Empire Strikes Back 1997 HD (a more accurate) Reconstruction (Released)

Hi everyone after doing a restoration of the 1997 version of ROTJ (very close to being 100% completed) I thought I’d make a more accurate version of ESB 1997 based off of Adywan’s great work. Adywan’s ESB 1997 kept in a lot of changes that were made in 2004 that bothered me (mostly all of the Falcon’s cockpit shots being left cropped) so I threw this version together in a couple of days. This preservation is in 720p unlike Adywan’s version which is 1080p, so I would say that if you don’t care about the changes that I made here, go ahead and get Adywan’s since it’s higher resolution.

Sources:

• Main source: Hal9000’s Empire Custom SE
• KK5SO’s Custom SE
• 2004 HDTV
• Harmy’s Despecialized ESB v2.0
• Harmys Respecialized ANH (for “A long time ago” title card)
• ESB 1997 LD (for one shot that is zoomed in on only for the 97 version)

Changes:

• Used Harmy’s Respecialized ANH to replace the Episode II style “A long time ago” title card in the 2004 version (and was still present in Adywan’s version)
• Used a clip from a 1997 LD capture to replace the shot of Luke’s feet stuck in the Wampa’s cave since it was zoomed in on only for this version
• Used Harmy’s Despecialized ESB to replace all of the zoomed in Millenium Falcon cockpit shots (except for one shot that was zoomed in for the 97 version)
• Used Harmy’s Despecialized to replace all scenes with lightsabers since they were redone for 2004 (and were still present in Adywan’s version)
• Used Harmy’s Despecialized to replace scenes on Bespin where Han’s shoulders have shadows on them which creates the illusion that he’s wearing his vest (shoulders were digitally lightened in 2004)
• Used Harmy’s Despecialized to replace scenes where the Imperial rank badges on some characters have been digitally re positioned (2004 change)
• The entire film has also been synced to the cinema DTS and LD 5.1 track

There are still a few things that are 2004 changes that are still in here, but they are just re composited elements that look almost identical to the 97 version.

Pm me for a link (it’s a 20gb file so it’s a megalink this time)

Some screenshots comparing the changes (using LD and Blu Ray screenshots not from this preservation):

ChainsawAsh said:

Weren’t these ESB and ROTJ 1997 preservations meant to be accompaniments to Harmy’s existing ANH 1997 preservation?

Yep that’s right. I have no intentions of doing ANH, Harmy and Team Blu have perfectly fine preservations!

stretch009 said:

Is there going to be color correction? Harmy said Adywan’s version was very Gout like in color which is incorrect for the 1997SE.

I wasn’t planning on doing a cc since I really like the completely white Hoth scenes, but if I were to replace the Hoth scenes with a regraded Blu Ray source so it’s slightly blue again, would anyone be more interested in that?

Any thought of authoring your 97 reconstructions to blu-ray?

I’ll do just what Ash said, give me a few days to throw this new version together and hopefully that’ll turn out better!

dgraham414 said:

Any thought of authoring your 97 reconstructions to blu-ray?

Yeah I have thought about it but I wouldn’t know where to start if I were to make menus for them. I usually just put the mkv into tsMuxer (I think) to create a Blu day iso without any menus just the film.

In theory I’ll be putting out a ‘DrDre ESB color correction’ version of ESB once he’s generated all the necessary individual LUTs to his satisfaction.
For my Custom SE version I just had him do enough for me to be able to mess around with them and get things good enough. I wasn’t necessarily going for a sense of accuracy per se, though the 1997 colors for ESB are what feel best to me subjectively. The Hoth nighttime scenes are a bit bluer than that, though, to better meet the (mostly) Revisited version of the Wampa scene I used in the middle.

Just finished using Hal’s Custom SE and KK5SO’s version (for unaltered cloud city scenes) and I must say, DrDre did a great job on the color grade! I’ll have a link available for it tomorrow.

ChainsawAsh said:

You probably already know and took care of this since you were very thorough when talking about your last version before using Hal’s work as a source, but just a quick reminder since you didn’t mention it in your post - the Wampa scene and the Emperor scene also require a different source than Hal’s custom SE.

Yeah I should’ve mentioned it. I used the 2004 version for the Wampa and KK5SO’s version had the original Emperor