Hey guys, so recently a fine lad uploaded something really awesome to the 'Spleen: two copies of the 1990 Russian theatrical version of Star Wars Episode IV. It’s a legit dub of the film, not one of those one man lector narrations. I haven’t had a chance to look at these all the way through, and I don’t know Star Wars shot for shot; just wanted to make that clear before I proceed.
Both are pretty horrible transfers - one pan and scan and the other widescreen - with runtimes much shorter than the original film, even accounting for PAL speedup on one of the copies (the other is a PAL transfer at proper film speed). I think the runtime difference might have to do with how splicy the film sources are, but part of me is really, really hoping it includes censors or edits made by the Soviets.
No matter the case, both copies contain content that’s spliced out of the other, and the picture quality on both is awful, so I figured it’d be a great idea to create a composite of the dub audio, sync it up to the latest Despecialized edition, and recreate the Russian ending credits (the crawl is just the English 1981 variant and the Greedo subtitles are in English) and any possible edits/censorship.
I’ve already done some early restoration work on the ending credits. These credits are very simple - just Russian text in white that fades in and out on top of a possibly unique star field. Here is the first credit from the pan and scan copy (the P&S camera actually zooms out after this credit to present a larger amount of the frame):
http://i.imgur.com/I4EZl8i.png
This is the same credit from the widescreen copy:
http://i.imgur.com/xsyDhic.png
And this is that credit as restored by me:
http://i.imgur.com/uKa3ckR.png
I stabilized and stacked six odd and six even fields from the first credit on the P&S copy, then stabilized and stacked six odds and evens of textless, fuller background from the same source, and then laid the restored credit onto the restored background frame. I darkened the result slightly to get rid of the halos, then I uprezzed it by a factor of two at http://waifu2x.udp.jp/.
Does anyone know a good “film wobble” or “gate weave” plugin for FCP 7? Because that would be the icing on the cake for these restored ending titles.
Anyway, I’ll use this thread to discuss the progression of my Soviet ANH project, but anyone else can use it to discuss upgrades of any other versions of these films from behind the Iron Curtain.