Harmy

And now, seriously, I see where Puggo is coming from. Of course it would be possible to do a better colour correction but it would have to be tedious work that would involve frame by frame rotoscoping.

And although Adywan proved time and time again that he could totally do it, could you really dump that on him, hasn't he got enough to worry about with his own projects and personal problems - having him help find one setting by reel is one thing but having him spend a seriously long time doing tedious frame by frame CC is something else.

Like the video shows - you can in fact polish a turd but it's a long, hard and tedious work and you have to ask yourselves, with the purpose of this project being to replicate the gritty feeling of watching an old 16mm film, would such an undertaking really be worth it? 

thorr said:

Puggo - Jar Jar's Yoda said:

There's no way normal color could be restored to PG, it would be like asking Adywan to polish a turd (especially reel 2).

You might be surprised.  I know I was when I first saw what he did with his HD Special Edition of Episode IV.  If the color is really bad on PG and one setting won't fix everything satisfactorily, maybe different rules can be applied (do whatever it takes to fix the color to make it look the best it can).

If you still need convincing about what is possible, check this out: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yiJ9fy1qSFI

;-)

OMG! LOL! ROFL! Awesome. I'm totally gonna use that the next time someone says: "You can't polish a turd." "Well, in fact, you can!" LOL 

The 16:9 version is definitely upscaled because episodes II and III were shot in 1080p and then cropped to 2.35:1, so they don't and never can exist in any resolution higher than 1920x816.

I have the DON release (Star.Wars.Episode.VI.Return.of.the.Jedi.1983.720p.HDTV.x264-DON.mkv) from tehparadox but it is not colour corrected. Or is this some other version?

I know this conversation is a bit of a joke but if you look at it realistically, the 93LDs were probably the first SW release to have a digital master, so with the level of proficiency some people here reached in transfering LDs, I doubt that a DVD (or god save us a Blu-Ray) sourced from the JSC analog masters would look any better than what was already achieved by fans.

Here's the rest of the shots seen in that video:

I'm surprised nobody did this yet, but here's a comparison of the comic con video recently released by LFL, which actually contains some footage straight from the shown video (not shot by a camera from a screen):

It seem like it is slightly tweaked (for the better actually) but nothing as drastic as the pictures on the official site. As this difference is very subtle and could be caused by recompression, I'd lean towards the Blus being unchanged from the 04 version or maybe just really slightly tweaked, like this picture shows. Either way, I'd bet my ass that it will be the 04 transfer on the Blus, as the 04 version is effectively a version of the films that doesn't exist in any other form, so a new scan would be the 97SE (if they used the altered negative) and not the George approved version.

Well, those panels do bother me but I'm afraid I can't fix them without fucking up the rest of the colours in those scenes. Apart from the panels, I think the scene looks fine though.

I could live without the Falcon dish if it was restored on Blu-Ray to the original 70mm release quality :-)

Puggo - Jar Jar's Yoda said:

I think it's George trying to decide which master to use for the blu-ray release of the OT.

Now, I'm not asking what is the best currently available release, but rather what release was the best when it came out - to give you an example I think the Executor set is awesome, although it's VHS only, so it definitely isn't the best currently available picture and sound quality, it was simply an awesome release in the VHS age.

Another example could be the 97SE VHS and LD release - I don't really like the version of the film presented but as movie releases go, it was great - top notch picture and sound quality for the formats they were released in, beautiful cover art and even the VHS release had bonus features, which was something I greatly appreciated at the time, as it was quite unusual.

Well, it's not just one frame, it's a similar error as the one in Luke's hair when he says "I'm Luke Skywalker, I'm here to rescue you" in SW DeEd and it definitely isn't in other HD files and on the DVD, I already checked ;-)

fffffff said:

Thank for fixing the white laser bolt.Did you get the other orange ones too? Like the one that shots Luke in the leg.  I ask because for some reason the  YT video is skipping. I am not seeing everything.

