CatBus

Sure.

The Despecialized Edition contains an M2TS file, which is the video and audio all "muxed" together into a single file.  (This is from memory, I may be skipping some important steps, so you may need to experiment)  Open that file on tsmuxerGUI, and then add the 720p SUP file from Project Threepio.  Then set the target to either AVCHD or Blu-ray, depending on what you're making, and that will create a new folder structure.  Then you can use ImgBurn to actually put this on a disc.  Some of this is explained in the Project Threepio README.

Anchorhead said:

The prequels are prominent in pop culture specifically for being so poorly done.

Well, yeah, but in defense of Easterhay's point, there is no such thing as bad publicity.  The Rocky Horror Picture Show was culturally relevant for a very long time for being awful, but the awfulness doesn't equate to cultural irrelevance.  Showgirls eventually tried to embrace the same tactic, with less success.

I think the prequels are more akin to Showgirls than the Rocky Horror Picture Show in this analogy. Instead of David Schmader's color commentary, we've got Backstroke of the West, same thing essentially.  But like Showgirls, I think the prequels are ultimately too boring to survive long in the cultural imagination.

Better, yes--obviously.  But we'd still be here complaining that the 1981 crawl made things worse for no good reason (curse you, Lucas!), that Lowry was still screwing up the transfers to home video, that the mono mix wasn't available (curse you, Lucas!), there'd be a fan restoration attempt to re-create the unavailable 70mm cut of Empire (curse you, Lucas!), and there'd be a healthy argument about whether or not Jedi was actually any good.  The internet was made for complaining, we must allow it to fulfill its purpose.  In other words, if we lived in such a wonderful world, we wouldn't even realize we had it so good.

I think the SW franchise is a lot worse off than the Superman franchise, and I only really like one Superman movie, and the theatrical cut at that.  At least I was able to buy an ultra-deluxe Superman boxed set and throw away all of the discs except one, to get the movie I actually wanted.  No such option with Star Wars.

I dunno, I live way the hell out in nowhere USA and it's typically 4K here.

Easterhay said:

...or at least accept that the prequels have their fanbase and are referenced in modern films as much as the original trilogy was in its day.

Your whole post presented a good point, but this section right here presents the limitations of that point. It's fair to measure cultural relevance through references in other prominent cultural works.  And, in works produced in the same eras, they may be about equal.  In works produced today, they may also be about equal.  I don't know either of these for a fact, but I'm willing to consider the possibility.  But the bolded text highlights the difference.

Star Wars was made nearly forty years ago and it's still a very relevant cultural work.  If someone made a reference to The Phantom Menace in 2036, it will make about as much sense to the audience as a "Dude, where's my car?" joke.  Yeah, that's a prediction, and yeah, predictions can be wrong.  But I simply see no way in hell the prequels will be anything more than an interesting footnote in 2036, akin to the Holiday Special today (which still gets referenced, but not much).

generalfrevious said:

I wonder... Has the relative unavailability of the OOT made its stature bigger than it otherwise would have been?

Wishful thinking. The Star Wars franchise has been sunk so far in schlocky fourth-rate sci-fantasy for so long that only a very few remember, or care, that it was ever anything else. Add to this the fact that the sci-fi/fantasy media markets have flourished enough in the meantime to have a wide range of excellent-quality work from other creators for people to choose from, and, well, there you have it.  The rest of the world has moved on to better things.  The OOT is the only reason Star Wars is still culturally relevant at all, sure, but that's hardly the same thing as saying its long absence has been beneficial to its stature.

I'm secretly hoping hairy_hen has some updated ESB English mixes.  Otherwise I've got his old lossless 5.1 track and a nice lossless 1980 stereo track, but he'd obviously be the best source.

Would not recommend my edit without some serious peer review first.  The last thing I want is a lot of pissed off mono mix fans with pitchforks and torches.  I mean, it sounds good to me, but I only just recently got into the mono mix and the Belbucus track is tried-and-true.  AFAIK only one person has downloaded my hybrid track (which, FWIW, is about 1/3 based on -1's 35mm captures and about 2/3 based on Belbucus).  There could be issues with it.

Harmy--regarding Puggo's 16mm capture, I've got that GOUT-synced in AC3 and DTS-MA, PM me if you still need it.

Harmy said:

I never made any adjustments to the Tarkin picture besides the resizing. But the picture posted here recently is a heavily compressed version of the original picture, which I can't find either.

Also, looking at those pictures CatBus posted, especially switching between them at full resolution, you can definitelly see a difference in sharpness on a big screen but not really in detail - I almost find the 720p ones more pleasing to the eye, because they have all the detail but they don't look so artificially sharpened.

The difference would of course be even less perceivable in movement.

Well, a lot of people would add a hint of sharpening when downscaling to counteract that softening effect, but my examples were simple downscales without any other filtering.  I agree the 1080p images look artificially sharp, but I think the 720p images maybe go too far in the other direction.

Harmy, nothing new to complain about in the new workprint.

