Harmy

It's more that your settings are the same for the whole film, so where the colour changes between shots differently in the SE than in the original, yours follows the SE. For example, in the original (judging by the GOUT and some scans I saw etc.) in the first shoot-out, when it cuts between the rebel soldiers and the stormtroopers, the shots of the stormtroopers are darker and more blue than those of the rebels (which I suppose is because of the smoke). Also the over-all colour of the walls should be less white-with-a-slight-cyan-tint and more white-with-a-slight-dark-blue-tint.

Well, yeah, I played around with the colours a little. To be honest, I think I will actually be changing your colours quite a bit, especially in the Tantive IV sequence. But with your corrections already applied, I can do a much better job than on v1.0.

I'm expecting a file size around 300GB. Do you think it'll be bigger? And could you please point me to some tutorial on how to use those programs to do it?

Yep, tried that. Premiere wouldn't even open it.

What about MeGUI, would it be possible to use that?

So, any suggestions to this? The only software capable of converting to lossless AVI I have right now is Premiere and because that's the reason I have to do it, I need an advice on what else to use (maybe something avisynth based?)

Also, I'm keeping myself busy, making some changes to shots I wanted to use the Blus for. Here's the first:

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=Q1JTAEMB

As you can see, in v1.0 you could clearly see where the patch to cover the added clouds was applied because of static grain.

None: When Luke releases the cable and falls from the AT-AT, the shot seems wider.  (there's a button with a dot not scene before) and the blue button is now black.

https://picasaweb.google.com/102542760950977079734/EmpireSpecialEditionChangesHD#5673411116828834546

I disagree with this one (not the glue but the widening). The 2004 master generally has much less cropping than any other home video release. It is not a deliberate change, just a result of better video mastering technology.

That's the thing, J, it does it very randomly. Sometimes it doesn't happen for a few seconds and then it happens 3 times in one second and it is different with each encode. I'm pretty sure this is not a framerate problem.

And yes, whichever way you look at it, this is indeed a team effort.

Oh and did I mention that another thing it does apart from skipping frames, is that it also sometimes does a sort of back and forth jerk. It suddenly goes one frame back like in a sequence frame1, f2, f3, f4, f3, f4, f5...

LOL. Actually, it renders at 16bit instead of 8bit (and makes it so insanely huge that my computer can't even play it).

No, I'll keep it at 542, it only says 544 in my above post, because like I said, those are the properties of a different clip :-)

Oh and BTW, here are the settings I used for the output from AP:

Yeah, that'll definitely be an improvement there and it is exactly the reason why I want to use the BD and to cut in and export from Premiere - the source wouldn't have made any difference in the compression artefacting if I was still using the shitty PowerDirector encoder.

And as to the resolution, sure, that is the list of properties of one of my despecialized shots exported from AE, and like I told you, all my sources were 1280x544 or 1280x546 (the HDTV source) and then I cropped them all to 1280x542 when exporting the film, just to be sure there weren't any differences in AR between shots and also to keep the cropping about the same as on the official DVDs.

Yeah, I never thought I'd really give up, I just said there was no point in continuing until the problem was fixed and I was sure I could find a way to fix it.

Now, I need an advice as to what would be the best way to convert You_Too's h264 encode to this format (the same format I render from AE, which seems to work well with Premiere):

Video

ID                             : 0

Format                         : RGB

Codec ID                       : 0x00000000

Codec ID/Info                  : Basic Windows bitmap format. 1, 4 and 8 bpp versions are palettised. 16, 24 and 32bpp contain raw RGB samples

Duration                       : 4s 880ms

Bit rate                       : 418 Mbps

Width                          : 1 280 pixels

Height                         : 544 pixels

Display aspect ratio           : 2.35:1

Frame rate                     : 25.000 fps

Bit depth                      : 8 bits

Bits/(Pixel*Frame)             : 24.000

Absolutely. Thanks to Troyig88's  generosity, there will only be a little delay, that's all! The HDTV may or may not help, since they have pretty much the same encoding. And mainly, they don't have You_Too's awesome colour correction. The difference  between v1.0 and v2.0 is that I'm using Premiere now and I was using PowerDirector before.

