Harmy

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B0dtCY1O9WXzMUJMNEdLUGNKSmc

The best way, I found to make an MKV from a BD with multiple crawl, or seemless branching in general (tested with the official BDs, not this but I’d assume it would be the same) is to import not the m2ts files into the muxing program, but the playlist file corresponding to the version you want.

Yeah, that was the idea anyway. v2.5 of ESB is still gonna have the same properties as the other v2s.

It’s usually done when there some higher res footage in the mix - for example The Revenant was mostly shot on standard Arri Alexa at 3.4K but some parts were shot on the Alexa 65 at 6.5K, so the film was finished at 4K with the 3K parts upscaled and the 6K downscaled.

But it would actually make sense that the last two prequels would be finished as 2K (2048x858), because that’s the digital cinema projection standard. And with the amount of green-screen used, there were many shots, where the live-action footage would be scaled down inside the frame when put into an extended digital environment. Not to mention the many many shots, which were purely CGI, so if they did finish the movies at 2K, there could be a lot of shots, which would be true 2K resolution and not just upscales.

As for 4K, there are many movies being released on UHD BD, which had a 2K DI, so they are 100% upscaled from 2K, but they still can look better than regular BD, because of HDR grading. Plus, if they were so inclined, they could probably re-render the CGI bits at 4K.

Plus, up until about a year ago, even movies shot on 35mm had their digital effects rendered at 2K, which means that not only the fully CGI scenes, but any live action containing even a little bit of digital tinkering, are stuck at 2K, so for example the LOTR trilogy is in the exact same boat as far as 4K, as the Star Wars prequels.

Shot, yes, but that doesn’t mean they were finished at that res - movies shot on the Alexa, which is 3.4K, are also often being finished in 4K.

Yeah - I think the compression exaggerated the faults of the Blu-Ray a bit in that video but the difference is still quite huge.
And Neverar’s looks amazing as usual, which is why I plan on using his corrections as the basis for v3.0 😃

There’s lots of recomped shots in v2.0.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B0dtCY1O9WXzMUJMNEdLUGNKSmc

Let me know if it can be downloaded or only viewed from there.

Handman said:

Harmy, your “Introducing the Despecialized Editions and its Sources” video has been taken down by Fox recently. It must have been recently, because I’ve seen it in my recommended videos until just about a week or so ago.

Well, that sucks.
Not sure if I should file a dispute, because while I do believe that the use of the footage in the video is fair use, I don’t wanna drag too much legal attention to the project itself 😕

I think they were mainly just testing the CGI for the prequels, while Fox was picking up the bill.

The crawl, afaik, wasn’t changed until 1981 for a double feature release with ESB to match its Episode V crawl.
There seem to have been some minor changes before then though - the shot of the rebel fighters lifting off from Yavin has been recomposited and the end credits were changed and I think a couple of other very minor changes were done. I’m not sure though if we know when these changes happened - might actually already have been done for the mono mix prints, which were struck after the 70mm and 35mm stereo prints were out.

On the contrary, 4K would need 4 times the bandwidth to be of equal quality with 1080p, so upscaling 1080p to 4K would be pointless and would either result in pointlessly huge files, or reduced detail compared to the 1080p version due to compression.

As for the '95 Czech dubs (I actually recently discovered they were made for the 1995 THX VHS release, not the '97SE), I didn’t include them, because the translation is awful and I also always try to include the most original dubs possible. If anyone wants any alternate dubbing, they are, of course, welcome to mux them in themselves - the number of audio tracks is way too huge as it is, so I can’t include multiple dubs for each language on top of all that.

I’m actually thinking about releasing the next version with english tracks only and then including links for all the different dubs and instructions on how to add them.

Well, the ANH crawl version was released in theaters in 1981.

Yes, the 1997 Emperor scene is identical to the theatrical release and the 2004 Emperor is IMHO one of the worst changes made to these movies and definitely the worst one done to Empire.

BadCane said:

I’m kind of ashamed right now. I’m a 23 year old and been a fan for some 15-17 years by now and only TODAY I discovered this. I thought they were renamed back in 1997-1999, when the whole Prequel thing came to life.

There’s definitely no shame in thinking that, because while the episode number has always been there for ESB and ROTJ, they were never marketed as such until after the prequels - the first time an episode number was ever seen on a home-video release cover was the 2000 VHS re-release of the ‘97 SE, which had covers that tied in to the look of the Phantom Menace VHS release.
So, the episode numbers were there in the crawls but they were never really a part of the films’ names - they were called The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi until they were effectively renamed in the early 2000s.

The MKVs played on all my devices just fine - my Panasonic TV, my panasonic BD player, my Samsung BD player, my folks’ Samsung BD player and Samsung TV, even on my grandparents’ LG BD player.

The encoding is h264 - it should work on most MKV capable players. It might be possible though that some players have trouble with so many different audio tracks.

Well, the thing is the value added and that value, in the case of these grindhouse releases, compared to say VHS, LD, the GOUT or the 2004 DVD, is high definition and the only way to pay the copyrigth owner for that value is by buying the BD or the HD digital download.

Having seen the scans, I actually believe that given proper care, a restoration based purely on these scans could look better than the official BD on all counts - with a bit of sharpening (which there is a lot of on the BD) it actually rivals the sharpness and detail of the BD, and with some careful cleanup and noise management, it could look nearly as clean as the BD, while not looking unnaturally digital, like the BD does. This would take some serious restoration effort though, so the simplest way to get the original version something resembling a modern transfer/restoration of the kind we see with movies like Jaws or Spartacus, is still to color correct and despecialize the BD.

Yes! These will be absolutely excellent for Despecialized. I might still need to use the Grindhouse here and there in v2.5, depending on how fast Poita can get the rest of the reels (and the other print for damage replacement) scanned but what I have now should already cover most of the most problematic parts of Grindhouse.

I really doubt it.

And they should look even better when I replace them with Poita’s scans 😃

That’s right, the over-all edit is still being done a 720p for that reason.

Oh, I’ve been working at 1080p for quite some time now - all the work on ROTJ 2.5 has been done in 1080p.
That being said, v2.5 will still be 720p only because I will be using parts of v2.0 but the newly despecialized shots should all be ready for v3.0.

I might. Although, at his point, using such high quality 35mm sources, it would be more like how to clean up a 35mm shot. There’s no point combining most of these with the BD, because after cleanup, I should be able to cut back and forth between the BD and the 35mm quite seamlessly.

Nothing’s really decided on that - these scans by Poita are quite new. But I think I will be keeping the colors pretty close to v2.0.

What is definitely decided though is that I’ll now be scrapping months worth of work I did using the grindhouse and will be starting from scratch using Poita’s scans. The progress using those should be a lot faster though, as they’ll require a lot less cleanup and color correction work.