Feel free to re-post wherever you see fit, but I think it's really just an interesting exercise at this point.  I feel the point was already made about the weakness of the Blu-ray transfer, this gallery just underlines it.  Someone could probably do a zoomed single-image version like that original Tarkin shot to make it easier to process, but my curiosity is satisfied, so I'm personally not going any further with it.

At the risk of invoking "oh not this shit again", it always bugged me how that Tarkin 720p/1080p comparison wasn't exactly apples-to-apples, with the colors not matching and I believe some image sharpening effects in there too.

So I made a gallery of a couple of other BD screencaps (fullscreen) at 1080p/720p/480p/240p so people could better visualize the loss of detail at each resolution, without getting distracted by changes not introduced by the scaling or re-encoding processes.  I thought the results were interesting enough to share, although I think the Tarkin shot is still adequate for most purposes.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BxypVa35j2XsRHp4Z1hKcU04MWs/edit?usp=sharing

EDIT: To be clear, these results are very specific to the 2011 Star Wars Blu-rays. Different sources would show a different amount of detail, and would produce different results.

Does the Mynock shoot first?  You have to see it to find out!

Not mutually exclusive... Braumeister Rani!

How about Max Von Sydow as an evil Braumeister?

Just to round things out with Russian audio, I now finally have a Russian non-voiceover dub for Empire Strikes Back.  So that makes one voiceover-style and one non-voiceover dub in Russian for the entire trilogy.

The quality is pretty good--I still prefer the quality of the voiceover dubs in general, but this is another fine option for Russian-speaking fans.  The only Russian audio I'm really pretty displeased with is the Star Wars non-voiceover dub, which has quite a lot of issues.  But if you understand Russian and can't stand voiceovers, that one is available too.

Like the non-voiceover dub for Jedi, the one for Empire doesn't voice over the crawl, so forced subs will be needed for that, and will be included in the next version of Project Threepio.

FWIW, although I'm making all of these available to whoever asks, I'm only keeping the voiceover dubs for my personal collection, so I can't say if the non-voiceovers will be available indefinitely in the event of some unplanned failure.  So if you want them, PM me.

Oh yeah, and the blown out detail out the window when discussing the Mining Guild, it looks pretty severe compared to the GOUT, but I know the GOUT levels are pretty wrong, so I'm not sure what correct should be.

Enjoyed the blaster gag too, always nice to have an Easter egg in these previews.  Regarding the colors, I actually really like the new Bespin colors, but I wonder what the new color reference means for our perennial argument about Hoth colors... if I recall, your last Hoth samples were using the color-boosted GOUT reference.

imperialscum said:

Well if we are honest, Lucas was not the only person from the production crew who made stuff up.

For stuff that old, I'm sure a lot of half-forgotten details get fudged or moved around.  Everyone's the big hero of their own personal life story, and details that run counter to that narrative sometimes just get automatically thrown out or altered if for nothing else but to make remembering the big picture easier.  Not necessarily in some self-aggrandizing way, either.  Just a matter of "I made a hell of a lot of dialogue updates.  Here is one dialogue update in Empire.  There's a memory gap of who made the update, but what the hell chances are I did it."  And the rest is (revisionist) history.

I think the misstatements by Lucas fit this mold, but they seem a little more jarring than some others because it's often not merely a matter of switching around a few dates, actions, or cause and effect, so much as creating a whole parallel universe of pseudo-facts to support the narrative of the genius director working outside the Hollywood system, producing a few promising proto-films in the seventies and eighties, and then really coming into his form and making several wildly-critically-acclaimed indie films in the nineties and beyond.

Don't ask for an ETA.

You might get one, but it might be off by a year or so... ;)

That said... July 26th, 4:23:07pm GMT.

Yeah, you've essentially got that right--if Harmy were to do a 1080p version, the SD material wouldn't really look any more out of place than it does now, because of the poor transfer.  IMO the Star Wars Blu-ray transfers are better than the one for Monty Python's Meaning of Life, and maybe not quite as good as the one for My Fair Lady, if that helps you place it in the pantheon of poor Blu-ray transfers.

kk650 said:

That said, I can see the difference between the 720p and 1080p images very clearly on my laptop as well so its probably just you. With all the releases and grading i've done, i'm guessing that my eyes are a little more fine tuned to such things than yours, no offense.

To the contrary, I'm quite certain that the substance of this whole conversation can readily be boiled down to a comparison of equipment size.

kk650 said:

I do actually see a very noticable difference in image quality and detail between that 1080p and 720p shot CatBus, perhaps its my large monitor that makes the difference easier to see.

Uh-huh.

Found it:

The difference in detail is barely perceptible (aside from the color shift from the imperfect attempt to match color grading).  But yes, encoding at 1080p would allow those barely-perceptible differences to be included.

You have the latest version of each.  I don't know the timeline exactly, but the 1.0 series came out earlier than you'd think because it was based on a good-quality HDTV broadcast of the 2004SE, rather than the 2011SE Blu-rays.  And the HDTV source is still used as a high-def way to undo changes that were added post-2004, such as the rocks in front of R2.  Empire is next to get the 2.x treatment, and it has its own discussion thread.