I just re-installed my OS, so there shouldn't be any junk I don't know about.

I work in Adobe Premiere CS4 (I can't use CS5, because I have 32bit OS). When it was installing, it installed a bunch of its own codecs and I didn't install any other codecs. The only other A/V software I installed was the latest version of Media Player Classic, After Effects 7.0 and Yamb.

My main video source is a H264 encoded 15GB 720p file. Other sources are lossless AVI clips rendered from AE.

When I render in H264 from Premiere, these problems are way worse and more frequent then when I render in lossless. The problem isn't present at all with the lossless files from After Effects (the crawl, the 1st flyby and so on), only with the H264 compressed files, so I'm assuming working with lossless only should solve the problem.

I work and render at 25fps.

Here's the whole list of properies of the H264 main source I'm currently using:

General

Complete name                    : D:\Media\STAR WARS\01 SW\1977 Episode IV - A New Hope 1080p_track1\BluRay_You_Too.mp4

Format                           : MPEG-4

Format profile                   : Base Media

Codec ID                         : isom

File size                        : 14.8 GiB

Duration                         : 1h 54mn

Overall bit rate                 : 18.4 Mbps

Encoded date                     : UTC 2011-11-07 14:17:48

Tagged date                      : UTC 2011-11-07 14:17:48

Writing application              : Yamb 2.1.0.0 [http://yamb.unite-video.com]

Video

ID                               : 1

Format                           : AVC

Format/Info                      : Advanced Video Codec

Format profile                   : High@L4.1

Format settings, CABAC           : Yes

Format settings, ReFrames        : 4 frames

Codec ID                         : avc1

Codec ID/Info                    : Advanced Video Coding

Duration                         : 1h 54mn

Bit rate mode                    : Variable

Bit rate                         : 18.4 Mbps

Maximum bit rate                 : 40.0 Mbps

Width                            : 1 280 pixels

Height                           : 542 pixels

Display aspect ratio             : 2.35:1

Frame rate mode                  : Constant

Frame rate                       : 25.000 fps

Color space                      : YUV

Chroma subsampling               : 4:2:0

Bit depth                        : 8 bits

Scan type                        : Progressive

Bits/(Pixel*Frame)               : 1.063

Stream size                      : 14.8 GiB (100%)

Writing library                  : x264 core 116 r2074 2641b9e

Encoding settings                : cabac=1 / ref=1 / deblock=1:0:0 / analyse=0x3:0x3 / me=dia / subme=1 / psy=1 / psy_rd=1.00:0.00 / mixed_ref=0 / me_range=16 / chroma_me=1 / trellis=0 / 8x8dct=1 / cqm=0 / deadzone=21,11 / fast_pskip=1 / chroma_qp_offset=0 / threads=12 / sliced_threads=0 / nr=0 / decimate=1 / interlaced=0 / bluray_compat=0 / constrained_intra=0 / bframes=3 / b_pyramid=2 / b_adapt=1 / b_bias=0 / direct=1 / weightb=1 / open_gop=0 / weightp=1 / keyint=250 / keyint_min=23 / scenecut=40 / intra_refresh=0 / rc_lookahead=0 / rc=crf / mbtree=0 / crf=14.0 / qcomp=0.60 / qpmin=10 / qpmax=51 / qpstep=4 / vbv_maxrate=40000 / vbv_bufsize=40000 / crf_max=0.0 / nal_hrd=none / ip_ratio=1.40 / pb_ratio=1.30 / aq=1:1.0

Language                         : English

Encoded date                     : UTC 2011-11-07 14:17:48

Tagged date                      : UTC 2011-11-07 14:36:48

Thanks Troyig, conversation taken to PM.

Yeah, I know, that would be real nice but at the moment I can't afford an 8GB SD card for my phone, let alone a 1TB external. :-( 

I just checked the prices and the cheapest are around 4000CZK, which comes to about  $250. That's the kind of money I have to survive on a whole month (not counting accommodation).

OK, bad news.

