ChainsawAsh

Haha, glad you liked my mini-review, Spence.

One more thing I wanted to add:

While the editing was pretty flawless, there were some technical issues I noted, such as audio sync being off for some shots (usually not by too much, though), one glitch in a shot with the added Death Star (camera starts moving at the end of the shot, but the Death Star stays in the same position), one shot that should have had the Death Star in it but didn't, and the credits and menus are at the wrong color space (0-255 instead of 16-235), making the player-generated black bars brighter than the hard-encoded letterbox black bars.  Also, your added credits start playing over top of the credits that are already there.  And in the shot of the lightsabers crossing in front of the Emperor, the cores still aren't quite white, and you can see that weird point where they cross, like in the '04 DVD.

Sorry, I just figured I should mention everything I had a problem with (and believe me, these technical issues are the ONLY things I took issue with, I have no complaints about the editing itself) before I write my otherwse-glowing review of the actual edit later.  Not trying to sound negative, I promise - just some constructive criticism in case you decide to go back and improve anything later.

Oh, and in your "abandoned concepts" video, you say you're going to show us both versions of the Luke/Vader/Han/Lando intercutting climax (which was really cool, BTW), but then you only show us the first one!  (Small, insignificant complaint, I know.)

Also, the "Duel of the Fates" trailer looks freakin' awesome.  It got me really excited for that edit.

I get to work with 35mm film and magnetic audio stock today!

I'm heading to the school's film building today to sync the mag stock to the 35mm dailies.  Did this with 16mm a couple weeks ago, but this is the first time I'll get to work with 35mm!  I'm quite excited.

Hopefully better prints can be found.

Ady of -1 - do you think you could PM me a still from one of the damaged/warped sections?  I'm just curious to see what it looks like.  I don't have any intention of spreading it around or anything.  Just curious.

Jacobss said:

It does look indeed great, but I have a few question:

1. What possible quality can be achieved with this transfer? DVD, BD or even something better? (the screen on other forum was almost 4K)

2. Will the transfer contain all 3 films?

3. What about sound? Will it also be restored? No chance for 6 track dolby?

Anyway, it does look so great, that I just can't believe it. I pray that one day it will see the light and show how poor Lucasfilm is. No crushed blacks, correct colors and beatiful quality. Speaking of colors,  I'm wondering how much Adywans color correction was right and how much the colors from Lucasfilm editions were. I'm curious if Death Star walls are green or grey...

 

1. This transfer is being done at 1080p, I believe, so the final result will likely be both a Blu-Ray and DVD (though I don't want to put words in -1's mouth).

2. I believe -1 only has SW and ESB, but he's looking for an ROTJ print as well.  So only the irst 2 for now.

3. This I'm not sure about.  Although there's no way the 6-track Dolby will come from this (it's not a 70mm print), we do already have a decent copy of the stereo audio from the laserdisc, so I don't know if the plan is to use the print's optical stereo audio (admittedly, you could transfer that to a stereo Dolby TrueHD or DTS-MA for the Blu-Ray) or the LD audio for the final release.

adywan said:

...people are saying how crap it's going to look.

For the record, I never said the final result would look like crap.  All I said was that, if it were released in its current state without any further restoration...

Ah, fuck it, I'm done trying to explain myself.  It looks great.

Finished downloading and watched it last night.

HOLY SHIT THAT WAS AWESOME.

That's all for now, I've got to get to class.

adywan said:

ChainsawAsh said:

Yep, pretty much.  But instead of DVNR smearing, you'd have very messed-up color instead.

Are you sure of that?

My god, i can't believe the negativity here. It's only at a very early stage and people are saying how crap it's going to look. sure, it's never going to look as good as a studio professionally done transfer but what have we got at the moment? The blurred to hell GOUT. Even if this was done only at DVD res and there were still issues with colouring or other things it's still going to be miles better than what we have at the moment. And this is even going to have the audio track directly captured off the print.

Now those colour corrections were done really quickly, but it does show what can be achieved with this. I'd prefer to have a scratched, grainy transfer with slight colour issues over the GOUT any day

And here's a comparison with the GOUT (Gout on top)

I fully retract my statements.  Fantastic job.

Yep, pretty much.  But instead of DVNR smearing, you'd have very messed-up color instead.

What are you talking about? The original Godzilla has a great R1 DVD release.  It even has both Gojira (Japanese original) and Godzilla, King of the Monsters (wonky US partly re-shot vesion).

Since this thread has veered toward an abortion discussion ...

I'm pro-choice, myself.  And even if abortion were illegal (which I don't think it should be), I think it would be disgusting if someone who was pregnant due to rape was not allowed to abort the child.

