Harmy's STAR WARS Despecialized Edition HD - V2.7 - MKV (Released) — Page 346

It seems to me that many of the issues we are noticing with 2.1 (eg. frame freezing while R2 talks on the BR; jerky orbital shot of Tatooine; inconsistent opening crawl speed) are, in fact, issues that the original theatrical release may have had; and the fact that the picture quality of this remaster is so good, itmakes such imperfections wih the source that much easier to spot.

In other words, it's Lucas' fault, not Harmy's.

@Harmy, what is on your list of fixes for 2.5 thus far?

I've now watched v2.1.

Wonderful.

I know it's only a recreation, and not strictly the authentic original, but when it looks this good who cares?

The only issue I noticed were some minor "chequerboarding" compression artefacts in the death star control room (in the darker reds, above this guy's hand).

It shows up more on my TV than on the PC's display, but hopefully the higher bitrate on the BD will take care of it.

Yeah, it's not there on the v2.0 MKV, so it should be fine on the BD as well :-)

Is it prediction time again?  I can try to see if I can be more wrong than the last time... lessee April 21st 2013 17:22:21.282.  You can bank on it.

The work on the extras is progressing rather nicely and there isn't much left to do on the movie itself. On the other hand it'll still take a while to render it all and then I still need to figure out the BD authoring, plus school work is starting to pile up, so I don't dare guess when it'll all be done. I could try giving you an estimate of course, but behold and laugh:

November 16, 2011
2:32 AM
Post 2364 of 8630

slynger said:

so how far off is V2.0? 

November 16, 2011
2:35 AM
Post 2365 of 8630

Harmy said:

It's going relatively slowly since I have to colour correct from scratch, so my most optimistic estimate would be two weeks.

3130 posts later...

August 29, 2012
12:12 AM
Post 5495 of 8630

Harmy said:

STAR WARS DESPECIALIZED EDITION REMASTERED (v2.0) is now officially released!!!

Harmy said:

Yeah, it's not there on the v2.0 MKV, so it should be fine on the BD as well :-)

You can actually see it in the v2.0 MKV, although the blocks are smaller.

Suggests it might be that way on the original BD, and your colour correction just made it more visible?

Oh, yeah, looking more closely, you're right. It's in my lossless files too, so I guess it is in the BD as well, only it's hidden in the crushed blacks.

Well, it's not really a problem - it's just very minor compression artifacting, which is basically unavoidable given the space available on BD. I've seen official BDs with much worse compression artifacts than SW.

Really? I have yet to see one. Every single Blu-Ray I've ever seen had some amount of compression artifacts and some actually much worse than SW; for example the BD of Aliens has loads of compression artifacts, as does The Godfather, though it's usually due to a more grainy nature of the film, plus 16:9 framed films are generally harder to compress, because with 2.35:1 or 4:3, the black bars compress very efficiently, so there's much less actual picture resolution to compress. And yes, they definitely used double layer BDs for SW.

Now, I'm not defending the SW BDs of course, we all know they're pretty awful and have many shortcomings but bad compression simply isn't one of them.

Slightly off topic; that's why I always say that we don't need more resolution for home video (if 1080p/2K content is good enough for most of today's cinemas, it sure as hell is good enough for home screens, however big,) what we really need is the same resolution with less compression. I think having 4K content at home is laughable - it's the same kind of marketing trick as 1080p smart phones - they should employ the new more efficient compression algorithms to get lossless 1080p into homes, not lossy 4K. 4K TVs are a different matter, because at a certain size, you begin seeing the grid of the TVs pixels when it's just 1080x1920 but you don't need the content to be at that resolution in a home environment.

EDIT: To avoid derailing the thread, please continue any discussion of home video future and present here.

Yes.

Red is murder on mpeg codecs.

yoda-sama said:

Quick response to your topic derail:  With my old 720p projector I expected to see pixels fairly easily at the size I was throwing, so I overlooked them easily enough, but when I got my 1080p projector I'd really hoped at my usual distance that it would be comparatively smooth as silk, but as improved as things are on this projector, pixels are still pretty obvious (though smaller) yet in some ways worse since I both expect not to see them (so they stick out when I do) and they're inherently sharper.  I'm taking the bad with the good on it, but do think that, for projectors at least, higher resolution [hardware] would be very beneficial regardless of content (meaning 720p, 1080p, etc. will look however they'll look, just not hindered further by visible pixels, but badly compressed 4K video is certainly not something that'd be welcome).  Displays should improve (even HDTV's, since if they're used as large monitors, 1920x1080 isn't all that great to be stuck at), but content standards should be more carefully thought out than this gimmick-driving hamfisted approach of late.

On topic, I may need to double check this when I next get a chance, but in the opening battle when the Star Destroyer is approaching the camera (chasing and firing on the Tantive IV), I believe I saw a slightly darker circular patch in it as it moved, possibly a compositing anomaly, maybe a color issue...  If that isn't enough to go on, I can watch it again when I get home and be more specific.

I'd say it is an issue with your projector. Pixels are not visible at 1080P at recommended seating distances unless the projector in question has screen-door issues. We use a 3metre wide screen and pixel structure is not discernible at THX seating distance even with my 20/12 vision. with a 7ft (2m) wide screen the pixels would be around 7/160th of an inch (1.1mm square) Some projectors have larger black borders around pixels that make things worse though.

However the compression macro-blocking and 4:2:0 colour compression can make things much worse. Uncompressed 1080P looks much much better than BD25 movies.

Avatar is the movie with the least compression problems I have ever seen, but then they did dedicate the entire disc to just the movie, no extras or fancy menus, and it looks great (2D version)

A projector, yes, 4K definitely could make a difference there, but that's the tech, not the content - I can always see the pixel grid on sharp bright static objects even in theaters with digital projection - especially on subtitles but take the Hobbit as an example - it was shot on 5K RED cameras but it went through a 2K DI, so all the theaters equipped with 4K projectors must have been showing it upscaled.

And a majority of today's films still goes through 2K DIs and restoration work or at least mastering is often done at 2K too, so going 4K on the content doesn't really make too much sense.

As to that dark spot - that's there on the BD (though again, I really don't know how you guys notice these thing - I'd worked with that shot for hours and never noticed).

yoda-sama said:

[I] happen to live within 10 miles of what seriously is/could be the best theater in the USA (at the very minimum, it has the largest digital projection IMAX in the world... and it is in Oklahoma, go figure).

Do you mean the IMAX in Moore, OK?

I live in Tulsa. =p