Harmy said:
Yes, exactly, I really tried to make those colors better but artifacts started popping up. Plus, on the other hand, the GOUT is too discolored.
Aw well, figured as much. Thanks for your effort! Maybe someday, with Team -1's footage.
Just downloaded this, and wow. I had watched 1.0 and didn't think there was anything to improve upon, but whatever you've done has restored some extra "spark" to the movie. I just opened the file to take a peek, and I kept getting sucked in and just watching it, unable to turn it off. It finally "felt" right. Like I finally "felt" the movie in the same way that I used to. This is now THE way to view ESB. Thank you so much.
I was just wondering about one thing... Since you've done such an awesome job restoring the original color palettes, in v2.1, are you planning to restore the original, more kinda dusky bluish undertones in the Falcon's approach to Cloud City (as seen here)? I always loved those shots, and hated how the SE just drenched the whole frame in this cartoony super red. It altered the mood—the original just gives me this sliiiightly eerie feeling, but the SE palette feels warm and cozy. It's lost that edgy feeling of night encroaching, the contrast of warm AND cool.
The SE colors are so "crushed" to red that the original colors probably aren't recoverable from the Blu or HDTV footage, so maybe this isn't really a feasible request.
Omigodddd so I get the despecialized editions, gradually fall off posting here, and then come back a few months later thinking "I wonder if he's changed that one shot of the clouds?" Boy, has he, and more! It's a full-on ultimate edition with everything anyone could ever want! Harmy, you are amazing. Could I get a PM for the HD version pretty please? Thank you!
Damn! There goes my credibility, haha. But I will say that the one that's 4 frames off is definitely noticeable to me, and juuuust about at or under the threshold of what I would find irritating. I'm starting to feel driven crazy by out-of-sync audio on everything. It seems to be a problem of our digital era.
Harmy said:
And one more question: I'm not saying I don't believe you but how for the love of God did you determine the delay to be 175 ms? That's seems just impossible to me.
That's what I came up with by adjusting the desync compensation in VLC until it felt right. It's probably not perfect. Anyway, I've been a bit busy but I'll probably be able to look at the 2.0 mix and hairy hen's mix in the next couple days.
Thanks Harmy, downloading hairy_hen's mix now, I'll try it. It is possible that with your mix the problem happens at an edit point somewhere, but since it seems to drift at a pretty consistent rate from start to finish, I think an overall correction should fix it for the most part.
Hi Harmy, came here via hairy-hen's thread which you linked me to.
First clip has the audio lagging, second clip the audio is ahead, last one is in sync. :)
I used to do QA for DVDs, I'm VERY sensitive to things like this. It kind of sucks, actually. :p
Hey Harmy et al. I got the trilogy a while ago now and I just wanna reiterate that they're absolutely fantastic and clearly the product of a lot of care. I do wanna note, though... it's weird that I seem to be the only one who's noticed this, but the audio sync on ESB seems to drift slightly over the course of the movie, so that it starts out in sync but by the end (or rather, by the last on-screen spoken line I can use to judge—Lando's promise to Leia to get Han back, technically about 7-10 minutes from the end) it lags the picture by about 175 ms. I figure changing the tempo by about 0.002% to make the whole track 175 ms shorter should bring it close enough. I'm trying to do this, but trying to import the ac3 into Audacity or convert it to 6-channel WAV on the Mac is giving me a huge headache. I'll let you know if I have any success, but in the meantime does anyone else have the capability to do this?
Just skimmed through ESB. Looks even better than ANH! In ANH there were spots where I was noticing—I don't know what it's called, pixel shifting? itching? boiling? where the digital grain pattern kind of shifts and "pops," which I was guessing is attributable to the source quality of the original broadcast. I think this was mostly in early Tatooine scenes, but I wasn't really taking note of it. I can go back and look for it if you want. But anyway, I wasn't seeing that in my spot check of ESB. Very sharp and clear! The Reconstructed footage integrated decently well. I probably wouldn't have noticed many of them if I wasn't looking for it. In fact, I'm pretty sure there are some edits that I DIDN'T notice. I'm curious though, Harmy, why you didn't replace some of the "windows" and "terrace" shots in Cloud City? Too noticeable? Honestly, the cruddy comping on Lando in the new "outdoor" shot jumped out at me more than the editing-in of the older footage!
