Star Wars Custom Blu Ray Saga Set (a WIP) — Page 16

Colson said:

Mjvmovieman said:

Darth Lucas said:

Harmy’s 2.5 for Empire and Jedi.

Are you using SW Despecialized 2.5 for Episode IV?

He’s using 2.7

Yep.

Just finished rendering v1.5 of my 81 crawl recreation. I was going to just use my prior version, but the shakiness of the crawl was bothering me. I could’ve let it go, but it would have stood out to me like a sore thumb every time I watched it, so I went back and using Harmy’s Respecialized, isolated the 97 crawl from its background and popped it in against the 81 starfield. Everything else is the same from v1.

Currently uploading to google drive, which should take about an hour. I will post a link here when it is up so you can either preview it to see the new crawl, or download it to use in any projects you may possibly want an 81 crawl for.

The crawl itself is the 97 crawl, but the 97 crawl is exactly the same as the 81 crawl, down to the speed (I watched one right on top of the other to be sure). The receding star wars logo is much faster in 97, which is why I only used the crawl text from 97, and recreated the 81 motion of the star wars logo by cutting it out of an early frame and keyframing it to match the path and speed of the 81 logo.

I’ll take a look at that crawl, but if you placed the 81 crawl over the SSE starfield, then it isn’t an accurate representation of the 81 crawl or flyover, because the 81 version used a different starfield, from Empire.

Williarob said:

If you took the crawl from the '97 version then isn’t that the '97 Crawl (where the Star Wars Logo races quickly away instead of slowly as it did in '77 and '81)?

I recently restored the actual '81 Crawl from an Eastman 35mm Print for use in v1.5 (This is the same one that was distributed with the SSE, but which at that time still had almost no stars. The Fox Logo, Long Time Ago, Pan Down and Flyover are all SSE, but the Star Wars logo and complete Crawl are taken directly from the Eastman print, stabilized and placed on top of the SSE star field…

https://we.tl/pqX2WuCgSh

If you need a version with less compression let me know.

That composition is quite nice, and the 1981 text is in great shape, and stable now. But as DL says, the issue is the starfield presumably. I wonder if you can grab the starfield from your own ESB scans somehow, if not from the actual 1981 intro.

Interestingly, I think the version you’ve created is most similar to the 1997 edition (1981 crawl text and speed with 1977 starfield). 😃

Yeah I just took a look. It’s very nicely done, but unfortunately just the wrong starfield haha. If you could find a good source for the 81 starfield, then it could be something really special. Pulling it from Empire is really difficult (that’s what I had to do) because you have to pull bits and pieces from various parts of the movie.

Looking for patterns in stars for hours on end can get pretty maddening. At the end of the day there was still one small group of stars I couldn’t find in empire, so I had to paint those in myself using a laserdisc transfer for reference.

Williarob said:

Interesting, I did not know that. I stand corrected.

However, this being the case, I hope you won’t mind if I use your '81 Crawl for SSE version 1.5?

Maybe you could use his starfield with your everything else?

I don’t mind at all. It’s hardly 100% accurate, but I’d say it’s about 95% so. 720p and totally frankensteined together if that doesn’t bother you.

towne32 said:

Williarob said:

Interesting, I did not know that. I stand corrected.

However, this being the case, I hope you won’t mind if I use your '81 Crawl for SSE version 1.5?

Maybe you could use his starfield with your everything else?

I wouldn’t mind this either.

What you’ve got to do is find a source (like a laserdisc or something) that has the 81 crawl/pandown and look for star patterns. From my hours of searching through empire, there is no one shot that has the entirety of the starfield present in the crawl. It became very clear to me that they just had one giant starfield that they used for the whole movie and just filmed different parts of it at different distances for every shot. So you kind of have to go through the film looking for matching star patterns and then stitch together various parts to create the starfield present in the 81 crawl for SW.

Fortunately a huge chunk of it is right at the beginning. The starfield behind the crawl in Empire is exactly the same as that in 81 SW, but shifted a bit to the right.

I can provide you with the entire starfield I stitched together in Photoshop to make things easier if you’d like, as laserdiscs are a pain in the rear to try and match to. PM me.

Here it is. Finally uploaded.

