Hal 9000

Could you perhaps flip the shot of the destroyer, and the destroyer in the second shot, shifting the Death Star to the right to make room for it?

I started out renting the OT from Blockbuster. At that time both the original and special edition versions were laid out to choose between. So I had rented and seen both a good handful of times that way before getting my parents to buy a set, the pan-n-scan SE. I traded my SE copy of ROTJ to a friend (who was casual toward SW) for his OOT copy. Later I’d buy a widescreen copy of the SE also.

Good point. I recall some ‘official’ condemnation of it, but I can’t say I’m aware of anything that came from GL personally.

Sending PM.

Sending a PM.

If I remember correctly, at the time the GOUT was released it was agreed that there was very little virtue in LaserDisc conversions because the GOUT was the best presentation of that master on video. There was Project XO which was canceled shortly after, which at the time was attempting to mine as much detail as possible from the LaserDiscs by using the best LaserDisc player in the world and doing fancy things to squeeze every drop out of it. With the GOUT, that put an end to all such things.

That said, I also recall the EditDroid version being regarded highly. As far as bonus material, there’d be some LaserDisc-specific content to compile, sure.

R2 dies from losing the will to live, until he regains it.

I’ll see about that one shot, anyway, with the heroes running by. But I imagine leaving it as the SE has it, even though I agree it’s not super well executed.

Fascinating little snippet. I wonder if it’s sort of all fun and games until it happens to oneself, as his sentiment about looking forward to seeing how people ostensibly remix existing films using the Internet did not seem to carry over into The Phantom Edit.

Yes, and for that change I was able to recreate it using stereo sources rather than folding down the 5.1 version. It’s simply lifting a consonant from earlier in the scene.

The stereo should be identical in content to the 5.1, with one notable exception. The 1997 mix doesn’t always present 3PO’s dialogue very well, and at least on my setup I hear some distortion. You can hear it most clearly in Luke’s garage. It appears to be like that in every iteration of the 1997 SE mix that I have access to. So for the stereo mix, I use the 1993 mix for any scenes in which I can discern this distortion. (Can’t do much about it in the 5.1 mix because no 5.1 mix available is anywhere close enough to use for swaths of the film at a time.) This supposed issue appears to be an inevitable part of using 1997 as the main source, but at least the (PLII) stereo track is free of it.

Sending a PM!

PM sent!

Oh, and another thing is I’ve made custom stereo mixes for all three. Because the changes are straightforward for the most part it wasn’t too much trouble to recreate the mixes using the 1993 and 1997 stereo mixes from PCM from LaserDisc. A few short portions aside, these are natively 2.0 Dolby ProLogic II. And the portions that I mixed down I did so targeting ProLogic II. Not that it matters because there’s a 5.1 mix anyway, but still.

I’m gearing up to revamp this project based on a few things changing. For one thing, I finally tried out DrDre’s color matching tool, and have fallen in love. I have used it to bring ESB a little closer to what feels right, using Adywan’s old 1997 reconstruction. I’ve targeted a happy medium between the two, and at least enough to remove the aqua color throughout the 19SE of ESB. For ROTJ I plan to bring it just a bit closer to the DeEd, but not changing it as much as ESB. ANH I may go ahead and grade it a little closer to Adywan’s color corrected 2011 BR.

In addition to regrading it like that, I plan to use Adywan’s fix for the Cloud City window that introduced a continuity error in the SE rather than resorting to OOT footage (color correcting it to match).

I hope to steal a few things from The Man With No Name’s Devastator project for ANH.

There’s a few things I’d like to list to see if anyone has the means and desire to assist with. These are wishes, not necessities, but would be welcome if someone shared the desire to see them realized:

• The first shot of the Battle of Yavin has been trash since 1997. Impressive CG at the time or not, I find it ugly. But I feel starting the battle with the OOT version doesn’t feel right because we see CG fighters frequently throughout. Not to mention seeing a straight line of sight between the moon of Yavin IV and the Death Star. I know Adywan is tackling this part of it, but I’d love a replacement for the whole shot. Pie in the sky, most likely.
• The added CG rats (or scurriers) to the first shot of approaching Mos Eisley feel like intrusive CGI. It’d be cool to see them removed, but it sounded like it may be trickier than it sounds.
• The shot with the two mirrored sets of troopers, it’d be nice to remove one set of those troopers. (And bonus points for removing the unconvincing CG droid also.)

Stay tuned!

I watched it like a year ago, and it was a lot easier to follow once I turned the subtitles on halfway through.

I don’t think I tried too hard to focus, because I knew I’d have to rewatch it when the second part comes out anyway.

Did you ever finish this, Dom?

PM sent!

Fullmetaled said:

Hal 9000 said:

My ‘Custom Special Edition’ of ANH addresses this. I use a syllable from the same scene to have him say, “I wanted you to have this….” And I don’t think it sounds too bad.

Also, the ROTS ‘canon cut’ by NFBisms tackles this differently. As Anakin and Padme have their hairbrushing balcony scene, there is dialogue implying Anakin is suggesting giving the baby a lightsaber.

What about obi wan explaining his relationship with anakin in return of the Jedi not remotely lining up with the phantom menace.

🤷

My ‘Custom Special Edition’ of ANH addresses this. I use a syllable from the same scene to have him say, “I wanted you to have this….” And I don’t think it sounds too bad.

Also, the ROTS ‘canon cut’ by NFBisms tackles this differently. As Anakin and Padme have their hairbrushing balcony scene, there is dialogue implying Anakin is suggesting giving the baby a lightsaber.

I’ll do that. I was erring on the side of more smoothing only because I assumed it mattered how closely the test and reference images were identically aligned.

If I understand correctly, I could shuffle the pixels of both images into a random order and get the same result.

Have you found a smoothing number that works best when the sources just aren’t cropped or aspect-ed identically?

It… doesn’t matter if the images are aligned? I assumed the way it worked was to compare each pixel with the pixel at the same address in the other image.

If it doesn’t matter what order the images are in, I guess it shouldn’t matter if the two images are even perfectly aligned. If one were slightly stretched or squished relative to the other… that may not matter?

Thank you, that helps me plan how to wrangle them into usable input. Should it matter whether they are stacked horizontally or vertically? It’d be easier and more precise for me to do that than to arrange them into a grid.

I’ve used VMware for years and had no problems. VirtualBox is a good free one I had used in the past.

Also, stitching multiple frames together seems to work really well. However, mammoth images seem to choke it and it does not progress past a certain point. But even with a low amount of color spaces (since a large amount choked it) the results are pretty darn good across a whole movie with very different locations.

I’ve just been running it within a Windows VM.

Cool, I’ll try that in order to hopefully get away with a scene-by-scene correction rather than shot for shot. Thanks for the orientation.