Harmy

TServo said:

The closest thing I know of is that screencap from the Senator screening, the one on zombie's site, and aren't you using that as one of the elements in your current composite?

Yeah, and I think that one looks great for what it is (one of my proudest moments in v1.0 actually) but there are two different mattes and I don't have the other one in any better quality than the GOUT.

It's the bottom left one in this picture posted by Laserschwert:

The picture comes from Rinzler's making of book and he actually used the GOUT for those too.

The one on the right is an unused painting.

And I saw a production photo of the actual prop from that angle and they clearly painted over the whole thing, because all the little details are different.

OK, here's a video with the new matte applied:

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=RSRIUW1I

Nope, that's what I'm hopefully waiting for!

More or less. There are some scenes I'm still waiting for new materials for.

To be honest, it looks better as a still (I'll post a video soon) but then I think we established that this shot simply never looked particularly good and what saved it was that people's eyes were drawn away from the bad matte-painting.

OK, how's this?

And here's a comparison with the SE, so all the differences are clear:

http://screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/89965

Oh, I wondered why it only said that the soldiers were new in the comparison comment :-) It's time to change it. Oh and the window is different and a lot of the soldiers inside the room were originally a matte-painting too.

Of course you didn't, because when watching the film normally, your eyes are naturally drawn to the movement in the middle.

But that's the problem, in v1, it's not the original matte. I'm working on some tweaks now but it will definitely be the whole mattepainting in v2.0.

@ CatBus: Yes, but its a whole original mattepainting, not just the soldiers and I bet that the soldiers are so obvious in the GOUT because of the screwed up black levels - I think they didn't paint much detail on the soldiers because they were meant to be mostly lost in the shadow.

EDIT: TServo beat me to it.

I was sort of torn about this one but I decided to do it in the end for the sake of purity: 

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=D2CO0WCQ

I did actually. I took the PG footage and aligned it with the HD footage and then stabilized it, rendered the stabilized version and then tracked from there.

If I want to track the subs movement, it's sort of a package deal, you can't track something less, it just doesn't work that way. I would have to create the shake artificially in order to make the subs less shaky.

I don't think so, because I'll first render a master and then add the effect to the whole file. But it should be clear which is which.

OK, I'm putting my foot down. The shake stays and that's final.

As to the grain and stuff, I think I'll just make an MKV "vintage" version with it.

Well, seeing all the reactions, I guess I won't do it then ;-)

And here's a little sample - right is with, left is without:

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=GYHHN67T

Wow, I never said I was gonna do it folks, just that I was considering it. It's just that seeing these 70mm scans I posted above (here) really makes me want it to see it look like that.

@Stinky: Yes, but that is only in the case of the original negative. Every single print derived from the original negative will have its own unique and random grain structure on top of the o-neg grain, and make no mistake, it's own dust and scratches too, so if you had a preservation made from a print or even an IP, it would have extra, totally random grain and some dust and scratches.

Anyway, it would actually be added during the AVCHD encoding, so it would be no problem to make a version without it, if there were enough people who'd want it.

I'm working on a video to show it. And I'm not going for a grind-house look by any means, just a less digital look. When they did the 2004 master, what they did was basically try to make it more like the prequels, which were shot digitally.

You can see a lot of dust and scratches in the 1997 SE transfer and it gives it a very film-like look.

Well, actually, there is quite a lot of grain there on the BD, so if I was adding any, then just very lightly. But it gives it such a nice retro feeling to have a spec of dust or a hair appear from time to time

Atlantis said:

I just watched that Greedo BD shot. I think the subtitles move way too much. It's more of a distraction and you notice the subtitles instead of the scene.

I honestly don't see why they need to move. You use the BD shots (or other sources) to have the best quality, clean shots. So your work is like a restoration. In a restoration you would also fix any subtitle problems.

So to have them added intentionally, is no restoration and if you are not doing a restoration, you should not use the clean BD or HDTV sources.

Sorry but that's bullshit. In a restoration, you're trying to restore the way things originally looked and since the subs did originally shake, it wouldn't be a restoration if you didn't make them that way. You seem to be mistaking digitalness and cleanness for quality. I use these sources because they have the best resolution. In an ideal world, we'd have a scan of SW that looks like this:

or this:

Unfortunately these unnaturally cleaned up BD and HDTV captures with screwed up colours and crushed blacks are the highest resolution sources we have, so they have to do.

Why not add grain and scratches and hairs?

Funny that you should mention this in such an ironic way, because I'm actually seriously considering that. I even already did some tests and I like what I'm seeing.

OK, here's the video: http://www.megaupload.com/?d=3BK11GXI

There is a glitch where the frame freezes for a second just before Han shoots, which obviously won't be in the final film.

Yeah, I used the 97SE and it was cropped so close that I decided to do it this way for v1.0 rather than cropping it so much. Now I figured why don't I just mirror it :-)

Just a little update:

I finally managed to get the BD footage to work (had to remux it to mp4,) so a new subtitles video with a few little tweak and using the BD footage is coming soon :-)