ElectricTriangle

Sounds great! Glad I could be some small help.

Have you considered using a color corrected version of the OT blurays? (at least for when he isn’t specifically criticizing the special edition). The BDs have notoriously bad colors, and better color would let them compare favorably to other films. I know you’ve already done all the hard editing work, but Neverar’s A New Hope Technicolor Recreation is in sync with the bluray, so potentially you could drop it into your edit without too much trouble.

^…^ said:
By the way, I’ve discovered that the IMAX picture found here (http://media.washtimes.com.s3.amazonaws.com/media/image/2015/12/16/film_review-the_force_awakens.jpeg) - that is 1.33:1, by the way - has been recomposited (unless BD/HDTV were recomposited instead, but I don’t think it’s the case)

Yeah, the promotional still is a Photoshop of several different frames, so that you can have both Rey and Finn in good poses plus a good explosion, plus the tie fighter firing all in one image.

This is the frame Rey and the left half of the image are taken from (as you can see, Finn’s pose is not as dynamic and too blurry):

BB-8 and the tie fighter are from different frames as well.

DMCA doesn’t exist outside of the US. Also, currently in the US there’s an exemption for breaking copy protection for the purposes of using the resulting footage for commentary and short usage, which is weird, since it judges your intent when breaking DRM (what if you decided not to use that footage in your documentary after ripping it?) and also doesn’t account for the fact that copy protected material might be in the public domain.

The question of what you do with the material after breaking the DRM is separate from the issue of breaking the DRM. In the early days of the DMCA, when companies actually tried to enforce the restriction on breaking it, I remember that legal decisions ruled that using the resulting footage for fair use purpose was legal, but breaking CSS wasn’t.

So theoretically you could be taken to court for breaking DRM, but the copy you made and distributed would be perfectly legal. God, copyright law sucks. In practice, I don’t think companies have gone to court over breaking disk DRM since the early days of HDDVD.

If you want a fun, legally dubious way around this, you could have a friend rip a copy in a foreign country and send you only the public domain content. Or torrent the movie as long as it didn’t come with any copyrighted bonus material or soundtracks.

I have the original files that were hosted on blip.tv before it shut down. (They can be found on archive.org). They are in a higher bit-rate than the youtube uploads, with the original cut for episode three with the Nadine bits. I will pm you links.

Oh and in Germany, a Stuttgart court found in the opposite direction in a terrible blow to the public domain. It looks like it was appealed to Germany’s highest court, but I can’t find if the court decided to take the case. So it looks like right now this is not allowed in Germany.

In the US there is ample legal president that this is legal.
Digitizing a photo or painting that is in the public domain should not create a new copyright on that copy, because an original work was not created. Bridgeman Art Library v. Corel Corp establishes a precedent that “Even though accurate reproductions might require a great deal of skill, experience and effort, the key element to determine whether a work is copyrightable under US law is originality.”

In other parts of the world this is less settled, but in the UK the National Portrait Gallery threatened Wikipedia for hosting their scans of old paintings. The museum backed down and the UK’s Intellectual Property Office then later said that “copyright can only subsist in subject matter that is original in the sense that it is the author’s own ‘intellectual creation’. Given this criteria, it seems unlikely that what is merely a retouched, digitized image of an older work can be considered as ‘original’.”

So in the US and probably the UK you should be fine to freely use and modify restorations as long as the original film is public domain.

Now, a lot of restoration houses do put copyright notifications on their work. They do this mostly so they can get paid for when another label wants to use their transfer. Because their business model depends on this it’s conceivable that they might go to court to try and defend them. You would probably win if you could afford to hire a lawyer and defend your case, but if you couldn’t then this would be an effective way to stop usage of their transfer.
There are weird areas this gets into such as if the restored tinting on silent films is copyrightable because it’s a creative decision, or because since the tinting aims to restore an original element of the film it is not copyrightable. Also, based on how the music industry works, multi-channel remixed soundtracks (from the original elements) are likely copyrightable depending on the creative decisions made.

Edit: And just beaten to it by Mr Shickadance

I sent PMs to everyone in the thread who asked. In the future, just click my username, select “start a private topic,” and ask away. I’ll get back to you much quicker that way.

I sent you a pm.

Glad you liked it!

Unfortunately, using the DC effects at the end puts a substantial amount of the finale in SD, including all the viewscreen shots of vger’s interior up until that point. And while they are impressively matched to the film, they are ultimately limited to being 2001 era budget cgi. I personally think most of the theatrical cut shots look better despite their limitations.
If I ever incorporate these effects, I’d want to do some extra work on them, including re-rotoscoping the two shots that incorporate a live action plate.