1981 Crawl v1.5

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B2bJjDvnfW0YeWYtbExFaW5FbTg/view?usp=sharing

Also worth keeping in mind that yotsuya has built the 1981 starfield himself as well. So he might be worth asking for advice and materials.

Darth Lucas said:

Here it is. Finally uploaded.

1981 Crawl v1.5

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B2bJjDvnfW0YeWYtbExFaW5FbTg/view?usp=sharing

Well, you’ve done a great job with the logo and crawl. Very, very nice. However, I would say there are a few problems with the interface of the bottom and top parts of the starfield that need addressing. You may need to crank up your brightness to see it all.

The stars on the bottom half seem much larger, brighter, and spaced out. That might be correct, though. I’m not sure and it’s not a huge deal.

More importantly, the seam between the top and bottom has what seems to be a vertically compressed strip of stars. edit: I think I’m describing this wrong and it’s the same difference between top and bottom sticking out here.

Most importantly, there’s a box on the left right with very bright ‘blacks’ and artifacts.

To the right of the moon, there’s a crescent shape of grey junk. Is that supposed to be there?

The difference between some of the sections of stars is just due to me pulling from different parts of empire. I got them to match as best as I can. They were much worse. I can attest that the positions of the stars are correct though, so them being more “spaced out” is a mere coincidence.

I’m not seeing this box with brighter blacks, mostly because I’m not sure where I’m supposed to be looking, but I’ll definitely fix that if you can let me know where you’re seeing it.

Also not seeing this crescent shaped grey thing, although I’ve been staring at this shot for a long time. I’ll get some distance and come back to look at it again.

Oh. I see the bright box now. I will fix that.

Behold, the ms paint http://i.imgur.com/yNIBAJS.png

Edit: well, I can barely see the cresent thing now. But it was clear in the google preview.

edit: oops

Ah ok I see what you’re talking about. I’m not sure about that crescent shape. I’ll clean it up just to be safe.

towne32 said:

Behold, the ms paint http://i.imgur.com/yNIBAJS.png

Edit: well, I can barely see the cresent thing now. But it was clear in the google preview.

The preview’s compression might have added to the visibility of those mistakes. I’m fixing them regardless, but did you download the file and if so is it any less visible to you? I’m not at my computer right now to check for myself.

Ok, I went into the starfield file and fixed both of those issues. I also took another crack at unifying the starfield a little more so the top and bottom don’t look quite so different. It’s still not quite seamless, but I think I minimized it so it’s not as noticeable and jarring. Thankfully none of these issues had anything to do with after effects, so dynamic link just updates the starfield and I’m ready to render the fixes.

Funny, what I’m lacking to finish mine is a stable image. I’m downloading both your versions to see if either of them will work. The starfield is not simple. It is quite complex and to recreate it properly you have to match it to a video of the original 1981 crawl. I’m using my copy of the TR47 archive that I’ve had for many years. It has many flaws, but it is at 24fps, not 30 as many LD preservations are, and the stars are clearly visible at the key points (when the crawl vanishes and just before the blockade runner appears.

Before and after those key points, the starfield doesn’t moves and it is pretty simple. Between, those two spots the starfiled stretches as it moves and the moons are not fixed against the starfield. There is a star right next to the smaller moon and you can actually see their relative positions change.

The one hurdle I have not even gotten to (because I don’t have a stable flyover) is the blue engine glow that covers the screen. I had some thoughts on that, but haven’t exactly figured out the mechanics of how to create a matt so the stars don’t bleed through the star destroyer, but the blue covers both. I was thinking of duplicating the star destroyer layer and use the brighten layer to make the starts shine through the blue glow and they a matted star destroyer over the top.

I’m much better editing single images than moving images. I have several tools that let me pull out the stars on the LD and make them look more like the stars from the SSE and BR versions. I haven’t completed my final rendering of the stars. I found that the photography of the TESB starfield and the 81 crawl starfield are very different so I was going to go through and use both to create something. I plan on using the LD starfield as is to start with, reduce and sharpen the stars, then copy over the TESB stars where the LD stars don’t look right (there are several places where the low LD resolution makes clumps).

My goal is to have a version of the 81 crawl that fits with the GOUT or the SSE so my goal was a modest 720p version. But considering the quality of the 35mm scans, that should work if rendered at 1080p.