Modernization Process - Tattooine
One of the biggest challenges in modernizing this edit of A New Hope was Tatooine:
alongside the outdated center channel audio, its sun-baked exteriors really highlight the original’s age. The cameras of 1977 simply struggled with such harsh light: you’d see blurred faces, out-of-focus areas, shadows that vanished and reappeared, overly pink skin tones, and droids glowing with lens flare as the camera panned past. Each of these issues has now been carefully corrected.
Next came the color grade. Today’s films—think Denis Villeneuve’s Dune—carry a refined, sun-washed palette that feels like a modern Tatooine, so I used that as my visual benchmark. But one single grade can’t work across every scene in a forty-plus-year-old movie, so each sequence was masked and treated individually: varying grain levels from my master blueprint were applied, then backgrounds and faces that remained soft or low-res were upscaled, remasked, and graded again to match the crispness of the rest of the film. It’s a complex, iterative process—but the result is spectacular.
Seeing A New Hope in this updated form is genuinely thrilling. The film retains all the magic of the original, but with a level of clarity and polish that feels right at home on a modern big screen. Now, of course, 720p with a comparison line inbetween doesn’t give the crispness or scale of the work that has been done, but it does give the main impression:
Video Preview:
https://streamable.com/bmfy4n
Now, I’m not finished - there is still more work to be done on the center channel (dialogue), I still want to compress the music, and there are still a couple of overly exposed droid reflections in some background areas. But it’s nearly there.
Luke Twin Suns
In one of Star Wars’s key scenes, the twinsuns scene, Luke’s face is unfocused and blurry - in almost every single version out there. Not anymore.
https://streamable.com/au48s4
