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Remastering the 1981 Episode IV Title/Crawl/Flyover (Released) — Page 2

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Hi Yotsuya. Cool project. The only thing I’d add is that the text edges look a bit aliased to me. (It might just be an artifact of the 720p preview video.) Is it possible to feather the edges of the text slightly? Keep up the great work. 😃

What can you get a Wookiee for (Life Day) Christmas when he already owns a comb?

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yotsuya said:

Thanks Poita.

I hate to mention it since you are so busy, but that is the top half of what we see. The frame right before the blockade runner shows up has the rest of the starfield as well as the moons and planet. Both are needed to properly render the starfield.

That image did help me get rid of some ghost stars and add in a few that weren’t in my other sources. So big thanks.

Yeah if you could find the time to get the bottom of the pan down also, it would be enormously helpful.

If not though I understand and I’m sure we could just stitch your top half together with our bottom halves.

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 (Edited)

I’ll see what I can do. My HDD shortage means to work on this I have to unload the THX files from the RAID to my one free drive, then load the SW Reel 1 sources (four of them) onto the RAID from their drives, it takes around 4-8 hours every time I interrupt one project for another.
The alternative is to work without a backup, but I lost so much last time that happened, that I am not willing to do that again, but it currently means backing up the files every time I need to work on them, and erasing the backup of the files I was working on previously. It is rather painful.

Just as an aside, I have viewed many Ep IV crawls, and the prints I have seen a have almost no stars in the Starfield, I think it was a compositing issue with the redo of the crawl. Audiences would have seen a fairly Star-free Star Wars at the time.

To recover the stars from these prints I am actually using Astronomy software (I was also an astronomer during my production days, both were work that rewards an inability to sleep) and it does a great job of digging the stars out of the noise from multiple prints and frames. It is time consuming, but effective

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 (Edited)

You are in luck, I hadn’t unloaded Reel1 yet to get back to THX.

Here is a quick extraction, the planet is probably a bit messed up by the stacking algorithm, but the stars are what you after, so I hope this is of use.
I won’t get back to this for months, so if it isn’t, then it will be a while till I can get to it again

Full size 16bpp TIFF 2422×4068 image is here:
http://tinyurl.com/zqy2hdm

I concentrated on the bottom half, so the top may have less stars than the previous image, but you could always comp the two together.

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poita said:

You are in luck, I hadn’t unloaded Reel1 yet to get back to THX.

Here is a quick extraction, the planet is probably a bit messed up by the stacking algorithm, but the stars are what you after, so I hope this is of use.
I won’t get back to this for months, so if it isn’t, then it will be a while till I can get to it again

Full size 16bpp TIFF 2422×4068 image is here:
http://tinyurl.com/zqy2hdm

Is the whole thing stretched out or is it just the planet and moon?

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 (Edited)

It is cinemascope, so it is twice the height, you can reduce by 50% to get it to the correct size. I didn’t want to do that and potentially lose stars.

Right click to view full size.

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I’ve always wondered whether the stars here are supposed to look bluish or pure white. The 1977 crawl, at least in Despecialized, has pure white stars but that may be due to Harmy’s manual color corrections.

she/her
mwah

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poita said:

It is cinemascope, so it is twice the height, you can reduce by 50% to get it to the correct size. I didn’t want to do that and potentially lose stars.

Right click to view full size.

Thanks for the clarification haha that’s what I suspected but I didn’t want to assume.

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Not many are pure white, they vary quite a bit.

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 (Edited)

Well, that changes things. That is awesome. I’ll have to really look at it later, but that will nicely replace my previous efforts to recreate it. But the two LD source I have do have more stars and have stars all the way through. I suspect it was an issue during duplication, not in the master.

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LDs and home re1eases have radically different exposure to the theatrical versions, you can see that in the explosions as well.

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Oh yes, I am quite aware of that. But my primary purpose for this remastering project is to replace the missing GOUT 81 crawl. Other than that one short segment, the ANH GOUT is an exact match to the Definitive Edition/Faces LD. But the less I have to do manually the better. Trying to overlay those LD scans over the 35mm film scans is fraught with errors. What you have provided probably would suffice on its own, but I would like to match anything I can detect from the LD’s to keep it as faithful as possible.

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 (Edited)

I love “making of” books and documentaries, so I wanted to share how I put the stars back in Star Wars, as some of you may find it useful or interesting:

http://thestarwarstrilogy.com/starwars/post/2016/07/07/Star-Wars-1981-Crawl-Restoration-Demo-part-1

Part 2 will be the pandown, which was relatively painless, part 3 will look at the Flyover, which as anyone who has attempted it will tell you is not easy at all, and part 4 will look at the Lucasfilm Ltd logo, Long Time ago title card and the Fox Logo, assuming I ever get around to editing the remaining hours of footage…

TheStarWarsTrilogy.com.
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I was on a roll with my BR color correction so I let this project sit idle. But it is a new year and I want to get this done first. I need to reorganize my file storage, but I got started on one piece of this already.

