"Krieg der Sterne"-Trilogie: German 4K versions

I’m proud to present the first fully German 4K version of the Original “Krieg der Sterne”-Trilogie! All three releases come with the same audio tracks included in the German Despecialized Editions (huge thanks again to cvs and J.J._McQuade for their help on these back then!).

Over the recent years, with several 4K projects emerging, people kept asking me if I would consider doing similar work for those versions, and I’ve finally found time to work on them. I am using ohteedee’s D+77/D+80/OTD83 as my base, which I’ve picked because they are the cleanest and sharpest of the 4K-releases, so this is the image quality bar I needed to match. Should I ever do German versions of other releases (especially 4K77/80/83), I “just” need to dumb them down to match their respective image quality.

Now, for some of this stuff I was able to re-purpose the After Effects projects I’ve created for Despecialized (especially the KDS end credits and some of the subtitle timings), but under the hood all sources are brand new. I’ve re-created all three crawls from scratch once again, now in Blender, trying to keep the 35mm/70mm optical compositing look (and preserving the ZÜRUCK-typo). For the Greedo subtitles I FINALLY found the correct font (Granby, in case you’re wondering), which I still had to modify a lot to match all the weird substitutes used back in the day.

The MKVs are encoded to be UHD-BD compatible, so you can just use tsMuxeR to convert them into ISOs which can be burned on 50GB BD-Rs. At least on my PS5 they played without a hitch, including working chapter stops. Here’s an overview of the audio tracks included for each movie (as said, they are identical to the tracks included in my Despecialized Editions):

Krieg der Sterne:

TRACK 1) 1978 2.0 @ 384 kbps [German]
TRACK 2) 1993 SilverScreen LD 2.0 @ 384 kbps [German]
TRACK 3) 1995 THX LD 2.0 @ 384 kbps [German]
TRACK 4) 2011 Blu-ray 5.1 DTS-HD @ 768 kbps 24-bit [German]
TRACK 5) 1977 5.1 @ 640 kbps [English]
TRACK 6) 1977 1.0 @ 128 kbps [English]
TRACK 7) Isolated Score 2.0 @ 640 kbps

Das Imperium schlägt zurück:

TRACK 1) 1980 2.0 @ 384 kbps [German]
TRACK 2) 1993 SilverScreen LD 2.0 @ 384 kbps [German]
TRACK 3) 1995 THX LD 2.0 @ 384 kbps [German]
TRACK 4) 2011 Blu-ray 5.1 DTS-HD @ 768 kbps [German]
TRACK 5) 1980 5.1 DTS-HD @ 1536 kbps [English]
TRACK 6) 1980 16mm 1.0 DTS-HD @ 192 kbps [English]
TRACK 7) Isolated Score 2.0 @ 224 kbps

Die Rückkehr der Jedi-Ritter:

TRACK 1) 1983 2.0 @ 384 kbps [German]
TRACK 2) 1993 SilverScreen LD 2.0 @ 384 kbps [German]
TRACK 3) 1995 THX LD 2.0 @ 384 kbps [German]
TRACK 4) 2011 Blu-ray 5.1 DTS-HD @ 768 kbps [German]
TRACK 5) 1983 5.1 DTS-HD @ 1536 kbps [English]
TRACK 6) 1983 2.0 DTS-HD @ 640 kbps [English]
TRACK 7) Isolated Score 2.0 @ 224 kbps

Resilio-Downloads can be found on the TSWT.com forums, while you can also contact SnooPac on here for download links.

And here are a few screenshots (with the black bars cropped out):

Krieg der Sterne

Das Imperium schlägt zurück

Die Rückkehr der Jedi-Ritter

Hallihallo Laserschwert, great work, thank you very much for that 😃). One more question, maybe there will be something with more data rate, i.e. a version around 80 or 90GB for e.g. Doublelayer BR or as a file for playback.

Großartig! Wäre es eventuell möglich diese schönen Originalposter als jpeg oder png zu teilen? Online finde ich keine Versionen in dieser Qualität!

DVD-BOY said:

Ron78 said:

Hallihallo Laserschwert, great work, thank you very much for that 😃). One more question, maybe there will be something with more data rate, i.e. a version around 80 or 90GB for e.g. Doublelayer BR or as a file for playback.

A dual layered Blu-ray is a BD50 as mentioned in the OP, which is about 45-ish GB.

Non one does 100GB home discs like the studio because of very low compatibility between the recordable discs and set top players.

Also scope titles have a lot of black pixels making up the letterbox bars, so the number of active pixels means very high bitrates are not as needed as 1.78:1 films.

I wouldn’t imagine there are any quality issues, but of course let the OP know if you find anything.

I meant the 100gb disc sorry and it was mainly about the media player faction who have everything backed up on NAS anyway, like me.

@Laserschwert: Thank You for the Upgrade! Have you considered using the 70mm SE German Cinema Prints?

@Laserschwert
Thank you very much.
I’m really looking forward to the 4K Versions of the old SW Trilogy.

Hi,

i tried to burn these MKV onto disc. But while convert the MKV using tsMuxeR 2.6.12 into an ISO file, I get an error message and the muxing stopped at around 50%:

tsMuxeR finised with error code -2.
“Warning! HEVC codec is not standard for BD disks! Reading buffer overflow. Possible container streams are not syncronized. Please, verify stream fps.”

In the “Track Info” the HEVC Videostream is marked as “Profile: Main 10@5.1 Resolution 3840:2160p Frame rate not found”

Even if I activate the option “Change fps 24000/1001” the error message is the same.

What did i wrong?

Hey Laserschwert,

Huge thanks for your amazing work on the 4K Krieg der Sterne trilogy! The detail you’ve put in is incredible.

But noticed a small difference in the credits when comparing your version to the German 1993 LaserDisc. The timing and positioning aren’t exactly the same. Not sure if the 1993 LD matches the theatrical cut exactly, but since the 1990 Sat.1 broadcast has the same credits (and was likely based on the theatrical version), I assume it’s more accurate. Here’s the recording: 93 LD Credits.

Also, the Greedo subtitles look very similar to the 1990 broadcast but are positioned a bit differently.

On another note, in addition to the German 1980 Empire Strikes Back 35mm print, there’s also a German 1997 Return of the Jedi 35mm print now. Since it uses the same initial crawl as the original theatrical release, the print could be used for future projects instead of re-creating the crawl. The print was scanned by The Aluminum Falcon, and more info is here: forums.thestarwarstrilogy.com.

Just a few minor things, but thought they might be helpful for future projects like a German 4K**-Trilogy or Despecialized v3.0 translations.

Thanks again for all the great work!