Info: Preserving "Soviet" Original Trilogy

Hey guys, so recently a fine lad uploaded something really awesome to the 'Spleen: two copies of the 1990 Russian theatrical version of Star Wars Episode IV. It’s a legit dub of the film, not one of those one man lector narrations. I haven’t had a chance to look at these all the way through, and I don’t know Star Wars shot for shot; just wanted to make that clear before I proceed.

Both are pretty horrible transfers - one pan and scan and the other widescreen - with runtimes much shorter than the original film, even accounting for PAL speedup on one of the copies (the other is a PAL transfer at proper film speed). I think the runtime difference might have to do with how splicy the film sources are, but part of me is really, really hoping it includes censors or edits made by the Soviets.

No matter the case, both copies contain content that’s spliced out of the other, and the picture quality on both is awful, so I figured it’d be a great idea to create a composite of the dub audio, sync it up to the latest Despecialized edition, and recreate the Russian ending credits (the crawl is just the English 1981 variant and the Greedo subtitles are in English) and any possible edits/censorship.

I’ve already done some early restoration work on the ending credits. These credits are very simple - just Russian text in white that fades in and out on top of a possibly unique star field. Here is the first credit from the pan and scan copy (the P&S camera actually zooms out after this credit to present a larger amount of the frame):

http://i.imgur.com/I4EZl8i.png

This is the same credit from the widescreen copy:

http://i.imgur.com/xsyDhic.png

And this is that credit as restored by me:

http://i.imgur.com/uKa3ckR.png

I stabilized and stacked six odd and six even fields from the first credit on the P&S copy, then stabilized and stacked six odds and evens of textless, fuller background from the same source, and then laid the restored credit onto the restored background frame. I darkened the result slightly to get rid of the halos, then I uprezzed it by a factor of two at http://waifu2x.udp.jp/.

Does anyone know a good “film wobble” or “gate weave” plugin for FCP 7? Because that would be the icing on the cake for these restored ending titles.

Anyway, I’ll use this thread to discuss the progression of my Soviet ANH project, but anyone else can use it to discuss upgrades of any other versions of these films from behind the Iron Curtain.

Not sure if you’re aware, but my release of Despecialized 2.7 included two Russian dubs that I got from Catbus (and one Ukranian one) that were not present in 2.5. One of the Russian ones is from the 80s (although perhaps that was speculation if the first showing really was this 90s version?), the other is recut from the SE. That’s all I know about them. I don’t know if it’s the same as these new uploads.

The credits were absolutely not created in SD, they’re definitely part of both film sources. As I said earlier, the pan and scan camera zooms out during the P&S credits, and I had to stabilize them to get rid of gate weave so I could stack a few of the frames and get slightly better quality. The P&S credits are also fairly splicy and dirty.

Now that’s really interesting, that the Soviet version in fact had translated end credits. Along with the Soviet dub from CatBus this could be quite a nice restoration project. 😃

By the way, the amount of different fonts used for Soviet (and dubbed foreign films) was quite limited. I am pretty sure to have seen this very font in many films already. There might be a TrueType version of it as well. I can also ask around in font identification communities.