n00b said:
@ Harmy
Is there any chance to get rid of those bright boxes around the Falcon and the TIE fighters at 00:36:42 - 00:36:44? This problem was much less prominent before Lowry "restored" the material though your workprint is already an improvement over 2004.
The problem here is, that the garbage mattes are actually visible in the bright areas of that shot (on the star-destroyer) - slightly crushing the dark areas in space shots (actually increasing contrast - lowering contrast makes the mates more visible) usually takes care of the garbage mattes on the black backdrop of space but there is no practical way I know of to get rid of them from bright areas.
AntcuFaalb said:
I've never had a good understanding of what exactly Harmy's intentions are with his Despecialized Editions. That is, is he shooting for (1) "what's on a theatrical print" or (2) "what would have been visible to the audience during the original theatrical run(s)"?
A good example of my confusion is illustrated by the fact that:
1. Harmy restored several compositing errors that were scrubbed away by Lowry's process for SW DeEd 2.0/2.1/2.5. Some of these were anomalies in a single frame that were likely not noticed by many during the original theatrical run(s).
2. Harmy did not restore all of the original wipes in SW DeEd 2.0/2.1/2.5 and, in many cases, left in the optical wipes that were created by Pacific Titles for the 97SE.
Harmy: I'm not trying to talk-down your work. I'm genuinely confused and I hope you can clear this up. As I've always stated: you do fantastic work and I'm consistently impressed with the quality of your output.
Well, I'm shooting for recreating the look, or rather the experience, of the original version in high definition - in other words, I'm trying to strike a good balance of restoring as much of the original as possible, while keeping it a congruent high quality watching experience.
So, restoring the wipes would definitely introduce some very noticeable quality drops, due to my best source being the GOUT and it would do very little to make it visually more like the original, because unless you're comparing them frame by frame, most of the wipes look pretty much the same in both versions, so the look and mainly the feel of the shots aren't really altered, whereas those compositing errors I did restore, while consciously unnoticed, do alter the feel of the shot and most of the ones I restored were possible to restore without losing any significant amount of picture quality - like this, this, this or this. Restoring those kinds of mistakes is also a kind of a nod to the people who know about them and will be looking for them :-)
