Harmy

You're right, of course. I don't know what happened there.

All intentional. Like I said, there was already a big debate over this some weeks ago.

Just finished Outbound Flight again and loved it! I think all the prequel stuff is handled really well and the prequel characters don't get much time and in the short time we spend with them in the book, Anakin and Obi-Wan are actually turned into fairly likeable characters. There are also some debates about testing children for Force sensitivity and not a single mention of midichlorians in the whole book. I think Zahn just wanted to tell his own prequel story (as in prequel to his own books) and had to make due with the canon established by GL.

Sure, like I said, the colours are not final.

In MPC, just press ALT+i to get a screencap at the actual resolution of the video. You can save it as either JPG, BMP or PNG and choose the folder :-)

Hi, OMEN, welcome to the forum :-)

I was going to write a long elaborate answer but I think You_Too said it all. If you look back in the thread, you'll find a whole heated discussion about the subtitles ;-)

Oh and the colours aren't final there but quite close, but you're probably right about it being a bit too yellow, it's a side effect of trying to make Greedo more green.

Yeah, most of the EoD OOT shots seem to be low res analogue transfers. Maybe they were pulled from some older documentaries' masters or unused footage.

I think I read somewhere that the guys who created the menus for the 2004 DVDs had access to film materials (perhaps some 97SE IPs or even just prints or something like that) and scanned them themselves because the 2004 master wasn't ready yet and that's why they have correct colours. The 97SE footage in the EoD could be a similar thing. With all the in-house equipment, it's probably no problem for LFL employees to do low res scans of archival material. Which makes it even sadder that most of the time old analogue masters are being recycled (like with the archival docs on the BDs).

Thanks for letting me know :-)

And while I was at it:

:-D

Here's the latest rendition of Greedo's subs:

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=ES0LNQNV

Yeah, but now they'll have the 3D versions to release on BD :-/

Sorry, none, but while I don't support frievous' complete pessimism, I can't agree with your arguments either. Lucasfilm doesn't necessarily have to do the restoration themselves but in order for the film to be preserved and released legally, they'd have to officially give the job to someone and we should absolutely keep fighting for that. Some of what you said doesn't even make sense, because if the public has to break the law to preserve and restore the film, that is definitely not fine at all.

Yeah, I tried the "change colour" effect I mentioned before and while it took a lot of careful adjustment of the settings, it definitely seems to have worked quite well :-)

Thanks for the feedback, guys :-)

Here's what I'm hoping to be pretty much the final version of the 1st part of the duel. Let me know what you guys think :-)

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=RDL6Q8YO

@Josh: Yeah, there is a difference but those shots are a few seconds away from each other and the second one will still be tweaked, because it's too bright. And the difference is more in the opacity of the glow than in colour.

Sorry, but I think I'll leave all the sabers the way they are now. I don't think there is any colour difference in Obi-Wan's saber there and it sure looks more like the original  then the SE throughout the whole clip.

Thanks for letting me know. I'll see what I can do about it.

@Slynger: Yes, there is a v2.0 planned for ESB and Jedi as well. There's a lot to do on ESB, I think it will actually be a larger project than SW v2.0; eg. many more of those zoomed in cockpit shots were recently discovered. Also, while I'll probably be keeping the recomposited shots for Falcon's cloud city approach, I'd like to recolour the ship to look more like in the original.

And while there's almost nothing I want to change on Jedi, I am now using better software, which will enable me to render it in better quality with less compression, so that alone makes it worth redoing.

I didn't find that function in Premiere but I don't really need it anymore.

What's interesting though, is that I found out that those artefacts I mentioned are only there when I boost the saturation in Premiere and they probably have nothing to do with the way you corrected it because it happens with other videos as well. Sorry about that.

Yeah. No problem, You_Too, I'm glad you post these :-) And seeing it like that, I think I need to dial it back a bit on that Vader shot. I first tried to just boost saturation a bit but due to the nature of You_Too's correction, this creates some artefacts, where some parts get boosted more than others, making the border between them rather jagged, but then I tried this (dialling back reds in shadows and increasing them by about the same amount in highlights) and I think it works really nicely, better actually than the saturation increase. But it does need to be applied with caution.

Yeah, no. I read you whole post the first time around and my answer still stands.

You're very welcome :-)

Oh and here's the second part of the duel:

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=HZ5SG5QO

Having learned some new info lately, I must say that the situation about real SW vanishing from the surface of the Earth doesn't seem so dire anymore. At least for the original film but the situation isn't so bad for ESB either and hopefully in time ROTJ as well. And I'm not talking about my projects, which I only consider a temporary viewing supplement but not a preservation in the real sense, if only for the fact that they don't contain most of the original optical composites.

Absolutely not an option, sorry. This whole exercise of re-doing the lightsabres (which by a rough estimate took something over 100 hrs) was not to make the light sabers look better than in v1.0 (where I used the scene corrected by Adywan, so the sabers looked good but still obviously digitally recomped)but to make them look more like in the original. And that goal was IM(not-so-H)O achieved.

And I think the colours are quite consistent - sure they're not 100% consistent but all info indicates that the colours were by no means consistent in the original either.

And also, another not-so-minor factor: I f*cking love the look of the v2.0 lightsabres. I already watched that clip I posted like 20 times!

Oh, and BTW, since I'd really like to avoid making yet another version after v2.0 (unless of course a considerably better source appears - but then a considerably better source would basically yield the whole DeEd unnecessary ;-)  ) quality control will be an important part of the project. A that's where you guys come in. I decided that as I'm progressing though the edit, I will post a separate workprint for every half an hour of the film when it's finished, which I'd like some volunteers to check. And then when the editing is finished, I'll post a second WP of the whole film, which will be at a higher bitrate - (probably a 4,36 GB 720p mkv) with pitch corrected audio (it has to stay 25fps, so that I can get relevant timecode based feedback) in order to make it a worthy watching experience to  give it a broader appeal, but not quite a worthy replacement of the final version.

Anyway, here's my latest render of the first part of the sabre duel. I think it's pretty good now:

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=DE0QP7NH

It should be pretty much the quality of the DVD9 AVCHD (the bitrate's slightly higher than that but that is to account for the GOUT in the upper left corner and the 04SE in the upper right corner).

Yeah, it should definitely be green but as you can see it changes tint even between these shots and it could be because of the bluer lighting of that shot.

That lightsabre is straight from 97SE without any major tweaks and I really don't think the saturation is too high on either the sabre or the lights considering the saturation on the rest of the picture. The GOUT is very wrong in that regard IMO. I had a chance to see some pictures that confirm this. I did tweak Vader's sabre in some of those shots you suggested before though.

Anyway, I'm editing the duel together now (no I'm not that far yet, I still didn't get past the first ten minutes. I just needed a break from the beginning of the movie and decided to put together the scenes where I'll be swapping a lot of shots - such as the duel but also the hologram scenes and the prison block shoot-out) and I'm having some serious trouble keeping the colours consistent throughout the scene.

With pictures like this being there, I wouldn't trust any of these to be a reliable colour reference.