That was fun and interesting, thanks for sharing! I’ve never thought of it from that perspective before. The cuts and stuff were good, I didn’t notice anything jarring. It makes Phil seem insane (I guess he is at that point) sort of genius and superhuman and it makes Rita seem really shallow haha.
Any update on this?
Also a question for anyone who knows. I’m not familiar with the books… did the books have so many fake deaths? That’s one thing (one of the few) that’s always bothered me about these movies. Fake deaths are fine when it’s dramatic and there’s a high chance of it being real or important to the story (Gandalf in Moria), but when Frodo is stabbed over and over, very bluntly by a giant troll, Gandalf flung up the entire height of a tower (actually he’s just flung up then appears on top)… it gets tiring and you start to not really care because you know they’re going to live. Or Aragorn falling off a cliff down the river. It’s just over the top.
Anyway, looking forward to this. I also would really enjoy a much shorter less over-the-top Hobbit so I’m looking forward to that part of it as well! Thanks!
Okay, I think I'm pretty near completion with this set.
Please give me any feedback possible.
v0.1 (Left - 720p | Right - 1080p)
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Harmy ANHDE/Gout 720p Comparison 1
Harmy ANHDE/Gout 720p Comparison 2
negative1's 1080p Film Scan Comparison
You_Too's Recreation for ANHDEv2 1080p Comparison
In all of these comparisons, the original is on the left, the recreation on the right. Colors and border thickness were the only things adjusted, for comparison reasons.
Also, I would like to start on more letters, so if anyone has any good sources for the end credits, that would be very helpful. This will be more difficult, because the fonts are so small, so the bigger and cleaner, the better. I do remember the John Williams credit stood out because it used a bigger font.
Anyway, please be critical here with any feedback. Thanks again everyone.
Here's another font somewhat similar to the original: Benton Sans
Haven't tried it out other than just some sample text on the site, but just thought I'd put it here for reference.
If anyone with an eye for unnecessary detail wants to help me out, I have to samples:
Sample A:
(filename: cZ7aa.png)
Sample B:
(filename: mtCeu.png)
If anyone wants to download these to their computer and toggle between the two and let me know which row you like the best (or least) in each sample, that would be very helpful.
The shaping of the "g" is a little different in each row. So while I would like opinions on the "g", I'm trying not to focus on which individual "g" looks better or worse. I'm mostly looking for which one sits the best with the rest of the characters, which looks like it belongs with the rest. Basically, if any of them look "off". Or feel free to let me know if you just can't tell a difference.
Also, just any general feedback on the consistency and shapes of any of the letters. If any individual letter looks to bold, too thin, too big, too small, too wide, etc. in comparison to the rest in the sentence.
For me, I've found that zooming out or viewing them at half size gives a better overview of the sentence, so you're not focusing on a specific letter. But everyone's eyes are different!
Thanks anyone who is willing to do this!
Adywan, I love this project!
Man, if Lucas really wanted to update the trilogy, he should really just hire you. There really is no better out there!
I like just about all of the changes. I read about the Obiwan hut dialogue change, and thought I wouldn't care for it... but I really enjoyed it. It actually seemed to flow better than the original. I went back and watched it, and couldn't even tell where the edit was - so well done on that!
The only thing I didn't like at all, was the lightsaber changes when Vader and Obiwan meet.
To me it's very similar to the Solo/Greedo change Lucas made, because it really changes the character of the character. If that makes sense.
That moment is a great illustration of the Good vs Evil idea and gives you some insight as to how the characters are thinking - Vader ready to fight (evil), Obiwan unwilling and defensive (good). Even after he sees Vader he doesn't activate his - only when Vader advances.
I think that changing that around really changes the characters.
Also, seeing Vader just standing there, without saying anything, with his saber already on... it's just a really cool moment.
Anyway, thanks again for all your work. Even if I disagree with that part, I thoroughly enjoy it as a whole. It looks and sounds great, and the rest of the changes are right on! It's incredible!
CatBus said:
EdFarmer said:
CatBus, I agree! If I end up doing a font, it will definitely be a complete font. Eventually I would hope to get enough sources to complete an entire alphabet without using another font for filler.
