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there are some clips with cleaned scenes?
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thxita said:
I know it has been a long time but is there any update on this project? I would love to see these clips restored to a decent enough quality
I would like to see this too. Several months ago, seeing as how no progress appeared to have been made, I tried to do it myself, and embarked on three week crash course of learning AviSynth and wrestling with the files.
I would say I had mixed results. I think I was severely handicapped having never used AviSynth before, and had more problems than a more experienced user probably would have had. When it was all said and done, I was able to create a few short sample clips, and to be honest, they looked pretty good, at least in terms of cleaning up dirt.
Several factors worth mentioning on my journey:
-My original goal was to try and fix up the deleted scenes so they could be inserted into the original versions of the films. Thus I was more interested in scenes that could be more or less drag and dropped into the films.
-For anyone who has researched the "cleaning up old film" topic even a little bit, you will have come across, I think it was called, "VideoFred's script" or some name like that. I believe that is, yes, what I ended up using, or some offshoot thereof.
-This did a good job with the spots/dust/specks, but stationary vertical lines still were troublesome.
-Another bad part of the resulting clips was that anytime the scene cut to a new angle, all of the dirt remained on the last frame of the first angle and the first frame of the second angle. I think this is because the script looks at a given frame, and then the frames directly before and after it to decide what to clean. I suspect this is where manual cleaning would come into play, but I had no desire whatsoever to go down this road (I believe some scripts in Vegas claimed to be able to help with this, but I did not have success).
-The most frustrating thing, though, was that the beginning of every clip I rendered would jump up and down horribly for a second or so, before "settling" in and playing normally. After Googling, a few other people seemed to have this problem, but I could not find any real solution. This is probably what most directly led to me stopping my attempts.
-The next thing that discouraged me was the sound. I felt like if they were going to be truly "cleaned up" they would need to have sound. For example, for the Treadwell scene, I believe a while back ..Sluggo(? not sure) helped make a version of the scene hosted on T'bone's site that had recreated audio from the Radio Drama. But, I was at a loss what to do with scenes like the Tatooine sandstorm. My only thought was finding other films that say Harrison Ford or the other actors appeared in and extracting certain lines? Perhaps voice actors who could imitate someone's voice? Either way it was a lot of work I didn't want to do.
-Rendering took a LONG time. I think six one to two minute scenes would take my computer (which is not slow by any stretch) an entire night. This definitely hindered progress. As a result, I would just normally render 8 or 9 second clips to see how things looked.
-Even previewing in MPC was incredibly slow with the complex clean up scripts. This was also a downer.
-Luke in the tank on Hoth was in black and white. I know The Man Behind the Mask had a great workaround with blue and red masks that he used in his War of the Stars / Grindhouse version, and I practiced emulating it myself. It was hard, but I think doable for someone like me.
-The Luke and Yoda training scene did not have the glowing lightsaber effect yet, which I thought would be necessary, so I found some guides for Vegas on how to do it, and while not too difficult, it was very tedious.
When it was all said and done, it was just too much work for me, especially since my job started picking up quite a bit then. I still have a dream of having them all beautifully restored and then reinserted into the original films for a sort of "extended version," but a lot of work would have to be done to get to that point. My only thought is that perhaps a committee of people might have a better shot of actually completing it than a single individual. I am also wary of investing too much time, because if Disney takes a more favorable view of all these old scenes / versions and ends up releasing them, I don't want to have wasted all the time (that might sound a little jaded, but it's true).
That's all that comes to mind at the moment.
In short, my ideal vision/workflow looks something like:
1) Automated dirt cleanup
2) Manual dirt cleanup for the rest
3) Fixing the colors
4) Somehow figuring out an audio solution (no idea on the how of that)
May the Force be with you.