This time around I am going to tackle the most difficult part first. I’m going to use the 1977 crawl from the 35 mm scan and the SE crawl from the Blu-ray to align the elements of the flyover. Then I’m going to separate it as three layers: the two ships, the laser bolts, and the engine glow. I have three versions of the 81 crawl from SD sources that I’m going to match to to get the intensity of the stars and the relative position of the final elements. I’m going to have to scrub the elements of grain and then add it back in when I composite the layers together. I also need to recreate the final frame by pulling the star destroyer from the 35 mm scan and edit it to match the SD sources. Then I need to work on the starfield again and the moons and planets. My last version is okay, but I now have better sources to make it even more accurate. Plus I need to further tweak the layer composite during the pan down.

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I’d like to see some pictures of your BR color correction progress…especially of reel 1, if you wouldn’t mind posting. Reads like you definitely have a plan for your projects, yotsuya. Perhaps you can post your updated flyover, when completed? Is there a date that you want this to be finished by?

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The flyover I’d like to get finished right away. Hopefully by the end of the month, but I am horrible about meeting deadlines outside of work.

I’ve been contemplating if my work on the blu-ray is ready to be seen or not. I think I need to go over it again with fresh eyes. One reason I want to tackle this project right now.

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Today the remastering resumes in earnest. I have storage space again and I am collecting all my sources together. I have the 1977 35mm scan for reference and stabilization (and perhaps more), I have the SSE 1981 crawl/flyover scan, I have the 1982 PAL pan and scan (it has lots of stars so it will be a primary alignment tool), the LD DE (again for alignment, and some for coloring), and the Blu-ray (for stabilization, good source for planet and moon, and to aid in enhancing details), and a copy of the original matte painting of the planet and moons (for the correct matting).

Step one is to do a rough alignment of the Star Destroyer flyover in Sony Vegas. Then export the images and align them by hand in external graphics software. A lot of work, by my previous effort showed that due to the condition of the 81 flyover, this is the best way. If I can use a good stabilized scan of the 1977 flyover I may use that instead. My comparisons show that they are identical - they only changed the matte used to composite the effects, not the actual effects shot. That would simplify things greatly, but I’m not sure it is any higher quality. The blu-ray has too many differences other than to use for a reference.

Once I have a stable flyover, I’ll create the layers and mattes and then start putting it back together.

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So, the first lesson is that the 81 crawl is not missing a frame at the end. It is one frame off in every version I have. But, the 35 mm released with the SSE, had a duplicate frame in the middle. Really messes things up when you are trying to align things. Fortunately I caught it before I had really gotten started. I now have the first real alignment done - making sure the frames line up before I export the frames as png. All the laser bolts and white flash frames are now aligned so I can just mix the frames with matching numbers. I’m using the Blu-ray as the base layer and then I’ll line up the blockade runner and star destroyer on that, cross referencing with the 1977 35 mm flyover.

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I decided that the place to start was to use the 35mm scan as my base plate. I also found, thanks to althor1138 sharing it on spleen, that the 1985 Special Widescreen Edition has very good alignment with it and has a lot less crush to the blacks making alignment easier. Step two was to redo the planet plate. For that I overlayed several frames together to eliminate the grainyness. That lowered the detail so I used a scan of the original matte painting to up the detail while retaining the color from the scan. Then I used the image Poita created of the 35 mm starfield and started hunting for the matching starfiends in TESB. For that I used the 35 mm grindhouse to maintain a consistent image quality. I found that the upper left corner, a strip across the top, and a strip along the bottom right of the moon cannot be found in TESB. So I used one of the 81 crawl sources and I selected the correct size star from the ones I’d fond and pasted it in the correct location to fill in those two areas. In order to fix the placement of the TESB stars to match the various 1981 ANH stars, I had to manually warp the images - aligning star that were in both. Then I overlayed a desaturated copy of Poita’s starfield over the top.

I have the elements and a method for processing them for the ships in the flyover, but it is very time consuming so I haven’t made much progress yet. It looks like I will be using the 77 version and fixing it to match the 81. There are few changes due to using the same elements but slightly different mattes and compositing. None of the actual 81 flyover elements are good enough and the 97 flyover is far too different (the engines are aligned differently and the blue glow and engine lens flares are different).

Armed with the new starfield and planet/moons layers, I redid the background layer, matching it to the 81 35 mm scan (some key stars are visible). I had to align the 5 different versions of the 81 sequence that I have so I could properly align the planet layer to the stars. They move in relation to each other and to get the movement right is complex as they move in both x and y in relation to each other. I also aligned the title and crawl to the stars. That just leaves the flyover. I need 4 layers for that. I need a beauty pass of the two ships, I need a matte for the two ships, I need the lasers, and I need the engine glow. The LD captures may be my source of the engine glow simply because it doesn’t have much detail to speak of and because the planet is aligned differently and it might produce some artifacts to use the 77 sequence to source that.

If what I have in mind works, the beauty pass will just be the 77 flyover. The matte will ensure that I don’t capture the stray star and block out all the other stars, the planet, and the moons from the source. The lasers will be somewhat transparent to capture the effect of the stars shining through the dimmer sides of the effect. Same with the engine glow which will be the top layer. At the moment I still need to test how the layers will go back together before I proceed very much farther. No point in creating all the layers if I can’t reassemble it.