For me, using another font for filler would be necessary under any circumstance. I don't just want 26 letters, I want a decent chunk of Unicode's Base Multilingual Plane...
Ah, you want much! :P
Yeah, at that point it'd definitely be necessary. Filler is probably not something I'd like to do (due to licensing)... but it should be easy enough for someone to fill in the missing characters.
Servo, Thanks again for the critique and message. Those screens above are a little behind. I've reworked a lot of the characters, but some are just giving me trouble. The x, believe it or not, drove me nuts.
Others aren't as annoying as just tricky. I'm probably on my 6th reworking of the g, and with each of those having dozens of variations.
Like I said I'm probably only 1/8 of where I want to be with this set of characters. I think I'm getting closer bit by bit, just very slowly.
Okay, took some extra time to look a bit more closely at the Lucasfilm logos, and it does look like a different font. But it was helpful to take a closer look because it looks to me like the SW Lucasfilm may be using the same font (though capitalized and more rounded) as the ALTA.
The holes in SW seem more oval... but when you overlay them, they don't exactly match up. And in order to make them match up, some letters needed to be decreased in width, and others increased. That would only make sense if you used a different element for each letter, which is probably very unlikely I would guess. But even if you adjust every character, they still didn't match up exactly, because you have the different curves and hole shapes.
negative1, Thank you so much for all of those! The scans are very helpful, but the extra explanation and overlays were even more helpful! Major thanks!
One question - does the ALTA from ESB not have a text border?
The Lucasfilm example was helpful, too, since I'd also began working on a new version of that. I might come back to that later, though, so it's good to know discrepancies.
I agree with negative1 on the Lucasfilm issue. I think SW/ESB/ROTJ all use the same font in the LF shots. I think the differences come from the layout, and some distortion.
You_Too, thanks for that. It was helpful. The more ideas I can get the better. And it's very very good, too. Did you redraw that or is that a manipulation of a scan? Either way, very nice.
Erikstormtrooper, thanks for the offer! I definitely will!
CatBus, I agree! If I end up doing a font, it will definitely be a complete font. Eventually I would hope to get enough sources to complete an entire alphabet without using another font for filler.
As for the subtitle font, does anyone know if it's the same as the ALTA font?
***********
Thanks everyone for the info and reference. The more images, scans, thoughts, references, etc., the more helpful! If anyone is aware of any other movies (or better - print art) that used this font, that would be very helpful.
I've only taken a few liberties with this so far. One of which was the rounding of the text, which I decided against. When I started looking closely, it just looked to me like the rounding was a result of distortion. After looking at the information on Mike's forums, I feel pretty exonerated with that decision.
But that had me wondering, and I'm sure many of you have had to decide on this before, what am I going for here? I could recreate the font exactly as seen - spacing/distortion errors and all. I could recreate it as seen, fixing the spacing and clipping issues. Or I could recreate it as it was intended. I'm fairly against the latter, because there are limited references, and I just don't see the point (other than actually restoring a now dead and beautiful font, which would be interesting but not in this case).
But I think it's going pretty well so far. I tested it against negative1's samples, and it matched up very well without any tweaking.
(order top to bottom: ESB, Recreated, SW)
And I think I posted this before, but here's a larger comparison to the other fonts. It's a little earlier on, so I've since changed the e and maybe the n/m in the negative1 comparison above.
So that's where I'm at right now. I'm probably only 1/8 of the way to where I'd like to be on this... but think I've got the basic layout and shapes down fairly well so far. Any critique/input/analysis on it is appreciated.
DavidBrennan, The project right now is simply to replicate the "A long time ago" text as a graphic. Of course, down the road it would be nice to build onto that, but that's not something I'm working on right now (directly, anyway). So sorry if I didn't make sense on that... a font is something I would definitely like to see come from this eventually, but not something I'm doing right now.
