ChainsawAsh

rainbow battle kid said:

So I got this yesterday and compared it to Despecialized and some of the darker scenes (luke & ghost ben, throne room) look way darker and bluer and like, to my untrained eyes, not quite as good, but are those colors more accurate? the ben scenes look appropriately moodier but the throne room just looks darker in a way that looks off when I go to it from the Desp. Also used the Luke/Yoda scene to test and felt like it was also kinda similar. Would love any insights

Interesting that you say it looks darker, since the most common complaint about 4K83 is exactly the opposite (that it’s too bright).

EddieDean said:

Hal’s TLJ is for people like me who thought it was an impeccable film with just a handful of niggles. It makes some very smart little cuts just to shorten some of the more immersion-breaking humour (while keeping the film funny), and its main cut is the Fathier chase and other elements on the casino planet (the Finn story, as you mentioned). Well worth your time.

Yeah, it seems like TLJ edits are either a light touch like Hal’s, or go way overboard (like killing Leia midway through, for instance). I’m waiting for a middle ground type edit, assuming I don’t do my own - poppasketti’s Rekindled seems most in line with what I want (especially his “major” changes), and darthrush’s looks promising for me, too.

deathstar1138 said:

yotsuya = ronster part 2, never give up dude. maybe someone will listen.

Nah, yotsuya actually grasps the core concepts at play, whether you agree with his conclusions or not.

Dude, chill. They’re huge files and were just released. They’ll make their way to public trackers just like 4K77 did, and no amount of begging is going to make that happen any faster.

Patience.

JonathanArthur19 said:

I do not want a myspleen or usenet link

Be patient. I’m pretty sure these are the only places it’s been uploaded to thus far. Someone will upload it to Mega or a public torrent tracker or something similar before too long.

No, the 4K is around 69GB, if I remember right.

I gotchu. Gimme a bit to cap them and I’ll shoot you a PM.

JEDIT: PM sent!

Not too obviously, but I think ROTJ is worse because the 35mm material only became available to Harmy when he was pretty much done with ROTJ 2.0 (I think that was the case, at least). Maybe he would’ve stabilized it further if he’d had access to it sooner.

Then again, I was wrong earlier when I said 4K83 is only sprocket-hole-stabilized - ohteedee said that while he was working on it, the gate weave was so excessive when just sprocket-stabilized that he had to stabilize it even further, prompting some to complain since that gate weave is part of the print and possibly should have been left in for the initial “master” release. But apparently it was so bad that he couldn’t leave it sprocket-stabilized without it being extremely distracting.

So it’s possible that ROTJ is just that difficult to work with as far as gate weave goes, all the way back to the negative.

Chewtobacca said:

Handman said:
Yeah, blacks look a bit crushed to me.

In many shots, the whites are blown out after ColorYUV(levels=“TV->PC”), too, so it’s definitely not a straightforward levels problem. I’d say that the luma range has possibly been compressed a little while the video was (already) in the TV range, which has the usual effect of making it look a bit too bright and somewhat undersaturated.

Seems like leaving it a bit brighter was a deliberate choice to stick to a reel-by-reel grade to preserve the print as is without crushing the blacks - found this quote from ohteedee while going back though the project discussion thread on the 4K83 forum, from September 17:

There is room at the bottom to darken but not in every shot. Space is not the darkest areas of the film, believe it or not. Is it okay to slightly crush some areas to improve it overall? Some will say yes some will say no. As it is there are a few shots in each reel that are slightly clipped at the bottom already. I’m resistant to darken much more but I’ll re-evaluate it.

4K83 is a bit more stable, but there’s still gate weave (though it was stabilized to sprocket holes, so the gate weave is inherent in the print itself). It’s less noticeable because it’s throughout rather than sandwiched between rock-stable BR footage.

Here’s one of the shots I toyed around with in Photoshop. Just a simple curves adjustment, though I did adjust each individual channel separately, but nothing fancy at all. Just clipping either end in each channel, really.

Yeah, I played around with some MPC-HC screenshots and it’s not as simple as capping it at 16-235, and it’s not as simple as a reel-by-reel universal adjustment, either. It’s a shot-by-shot thing.

Yeah, I’m not sure if it’s actually too desaturated or the black level and/or contrast is too low - I actually turned my TV’s brightness down a ton and it looked significantly better with no crushed blacks (the letterboxing was still the blackest part of any given frame by far), and it seemed to bring out the color a little more. For 4K77, I didn’t have to change any settings at all on my TV, though I was occasionally tempted to turn the brightness up, the exact opposite of how I felt with 4K83.

