Harmy

No - the whole sky is put in from a 35mm scan but the entire ground section is one piece.

Well, that's what I meant - it would be really cheap for prints in decent conditions - those are usually in the thousands of dollars range, aren't they? I've seen super8 prints being sold for those prices.

Yeah, that's what doing a v2.1 is all about, getting all these little details right :-)

Yes, it possibly made the grain more visible; I didn't add any, if that's what you were wondering. The suns are taken directly from a 35mm frame scan are now much more authentic in both appearance (including shape) and movement. The colors are also much much closer to the IB print now.

That's not reasonable; that's really really cheap - so cheap in fact, that there just has to be something wrong with the prints IMO.

OK, as promised, here's today's final update:

http://uloz.to/x2xUSRS/sunset-v2-1-mp4

There's more coming :-) I really want to get this done before Christmas.

Oh, no, I really meant his redemption in the eyes of others.

No, there shouldn't be any changes to that. Or at least not the part that has subtitles.

And another one:

Yeah, I cut 3P0 out and recolored him separately :-)

Another little tweak I just did:

Yeah, the whole deal with Vader's redemption is a bit stupid when you think about all the evil he's done.

Also, regarding that shot of Qui-Gon that is usually given as an example of really bad DNR in the new transfer, I don't think that's actually the case - it actually looks more like an upscale or maybe a sharpened out of focus shot - and it seems like it always was - check it out next to the shots that directly precede and follow it; BD top, HDTV bottom:

The shot seems to have much less detail compared to the neighboring shots, even in the old HDTV transfer, only there it's not as striking, because the neighboring shots aren't so detailed either and it has the dupe grain from the I.P.

I'm using thousands of screenshots from a professional scan of the IB print as a reference (unfortunately downsized to SD), not some screen photos. That's all I have to say about that ;-)

OK, guys, I would have you know there is a whole "How To's and Technical Discussion" section on these boards, where you can discuss how to burn AVCHD to DVD and the advantages and disadvantages of MKV vs. BD to your hearts' content.

It shouldn't really matter - v2.1 will be frame identical, so he should be able to just swap the sources in whatever program he's using after v2.1 comes out.

Wow, seriously, frame by frame in photoshop? That sounds crazy complicated. If you send the frames to me with one sample frame of what you want it to look like I can give it a shot and see how well can this new toy introduced in AE CS5 called rotobrush deal with it. Plus I could use a higher quality source for that shot for v2.1 anyway :-)

Sorry about that, I know that recoloring the target separately will be a pain in the ass :-)

That looks great, You_Too :-) One thing I noticed switching between the two is that the target is a very similar color as the sabre in the pre-adjustment picture - wouldn't it have been affected by the fading the same way as the sabre?

Dunedain said:

I'm not sure if adding grain helps that much, though. Since some of the natural grain and detail have already unfortunately been removed on the blu-ray set, adding artificial grain over it might just obscure some of the nice detail that has been retained.

Yeah, it definitely would obscure some detail actually - it's more about the feeling you get from watching it - the way it is now, it feels very digital; adding some grain definitely won't add any actual detail but it would help it feel more warm and authentic and even feel more detailed and I think that is more important than the actual measurable amount of detail resolved.

In that comparison, I added quite a large amount of quite coarse grain because it was just a quick proof of concept - I think with more care, it could look a lot better with some finer grain.

I have to disagree with Alex too, IMHO the entire transfer has excessive amount of DNR, in some shots it's simply even more excessive than in others. Basically, when dealing with a scan from original negative (which the master here should be) any grain removal at all is excessive IMO.

Also before anyone asks, I'm not considering doing anything with the other 2 prequels, because A) I hate them and B) AFAIK, Episode II is the theatrical version in the HDTV broadcast and there are some very decent ones floating around and Ep III is the theatrical version on BD and the only version of that I ever want to see again is also already out there (the Backstroke of the West dubbing synced to the BD).

It's funny how you can see where the net of the wig is glued and make-up'ed (made-up?) to Liam Neeson's scalp - sometimes HD shows stuff that was never meant to be seen :-) I recently noticed the same thing but even more visible on Sean Bean aka The Walking Spoiler's scalp,  when watching Game of Thrones on BD.

And yes, I'm seriously considering it as a little side project, as long as someone promises to sync the theatrical DTS audio to it.

No, just added the grain and yes, I did sharpen it a little to see if any more detail could be gotten out of it but like You_Too said, it probably wasn't a great idea :-)

So, I had another chance to give the TPM BD a closer look and it isn't really that bad - both available HD transfers are bad in their own way but in direct comparison, the BD definitely wins over the HDTV/DVD master - it may have some of the grain removed but it has quite a bit of fine detail left in it and it definitely has tons more fine detail than the HDTV captures, so I think that if an HD theatrical reconstruction was to be attempted, the BD should be used as the main source.

Check this out:

Look at the detail on the tunic and Qui-Gon's hair and beard - I only have an 8GB 1080p HDTV capture of TPM, so the higher bitrate raw capture is likely better but I doubt it would make a huge difference in a low motion shot like this. I also tried adding some grain to the BD footage (3rd picture) and as you can see, it does give an illusion of more fine detail and I think it should be considered for a theatrical reconstruction using the BD as the main source.

The problem I actually find worse than the grain removal, is the color banding n the out of focus areas but there unfortunately isn't much that can be done about that.

Here's a video comparison of this shot:

http://uloz.to/xDngMad/reel-3-sky-1-mp4

The still image doesn't really show that what was removed from the sky wasn't actually grain, but weird static video noise from the GOUT (I had to use the GOUT for that whole section of the sky to make it even but unfortunately it introduced this problem, which is now gone).