http://originaltrilogy.com/forum/topic.cfm/GOUT-Extremely-Cruddy-Edition/topic/15871/

Take a look around.  Just because this project doesn't share your priorities doesn't mean there aren't others that do, or that you can't VHS-ify the Despecialized Edition yourself.

Well, in ideal world, a theatrical version would have a seamless branching choice between the '77 and '81 crawls, but since seamless branching is really difficult to do, I had to decide for just one, and given that choice, the most original will always win. Plus, like CatBus pointed out, the Episode IV crawl screwed up the timing of the scene.

deepanddark20 said:

All I'm asking for is a movie that has all the quality of Harmy's edition, except with the words "Episode IV A New Hope" in the opening crawl. I shouldn't need to request that a whole new fan project be started just to make this one little change.

There are other fan projects that swap out the crawl for versions with other languages, so it's not too much of a stretch to think someone might do the same for the alternate crawl/flyover, for example:

In response to Gogogadget, if you can do that and make it seamless with no loss of any quality, I would adore that. 

...and there you go.  A whole new project requested and potentially started.  I'd watch out for starfield incongruity, though.  I'm not sure there are any copies of the '81 crawl and flyover without obliterated starfields.

I apologize I didn't know you weren't looking for the VHS look all-around.  Your dissatisfaction with the brightness of the theatrical version in at least one scene led me to believe (incorrectly) that you might prefer the colors of home video releases to the theatrical colors.

I have no problem with you using stuff from DeEd.

yoda-sama said:

Not sure what version "present and correct" is supposed to refer to...

I'm assuming it's just a matter of taking the crawl/flyover from the Blu-ray, doing some processing (at minimum, scaling to 720p, but could also attempt better color-matching, laser despecialization, and starfield de-obliteration), and pasting it over the equivalent frames in the DeEd.

The result would be DeEd with the '81 crawl, with the same timing/cue glitch that it's always had.  Any attempt to actually fix the timing glitch, or just paste text in front of Harmy's existing crawl, wouldn't be accurate to any version of Star Wars that's ever existed, so I hope no attempt is made to do that.

CatBus said:

yoda-sama said:

Not sure what version "present and correct" is supposed to refer to...

I'm assuming it's just a matter of taking the crawl/flyover from the Blu-ray, doing some processing (at minimum, scaling to 720p, but could also attempt better color-matching, laser despecialization, and starfield de-obliteration), and pasting it over the equivalent frames in the DeEd.

The result would be DeEd with the '81 crawl, with the same timing/cue glitch that it's always had.  Any attempt to actually fix the timing glitch, or just paste text in front of Harmy's existing crawl, wouldn't be accurate to any version of Star Wars that's ever existed, so I hope no attempt is made to do that.

This is actually false! The BD contains the SE crawl and flyover, which was made in '97 and has the fast receding SW logo. The '81 crawl and flyover had a different starfield, whereas the '97 crawl has the same starfield as the '77 crawl, albeit shifted slightly upwards, so in order to "restore" the '81 crawl faithfully, one would have to recreate it or use a LD transfer for it and then you'd have to redo the flyover as well, because it was recomposited optically in '81 and has different matte lines than the '77 one and the '97 one, which was recomposited digitally. Plus the background has a slightly different look in the '81 version.

You could probably still use the '97 crawl, if you managed to separate it from the background, because I think what they did was that they wanted to recomposite the crawl and the flyover digitally for the SE, using the original elements, and they ended up using the original element of the '81 crawl and the original elements from '77 for everything else.

Harmy said:

This is actually false! The BD contains the SE crawl and flyover, which was made in '97 and has the fast receding SW logo. The '81 crawl and flyover had a different starfield, whereas the '97 crawl has the same starfield as the '77 crawl, albeit shifted slightly upwards, so in order to "restore" the '81 crawl faithfully, one would have to recreate it or use a LD transfer for it and then you'd have to redo the flyover as well, because it was recomposited optically in '81 and has different matte lines than the '77 one and the '97 one, which was recomposited digitally. Plus the background has a slightly different look in the '81 version.

You could probably still use the '97 crawl, if you managed to separate it from the background, because I think what they did was that they wanted to recomposite the crawl and the flyover digitally for the SE, using the original elements, and they ended up using the original element of the '81 crawl and the original elements from '77 for everything else.

Stop blowing my mind!

Plus there is a yet unproven but likely theory, that there were actually two different versions of the crawl in '77 - same elements but different compositing, with less weave of separate elements for the second one (the one on the GOUT DVD).

No, I'm pretty sure that the audio stays exactly the same and it's the picture that is out of sync.

Gogogadget said:

If I did the '81 crawl with the incorrect musical cue, you'd have extra frames and then the audio would have to be re-synced to the entire movie.

Aren't the lengths of the '77 and '81 crawl/flyovers the same (the frames are different internally, but they start and stop at the same place)? So if you pasted over the '81 crawl/flyover with the existing audio, the audio glitch would "just happen" exactly correctly?

EDIT: Harmy beat me to it. And yes, the framecounts are different if you just do the crawl, but you'll find you have to do the whole crawl/flyover to do it right, and then they line up nicely.

Gogogadget said:

i've never liked the incorrect cue and it's totally lazy of Lucasfilm to never go back and fix this.

I both love it and hate it.  I treat it kinda like the stormtrooper headbonk.  Every time I see it, I think [in director voice]: "Early! Tatooine, listen for your cue! Now go back into the starfield and wait for it this time!"

I never noticed it until it was pointed out to me.

Harmy said:

I never noticed it until it was pointed out to me.

Same here!