CatBus

Here's an example of what I was talking about with adjusting gamma to bring out colors.  Left is untouched BD, right is gamma-adjusted.  See how Alan/Tony's car becomes truly red?  Adjusting only the brightness, the car gets darker but not redder.

Of course, I have no real point of reference for any of this, but I believe that's likely closer to correct.  Anyway, for those who want to give my script a run, here's a warning: my script makes most of this movie pretty dark.  Dark interiors, night scenes, etc can be pretty murky in parts--not crushed, but pretty damn black.  Again, this is without a reference (I don't trust any DVD release), so I just did what seemed right, and I'm not entirely satisfied with the results either.  YMMV.

FWIW, and mostly just because correcting the Japanese Hard-Boiled Blu-ray video has seemingly become some sort of cottage industry, I just took a stab at it.  I started with the hypothesis that instead of adjusting brightness, we should mostly be adjusting gamma.  Gamma correction affects chroma as well as luma, so in addition to bringing down the brightness, it would increase the color saturation.

I'm pretty impressed with the results and will probably use this for myself in the long term (paired with Matt's excellent audio and subtitles, of course).

It doesn't fix every problem, of course--particularly some of the hospital shots which look washed out no matter what we do to them (and maybe they just look like that...), but for a global fix without any scene-specific tweaks, it's pretty good.

I'm still rendering ATM, so no screenshots for a few days if anyone's interested.  Also, I know the Blu-ray is already cropped on the right, but I couldn't handle how the frame edges occasionally wobbled (particularly along the bottom edge), so I cropped mine further to 1.85:1 just to get a stable frame.

AviSynth code below:

Levels(0,0.55,255,0,255)

Tweak(0,1,0.8,1)

Crop(0,20,0,-22)

AddBorders(0,21,0,21)

Feel free to PM me a link to that German SRT file.  I'm a bit busy ATM, but I'm sure I can make a nice-looking sub from it.  In fact, it'll just have to be nicer-looking than all the other subs, because I can't in good conscience make subs that look as bad as the regular Matrix subs when I have a choice ;-)

I think this is the thread about the audio descriptive tracks:

http://originaltrilogy.com/forum/topic.cfm/Star-Wars-films-with-audio-description-Can-anyone-help-out/topic/4933/

AFAIK audio descriptive tracks for ESB and ROTJ in their unmodified forms do not exist.

Damn that was a great resolution to the whole mystery torrent thing, thanks Shadoe.

Project files have been updated to version 6.3 (original post has been updated as well). This is a pretty minor update, but I felt enough unrelated small updates had accumulated to justify a release.  Please PM me for the temporary download links until the files are available in a more permanent location.

Rough summary of changes:

- Minor improvements to Polish subtitles (Star Wars only, thanks to Feallan)

- Minor changes to SDH formatting (Empire and Jedi only, essentially reverting to 6.1 formatting)

- Minor documentation improvements

- Project Threepio now includes a modified version of MuxMan for people who want to use free DVD authoring software.  The latest official version of MuxMan (long unmaintained) has a bug in the language code for Indonesian (it uses "in" instead of "id") and some DVD players can't tell what that means.  The only difference in the modified version is that it uses the correct language code for Indonesian.

- I have now made a second attempt at right-aligning double-dialogue in Arabic, with better results (screenshot in original post). For background: I use vsfilter to render the subtitles, and vsfilter has known issues with RTL scripts, Indic scripts, and perhaps others.  This solution should bring RTL scripts up to parity with other scripts... assuming there isn't some other sort of crazy unworkable problem that I don't know about because I can't read Arabic.  Either way, in the event vsfilter proves unworkable for some future script, I think I've laid the groundwork for allowing an alternate rendering engine to be used.

YanniD said:

An Oppo 93 and above will output 1080p24 from 720p24

Actually not entirely true.  In the same firmware that removed ISO support on the 93, a bug was fixed with the side-effect that 720p24 could no longer be output as 1080p24.  As far as I know, it's not fixed yet and may not be fixable, as I believe the two bugs are two sides of the same hardware bug.  If you still have the ISO firmware, you're fine, but then you have the other scaling bug and any other bugs fixed since.

It's good to see the '81 crawl combined with the '81 flyover.  Having just the '81 crawl always seemed like only half the project.  Now we've got the whole thing (with varying degrees of quality).

The DVD downscales (current for ESB and ROTJ, at v2.0 for SW) might be under 4GB, or close to it.  You're going to be dealing with DVD quality anyway with files that small, so forget HD. Honestly really worth getting a DVD or BD burner IMO.

EDIT: What Harmy said too.

s/John Williams/John Carpenter/g

I suppose that might bridge the gap between Star Wars and Battle Beyond the Stars.

Anchorhead said:

Do you care about Official Canon, and if so, why?

