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The Empire Strikes Back "1980 Theatrical version" Reconstruction - Adywan (Released) — Page 21

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Did adywan do any star field recovery for this?  One of the most annoying things about the 2004 versions aside from the blue cast is the way the stars are so frequently dull and nearly invisible in many shots.  Also, have muted engine glows been restored to their proper brightness?

This would be a fantastic project even without such fixes, but I'm curious about them, because they would make it even better if so.  I always liked the way the stars in the originals were so bright . . .

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The starfields look fantastic in this version, so I assume Ady did do some starfield recovery.

I'm not sure about the engine glows, but they seemed fine to me.  Then again, I haven't watched the 2004 versions in six years, so I don't really remember how bad they were.

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Everything in this looks the way it should, short of all the special fixes he's doing for ESB:R.  Think of it as "ESB:R Lite".

My outlook on life - we’re all on the Hindenburg anyway…no point fighting over the window seat.

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This sounds great.  I’d love to see it.  I don’t know where to find it.

EDIT: Found it! :-)

 

Time is running out for the Rebels. Antilles upcourt to Skywalker. He’s being paced by Darth Va— the bone-jarring pick by Solo! He came out of nowhere! Skywalker’s open from way outside, he launches at the buzzer... Good! It’s good! The Rebels win on a sensational buzzer beater by Luke Skywalker! Let’s take another look at that last shot. He just does get it off in time. Wow, what a shot. That’s why they call him Luke Legend.

 

That may be the most exciting battle I have ever been privileged to broadcast. Certainly the most dramatic finish. We’ll get you an update on the Artoo Detoo injury situation in just a moment. Right now let’s go courtside where SuperShadow is waiting with Chewbacca.

 

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Aw, crap.

I found a .dlc and downloaded 42 .rar files.  Turns out they’re encrypted and I don’t know the password.  I don’t remember seeing anything about a password, and the site where I found the .dlc is down.

 

Time is running out for the Rebels. Antilles upcourt to Skywalker. He’s being paced by Darth Va— the bone-jarring pick by Solo! He came out of nowhere! Skywalker’s open from way outside, he launches at the buzzer... Good! It’s good! The Rebels win on a sensational buzzer beater by Luke Skywalker! Let’s take another look at that last shot. He just does get it off in time. Wow, what a shot. That’s why they call him Luke Legend.

 

That may be the most exciting battle I have ever been privileged to broadcast. Certainly the most dramatic finish. We’ll get you an update on the Artoo Detoo injury situation in just a moment. Right now let’s go courtside where SuperShadow is waiting with Chewbacca.

 

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THANK YOU!

 

Time is running out for the Rebels. Antilles upcourt to Skywalker. He’s being paced by Darth Va— the bone-jarring pick by Solo! He came out of nowhere! Skywalker’s open from way outside, he launches at the buzzer... Good! It’s good! The Rebels win on a sensational buzzer beater by Luke Skywalker! Let’s take another look at that last shot. He just does get it off in time. Wow, what a shot. That’s why they call him Luke Legend.

 

That may be the most exciting battle I have ever been privileged to broadcast. Certainly the most dramatic finish. We’ll get you an update on the Artoo Detoo injury situation in just a moment. Right now let’s go courtside where SuperShadow is waiting with Chewbacca.

 

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Cap, could you PM me with where you got this?  I've been looking and can't find it - I converted the VIDEO_TS files to an MKV and put it on my hard drive, but I dropped my hard drive earlier today and lost all my files.  Therefore, I need it again.

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Please, sign me up as well. Couldn`t find it !

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In response to the last few posts, there are/were several ways to obtain a copy of this disc:

Usenet - it was originally posted to alt.binaries.starwars, but over 200 days ago so you will need to have a provider with good retention. Try searching for ESB THEATRICAL on binsearch. There was also an optional audio fix & instructions posted.

Rapidshare - links were available on tehparadox, which was unavailable for a time but I think is now back up. Most recommend you use a piece of software called jdownloader in conjunction with the links. I think the audio fix was already applied to the one uploaded here.

Torrent - there was a torrent at demonoid, but, a) some files had been altered and did not exactly match what Ady posted, and b) it's probably no longer seeded. Not recommended.

--

I finally managed to check this out a few weeks ago. It really is excellent work. Bearing in mind I have never seen the SE, I didn't notice any distracting changes and it felt like I was finally watching a good quality transfer of the 1980 film.

Almost perfect, but if anyone wanted to take a shot at their own theatrical reconstruction there are some improvements that could be made. There were occasional choices in colouring that made faces and skin look waxy and artifical, and some crushed black levels look photographically anomalous. I suppose this was a limitation in the source.

The Hoth scenes were originally very grainy, so I'm not used to seeing them so clean. And some of the cloud city backgrounds had very slight aliasing.

And if I wanted to be really picky about 1980's authenticity, I could mention the URL for thx.com that appears at the end of the credits...

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Moth3r said:  And if I wanted to be really picky about 1980's authenticity, I could mention the URL for thx.com that appears at the end of the credits...

Now, even by ot.com standards, that's picky! :-D  I had similar thoughts about some of the faces, but assumed that some of the look was a byproduct of the color correction.  I'm fairly certain that the black crush is in the source.