If you're looking for a font for writing text, from what I've found, I agree with Laserschwert on the two he mentioned. But I think Trade Gothic definitely seems closest. If all you need is the "A long time ago" screen, I could send you what I have, but it's pretty rough right now, and I'm not sure it would be much better than Trade Gothic. Click on this for a comparison:
If you can't read the text on the left, it is (from top to bottom): News Gothic, Trade Gothic, Harmy's cleaned original, Mine, Franklin Gothic Book. And here's another view or two (last 3 images at the end of the album are just at different zoom levels).
Erikstormtrooper, I don't know much about creating fonts, and it's not something I'm working on right now, but when I get there, I will probably need help with the font thing.
RU.08, Yeah... I noticed in a couple threads people were having a hard time with the subs. I haven't looked into it much, since I'm just doing the ALTA right now, but is the sub text the same as the ALTA text, just bolder?
Actually, I remember when looking through some of those subtitle threads, someone came up with a really great and very close match. Went to find it in my bookmarks to link here... turns out it was you! :D
Also, for subs, is a graphic overlay a no-no? Does it need to be a font and rendered by script? I didn't know if a script can control the scaling of a vector graphic.
Thanks everyone.
Right now I'm working on these as SVGs as althor1138 described, so they will scale to any size without any quality loss or artifacting. As SVGs, I do have to edit/recreate the Bezier curves as well. Here's a an animated gif of the layers:
Puggo, I played around with font creation last night, and it's definitely possible to recreate the font using this as source. But right now I'm just trying to get this set down accurately as an SVG.
Thanks for the reference suggestions, RU.08 and Lasershwert. The more of these I can get the better!
I’m not sure if there’s any interest in this, but I’ve already started playing around with the idea, so I figured I’d go ahead and post it here and see where it goes. I’m not very good with video or audio editing, so I figured this is probably one of the few ways I could actually contribute to any sort of semi-restoration. That, and I’ve recently become fascinated with fonts. Not sure why.
I started this after looking at a lot of the comparison screenshots between the user created content here. I noticed (and was very impressed by) Harmy’s DeEd, where he managed to recreate the scrolling text. It looked incredible. But I noticed that through all of these restorations, the “A long time ago” intro text (and Lucasfilm Limited text) almost always remained untouched.
So I began playing around with the idea, and then I saw Harmy’s preview for his upcoming DEED v2. He used a film reference, and I’d never seen such a clear presentation of it. All of these years, I’ve been used to seeing the soft font with a soft blue glow… but after seeing this restoration, now I realize that it wasn’t a glow at all! It was a bleeding/compression/scaling issue. The font had become distorted.
If you overlay them in a photo program and hide/show the layers (the gif below is the best I could do here), it’s very easy to see that not only has the text become blurry and dull, but the actual layout of the text has become distorted. It looks bubbled, pushed out… almost like a fish-eye lens.
Thanks to doubleofive for the comparison references for the pic above and below! Each frame of the gif below is delayed 10 seconds. In order: dark_jedi’s GOUT, Harmy’s DEED, Harmy’s DEED v2, Recreation, Special Edition.
From what I’ve read, and I’m sure many here know more about this than I do, the font used in Star Wars wasn’t digitized until after the movies were released. And even when it was digitized, it doesn’t look like it was digitized very accurately. You can see the digitized font in the Special Edition (and newer editions) above - it’s very different.
So I thought, why not try to re-create it accurately? I mean, it is the first thing you see in the movie.
Not only would it provide for a cleaner look, but it would cancel out any noise artifacting, and help with stabilization. It will also scale better.
That way, it can be scaled up (or down) to whatever size without any loss in quality. A soft glow will look like a soft glow instead of a hazy blur. A solid border will look solid. For fan edits, it would be much easier to alter/manipulate, and create effects with, change the colors of, etc.
I haven’t looked into how complicated this would be, but I guess this could eventually turn into a source to create a font, which could then be used for the alien subtitles and maybe an end credit restoration.
I guess uses of this are pretty basic and limited. But does anyone think that this is something worth bothering with? I haven’t followed everything as closely as I would’ve liked to, so as far as I know someone else may have already done something like this. Please let me know if so. And if not, and if this seems like something that might be useful, any comments/critiques/criticisms would be great. Also, any other reference material would be a huge help! Thanks!
D'oh!
