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Best HD Version(s) of Prequel Trilogy Deleted Scenes? Check out Hal 9000's package! — Page 2

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Quick question for the experts out there…
The three Padme ‘formation of the rebellion’ deleted scenes are some of my favourite, but I would be curious to know if all the effects are 100% complete and movie ready? 😕


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Yes, pretty much so. In the director’s commentary track back on the DVD, they mentioned that once they decided to remove the petition-plotthread, the entire rebellion-thing had to go. Unfortunently, the movie works way better with it.

For seventeen years the renegade Pfhor scoutship jumped between the closely packed stars of the galactic core. And all over the ship, dancing through the wreckage of the Pfhor computer core, Durandal was laughing…

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emanswfan said:

Eventually, I hope to get around to creating proper 4K upscales of deleted scenes using Gigapixel AI, but in the mean time HAL9000 has the best upscales currently around.

I reached out to various people I know from all over the internet who performed various successful upscaling projects I know of. Basically, the plan is to accumulate some additional knowledge and maybe get to know some variants in technique.

Having deleted scenes indistinguishable from at least 1080p footage would be a really big help for various fan-edit projects out there.

For seventeen years the renegade Pfhor scoutship jumped between the closely packed stars of the galactic core. And all over the ship, dancing through the wreckage of the Pfhor computer core, Durandal was laughing…

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 (Edited)

I’ve run all the ROTS deleted scenes through all four current (Video) Gigapixel HD algorithms and have been going through deciding which is best for each shot and blending in others if necessary. So far I’ve found Artemis HQ generally works best; CG is cleaner but makes less of an attempt to add detail. I can post a few screenshots later. It’s not that significant an improvement over Hal’s upscales for most shots, honestly. Small faces are a weakness as well - I may attempt to enhance them with Remini but that’s a lot more manual work than I was really intending to put in.

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sade1212 said:

I’ve run all the ROTS deleted scenes through all four current (Video) Gigapixel HD algorithms and have been going through deciding which is best for each shot and blending in others if necessary. So far I’ve found Artemis HQ generally works best; CG is cleaner but makes less of an attempt to add detail. I can post a few screenshots later. It’s not that significant an improvement over Hal’s upscales for most shots, honestly. Small faces are a weakness as well - I may attempt to enhance them with Remini but that’s a lot more manual work than I was really intending to put in.

You never fail to impress me sade1212!
It’ll be interesting to see if you can somehow enhance these scenes…


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Here are a few shots. They’re fairly underwhelming; I don’t think they really hold up any better than HAL’s do - you still have to sit pretty far from your TV, or have a small screen, for them to hold up to the actual Bluray footage. They also suffer the common upscaling problem of being overly sharp, making areas without much actual picture information seem clear and in focus (I think this is most apparent on the Senate Offices establishing shot) when your brain would have done a better job of just imagining that detail in a blurrier image. Maybe a slight softening and fake graining would help that. I’ll keep trying to improve them. Note that the colour difference comes from HAL’s upscale being slightly regraded, I think, while mine aren’t.

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 (Edited)

Here’s a very flattering demonstration of what Remini can achieve with faces. Unfortunately doing a 100 frame ish shot in this manner takes me about an hour since the workflow involves Photoshop contact sheets, Bluestacks and EBSynth… It also only works with faces which still have a discernible likeness to the actors - the tiny faces in, say, the ROTS rebellion deleted scenes can’t be saved using Remini, since the faces it generates are not right at all.

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Could someone send me the link? Thanks in advance 😃

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Hal, I would love a link as well if possible.

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Hey Hal!
I would love a link as well if possible 😄
Thank you very much for doing this stuff! ^^

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Vidmaster said:
I reached out to various people I know from all over the internet who performed various successful upscaling projects I know of. Basically, the plan is to accumulate some additional knowledge and maybe get to know some variants in technique.

Having deleted scenes indistinguishable from at least 1080p footage would be a really big help for various fan-edit projects out there.

The results are in, mostly standard stuff like “I just run Gigapixel”. HOWEVER there was one answer in particular I want to highlight. Its from someone who is working on (and was mostly very successful) in upscaling old Full-Motion-Video Games:

For the upscaling part of the process, he is using a combination of Topaz Labs’ Video Enhance AI and Gigapixel AI. The former is specifically for upscaling video and the latter for still images.

The first step is to do a pass with Video Enhance AI, checking if there are any spots where it didn’t do a particularly good job. Afterwards, he hecks if he can improve on that sequence frame-by-frame with Gigapixel AI. That second step can be a really arduous process, obviously.

A couple of other Gigapixel-packages (DeNoise AI and Sharpen AI in particular) can be very useful - but given the resource-intensive nature of the work, coupled with the inevitable trial-and-error process to see what works and what doesn’t, it can be a very lengthy process to attempt to use all of them.

In addition, he also employs use AVIsynth+ a lot for cleaning up footage before upscaling it (since some of the original footage he is working on is terribly messing, compressed, sometimes interlaced, and so on). In particular, he mentioned to me that I might “find this necessary for some of your upscales, depending on the quality of your source footage. If they’re fully-completed-and-mastered-but-just-deleted scenes from DVD extras, they should do just fine in terms of quality - but depending on the DVD region/interlacing, you might need do a bit of that to clean up quality before you upscale.”

For seventeen years the renegade Pfhor scoutship jumped between the closely packed stars of the galactic core. And all over the ship, dancing through the wreckage of the Pfhor computer core, Durandal was laughing…

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sade1212 said:

Here’s a very flattering demonstration of what Remini can achieve with faces. Unfortunately doing a 100 frame ish shot in this manner takes me about an hour since the workflow involves Photoshop contact sheets, Bluestacks and EBSynth… It also only works with faces which still have a discernible likeness to the actors - the tiny faces in, say, the ROTS rebellion deleted scenes can’t be saved using Remini, since the faces it generates are not right at all.

Are we gonna get a version of this in motion?