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Coming to these forums about 4 months ago was a thrill ride of epic proportions. Somehow Harmy’s Return of the Jedi 2.5 preview showed up on my youtube page and all of a sudden, years of “dormant” Star Wars fandom came rushing back. The excitement was through the roof. I found his video’s on tehparadox and went through all the little downloader hoops to get those films. I did not yet have a blu ray burner so in order to watch them on my xbox 360/50 inch plasma, I had to reencode them down to mp4 files.
After having vowed for years to never buy the blu rays, Harmy’s “honor system” compelled me to go pick up a copy. I wanted to do my part! I looked online and discovered the steelbook editions and made a special trip to Best Buy and picked them up.
In reading Harmy’s FB I found links to these forums and Harmy’s threads and, being in a lull at work, for the next several days solid I read tons and tons (literally YEARS) of posts and through most of the main threads here… From a group of people coming together to get Lucas to release the OT on DVD … then to Poita finding the “deal of the century” on a film scanner in Korea… to TeamNegative1 starting their own scans… K650 recoloring the blu ray… and of course Harmy’s initial work… Mike Verta coming in and explaining his restoration project. From an “outsider looking in” this is a PASSIONATE group of people, and sometimes those passions have led to very heated and emotional discourse! Even I got involved in that when I tried to beg/debate Harmy to make a color change in Empire snow! 😃
What does all of that have to do with this post? I have no idea except perhaps I wanted to do something of my own for those that are itching to play with these releases on their own while we wait for “things to come together” with Poita/Dr Dre/Silver Screen Edition version 2.
There is thinking that recoloring the Silver Screen edition in one pass is POINTLESS, because the color correction has been done shot by shot. So if one or two scenes are “off” if you “fix that” the everything else will be destroyed by that fix. But the more I looked through the SSE the more I felt like there was a consistant feel to it… and that feeling is… it’s “Cold”.
Inspired by Dr. Dre’s recoloration at reel 1 I felt like that is VERY close to definite (discussion of lightbulbs aside, LOL) and so I decided to do an expirement and try and make a tattooine scene from SSE “match” his recoloration, and then just see what it does to the rest of the film. To my surprise the changes positively impact at least 80% of the film, and perhaps only a small number of shots “look wrong” now, at least IN MY OPINION! 😃
So using, aviDemux 2.6… a very small and simple video re-encoding utility that has a pretty nice array of filters and options. I set the output BACK to mkv (because it defaults to AVI) and then changed the video output to Mpeg4 AVC… then I added the color filter, found my scene and made these changes:
You’ll notice that the results on the right are quite a bit “too green”… I’m not sure why but it seems the video encoded by avidemux tends to show up “more red” when viewed in VLC media player.
Anyway, after a couple of hours of reencoding, I got these shots comparisons: (SSE on top, reecocode bottom)
After reviewing these… I think the colors are still too saturated and so I’ll go back and lower that down some more… and that’s the beauty of this one! I just wanted to offer settings as a starting point and if you want to desaturate it or change the brightness you can change it to your hearts content. 😃 Good luck and have fun!
