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Somewhere, George Lucas is having a cold sweat and he doesn’t know why…
Ever wanted to experience the Star Wars Holiday Special like never before? Now’s your chance. Relive the magic of Life Day, awkward musical numbers, and Wookiees grunting through domestic drama, but in eye-popping 3D! Yes, you can now watch Chewbacca’s dad get way too into Wookiee VR porn… in actual VR. You’re welcome? And if that doesn’t do it for you, Bea Arthur’s here to pour you a drink and sing you through the shame. Put on your 3D glasses, lower your standards, and prepare for the most immersive bad decision of your life! Introducing the first ever release in the Project ThreeDee series: ThreeDee Seventy-Eight!
What is this? What is Project ThreeDee?
This release is part of a larger project I’ve been working on: a full 2D-to-3D conversion of the Star Wars prequel and original trilogies, using the 4K UHD Blu-rays as source material. Back in the early 2010s, George Lucas had begun converting the saga to 3D, with The Phantom Menace receiving a theatrical release, and Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith being shown privately at Celebration. But after Disney acquired Lucasfilm, the rest of the planned conversions were quietly shelved. With little sign that they’ll ever resurface—at least not in any official, home-released form—I’ve decided to pick up where Lucas left off.
The Holiday Special isn’t part of that six-film run, of course, but it’s a perfect testbed. The full conversions will take a long time to process, so I wanted to release something smaller first, to get feedback, refine my workflow, and let people enjoy the weirdness of this format in all its retro-futuristic glory. If you’ve ever wanted to experience this masterpiece in 3D… well, you might be beyond help. But you’re also exactly the audience I’m looking for!
Where to download?
For more info on where to download, please either PM me or search the other forum for my topic with the same title.
How was it done?
I first used MakeMKV to losslessly extract the Holiday Special from the EditDroid DVD. With a custom VapourSynth script and FFmpeg, I deinterlaced the special to 60 frames per second—well, actually 60,000 frames per 1,001 seconds—using the QTGMC algorithm. From there, I used the iris3 model from Topaz Video AI to denoise/dehalo the deinterlaced footage, but without upscaling. Finally, the Any_V2_L model in iw3 was used for the 2D-to-3D conversion, which also handled the final encode to H265.
Why was it done this way?
Lossless Intermediate Encoding
Throughout the process, I wanted to ensure there wouldn’t be further degredation to the Holiday Special; although the EditDroid release is said to be the cleanest, the quality is far from great. So up until the very last stage of the project, I used lossless encoding to prevent generational loss. This did require a lot of storage space, but I’m quite pleased with the results. The final H265 encode was with CRF 4 and on the “slow” preset, resulting in a 20GB file, which is reasonable for both doubling the framerate as well as doubling the horizontal resolution (original EditDroid rip: 5.86GB).
VapourSynth + FFmpeg + QTGMC Deinterlacing
In my testing, QTGMC was able to preserve fine details more accurately than any other algorithm I tried. nnedi3 was a close second, but would ocassionally miss some of the finest details. bwdif/yadif were nowhere close, producing combing and aliasing artifacts. I was able to fine tune the parameters of QTGMC to get a clean result with a custom VapourSynth script and take advantage of parallel CPU+GPU processing thanks to FFmpeg.
Topaz Video AI + iris3 Denoising/Dehaloing
Unfortunately, even with the best possible settings for deinterlacing, the result is still poor. Lots of compression artifacts, noise, ringing, and many more issues plague the EditDroid release. While I am not yet skilled enough to fix this myself, Topaz Video AI’s iris3 model did a wonderful job (for the most part) removing artifacts from the footage without removing fine detail. It isn’t perfect by any means, but I’m quite happy with it at this stage. It was also able to correct some of the waviness that can be seen on some straight lines in some scenes.
No Upscaling
While Topaz is typically used for upscaling, I don’t feel it provides much value here. For one, the EditDroid release has a vertical resolution of 480 pixels, which doesn’t integer scale well to the most common television resolutions: 720p (1.5x resolution), 1080p (2.25x resolution), or 4K (4.5x resolution). With integer scaling, pixels are crisp, and proportions are preserved; non-integer scaling, however, results in blurriness and incorrect proportions. Think of it this way: how do you display half a pixel?
Another problem with upscaling is it gives Topaz more room to mess things up. AI artificially “creates” detail, which can sometimes look good, but mostly, tends to look awful. It’s usually not too noticeable from far away, but up close, it can add smudges, “brush stroke”-like patterns, or other artifacts. These “hallucinations” I want to avoid as much as possible.
Finally, I’m sure a 20GB file is already gonna be too much for some of you. I get it! But now imagine if I simply doubled the resolution. That would be quadruple the file size (2x width, 2x height). Would anyone want an 80GB file that isn’t even 1080p? All the while, not adding any real value in terms of detailing? Sure, I could use a higher CRF value on the final encode, but I would much rather release it in 480p with a lower CRF and more detail preserved than a larger resolution with less detail preserved.
iw3 + Any_V2_L
iw3 is free and open source, unlike many other 2D-to-3D conversion tools. In my testing, it mostly gets the depth shockingly correct (with a few minor stray hairs every now and then being out of place). I haven’t tested many other tools, but I did try out the free demo of Owl3D and can’t say I would shell out money for it when iw3 exists (I wouldn’t even shell out money for it if iw3 didn’t exist, to be honest). The Any_V2_L model appears to have been trained well, and there are only a few minor issues with depth that I’ve so far noticed and, believe me, I’m checking every nook and cranny of this creation (you wouldn’t believe how frightening it is to look a Wookiee in the mouth in 3D)!
What’s next?
I’d love to get some feedback on ThreeDee Seventy-Eight before proceeding with the first six Star Wars films. On my i7-5930k (yes, a CPU from 2014), this process took, from start to finish, about four days. Granted, I wouldn’t have to do any cleanups, but rendering them in 4K UHD (and possibly doing both HDR and SDR if iw3 can handle HDR) will take a considerable amount of time, space, and if my CPU blows up, money.
In the mean time, I do have several improvements I’d love to make to the Holiday Special/ThreeDee Seventy-Eight. First, I’d like to figure out a way to eliminate Topaz Video AI. If I can figure out how to denoise, dehalo, and correct the wobbles of the video with other tools, that would eliminate the need of AI, which would result in a more accurate presentation without the hallucinations. Second, I’d love to learn the process of colour correction; I have yet to see any version of the Holiday Special that isn’t either washed out or way oversaturated. I’d ideally love to replicate the colours as shown in the previews of That Guy With No Name’s 4K77 work in progress restoration project—really great work! Third, figure out how to improve clarity of the video without reintroducing haloing and other artifacts from oversharpening. It’ll take a long while, but I think a higher fidelity release of the Holiday Special is possible with the EditDroid release as the base (at least until we can convince Carrie Fisher’s estate to sell her personal copy).
The ThreeDee will be with you, always…
This project isn’t just about converting old sci-fi oddities to 3D; it’s about honouring a strange, curious corner of Star Wars history that was nearly forgotten, then rediscovered, then memed into oblivion. It’s about continuing the weird path George Lucas started down, even if it ends with a coked-out princess and a space parody of Julia Child.
If you’re still reading this, you’re probably either a fellow 3D enthusiast, a die-hard Star Wars fan, or just someone who enjoys watching people pour hundreds of hours into things no one asked for. Either way, I salute you! Thanks for checking out ThreeDee Seventy-Eight. May your eyes survive the experience, and may the ThreeDee be with you, always!