Harmy's RETURN OF THE JEDI Despecialized Edition HD - V3.1 — Page 23

Harmy, you have released RotJ and ESB Despecialized 1.0 and Star Wars 2.0, now make me a sandwich. And btw, please clean my house and feed my cats ;)

Harmy said:

Dude, maybe it's just me, but that post feels like a very polite executive giving orders to an employee. The fact that those shots have these colors in the GOUT doesn't mean that they're correct or they look like in the original and since I had no other reference, I was usually aiming for consistency.

But that planet where around its orbit the last fight takes place, is clearly green. It is in each other shot, also the story suggest that is a completely jungle-themed planet. Remember the speeder fight, the ewoks. Its that planet, right? looks very green to me

-You must do what you feel is right, of course.

Troyig88 said:

... Jabba's boat ...

OT: This made me LOL, not sure why.  Never thought of it as a boat before.

Hey all, first off, all honors and exaltations to Harmy.  Thank you.  I'm showing the Trilogy to my 5 yr old for the first time and using your versions.  However, I'm trying to figure out if Subtitles have been released with this.  I found it on TPB but without a threepio folder, does one exist for this?

BuddhaMaster said:

 I usually spot microscopic color deviations, others wouldn't even realize at all. Here are a few things that need to be adjusted, those differences are pretty obvious, so please change them: The color of the party-ship is grey in the original (you reverted R2D2 back to gray), in your DeSpe it's as red as in the SE! Please return to grey. Or reduce the artificial looking shimmer that makes it look too much like plastic. The Falcon is just as green in your DeSpe as it is in the SE. Please, please return it to a neutral grey (warm grey) as in GOUT. Also the planet needs to a bit more red. It almost seems as if there is a bit of green tint all over the picture. Just reduce green a notch and shit a bit towards blue/purple on the Falcon. [Further demands from BuddhaMaster edited out]

Wrong. Wrong on all counts. Astonishingly wrong. A magnificent achievement of wrongness that will live on in infamy. Harmy does not need to adjust the colours or reduce artificial shimmer or return anything to gray or add in a bit of red or remove the green tint -- he doesn't need to do any of the things you say because he doesn't work for you.

You are not the customer. You are not the client. You are not the employer. Harmy does the fan-edits out of personal enthusiasm and chooses to share his efforts. If you don't like something, you certainly have the right to comment on whether or not something worked for you personally, but not to tell him what he has to do.

He doesn't have to do anything!

Originally, Harmy asked that people not criticize his work outside of personal messages, saying that many of the flaws went unnoticed and pointing them out would distract from the viewing experience and ruin it for people who hadn't seen mismatches of footage or colouring errors or video encoding problems. He's changed his mind as he doesn't want to censor criticism and reactions -- but I suppose that also opened him up to receiving demands from people who've no business providing anything but criticism and reactions.

I really like Harmy's work on RETURN OF THE JEDI. However, he's mentioned a few future changes that I'm not too enthusiastic about, personally -- he says that he'd like to restore the visible matte lines to the rancor, matte lines that were removed for the DVD edition. Personally, I think that the matte lines were bad in the standard definition picture. In a high-definition release, the matte lines would be even more distracting. I agree that they're part of the original theatrical cut, and if that's what Harmy wants to rebuild, then the matte lines are something to be included. But they would be a massive distraction from the viewing experience. What Harmy's done with his Despecialization is to remove distractions that alter the tone and atmosphere and visual appeal of the original films. The matte lines have never appealed and the clean-up job for DVD was one of the few post-post-release changes that have improved rather than detracted.

Any HD version of the original cuts of the trilogy in the future would likely keep the cleaned-up version of the rancor. The simplest route to producing an HD version of the films would be to take the current editions and re-edit them into reconstructed theatrical cuts, with only missing shots re-transferred from the original elements. They'd probably avoid replacing the shot of the rancor on the grounds that the new version is simply the old version, but cleaned up.

Harmy has released his first RETURN OF THE JEDI with the cleaned up rancor scene, and even if his later versions put the old effects back in, I'll still have his first version. He can do what he likes. This is just my opinion.

Harmy said:

OMG, that would be so terrible if an eventual official release was a despecialized edition! It would make me so unbelievably angry, if they just replaced the obvious changes and kept the rest from the SE. They should scan an original print - or several and combine them - so that there isn't even a hint of anything Special Edition.

Hmm. That would be preferable. It's certainly possible!

From http://secrethistoryofstarwars.com/savingstarwars.html :

[For the Special Editions,] ILM was working on many dozens of new shots. When these were completed, they apparently were printed onto film and re-cut into the negative, replacing the original negs, which were undoubtedly put back into storage. As a result, the negative for Star Wars is filled with CGI-laden modern alterations. 

Of course, it would be very easy to simply put the original pieces back and conform it to the original version, or use the separation masters and IPs, or simply scan the old pieces for a digital restoration. But this is problematic due to handling issues (and losing more frames). When Robert Harris restored Godfather last year, he had to do it entirely digitally, saying that if any pin-registered mechanism were to touch the negative it would crumble. In Star Wars' case, using scans of the separation masters is perfectly viable, and though IPs and Technicolor prints are not ideal for masters they could be usable if cleaned up digitally. 

Perhaps the easiest option would be to simply follow the 1997 restoration pattern but in the digital realm: scan the negative in 8K, then scan the stored pre-SE shots or re-comp them, and fill in any damaged areas with IPs or separation masters, reconstructing the original cut, then digitally remove dirt and damage, and finally use a Technicolor print as a color reference for the Digital Intermediate created. Such a product would be theatrically viable, as pristine as when it had been shot, and 100% faithful in image and color to the original release.

The pricetag of doing a project like this would likely be under a million dollars. One day, I predict this process will happen, but that day does not seem to be anywhere in the near future. 

It will remain to be seen if the negative to Star Wars is in a salvageable state by the time this happens or if it has become a brittle relic, faded to black and white.

- Michael Kaminski

Hi Harmy & all contributors.

Does someone have all subtitles for this movie in SRT format?

From Star Wars Despecialized edition, I was able to extract the subtitles for my country but in episode 5 & 6, It's a pain in the foot...

I didn't find them apart so I'm hoping someone has converted them from the mt2s files.

Please PM me or answer here if you have them.

Cheers & THANKS A LOT for these despecialized editions!

Note: I duplicate this message in the other movie episode.

The   BuddhaMaster  posts  look like they have been run through
babel fish translation.
I have used babel fish translation. And it will translate the words but murder the grammar.

I'm not seeing any version of RotJ or ESB on tehparadox, just ANH. Unless I'm just totally missing something, I can't find the other two anywhere.

At any rate, amazing work on all this Harmy. My wife has actually never seen a single Star Wars, so I borrowed the Blu Rays from my brother, and as soon as they hit Mos Eisely I realized how bastardized the trilogy was. We didn't finish watching, so I'm hoping to go through your versions with her this weekend.

Thanks so much for this

Harmy said:

They're all in one thread on teh.

All links for TESB 1.0 and ROTJ 1.0 are down.

@ AdmiralBarackbar PM sent.

Harmy said:

They all show as online in JDownloader.

You're right. : )   I wonder why they appear to be down when you try and download them with your browser.