I’m really looking forward to a shot-by-shot CC with reel change markers painted out.

Perhaps, and the few changes it makes are so obvious and improve the film so much I can’t believe they weren’t implemented by the filmmakers themselves during production.

DominicCobb said:

the nature of how this was shot led to projection problems being far more obvious and frustrating than for most films.

Yep, that’s pretty much what I was trying to get at. You worded it much more clearly. 😃

Hal did a TLJ one. I’ve not seen the final version, but the early version I watched was good. Hal just seemed to come at TLJ from a different direction than what I was looking for, and I haven’t dived too deeply into other ones yet. But it sounds like Hal’s TLJ might be up your alley (unless you really hate the Space Leia bit).

You can always mix and match, too, and you should look into others’ thoughts on various edits for each film to decide which ones to try. Q2’s edits are very highly regarded, though I haven’t seen them, as are Octoroxx’s. MagnoliaFan’s episode I and II are fun for a look at earlier attempts that influenced future edits and take some risks that some really liked. I’ve also heard Stankpac’s name thrown around for III.

Some mix and matches won’t work due to choices one editor makes that contradict things in a different editor’s work, but Seciors’ I, Hal’s II, and L8wrtr’s III is a popular combo trilogy.

Good luck, hope you find some edits you enjoy!

I don’t think it was projection issues, or if there were, it was because the color timing itself was murky and muddy and low contrast. The Blu-Ray looks like crap (at least, I thought it did).

schorman13 said:

a_o said:

Are there FLAC encodes of the laserdisc PCM audio synced to 4K83?

I’ll be sharing these soon over at thestarwarstrilogy.com. I just haven’t got around to it yet. 😃

Looking forward to this! The optical print audio is nice to have and sounds great, but I’d still like to pair a laserdisc-sourced PCM of the 1983 mix with this.

Overall, I think Hal’s are the best (I’ll also give a shout out to his The Force Awakens: Restructured, which has definitively replaced theatrical TFA for me in a way no other fan edit ever truly has, even prequel edits). There are places here and there where I’d do things differently, but they’re the most polished and professional quality prequel edits I’ve seen, indistinguishable from an official release bar the unavoidable low quality of some of the deleted scenes.

L8wrtr’s edits are also excellent, but not quite at the same technical level as Hal’s (as in, you can see the “seams” here and there).

Seciors’ Episode I is great too, and unique in that it cuts Sidious out of the film altogether, keeping the “Man behind the curtain” a little more mysterious and ambiguous.

NFBisms’ ROTS New Canon Cut is also fantastic, especially for a first time(?) editor. It’s laser-focused on building up Anakin’s character to be a bit more in line with his The Clone Wars TV series portrayal.

I should also note that MalaStrana has made an alternate audio track for Hal’s Episode III that takes some cues from NFBism’s edit as well, though I don’t know how widely available that audio track is yet (I only recently converted it to DTS and sent that encode back to Mala and Hal for distribution).

Thoae are the ones I’m most familiar with. They’re all great in their own ways - it really depends on what kind of changes you’re interested in versus what things you’d prefer to remain as they are.

I will, however, say that I’ve yet to see an Episode II edit that comes anywhere close to Hal’s The Approaching Storm. Nearly flawless work. Episodes I and III have other edits that give Hal’s a run for their money, but not Episode II, for my money.

I haven’t heard of it. Do you have any links to places (here or otherwise) where it has been talked about? It’s possible that it could have begun to go by a different name at some point; any kind of discussion online about the edit will provide some clues as to what happened with it.

Jay said:

If you honestly believe I deserve most of what Collipso said, I don’t understand why you’re still here.

Honestly? For the projects that call this place home. I’m not even sure why I’ve been checking the Off Topic or General sections for the past day or so, and I probably won’t continue to do so very much, if at all, from now on.

How is that not political, and as such, no longer allowed under the new forum rules?

OutboundFlight said:

Jay might overreact to certain things, but this post is just proof the same applies to you (if not more). He doesn’t deserve most of what you said.

I mean, to be fair, Jay deleted most of the threads that contained posts of his that would show he might have, in fact, deserved most of what has been said recently, so…

snooker said:

I like fan editing too much to up and leave, but this whole thing stinks.

This feels like the snap from Infinity War.

Yeah, a bit.

Since it seems like I’ve survived the banhammer, I will say that I’ll be visiting the site more or less exclusively to follow projects like yours, Snooker. Glad to see you aren’t packing up and leaving.

Yeah, I was iffy on the idea when you first suggested it, but I really dig those!