Not in the least. Basically because I wholeheartedly buy into the postmodernist view that the viewers/readers/listeners of an artistic work are the ones who ultimately provide its entire meaning. If it's the same meaning as that intended by the work's author/creator, bully for that I suppose--but that's completely unnecessary.

In my view everyone comes to the table with their own personal canon, for any creative work. It just happens that if certain creative works have a "director approved" label on them, some people are able to set aside their own feelings, or reconsider them in such a way that their opinions eventually match the "prescribed" opinion. If at any time they simply cannot make their opinion match the prescribed opinion, there's usually some resulting anger and soul-searching.

Official Canon is just an attempt to maintain control of a creative property after it's already entered the public sphere. Which seems to be an ongoing theme with Lucasfilm in particular.

It seems every single release of Harmy's Despecialized Editions has involved someone asking for a release date, Harmy providing a release date, and then that release date proving spectacularly wrong (by up to a year) due to unforeseen complications.  Predicted release dates are therefore pretty much a joke in this thread. So with his latest answer, Harmy's playing it safe--or so I hope!

PM sent.

No black dog's telling him to shoot anyone, he's not trying to impress Jodie Foster. So he pretends he's a bunch of different people and has a couple accounts. Yeah it violates forum rules, but it's pretty harmless in the long run (esp. given how obvious he is about it--there doesn't appear to be any risk of anyone getting fooled) and we get a 35mm preservation out of it.  Beyond that, what's there to be interested about?

This is no hoax. I believe the lack of a finished final product can be easily explained by: 1) it's friggen hard work, and 2) I'm inclined to believe there's a little perfectionism involved here, and "release early, release often" is kindof an anathema to perfectionists. Why release an unfinished product when you only need to wait maybe three more years and get a perfect one?

You rush a miracle man, you get rotten miracles.

Now there are -1 of them.

Asaki said:

Awesome =)

I'm going to try my hardest to make sure that this year is the year I finally see the Holiday Special. I hope it's everything I've heard it is!

Just in case you get some crazy notion--no, there is not enough beer in the world to make it tolerable.

Harmy said:

...so it would probably be easier to redo the edit from scratch...

Too bad. So we'll have to wait at least a week for that, then, eh? Maybe two?

Any chance of this making its way into a new Zion Hybrid release? I have to admit I am a big fan of the cheesy menu music and Rifftrax options. Also I'm not versed enough on SWHS version to know if this new version is across-the-board better than everything else or just better in certain scenes than certain other versions.  Any guidance for someone who's otherwise pretty happy with Zion Hybrid (but notices it's oversharpened)?

Harmy said:

I wouldn't say it's the best movie ever personally but I did like it a lot - definitely liked it a lot more than Citizen Kane, that's for sure.

I'll admit maybe I'm a bit of a sucker for noir, but I could just watch the closing scene where Holly waits for Anna outside the graveyard over and over and over. Right in the gut, every time.

It's Carol Reed's The Third Man (1949). If you're into noir, old movies, Orson Welles, cinematography, or zither music, check it out.

EDIT: And no, I'm not exaggerating.  It is the best movie ever.

Harmy said:

Best. Movie. Ever.

Yeah, I've never encountered any of those problems ;)

I'm not much of a TV junkie. I just watch movies now and then. Hell, I haven't watched broadcast or cable TV since maybe the late 1980's. And I don't game.

EDIT: Okay, I do game, but my games involve big folding gameboards, little wooden pieces, and cards.  Slightly on-topic, Vlaada Chvatil is yet another reason for the world to thank the Czech Republic for its awesome citizens.

yoda-sama said:

I don't see why people bother with all the headache when there's plenty of PC-based solutions, which can also bring a lot more to the table beyond just video...

I think the reason for many is there is no headache.  Put the disc in, and play it.  There's nothing else I want to do with my TV, so the same procedure works for everything.  I only consider an HTPC because I'm a tinkerer--I can't even think of an actual problem I've really encountered that it solves.

Agree discs are not fully silent within a certain radius, but even in the worst-case scenario, they spin slower than fans and hard drives, and certain vendors take a little more care choosing quiet transports (for not really that much more money), which makes them effectively silent at any reasonable viewing distance.  The audiophile market, crazy as they are, gets vendors to make nice stuff sometimes.

yoda-sama said:

Computers good enough to handle Full HD video can be put together so incredibly cheap anymore, I just don't get it...

Fans. At least in my case, I want my movie watching experience to be such that, during a dead quiet part, I can truly hear a pin drop. Fully fanless systems with no moving parts, powerful enough to handle full HD video, are pretty pricey items (I've shopped them). Even then, I find a shiny disc to simply be easier, if you have it.

Others may have other reasons for forgoing the HTPC route.