 

Well, I didn't fix any others but this one seemed to be the most obvious. I'll go through the whole scene and see what I can do

Is there anyway that blue haze around the Star Destroyer can be tone down a little more?

Not really. It's there in the original as well, so I'm gonna keep it the way it is now.

 

Do you think it would be worth putting back in those  original  Lightsaber flashes?

The thing is, they are the original flashes, they're just recomped, just like the lightsabres. And while I guess that unlike the LS it would be possible to seamlessly put the original flashes back, they're not really noticeable by the naked eye and it would be A LOT of work. 

Anyway, here's a new video:

http://youtu.be/XGJGG9oXW68?hd=1

It's just a test of concept, so I'd really like to hear your honest opinions. But I'm positive that done this way after DJ sends me the shot from his upscale and with some further tweaking, it can be a real improvement over the old version.

dark_jedi said:

...I am FINALLY DONE...

Well it has been a fun time, and it has been cool, now it is time to get ALL SW related files and folders OFF my PC and archived on my external drives, can't wait to get all this shit off my PC so I do not have to look at it anymore, plus all these files are taking up SO much space LOL

It's great to hear you're done but please don't do that before you get the shots for me ;-)

Help me, Dark_Jedi, you're my only hope... :-)

Yeah, I'm really glad about that, thanks guys.

There is this one encoding error that I spotted, which is in the source file, so there may be more and it's the kind of glitch that was only spotted in SW DeEd after many eyes started scrutinizing it after the "final" release.

And me having to make another version could have been avoided if these things were already spotted in the workprint. I'd really like to avoid that situation with Jedi and I therefore decided, that I'm not gonna release ROTJ until somebody spots that glitch I already know about in the WP.

Of course, no problem :-)

Here's a presentation describing what and why was changed (only the changes in that video, there will be more in the final version):

http://www.uloz.to/9823231/sw-v1-2-comparison-pps

Maybe the original narration didn't go well with Lucas' latest revision of history, so they just changed it. It may be worth going through looking for changes.

Anyway, if there was something really good about LD, it was the audio, so I'm sure if there is the new narration on the Blu-Ray, someone here is going to make a preservation using the superior Blu-Ray video and the original LD audio - if the BD video is considerably superior that is, I fully expect these special features to be SD only (just look at the running time) so with LFL's history of recycling old LD masters for the actual movies, it would be a wonder if they'd make a new transfer.

LOL, yeah. But I always counted on the Blus to be the 2004 transfer, just with less compression artefacts then what's currently available. In fact, if they brightened it before it got compressed for the Blu-Rays, it would be easier to colour correct while keeping it nice quality. But even if I did decide to do another version based on the Blus, it will be some time before I'll be able to afford them (probably gonna wait for some 2nd hand sales).

Thank you. I'm going through the workprint putting down all the suggestions I'd like to try and fix.

http://youtu.be/kyhjyEw7MvU?hd=1&t=3m10s

:-)

Well, here it is from my latest workprint, it still needs some tweaking as I may have gone a bit too far with the contrast in an attempt to conceal the Emperor's head slug but logically, when you increase brightness, you need to increase contrast as well, to compensate for the brightening of the areas that should stay dark:

Talking about scan lines, check this out:

It's taken from DJ's GOUT upscale. I sharpened it and tweaked the contrast a bit to make it more apparent, but the vertical scan lines are apparently there in the original, only they get lost because of low resolution.

It may seem like I'm not doing much these days, so here's a new video, so that you see that I was actually busy as a bee ;-) :-D

adywan said:

Han reunited with Chewie

http://youtu.be/sWTtMdXAazs?hd=1

That is awesome!!!

"I'm done with that STAR WARS crap! I'm in Cowboys and Aliens! Daniel Craig is my Wookiee bitch now!"

"She was my wife! And she's still spitting up hairballs!"

I'm fine guys, thank you. I'm quite satisfied with having my name connected just to the Despecialized editions. And I didn't discover it, I just found out that it was in all the versions because I was looking for a source to fix it :-)