CatBus

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DrDre said:

Here’s a first pass on the Leia/R2-D2 corridor scene:

It’s nice to see all that red clipping from the 2011SE gone.

IMO, it’s all about what YOU want. Do you want to experience the films as if you were in a threatre watching them projected, or do you want to experience the films as if they’d undergone a respectful restoration and released on Blu-ray?

If the former, 4K77 and 4K83 are more likely to make you happy.

If the latter, Despecialized is most likely to suit your tastes.

Neither of them are perfect. In particular, Star Wars is pretty imperfect from both offerings IMO, but I come down on the side of Despecialized because I’m looking for something akin to a respectful Blu-ray restoration.

That said, 4K83 is amazing and worth a look, even though I still very slightly prefer Despecialized ROTJ, for nothing much more than the extra fine detail.

EDIT: D’oh, oojason ninja’d me.

Question about scene-by-scene vs shot-by-shot: have you seen a significant difference in shot-to-shot variation in the 19SE source vs prints and other sources? i.e. when you say the shot-to-shot variation is inherent to the source, is that mostly ultimately due to the 1977 source in your opinion, or did it get added/boosted somewhere along the restoration pipeline?

Just wondering. Scene by scene looks very nice, and IMO white walls have never done anyone any favors with shot-to-shot color consistency.

Bluto said:

CatBus said:

IIRC there are a few places where the heavy cropping has a significant impact on content. I think ESB is worst affected of the three films, and I think there’s one scene where Leia is cropped out of the image altogether. But as far as I know, nothing of that scale in Star Wars.

Do you know roughly which scene this is? Presumably she was already cropped out to some degree originally for her to disappear completely, unless the new cropping is considerable there.

Harmy - I don’t blame you for planning to keep the UHD cropping for the most part. It would be a near impossible job to reinstate a border seamlessly throughout each entire film. Thanks for the video update!

Found it.

https://originaltrilogy.com/topic/DIF-Difference-tool-to-spot-visual-changes-Current-2004-vs-2019/id/13179/page/3#1344390

There’s a million screencaps in that post, so search for the text “she goes out of frame”. It’s a scene where Leia is definitely not the focus of the shot, but she is speaking, so it’s significant IMO that she got cropped out of the frame.

Oh, one more thing about the cropping. The subtitle overlays we (or at least I) currently use for SW and ROTJ are based on DeEd 2.x framing. Presumably, if the shot is cropped, those subtitles will need to be resized and repositioned to match the new frame. Not a big problem, just something to keep in mind.

Bluto said:

CatBus said:

IIRC there are a few places where the heavy cropping has a significant impact on content. I think ESB is worst affected of the three films, and I think there’s one scene where Leia is cropped out of the image altogether. But as far as I know, nothing of that scale in Star Wars.

Do you know roughly which scene this is? Presumably she was already cropped out to some degree originally for her to disappear completely, unless the new cropping is considerable there.

Harmy - I don’t blame you for planning to keep the UHD cropping for the most part. It would be a near impossible job to reinstate a border seamlessly throughout each entire film. Thanks for the video update!

I seriously don’t know. I’m trying to search threads here but you know how that is 😉

I just remember reading about it in one of the UHD/changes threads, but there are so many, it’s hard to keep track. Yes, I believe she was already at an extreme edge to begin with, but the cropping on ESB also takes out a bigger chunk of the edges.

IIRC there are a few places where the heavy cropping has a significant impact on content. I think ESB is worst affected of the three films, and I think there’s one scene where Leia is cropped out of the image altogether. But as far as I know, nothing of that scale in Star Wars.

Harmy said:

Just read the quote in 44rh1n’s post 😉

Here’s the promised video: https://youtu.be/5ByflKACiBQ

A couple shots in there had me wondering: what’s your plan/process dealing with the heavy cropping in the UHD versions? Are you restoring out to the edge of the 4K77 frame, the BD/DeEd2.x frame, not restoring cropped areas, or case-by-case?

If so, how does that work out? There were a few cropped shots in the 2.x series that you restored to a less-cropped version, and that seemed to work pretty well in most cases.

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I know alternate versions are sometimes curiosities worth checking out from time to time – different Blade Runner cuts, extended cuts of the Lord of the Rings films, even Buckaroo Banzai with an alternate opening, and the alternate versions are even sometimes better than the theatrical versions.

But with Star Wars, there is nothing worth watching about the Special Editions, in any iteration. Their only saving grace is that they provided raw materials for Harmy’s reconstructions, allowing us to have an Original Trilogy preservation that’s very much like what a respectful Blu-ray release would have been. Harmy’s versions are still my favorite for this reason, although 4K83 1.6 really upped the color game and is now very nearly as good IMO.

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I can help with the OT films.

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FWIW, I disagree. I think that 4K83 has been in the color doghouse so long that people are used to simply dismissing its color accuracy. But I think 1.6 changes the narrative, and 4K83 is now the one to beat in terms of color accuracy. Harmy is always very good, but suffers from uncorrected SE-related tweaks here and there. I think it’s safe to say 4K83 is the closer of the two in terms of how the colors looked in a theatre. Of course, you do still lose a lot of fine detail with 4K83, but that’s the trade-off.