Lord__Vader, I really appreciate the offer, and never really thought about doing it myself. I would have to learn more about authoring, and would have needed more time (not to mention a better computer!). Thank you though! I'll just wait for Adywan's 1080p ROTJ for now. Thanks again, though.
Anyway, I just showed the Dark_Jedi versions (thanks Fink Frink!), and all went well. It'll be great to have a cleaned up set of the original versions, and a set of Adywan's awesome edits of the modern versions when they're finished. Can't wait!
Great stuff here. Great place. Thanks so much for everyones help, and again to all the editors for their hard work.
Well, after a very long time of trying to figure out Avisynth, and everything that goes along with it, I began a test encoding. Looks like each movie would take about 10 days. And that may be just for the first pass! To say the least, I don't have enough time for them to complete! I think I'm having some sync issues as well. Hard to tell for sure, or if it will become worse, since it takes me 20 minutes to test a few seconds!
So if any DIY'ers have already done V and VI for DVD5, it would really really help me out.
Edit: (trying to give the darkjedi ones a look now... though I'm not totally clear on what they are yet... g-forces, but with better audio? - the amount of info, versions, and work here on these forums is endless! Incredible!)
Thanks again everyone for the time and help.
I ended up showing the Dark_Jedi GOUT Image Stabilized with 5.1 audio, and it turned out great! Everyone really enjoyed them. Thanks again to him, and g-force, and all involved with this. I can't tell you all how much I appreciate it.
Thanks Chewtobacca (great name, I laughed).
The place we're using just has a 480p Projector, so HD versions won't make a difference. I was planning on showing Adywans IV Revisited, and V AVCHD. I converted the AVCHD to DVD. The quality is lesser than the original file of course, but it is still much better looking than the official release of V, and the color looks much much better!
I took a look at the Ewokgroomer/Wookie Groomer version. I was hoping Hayden wouldn't be there, but... he is. That's the main thing I'm trying to avoid.
So I guess my options are to show Adywans IV and V, and the official SE VI (ugh). Or just to show all 3 GOUT, which look really bad and are 4:3. The projection screen isn't that big anyway, so the GOUT would be fairly small. I'm not sure if that would be a poor/distracting experience.
I really like the GOUT Image Stabilized IV, but I can't find one for V or VI. I don't know if they're out there. If so, I would definitely be more inclined to show them.
But Adywans stuff is so nice! I'm so torn!
Hey everyone. I got pointed to this thread from one of the Adywan threads. I'm very new to the whole FanEdit thing, and really impressed by all this! In a few weeks I'm showing the trilogy to a lot of new people for their first time. I was planning on showing Adywans versions of IV (Revisited) and V (AVCHD with old Emp)... but I can't find anything comparable for VI (if anyone has any ideas, let me know... SE quality but without Hayden... any other edits being removed would be nice).
I wanted to keep the quality consistent for all 3 movies, which was preventing me from showing GOUT VI after the IV and V mentioned above. I was also avoiding showing GOUT IV, V, and VI straight from the official DVDs due to the really poor qaulity, and 4:3. I'm showing them on a projector, which may wash them out a little, but the screen in not that large, and showing them letterboxed would be poor.
Someone suggested I take a look at this thread. I found a version of GOUT Image Stabilized IV, but can't find V or VI. Do they exist?
If so, I would really consider showing them! G-Force, and anyone else involved in these... great job, and thank you!! Thanks so much for all the hard work. The more I look around this site, the more impressed I get! It's too bad it takes a fan/the fans to give these movies the restorations they deserve... the Lucas team (well, Lucas himself) should be ashamed!
Thanks for anyones help and direction!
Thanks thorr! I checked out a version of GOUT Image Stabilized Ep IV, and it is nicer than the disc versions. I'm a little lost when they're talking about the scripts and stuff, but I'm trying to figure it out.
All this is kind of hard to follow and a little overwhelming since I'm kind of new to the whole FanEdit thing.
I have Adywan's IV and V. For now I think I'm kind of just looking for a version of VI of similar quality, minus Hayden (and maybe the Jedi Rock or another thing or two). Something that starts with the latest release quality, but just fixes a few of the things to make it more similar to the originals. Is there anything like that you could point me in the direction of?
