newguy said:
Introduction: just another star wars fan project
First of all i wanna say that I don't really follow the Star Wars fan edit scene so this might already be done and/or might not really be that interesting to most of you, but this a personal project of mine that I'm doing anyways so I thought I might as well share it here since some one might find it interesting.
Anyway, I saw Harmy's Despecialized version a few weeks ago and got really inspired of doing a similar project but for the version that I grew up with and actually prefer to the originals (expect for a few changes): the specialized editions. But as most of you are aware of the contrast and colors on the bluray are pretty much worthless so the focus of this release will be to make a complete color correction of the bluray as well as a few changes (only Han fires; CG rock, Jabba scene and some of the Mos Eisley CG will be removed) and it will be released and synced to the 97 theatrical DTS surround soundtrack. What I'm basically doing is what I think should have been the bluray release of Star Wars.
I will put a lot of effort in to provide the highest picture quality possible, that means that my whole workflow will be in a DI-format (Prores) and it will end up as a 1080p 25GB (single layer BD) file using x264 2pass slow preset. I've tested the workflow and quality wise it's pretty much transparent to the original bluray. The tools I will be using is Adobe Premiere, After Effects, Colorista II and avisynth.
ETA is when it's done. I have a full time job so dunno when I get time to finish it, been working with it for about a week now and I'm already 20min in, so lets hope that I will continue in that rate.
Color correction
I will do a cut/cut CC of the whole film, and it should be noted that this will not be a “regrade” of the film, I'm pretty much relying heavily on the RGB-parade, waveform and vectroscope to make sure that contrast is spot on in every scene, that objects that are supposed to be white are white and not green, blue or red (although it will probably be slightly on the warm side throughout the film), and that skin tones are on the skin tone line on the vectroscope throughout the film. So my objective is more to make sure the colors are accurate and not what I think look best/trying to imitate what the original print looked like. My first plan was actually use Harmy's version as a reference but I found pretty quickly that his CC and contrast are very inconsistence (no offense) and there are some scenes that have a lot of weird things going on color and contrast wise. I will also remove all the weird magenta smoke and flashes throughout the film. the GOUT will be used to some extent as a reference when it comes to shadow detail, exposure, smoke color etc.
Screen samples
I hope that I don't upset anyone when I include Harmy's version as a reference here, I figured that since they are so popular they should make a good reference. Since the first scene on tatooine look so much worse then the rest of the movie I ran it through MCTemporalDenoise, it's not perfect yet, but it looks much better then the original at least.
Order: Top(bluray), middle(Harmy's), bottom(mine)
How much more work is needed until a release? And will it be released as a torrent or direct download?