I started editing and tried to export the first five minutes and found out that the video gets randomly one frame off. So sometimes, when I cut out frames or shots to colour correct them separately from the rest (eg. the flash frames), when rendered, the actual edit occurs one frame off from what I see on my timeline, thus applying the colour correction to a wrong frame, totally ruining it. This issue will only get to be even more of a problem when cutting in the despecialized shots, because then I could get one SE frame at the beginning or end of the despecialized shot.

The only way I could find, that might make sure this doesn't happen was using only uncompressed video for the editing. But that I simply cannot do, since I have big trouble fitting even the 15GB 720p mp4 file from You_Too that I'm currently using along with all the despecialized clips on my hard-drive.

But unless I somehow solve this issue, there's no point in continuing :-(

So any advice would be appreciated.

none: There are many shots which have significant glue stains.  Notated some of them in the shot spreadsheet but didn't do an overall review for them.  But they seem to have been universally addressed in 1997.

If you mean the thing that I think you do, i.e. the darker blots at the beginning of many shots - do you see them in other then GOUT sources? Because I thought that's what they were at first too, but actually, when you look closely, they copy shapes of objects from the last frame of the previous shot, so I concluded that they are in fact especially ugly DVNR artefacts!

Don't know if this has been found yet but I thought I'd point it out just to be sure. This fade has definitely been redone, because its timing is slightly different:

I really don't remember it having Anakin in it. But then it's been ages since I've read it - I'm going to re-read it soon. It's the story of what happened to the Outbound Flight mentioned in the Thrawn trilogy - the expedition to the unknown regions the real C'Baoth went on.

But you probably should read it after Survivor's Quest anyway, since that's the way it was written. I think there's another fairly new Zahn SW book I've not read yet, so I'm not sure where that should go on the reading timeline - but just like with the films, I usually tend to read the books in the order in which they were published.

EDIT: Sorry, right, now I remember, it does have Anakin - but I don't think it's too Lucas prequelly - at the time I read it, I already didn't like the prequels, so I don't think I would have liked it so much if it was too much like the prequels.

After all, Zahn was able to brilliantly continue Return of the Jedi, so why not the Phantom Menace ;-)

To me it does make it silly and childish. To me an audio book should be an equivalent of reading the book yourself, only using your ears, not your eyes. I almost never listen to abridged audio books either.

We've been in a frequent PM contact but I'd like to thank You_Too publicly for these awesome corrections and for all his behind the scenes help with using them in my edit! And believe me, it was a lot of help and he's been great about it and I'm very grateful. :-)

Oh, and going through this thread now, I wanted to mention how the BD shows just how horrible the Jabba scene in SW is:

http://img710.imageshack.us/img710/5798/jabba2.png

Look at the blurry edges around Han and the obvious heavy DVNR applied. IIRC, they couldn't find the original elements for the scene when making the 97SE, so they used some dupe they dug out somewhere in the archives, so they had to scrub out a lot of grain to make it "fit" with the rest of the film and at this resolution, it shows pretty horribly. And even the 2004 Jabba looks really horrible. He looks like a f*cking oil painting in this picture :-/ Well, actually everything does, look at Han's hair!

To be honest, I might adjust You_Too's colours a little in some scenes, since his settings are the same for the whole movie and some scenes may need individual approach. But only a little, since I really like his colour corrections over all.

OK, guys, here's a buttload of good news (well, assuming no unexpected problems arise):

I just reinstalled my windows and tried some new stuff in the process.

Not only does it seem that I will be able to use the Blu-Ray as my source, I will be able to use it with You_Too's awesome colour correction, which seems to solve many of the colour problems I was unable to solve myself (such as R2's over-blueness).

Furthermore, my room-mate just got a 2TB external HDD, which I should be able to borrow for encoding and it seems I figured out how to import the footage into Premiere, so it's bye bye PowerDirector-1pass-maximum-of-13mbps-mpeg2-encoding and hello Premiere-lossless-avi :-)

So, if all this works out, v2.0 should totally f*cking rock!!!

Oh and assuming a decent learning curve for Premiere, it could be done in about two weeks...