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.