The Empire Strikes Back "1980 Theatrical version" Reconstruction - Adywan (Released) — Page 14

Wonderful work, Ady! I watched this last night and it was so enjoyable to see the theatrical cut in such high quality. You sound critical of your re-cut of the Wampa cave scene but, to me, it looked flawless! I don't have a fine eye like some others here, so maybe I'm missing slight inconsistencies, but for me this is better than I could have ever imagined possible for a fan edit reconstruction - really well done!

If you do decide to do a DL version with a couple of slight fixes, there were a couple of audio drop-outs I noticed which you might be able to fix if you wished. The first is about 7 seconds after Vader delivers the line "Join me and together we can rule the galaxy as father and son", where you can hear a slight glitch in the music. The second I noticed was just after Luke falls onto the weather vane; as the piece of trash falls below him towards the clouds there is a very slight audio drop-out of the music again. I don't have the finest eye, but I do have a fine ear ;) I checked both of the mixes you uploaded, the v1 and the v2 with the falcon portal sfx removed and these drop-outs appear in both mixes. They're nothing major but, like I say, if you want to smooth out any other slight errors in the future, I thought I'd bring these to your attention.

Many thanks again, Ady. This is my favourite version of ESB until ESB:R comes out. Good luck with the continuation of the Revisited edit!

I'm pretty sure that's the way it was until 1997.

Check out this article I posted featuring the pre-SE ESB on a grain elevator: http://originaltrilogy.com/forum/topic.cfm/ESB-on-a-grain-elevator-dark-years-stories/topic/11570/

Nicholas J. Michalak said:

I've been living with these SEs so long, I don't know any different.

-NJM

Be careful.  That kind of attitude among fans is what Lucas is praying for right now.

I wanted to say thank you for this! You have created a damn impressive hybrid here, very professionally done especially the inserted matte paintings. It's sad you didn't have better material to work from as the only good thing about the 2004 footage is the resolution, you've done good improvements to it though. It must've been a hell to color-correct, the scenes that looks best to my eyes are the Dagobah scenes, just beautiful! 

I'm sure you already know this and you've also said yourself it wasn't a 100% reconstruction but I just wanted to point these small things out if you consider to improve it sometime.

Still left in...

Also...which movie is the old Fox logo taken from? It looks great.

Anyway, thanks for a wonderful reconstruction!

msycamore said:

Still left in...

doubleofive said:

 

EDIT: checked the official pictures, never noticed the cloud change. Sorry.

 

Hey, where'd you get these pics, I remember seeing this comparison on starwars.com back in 2006 and I keep looking for it but can't find it anywhere...

Oh, and wow, does the original look way more scary...

I found them in a zip file from someone here, I've been debating on uploading them somewhere.

zombie84 said:

Actually, the issue I have more than anything is the color correction. Well, the image characteristics, anyway. The colors are fantastic. Hoth is white, but I'm glad to see that there is some blue in there, because there should be a tiny bit of blue in some of the shadows in certain scenes as far as I can tell, same with some of the Bespin duel. The issue really is one of contrast. The image is way too punchy. It looks like its the 2004 DI with balanced colors but nothing else. Usually it looks quite nice and makes the image seem sharper, but the black levels gobble up detail, the contrast is about 10-20% higher than it should be, and certain scenes have strange balances, for instance Dagobah seems to be a lot brighter (and blue/green-er, compared with the GOUT, which I still hold as the most reliable color reference; strangely some scenes here looks LESS contrasty than the GOUT). I'm being extremely nitpicky here, of course--this transfer is so good that any complaints have to be! If there ever is a 2.0 version of this done, it would be nice to have the midrange a tad brighter in most scenes to reflect the original photography. ESB was always the most contrasty in its lighting, but it was never quite this extreme.

Yeh, this is a major problem with the 2004 transfer. For some reason they brightened up ESB way too much and in many shots completely destroyed details in the brighter areas. Same problem with the crushed blacks. Unfortunately there really isn't anything that can be done with these transfers to rectify this. trying to bring out detail in the darker areas just brings out more problems with very bad video noise in these areas, which is something that OCP's classic editions suffered with badly. The GOUT also isn't a very good indication of the true colouring, but is a lot closer than the crappy 2004 colours. The GOUT has a red shift, whereas the 2004 has a cyan.

msycamore said:

 

I'm sure you already know this and you've also said yourself it wasn't a 100% reconstruction but I just wanted to point these small things out if you consider to improve it sometime.

Also...which movie is the old Fox logo taken from? It looks great.

Anyway, thanks for a wonderful reconstruction!

This was always going to be more of a representation more than a restoration. I started this thing around May 5th and has just over 2 weeks to get this all the work done and  ready for the 30th anniversary, which really gave me no time at all. So some of the smaller changes and the fonts weren't one of the top priority when doing this. Some of the FX work took a lot longer than i had hoped which meant i had no time to do some of the smaller stuff, but i wasn't really too bothered about that to be honest.

The Fox logo was taken from Movealong's "the story of the Empire Strikes Back" DVD and i think he may have got this from the film Bus Stop, but i'm not 100% on that

http://picasaweb.google.com/doubleofive/StarWarsComOfficial2004ChangesESB

Uploaded the ESB Official Changes, with captions. For those curious on what Ady may or may not have changed back.

adywan said:

This was always going to be more of a representation more than a restoration. I started this thing around May 5th and has just over 2 weeks to get this all the work done and  ready for the 30th anniversary, which really gave me no time at all. So some of the smaller changes and the fonts weren't one of the top priority when doing this. Some of the FX work took a lot longer than i had hoped which meant i had no time to do some of the smaller stuff, but i wasn't really too bothered about that to be honest.

 Ok, I understand. Well, that makes the final result even more impressive!

doubleofive said:

http://picasaweb.google.com/doubleofive/StarWarsComOfficial2004ChangesESB

Uploaded the ESB Official Changes, with captions. For those curious on what Ady may or may not have changed back.

Awesome, thank you so much for that.

It seems like almost every single fx shot in ESB was digitally altered :-(

Reasons why I don't think we could recreate the theatrical version from the 2004 HD:

Elements from the 1977 background were isolated and retimed. The horizon line was dropped to accommodate the large CG ronto creature. Digi-matte buildings bulked up the skyline, and a ground-hugging speeder was "raised" a few feet.