It's good to see the RED RED RED of the new Cloud City toned down a bit, though it may be impossible to bring it back completely to its original dusky hues. There was quite a bit of blue in the original Cloud City, even greenish-blue, and I thought this made it both more convincing AND more effectively eerie and threatening. The 2004 colors just look like tomato soup, or something out of a cartoon. Adywan, if you're in here, I'm curious why you didn't restore this shot in particular:
Was the GOUT footage not good enough quality? Or just an oversight? Does anybody have plans for a future edition that cuts in that original shot? I wouldn't have recalled that particular shot until it was brought up in Adywan's thread, but MAN is the original one scarier. Almost wish someone hadn't posted it because now I want it :p
Anyway, damn, I sound like I'm complaining about every little thing, but really, I'm amazed by the work that Adywan and Harmy have done on these editions and I'm champing at the bit to watch them through! Right now Ady's Reconstruction and Harmy's Partly Despecialized Edition stand as my definitive versions.
Oh yeah, and I was able to just stream the m2ts files from my computer to my PS3. So, yeah, if anyone doesn't have a disc they can just do that.
Woohoo! I just skimmed through ANH a bit, and I am so excited to sit down and watch it as soon as I can marshal a few buddies. I'm surprised by how watchable the GOUT-sourced shots are on my 46" LCD. Dewbacks and Rontos aside, I haven't seen Star Wars like this in a looong time! Grabbing ESB and ROTJ post-haste.
Just wondering, Harmy, if you've kept the editing files, so that when the Blu-Ray discs come out you can just drop in the higher-bitrate video.
Thanks a ton, Harmy!
The covers look pretty snazzy too, and should look great on that silver paper! However, if I may critique (okay, this looks like a huge rant, but really it's just a bunch of minor nits—it just runs really long because I'm bad at explaining myself):
The cropping on most of the images looks awkward. I'd try to get the whole image in there rather than crop off Luke's ear or Chewie's forehead. Watch out especially for places where the edge of the image intersects an edge or corner of something in the picture (like the side of Luke's face, the top of Han's hairline, and the bottom of Tarkin's chin on the ANH box, or the line of Luke's lower arm on the ESB box, or the bottom of Leia's bikini top on the ROTJ one). This is called a tangent and is generally something to be avoided because it flattens the image. The idea is either to get something totally in the clear, or crop it cleanly and decisively. Also, I'd make the title text on the front covers bigger, and maybe move the images up to put more white space (well, black space in this case) around the titles to give them more importance.
For the backs of the covers, I'd check your margins on the text. "The battle continues" should line up on the left with the block of text beneath it, but it's edging a bit left of where it should be. "The Empire falls" I'm not sure about, I'd have to pull it into Photoshop to check, but I think it might be off too. I'd widen the running text; it looks squished and hard-to-read as is. Also there should be no apostrophe in "its," there's an extra space in "THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK PARTLY DESPECIALIZED EDITION," and the "the" preceding "RETURN OF THE JEDI" should be in caps too since it's part of the title.
I think you could get rid of some of that mess of logos and notices in the lower right. For instance, I don't think the copy protection logo, the Video Packaging Review Committee logo, and the notice that goes "The copyright proprietor has licensed the picture contained in this video cassette . . . " are really appropriate to this release. Getting rid of some of those might allow you to move down the images and give your running text some room to breathe. (New idea—you might even shrink the largest image, since it's nowhere near print resolution anyway, and then have a small bullet-point list of things you've restored. Han shoots first! Lapti Nek! Original Cloud City buildings! etc.)
Also, I know that you want to showcase the restoration you did on the Sarlaac sequence, but I don't know if that's your most dynamic image to use as the central picture. I might switch it with either of the other images, or maybe use a cap from a different shot or sequence altogether, one where you can see someone's face or at least a more dramatic silhouette.
Anyway, if you bounce me the PSD files, I could give 'em a whirl. . . . Heck, I could even take a crack at them as they are now, just to show you what I mean.
Like I said, though, they do look snappy. You did a nice job with them, I hope I haven't stepped on your toes here. I'm just concerned that your covers are as good as possible so they do your own work justice! :)
Hi guys, don't know if it's bad etiquette to sign up and immediately ask Harmy for a PM. . . But could ya hook me up, Harmy? :)
I've been a long-time lurker here and your and Ady's work looks really inspiring. It's taken me a long time reading through these forums figuring out which version of the OUT is "the one" to screen for my friends. Not sure the GOUT is gonna fly these days. So, as much of a purist as I am, I think the few lingering Rontos and such may be a fair tradeoff for mostly HD quality.
By the way, has anyone tried putting the file on a USB stick or media server and playing on your PS3 that way, instead of burning it to a disc? I'm just assuming it'll work that way.