Harmy's THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK Despecialized Edition HD - V2.0 - MKV & AVCHD (Released) — Page 55

At the risk of invoking "oh not this shit again", it always bugged me how that Tarkin 720p/1080p comparison wasn't exactly apples-to-apples, with the colors not matching and I believe some image sharpening effects in there too.

So I made a gallery of a couple of other BD screencaps (fullscreen) at 1080p/720p/480p/240p so people could better visualize the loss of detail at each resolution, without getting distracted by changes not introduced by the scaling or re-encoding processes.  I thought the results were interesting enough to share, although I think the Tarkin shot is still adequate for most purposes.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BxypVa35j2XsRHp4Z1hKcU04MWs/edit?usp=sharing

EDIT: To be clear, these results are very specific to the 2011 Star Wars Blu-rays. Different sources would show a different amount of detail, and would produce different results.

Feel free to re-post wherever you see fit, but I think it's really just an interesting exercise at this point.  I feel the point was already made about the weakness of the Blu-ray transfer, this gallery just underlines it.  Someone could probably do a zoomed single-image version like that original Tarkin shot to make it easier to process, but my curiosity is satisfied, so I'm personally not going any further with it.

I never made any adjustments to the Tarkin picture besides the resizing. But the picture posted here recently is a heavily compressed version of the original picture, which I can't find either.

Also, looking at those pictures CatBus posted, especially switching between them at full resolution, you can definitelly see a difference in sharpness on a big screen but not really in detail - I almost find the 720p ones more pleasing to the eye, because they have all the detail but they don't look so artificially sharpened.

The difference would of course be even less perceivable in movement.

It's actually quite hard to tell the difference.

Harmy, nothing new to complain about in the new workprint.

Harmy said:

I never made any adjustments to the Tarkin picture besides the resizing. But the picture posted here recently is a heavily compressed version of the original picture, which I can't find either.

Also, looking at those pictures CatBus posted, especially switching between them at full resolution, you can definitelly see a difference in sharpness on a big screen but not really in detail - I almost find the 720p ones more pleasing to the eye, because they have all the detail but they don't look so artificially sharpened.

The difference would of course be even less perceivable in movement.

Well, a lot of people would add a hint of sharpening when downscaling to counteract that softening effect, but my examples were simple downscales without any other filtering.  I agree the 1080p images look artificially sharp, but I think the 720p images maybe go too far in the other direction.

Oh, that one, yeah, that's old, I thought you were talking about the last workprint, which has this section in it but with redone colors. I PMed you guys the links for the right one.

Yeah, I do plan to release an MKV as well as an AVCHD.

Which reminds me, I'm going to need the latest versions of the audio tracks in both DTS-HD for the MKV and AC3 for the AVCHD, so if someone could get me those I'd be very grateful. Did anyone ever sync Puggo's 16mm mono track to the GOUT?

About that, Catbus used Team negative1's capture to create new version of mono SW track, PM him about it.

Would not recommend my edit without some serious peer review first.  The last thing I want is a lot of pissed off mono mix fans with pitchforks and torches.  I mean, it sounds good to me, but I only just recently got into the mono mix and the Belbucus track is tried-and-true.  AFAIK only one person has downloaded my hybrid track (which, FWIW, is about 1/3 based on -1's 35mm captures and about 2/3 based on Belbucus).  There could be issues with it.

Harmy--regarding Puggo's 16mm capture, I've got that GOUT-synced in AC3 and DTS-MA, PM me if you still need it.

No rush or anything, but are you able to project an ETA for this new edition?

No.

Now, I've got all the foreign tracks and the English mono-track from CatBus, now I just need the other English mixes.

Oh and is there any chance someone has that starwars.com web commentary for ESB?

As another example of why I need someone else to handle the audio for me, I just watched an entire episode of Sopranos with 5.1 sound without realizing that I had the left and right front speakers disconnected the whole time :-D This happened to me before with Star Wars but I had only the rear speakers on and didn't realize until C-3P0 was supposed to speak his first line, which of course would have come mainly from the center speaker, which was disconnected, so I watched the entire titles, crawl and the first three shots with Tantive IV and the stardestroyer without ever realizing that the sound was only coming from the rear speakers :-D

I'm secretly hoping hairy_hen has some updated ESB English mixes.  Otherwise I've got his old lossless 5.1 track and a nice lossless 1980 stereo track, but he'd obviously be the best source.

OK, guys - don't expect any releases any time soon, because my computer just died :-(

It's probably the motherboard but it's hard to tell, so a friend of mine, who works in I.T. will come on Wednesday to try and find out but it's definitely gonna take some time to sort this out :-(

That sucks. :/ What exactly happened?

I'm sorry, I've been trying to deal with this the whole afternoon and really don't feel like going into it again. The important thing is, that I'm pretty sure the data on the HDDs are safe, so hopefully, once I get it sorted, I can jump right back in where I left off.

No problem. I hope it'll get fixed soon.