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Classic Edition: The Empire Strikes Back by Ocpmovie (Released) — Page 3

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Depending on the time frame of a possible RotJ, you should definitely check out what Citizen is doing.
There's much better color detail in his ANH, and Jedi should be just as impressive.

Dr. M

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Citizen seems to be doing very nice and complicated work, yeah.



Speaking of complicated, with all my worries about DV artifacting, I've decided to let this one encode for another day and try out some new tricks on it.

Nattress has an FCP plugin which is supposed to remove most DV artifacting, or at least greatly lessen it. This might result in a much better looking version of the Luke/Vader duel and other bits I've been worried about the artifacting in. It takes forever to render, but I'll let it run today and see how it all looks.

It's supposed to work by intelligently smoothing out the color information and combining it with what it can glean from the brightness information.


Nattress also has some decent frame rate converting plugins which I'm trying out on other projects.


I have also been a bit annoyed by some artifacting in the edited scenes that resulted when I shrunk the film from dual to single layer so I'll be playing with lowering my encoding rates to make the shrinking less necessary, or perhaps shrinking the main feature by itself before using it.
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Hey Senior OPC, You have any idea for disc art yet on this bad boy??
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Sounds like this is generations ahead of ANH. Any chance of a v2 of that?

Dr. M

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>> Any chance of a v2 of that?


No. I already answered that actually .... kind of has to do with the amount of SE stuff in ANH, I did ANH the only way possible really.
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OCPmovie, this looks just unbelievable. Wow.
I finally got hold of your SW edit recently (and was blown away)
So I know the quality of your releases.
Any guess on when this fine piece of work will hit the "toe-rent" and NG circles ?
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Heh. Beats me, nobody's actually torrented any of my releases apart from Deleted Magic, which is a huge shame. I and many others have lobbied for 'em at myspleen, but no goin'.


So, I let the thing render for nearly 3 days to try out this new FCP plugin that supposedly cleans up DV color artifacts.

No go. It worked much better on interlaced DV video - working from this DVD, I don't know if it actually did anything. The artifacts are still there. I don't think they're worse, but they're there.

So okay, this is the best quality we're getting. And it looks good. I like Vader with the red saber, it makes it feel a lot more "Star Wars" somehow.

I've synced up the sound and am reencoding all the video.

What's left? Well, thinking about menus.


The original theatrical poster is my desired poster for this release - unlike ANH where there are many nice alternate covers, the alternate ESBs are merely "interesting" to me.

Rock on ...
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I was sick at home at all day, so I whipped up this prototype here

[URL=http://img295.imageshack.us/my.php?image=classiceditionesbsample7gw.jpg][IMG]http://img295.imageshack.us/img295/9964/classiceditionesbsample7gw.th.jpg[/URL][/IMG]

I'll finish it soon as I get more specs on the release.
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Wow, a cover already. Geez. Thanks Mark.


So, lemme think. I never liked the back cover being done in that "Impact" type font, the fonts used need to be pretty classy and, well, classic. Have an old-fashioned, timeless feel about them. Nothing too insane or dramatic or cheesy.

Right below or next to The Empire Strikes Back, let's put in Classic Edition, slanted to match the Empire logo, if that looks all right, or just put Classic Edition ...

On the back cover, well, it's not written and directed by George Lucas. =) I don't think there will be any special features to note. Sound mix from the original 35mm theatrical presentation. Just put basic notes on the presentation and preservation of the film as seen in 1980, but mainly a description of the plot, the official descrip should do.

The starfield is dodgy in your mockup, it looks cloned and pasted, put a proper one in there, and we're good ...

Thanks for doing a cover already - exciting!
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Was there ever a good cover for the Classic ANH?

A long time ago in the faraway galaxy...

Star War: The Third Gathers
Backstroke Of The West

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I'll tinker with it a bit tomorrow.
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Sluggo's cover is based on the cover that I liked for the Classic ANH - although I did have some issues with it, the typeface on the back or whatever, but it was a good cover.

I should have bothered to do my own covers for all these. =) Especially DM.
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Sound is still out of sync despite my best efforts, the sync of the version in DVD Studio Pro is completely different from the version in Final Cut - lots of mysterious vanishing frames in the latter.
DV artifacts present. I'm annoyed that I had to bring the quality of the thing down to DV quality for so much of the ending just for fairly stupid last-minute changes = Vader's red saber, Han's freezing "vest" and the flopped insignia on the imperials. It might have been better to just leave these damn changes in and keep it full original DVD quality.

Hm. Oh well.
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Sluggo , you're on the right track with the cover. You might wanna move the top text in the back down for easier reading, and might wanna try a more appropriate font. I know this might still be early, but man, am I psyched about this release. OCP, your version of ANH was mindblowing.
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Regarding the saber/PQ drop issue, you might wanna think about a 2nd version keeping the uncorrected saber for quality's sake.
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Thanks Bespin!


Regarding the quality issue.

I'm giving this another shot - trying a new setting on Nattress Nicer. I'm setting the color sharpness to zero (instead of 90) to try and zap out those awful artifacts in the carbon freezing chamber scenes.

Results are promising so far.

That's the problem with Empire - this is going to be a better quality Classic Edition, but when watching Empire you really expect perfection. With ANH (or even ROTJ) the film is much messier, and in ANH especially people don't mind a low quality shot or a junky effect as long as it's within reason and looks ANH-like. With Empire, every little lapse in quality stands out and looks shocking. This is certainly why the Special Edition was done in a much more subtle and classy manner for this film - you can't get away with screwing Empire up.

The FCP scenes are a bit softer than the official DVD scenes (with more "full" color saturation in the unsaturated areas), but that won't be a huge issue if I can remove all these artifacts. The quality will be good enough to stand by.

Wish me luck.
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Good Luck! and May the Force Be With You!
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CALL FOR HELP

Re: Return of the Jedi


Looking for a good quality, preferably PAL transfer of Jedi. Moth3r and Citizen haven't gotten to Jedi yet, and of course the XO project is gonna take a while ...

But I need a laserdisc transfer of Moth3r quality for whenever I do Jedi, sometime in the future. I want to do it right, using the best quality laserdisc footage available.

Some of those I've mentioned above may be reading this. You probably have rough encodes of Jedi going, or have done SOME work on it. I will accept a rough version, as I'm doing my own editing anyway, I just want good source material. Any help that anyone could provide would be a positive thing.

And, yeah, I probably should have gotten hold of the Moth3r Empire before going ahead with this project. If anyone here in the States sends me a copy of the Moth3r Empire by tomorrow, I'll sneak it in and use it. =)

Anyway, any help you can provide would be much appreciated. There is no timeline for a Classic Jedi right now, nothing's in the works and I'll be waiting a bit before doing it probably ... but when I do ...

Garrett Gilchrist
1736 Kilbourn St.
Los Angeles, CA 90065
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Of the Moth3r Empire?

Rock! Thank you so much ...