And that's all I'm going to say on that subject.  I tend to get too upset at people for disagreeing with me on the issue, so I'm just gonna quit while I'm ahead.

The way I look at it:

ACT I = Episodes 1 and 2

ACT II = Episode 3

Then it kind of goes back, since the jump forward in time requires everything to be set up again:

ACT IB = Episode 4

ACT IIB = Episode 5

ACT III = Episode 6

So basically, the entire OT is Act III, but it has its own 3-act structure within.

350GB likely won't be enough for a 1080p edit.  I'd get a terabyte hard drive, preferably one that has a FireWire or eSATA connection (much faster than USB 2.0, which - in my experience - isn't fast enough for 1080p video editing).  You can get away with USB 2.0, just don't be surprised if it stutters a lot for you.

I didn't realize I was going to get so much heat for my "looks like shit" comment.  I was referring to how it looks in its current state.

I don't think it looks like shit.  I think it's the best source we have at the moment for a true theatrical restoration, better than the GOUT, any laserdisc transfer, or any hybrid SE/GOUT/LD project.  I do think people should be aware that the cleanup work on this is going to have to be extensive and time-consuming, so they shouldn't get their hopes up that this is going to be released soon.

"Looks like shit" = if it were released on DVD/Blu-Ray in its current state, with no cleanup, it would be unnaceptable.

I also think 3 or 4 months is quite optimistic.

Watching it again on my CRT in a more awake state, I've decided to do another pass, this time at 576p24 instead of 480p24.  I've scrubbed through and re-done all the work I did at 480p, and the results look pretty much exactly the same on my computer this time (not sure why 480p looked better last time I tried it).

Tomorrow, I'm going to go through shot-by-shot again, with the 576p version, and fix anything I missed in my first pass.  Then I'll render it out to a 720x576, 23.976fps ProRes file, convert that down to 480p, and make a new DVD and see if that looks better.

Same.

Oh, no.  OT.Com ragecomics better not be around the corner...

But I am already in my pajamas ...

(okay, I'll stop - back on topic, everyone.)

People eat deer.  As far as I know, no people eat aborted fetuses.

Therefore, Frink, your comparison is invalid.

;-)

Said the 65-year-old, toothless, cross-eyed man ;-)

Life begins before the fetus has a brain or a heart?  Does that mean when your heart stops beating and your brain stops working, you're still alive?

Well, when I say "looks like shit," I didn't mean that it was a bad quality source, because it certainly isn't.

The thing is, I feel like a lot of people here expect a film print to be perfect, as in, we scan it, then put it on DVD, and it'll knock the pants off the SE DVDs in terms of quality.

The reality is that the print is heavily pink-shifted and dirty, and it will require quite a lot of work to get it to look good.

But I absolutely agree that it is far and away the best source so far for the OOT.

Yes.  Don't get too excited too fast, though - the print kinda looks like shit.  It's going to need a lot of restoration work to make it acceptable for general release.

You know, I didn't think the Keanu version was all that bad when I saw it.  It started out promisingly enough - I was comparing it to the '78 Body Snatchers remake in my head.

Then Gort started killing people, and turned into some murderous nanoswarm or some bullshit, and the ending - the best part about the original - made no fucking sense at all.

So, yeah, CS was right.  Avoid the Keanu version at all costs.

Totally woke up an hour late for class today.  Buried my face in my pillow and screamed "FUCK!" at the top of my lungs ... only to have my roommate bitch at me later for waking her up.  Goddamn I hate my life sometimes.

I've got a "temporarily unavailable" error for #7 and #21.  All the others seem to check out, though.

Moth3r said:

ChainsawAsh said:

Well, after doing some tests with both versions, it seems that fixing the combing artifacts in the 480p file yields better results than fixing them in the 576p file.  So I'm going with that.

That doesn't make sense to me. If the source is an interlaced PAL frame with 576 lines, the odd and even fields are separate (as a crude deinterlacing method, you could "dumb" bob - through away one field and in recreate the missing lines by interpolation).

However if the interlaced source has already been downscaled to 480 lines, then the fields will have been merged together during the vertical resizing, making them much harder to separate.

Honestly, I don't know why deinterlacing the 480 version works better than the 576, but that's why I tested it using both.  Anytime I ran across an unsolvable issue with the 480-sized version, I tested the same spot on the 576 and got the same thing.  Must be something to do with the fact that the film was originally a 480 project that was upscaled to 576.

Moth3r said:

Maybe you should have approached it as "here's how you can fix your own disc" rather than "here's what I've done, anyone interested in a copy"?

Perhaps.  The thing is, it's not exactly a simple process.  My method requires Final Cut Studio on a Mac and slowly going through the film shot by shot multiple times in order to manually correct its issues.  It's not a "run it through program A, then program B, then you're done" type thing.