Harmy's STAR WARS Despecialized Edition HD - V2.7 - MKV (Released) — Page 163

I've been checking this thread almost daily for the last few months, Harmy. I can't wait until the one time I click on here and see that v2.0 is available. That will be a day long remembered!!!

Hi Harmy,

I just created an account just to say thank you. Your work is really important to all of us that grew with the movies.

The amount and quality of the work done so far is really amazing.

I don't speak english that well so I'm just going to point to shadowfist23's post at  the top of the page and say that he expressed my feelings a lot better than I'm ever going to be able to.

Thank you, and keep up the good work!

Forgive my complete ignorance on the subject, and not sure if this has been asked already.  But what is the cause for the variances in color, I see obi wan's and luke's color change from scene to scene occasionally.  Just curious.  The quality is amazing btw.

Wow, excellent project ... and that's just from seeing your YouTube video samples! Version 2 should look great as well (hope you'll do more YT samples).

This may be a little late (and of course your sample are old), but I found a couple of things that could use fixing (?) OR at least to keep in mind for the new version.

The landspeeder shot on the way in Mos Eisley Spaceport is "despecialized" but the ink spot ILM made for a shadow screams "lame". As you've reworked that entire shot, how about fixing the shadow, too?

The top section is the DVD release of the laserdisc (thanks, George!). Ink spot -- no color, black crushed, and just doesn't look like a shadow.
Your "despecialized" is the center section. Looks great ... except for that ink spot. For this proof of concept, I used the ink spot shadow area to mask and darken the same area from the clean beginning of the shot, and overlayed that result onto this frame. This allows the now darkened ground texture to show through like an actual shadow. To take this fix only one step further, you might like to adjust the contrast on the speeder to better match the surrounding scenery (darks, lights, saturation).

Also, the beginning 8 frames of the "move along" shot was jarring and made me replay it to notice a number of areas that hopefully will be addressed:

frame 1 - garbage by helmet of center trooper; frame squashed
frame 2 - same frame 1 w/o garbage or squash
frames 3 & 4 - same frame
frames 5 & 6 - same frame
frame 7 - OK
frame 8 - frames 7 & 8 superimposed (looks blurred)

Thereafter, it looks and moves fine.

@Space Ranger

Just to help clarify what Harmy already said, the point of this project is not to make things "better" (which is all relative anyway), but to make them EXACTLY the way they appeared on opening day in 1977. Could harmy make the shadow look more real? Sure. Do we want him to? NO! That's what the SE's are for. Harmy is making the best possible reconstructions of the original cuts of the OT as is humanly possible with what's publicly available.

Page 141+? Funny! It was looking so good I guess I was expecting "Despecialized" to be a "George Goes Sane" version. ("It's been a kind of urban legend that Star Wars was mostly printed on Eastman stock so that George could count on them to eventually fade badly and keep collectors from having good copies." -- speak of The Dark Side!) Must've been traumatic XØ flashback. :D

While I was back there (p.140), I noticed the Adobe Premiere Pro screenshot. Looks sweet, but is it just a pretty picture -- as troublesome to use as the all preivous versions (inaccurate settings, false previews, half-baked filters, etc.)?

Sorry to read about the YT situation. ("When the people fear the government, there is tyranny.")

So the color differences seen in different frames were also seen in the 77 original? 

I spent a little bit of time trying to line up the chapter titles from the GOUT DVD to the 25 chapters in the Despecialized Editions. I put the results here:

http://goo.gl/nwAJk

There are tabs at the bottom (a little hard to see w/ Google's color scheme) for each film.

The GOUT DVDs have 50 chapters each while the DeEd files have 25-27, so not every chapter break lines up completely and some sort of wind up in the middle of a scene but it's better than "Chapter 1", "Chapter 2."

Doesn't seem like there's any reason to be dicks about it.  He didn't suggest totally redoing the shadow to be a better effect; he was just looking at transparency, and using the existing shape of the animation.  Given how shit the GOUT is and how low-resolution the available LD rip alternatives are, unless Harmy's got some reference he's posted showing that the shadow was always totally opaque it's not outside the realm of possibility that the shadow element was printed at partial transparency originally.  I mean, they knew how to do it a couple of years later, and a black blob is pretty easy to hide optical compositing lines in.  YEs, everyone knows what the goal of the project is.  Don't be such elitist douches.

INv8r_ZIM said:

Doesn't seem like there's any reason to be dicks about it.  He didn't suggest totally redoing the shadow to be a better effect; he was just looking at transparency, and using the existing shape of the animation.  Given how shit the GOUT is and how low-resolution the available LD rip alternatives are, unless Harmy's got some reference he's posted showing that the shadow was always totally opaque it's not outside the realm of possibility that the shadow element was printed at partial transparency originally.  I mean, they knew how to do it a couple of years later, and a black blob is pretty easy to hide optical compositing lines in.  YEs, everyone knows what the goal of the project is.  Don't be such elitist douches.

At this point, I reckon most followers of this project are tired of coming in here and seeing someone complaining that the colours of Harmy's latest clips/screengrabs are nothing like GOUT or whatever.

No, that's not an excuse for being impolite, but I do think the complexity of the whole OOT/SE-situation demands that people read a little more into things before posting stuff like that.

I mean, it only takes a minute or two on Google to find out that the shadow was always an opaque blob.

Hey guys, first off, a huge thanks to Harmy! This is a tremendous achievement and as someone who has never had the opportunity to see these movies in their original cuts, this is just amazing. Thank you so much for your hard work!

Secondly, I just downloaded Empire and Jedi (going to wait for New Hope 2.0), and I've run into a bit of an interesting situation. I burned Empire onto a Verbatim DVD+R DL disk, and couldn't get it to play in any of my friend's Sony Blu-Ray players. On an off chance, we threw it into his roommate's Samsung, and it worked without a problem. When I got home, I tried to watch it on my PS3, but it says it can't play the disk. I'm a Mac user that used Burn, and this is the first time I've burned a DVD, so I'm really stumped here. Any ideas?

Darn, wish i could get into spleen.

negative1 said:

720p link: http://img269.imageshack.us/img269/1/swr3mos0643.jpg

Very cool! Your actual frame (16mm, 35mm, 70mm)? Well, on further review, I guess I really can't call it an "ink spot" (sorry, ILM, my bad) if this project's "very good, high quality accurate sources" prove not as accurate as an official DVD grab (left-film, right-DVD):

It seems the DVD grab does show some texture/color in keeping with the ground's, after all. Any instances of areas going very dark elsewhere? Perhaps the project might like to assess this.

BTW, H, no offensive soundedness noticed. :)