I cannot believe that Moth3r has never seen the Special Editions.

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Ha, I wish I could have never seen the SE's.  To think I actually preferred them before the 2004 versions were released!  *head-desk*

 

Hey, thanks to everybody who PM'd me for how to find this.  I'm going to be getting an external hard drive soon, and once it gets here I'll be able to check this out.  Sounds like there are a few minor flaws, but overall it's probably the best version of Empire out there as of yet.  :)

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The SEs aren't really that bad. The 90's George version of ESB still works.

It definitely is the best Empire out. Be sure and crank the sound.

VADER!? WHERE THE HELL IS MY MOCHA LATTE? -Palpy on a very bad day.
“George didn’t think there was any future in dead Han toys.”-Harrison Ford
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Moth3r said:

Almost perfect, but if anyone wanted to take a shot at their own theatrical reconstruction there are some improvements that could be made. There were occasional choices in colouring that made faces and skin look waxy and artifical, and some crushed black levels look photographically anomalous. I suppose this was a limitation in the source.

yeh, the skin tone & crushed blacks  thing is a problem with the 2004 transfer. sometimes the skintones don't have any highlights and are all one shade so it was impossible to restore these without rotoscoping sections to add new highlights which would have taken forever.

ANH:REVISITED
ESB:REVISITED

DONATIONS TOWARDS MATERIALS FOR THE REVISITED SAGA

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This version is really wonderful to look at.  Thanks, Adywan!

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I was finally able to get this all downloaded.  The Mac jdownloader program liked to crash, so I had to get each piece individually, but it now resides on my new Firewire hard drive.  :)

Haven't yet had time to actually watch the movie, but I flipped through it last night on the computer to get a general idea.  On the whole, it's pretty fantastic.  The picture is clean and detailed and the colour for the most part seems very close to the original.  Seeing such a good image without the hideous blue cast is rather wonderful, and most of the original shots that were put back in blend well with the rest of the movie--they are at times noticeably softer but not horribly so, and I'm very impressed that it came together so well.

It does seem to me that the removal of the blue cast was actually too aggressive at times--shots that should legimately have blue in them are now sometimes a flat sort of grey (such as the appearance of the Executor, as evidenced by 70mm film scans).  The sabres in the cave scene didn't seem to have been corrected, because they still look washed out and dull as they do in the 2004 version, but they did look rather better elsewhere.  As Moth3r pointed out, crushed blacks and skin tones were sometimes problematic, and there's a sort of slight 'fake digital' look to it sometimes, but that's just a limitation of the source material.

I've only listened on my headphones so far, not the full 5.1, but mostly the sound seemed pretty good.  The majority of it is the '97 SE mix, so there are various dialogue differences from the familiar 35mm version (how many of them appeared in the 70mm is anyone's guess).  Some parts of the movie use the 1993 mix, but this was not always done consistently: most--but not all--of the music edits, and a few of the lines, in addition to the obvious places where the edit differs from the SE.  Occasionally the transitions between the sources weren't always seamless and had audible jump cuts, though admittedly this was rare.

What I can't figure out is why adywan decided to use the surround channels from the 2004 mix combined with the front channels from the 1997 version.  I won't fully know what that sounds like until I've had a chance to play it in 5.1, but while usually they are similar, occasionally this results in a bizarre effect when they don't match up.  Most clearly this can be found when Luke observes the probe droid meteor landing on Hoth: the dvd version added a rolling echo that moves from front to back to bolster the impact, but in this mix only the rear half of the sound is heard (in all pre-2004 versions, this was not there at all).

Most of these things come down to individual preference and nitpicking, though.  He has done an incredible job with this, and I'm very grateful to him for making this version.  Here's hoping to see a theatrical version of Star Wars from him sometime in the future.  ;)

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Yeah, I can't remember how aggressive Ady's version dialed out the blue, but I remember it being fairly white, though not totally, mind you. It seems most people try to base the "theatrical colours" on the GOUT, which is the worst thing you could do because those damn transfers are almost black and white. I think the 1995 Faces set had pretty accurate colour levels from my memory, Hoth looked blue a lot of the time as it should, but it was only in some scenes and some shots and only to certain degree. You can recreate the original colouring by taking the GOUT and jacking the saturation in your PC player or television monitor 3/4 of way to its maximum levels, and when you do this you see skintones come back, colours are vibrant again, and Hoth is very distinctively blue a lot of the time. The Luke-Vader abyss/platform duel is pretty blue too. Dagobah has a lot of blue in it. It's part of the cinematography, it's a cold looking movie and it suits the subject matter I think.

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The colour for the theatrical & '97 AVCHD was never fully completed. For Revisited, ESB has gone through a few more colour passes since i did this to restore the blue, without tinting the whole picture.  The theatrical reconstruction was a last minute decision and i knocked it up in 2 weeks so it would be out for the 30th anniversary.

ANH:REVISITED
ESB:REVISITED

DONATIONS TOWARDS MATERIALS FOR THE REVISITED SAGA

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Can anyone PM me a link to the .dlc for this release? I've been searching for it but I'm having no luck at all finding it.

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Aaaaand I'm downloading. Much obliged Ady, you're the very best!

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Ady, absolutely beautiful. Thank you very much for doing this!