Version 2 of this edit is now available. It’s a fairly small upgrade, but now it’s a little more polished.
version 2 changes:

• newly created opening titles which have a logo animation similar to the DC DVD.
• cleaned up some of the redone effects
• made the DVD footage’s aspect ratio consistent throughout the the film
• used color-corrected Blu-ray footage to add the theatrical alien subtitle font.
• Motion tracked the the DC “Starfleet Headquarters” shot to replace the title with an HD title in the main title font.
• Fixed one brief editing error in v1 that repeated a reaction shot incorrectly.

This image gallery shows the changes made for v2: https://imgur.com/a/K0EhF

Now available on the 'spleen or pm for a link.

I just finished version two of this edit which adds some polish and gets rid of the remaining VHS footage with the help of a new source (thanks to Beber for the French TV capture). I also gave it a new color grade, patched out the HDNet logos with DVD footage, and added subtitles

Available via the 'spleen or PM.

Jdownloader never re-encodes youtube stuff, and works pretty well.

This (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0rrolf6VM_U) footage looks to be 24fps, so the attempted fps conversion is likely were it went wrong.

The audiobook narration is great, and this edit looks really neat. The scenes from the youtube video seem to have some sort of framerate problem, and are currently stuttering. Also, I think you should probably avoid any sort of OT.com logo, as none of the projects here are produced or directly approved of by the mods.

The composite shot looks nice. The music’s always going to be hard to cut, but I think those are probably decent spots to do it.

I asked Williarob what he had been using for his Star Wars project:

Williarob said:

The best tool I found was Photoshop - If you save both versions as an image sequence you can record Photoshop doing it’s ‘Edit - Auto Align Layers’ thing as an action, and then run that on the whole folder as a batch, or maybe write a script to do it. It doesn’t always work, but that was the best tool I found for aligning sources.

That’s a cool idea!
The left-hand doorway in the 2nd image could probably be darkened a little more to keep the frame balanced.
Also, the hallway on the lower deck could be tinted blue to match Probert’s version and the hallway of his you already added.

Also, if you make an imgur account, you can select an option to not re-compress images. Currently, those are pretty chunky jpgs.

Synnöve said:

I believe that footage came from the same scan that was used for the HDTV master; the frame geometry is different from the Blu-Ray.

It is. I always forget they did a whole new scan for the bluray, as they ended up thoroughly botching it. I wonder why they bothered.

Synnöve said:

Hah it will be even more magical if I can find a better way to align the transfers; right now I’m doing it manually and, while it works okay, it’s tedious and the alignment quickly changes within the sequence (notice how the right bottom corner has some ghosting due to misalignment).

That sounds extremely tedious. There might be some way to use use Photoshop’s auto align and some scripting to deal with that. You might ask Williarob, I know he’s had to deal with aligning different sources in his projects.

Oh, and I know you probably realize, but keep in mind the HDTV is wrongly flagged at PC levels (0-255) while actually being 16-235. You need to convert the luminescence levels.

They reuse a bunch of the dry dock scenes in Wrath of Khan. I explored using them for my HD director’s cut recreation, but unfortunately most all of them are trimmed compared to their length in TMP.
The behind the scenes documentary on the bluray shows the transfer before the DNR and contrast boost, although it still unfortunately doesn’t include any full shots.
Comparing Synnöve’s sample to that footage shows really great results, detail-wise: https://i.imgur.com/pIA2sv2.png
This process is basically magic as far as I’m concerned.

Whoo! Glad to see this back. That sample looks great!

Wow! Very cool.

For those that don’t have usenet, I’ve uploaded a copy of this, and anyone can PM me for a link.

Update: A link is still available as of 2025

I think the bulk of it was a link from this site:
(these sites also have examples):
https://www.themarysue.com/remastered-buffy-is-a-butt/
https://gizmodo.com/oh-dear-buffys-hd-makeover-is-a-total-mess-1671812347

As far as I can tell, Joss Whedon is very opposed to it being released in this state, and these been no traction in the last few years for this coming to home media (all the streaming sites still use the original SD masters too). I’m not even sure if it still airs on HDTV like this anymore, or if it got recalled.

If you really wanted to, you could track down the HDTV airings, and then recreate the original framing of the show by cropping and re color-timing the open matte shots and discarding the cropped shots for SD footage (which are probably numerous, eps. the SFX shots). Probably not worth the effort.

Yeah, all the footage shot in 1971 is pretty severely cropped, which is unfortunate, because otherwise it’s a really nice transfer. (It is actuate to the European theatrical presentation, but that still means the majority of the film is framed wrong). And in my fan edit, all of the footage I use would be framed wrong.

The 4:3 HDTV is lacking in detail, but I was able to color grade it to look somewhat more like the bluray master.