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abcde said:

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Likewise 😉

LexX said:

CatBus said:

Broom Kid said:

but after copyright expiration

I’m not at all convinced this is ever going to happen, and currently have no reason to believe it ever will.

While I agree copyright extensions are already to ludicrous levels and may get worse, never is a very long time. It’s just my opinion, but I think they’ll give up before they hit 10,000 years. Also, the fact that copyright terms are codified into so many multilateral trade agreements actually makes further extensions a lot more complicated than they were only a decade or so ago. Not impossible, but certainly more expensive.

Unfortunately, at that point no-one cares. The film is owned by the one company that’s notoriously one of the reasons of updating the whole copyright law and already none of their films have been made to public domain. With limitless money you can change the laws.

By “before 10,000 years” I suppose I should have specified that I’m predicting considerably less than 10,000 years, but you know the Internet and sarcasm tags. I think they’re standardized at around lifetime+90 now, I’d say lifetime+120 is the limit before ludicrous turns untenable, at least on a global scale (all it takes is one country holding out and the whole extension house of cards collapses, with global trade and the Internet making imports not the hurdle they used to be). And at lifetime+120, there will be plenty of Star Wars fans still in existence. We won’t all have evolved into Eloi yet. I, however, will have evolved into mulch – I’ll grant that much.

Broom Kid said:

but after copyright expiration

I’m not at all convinced this is ever going to happen, and currently have no reason to believe it ever will.

While I agree copyright extensions are already to ludicrous levels and may get worse, never is a very long time. It’s just my opinion, but I think they’ll give up before they hit 10,000 years. Also, the fact that copyright terms are codified into so many multilateral trade agreements actually makes further extensions a lot more complicated than they were only a decade or so ago. Not impossible, but certainly more expensive.

yotsuya said:

Nice to hear from him after so long, but kind of depressing that nothing is going to come of this.

We don’t actually know this. Lucasfilm/Disney isn’t interested, but after copyright expiration, public-domain outfits like Laserlight may be. They’re always looking to… well… do things on the cheap (even moreso than Lucasfilm), so a pre-made preservation of a previously-unavailable popular classic film would, I’d think, attract quite a lot of interest from them.

Sure, it’d be Mike’s grandkids inking the deal and our grandkids buying the discs (or cranial implants or whatever), but something could still come of Legacy, even if it’s nothing more than a new copy of the film for the Library of Congress (which, frankly, is enough in its own right IMO). It’s always been about the long term goal of preserving history for future generations, not the short-term goal of watching it in our lifetimes. Although I think everyone involved thinks that would have been nice too.

yotsuya said:

To be blunt, this is the same thing they did with the GOUT. They took what they had lying around and put no effort into it.

Same could be said for the old masters for the unreleased 3D conversion they just had laying around. Or in 2011, for the old DVD masters they just had laying around. Lucasfilm has a cheapness about home video releases that’s still very much alive under Disney.

Very cool. Yes, IMO 1080p subs are the best move for compatibility. Right now, I treat 2160p subtitles as more of an archival format – useful for special purposes, but not for most direct applications.

Complain all I want about the state of Blu-ray subtitles, they are very cool in that they allow stuff like what you’ve just done. Old school DVD 3 regular colors + 1 full transparent color would look more like an encoding glitch than a reel change marker.

Other uses I’ve seen for non-text subtitles include alternate aspect ratios, where the underlying video is open matte, but with “black bar” subtitles, you can reimpose the matte and get a theatrical aspect ratio.

oohteedee said:

I’ve successfully created pgs subs that contain the original reel change markers for 4k83. This allows you to see the original reel change markers for projects that have had them removed (v1.2 and up).

That’s a really cool, creative use of subtitles. I just wanted to say that before I went on to the technical stuff.

I’ve only created a 2160p version for now but I notice when muxed into a 1080p file they scale down to the proper size and location.

CatBus is there any advantage to having native 1080p and 2160p pgs subs? The 2160p work in both.

The only difference is player compatibility. Most (all?) subtitles for commercial UHD video are 1080p, and I don’t know if there are any players (and I’m talking hardware players here) that simply don’t understand what a 2160p subtitle is – the detailed specs for UHD subtitles aren’t publicly available, AFAICT. Certainly some 2K-only players (regular Blu-ray hardware players) would balk at 2160p subs.

Also when I timecoded it I assumed the first frame would be at 0. The markers were one frame early. Is it the standard for the first frame to be 1 during playback?

Thanks for the tools which allowed me to do this.

I swear the timing of PGS subtitles was codified by my archnemesis. There are actually a lot of issues with this whole topic, but the short answer is you just do what works 😉

Just a side note but when rendering them it gave a warning that the duration for each was less than 500.5ms. I overcame this by adding a blank marker to the end of each set, otherwise the last marker displayed for around 500ms.

If you’re using BDSup2Sub, there’s a command line option (–minimum-time) to reduce the minimum display time.

https://github.com/mjuhasz/BDSup2Sub/wiki/Command-line-Interface

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