I'm going to be showing these movies to a few people for the first time, and I just want to keep the quality even throughout.
I'm kind of torn! In a way, I'd like to just show the GOUTs... but the quality of the restored versions are so nice! It's just that they're changed in so many ways. I'll be showing them on a projector, so it might wash the quality out further... so starting with bad quality versions could look pretty ugly.
Sorry if it's improper to talk about this in the wrong thread, I'm not sure how strict this board is about side discussions in threads.
Thanks!
Just thought I'd post a little story and thank you here.
I brought up something about Star Wars at work one day a few weeks ago, and to my surprise, half the people I talked to hadn't seen it. Amazed in disbelief, I decided to have everyone over to watch them later this month. The place where I live has a little clubhouse thing you can rent out with a tiny theater room for about 20. Perfect.
I haven't seen Star Wars myself, aside from on TV and VHS a few times, since the Special Edition versions came out in the Theaters. Which at the time, I thought some parts were neat... but I didn't realize the Special Editions were at the expense of THE Star Wars I knew and loved. As the years have gone on, thinking about the Special Editions just annoys me more and more, and even parts that I thought were neat then, I've come to hate.
So when looking for what version to show everyone, I would like them to see the versions that made them the greatest trilogy of all time... you know... the original versions. I was excited to see that the newest DVD set included the originals! Perfect! Then I saw them........ I think my VHS tapes look better (slight exaggeration, I know). It's pathetic. And 4:3 means they won't scale to the screen. Eh.
Annoyed, I figured maybe I'd just show the dumb Special Edition ones. Little did I realize the Special Editions on the new DVDs aren't even the Special Editions I've come to know and hate... They've been changed again! STOP IT GEORGE. PLEASE. Han is supposed to shoot first, he's kind of a jerk. THAT'S THE POINT OF YOUR STUPID MOVIE. Then I have to see some deleted scene reinserted, where Han jitters up and down, no new information is offered, and everything is just repeated from the last scene. It was left out for a reason, wasn't it? And now to make things worse, at the end of the whole thing, as the ghosts appear, Vader is now some teenager giving us a creepy stare? It doesn't even make sense! It's just weird! Then add in all the stupid breaks I take from the actual movie to watch Jawas flying around, or little robots do nothing, or animals running around, standing around, standing in the way, singing. STOP IT PLEASE.
Sorry, I got carried away there.
About to give up hope completely, I found this site, and ANH:R. I was totally blown away reading about it. I coudn't wait to look at it, and had a hard time finding it. To be honest, though, I had never heard about Fan Edits. I have to say, initially I expected any Fan Edit to be a poor hack job. Luckily I was completely proven wrong.
I can now say that ANH:R is THE best version of Star Wars I've ever seen! What an amazing job, man! I just can't get over how well done the whole thing is... it really is totally impressive to me. I just can't get over it! THANK YOU!!!
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Now I have a new problem. I was going to show ANH:R, and then just the bad looking original versions of the other two, when I found Adywans version of Empire. Again, very impressed, and excited for the fix (for yet another Lucas edit I was unaware of until this whole unfortunate revelation).
So now I'm showing ANH:R, Empire 1080p, and .................
I'm not sure what version of ROTJ to show! Should I show two great looking movies, then the original awful looking ROTJ? I think it's my only option. The CGI in Jabba's place is really awful, but it's only a minute or so. But I can't get over the ghost thing.
If the 1080p ROTJ was out within the next few weeks, I'd for sure show that, but knowing how much effort it takes, I can imagine that may be very unlikely.
I think it's almost worth just showing the original ROTJ in poor quality just for the old ghost. But then would it be distracting showing two great looking versions, and a bad quality finale? Going from two great looking versions to a bad one can be distracting. Is there another version floating around close to the original and in better quality (or even the 1997SE) that anyone would recommend? Anyone have any opinions?
Anyway... Sorry for the long post. I can't thank you enough Adywan. I'll try to donate a little once I can afford it, but it might not be able to be much, so I apologize.
