Harmy

Thanks 😃

I think the 35mm LPP shots are just objectively better than rotoscoped BD/GOUT hybrids. All you need to look at is the fact that in ROTJ v2.5, I replaced the BD footge with the LPP scan for an entire scene, which had no changes, just to improve the image quality - and sure, this scene was particularly bad on the BD but it shows that the 35mm shots, when properly cleaned up, sensitively sharpened (as they have to be in order to fit with the BD, which has tons of artificial sharpening applied) and color-corrected are nearly on par with the BD footage, which is so over-processed, it barely has more detail than 720p, even though it comes from an earlier generation print.

A lot of the shots I replaced with 35mm in ROTJ did look better on the BD, but not because they came from a 35mm print and the BD comes from a better source, but because they were recomposited on the BD and so they are supposed to be slightly lower quality than the BD in any version claiming to be the original.

Oh, and also, I absolutely don’t have lesser standards for what passes muster in ROTJ than in SW and ESB - on the contrary I only did all that rotoscoping in the older versions, because the best source I had was a terrible DVD or, in best cases, compressed and watermarked samples of a dirty and grainy 35mm print for a few shots - now that I have proper 35mm scans at my disposal, I can finally replace all those rotoscoped shots with the 100% real original shots in SW and ESB as well, so they also can have the same very high standard of what passes muster as ROTJ already does.

Oh, I don’t think anyone’s claiming that PSB is a perfect color-reference, just that it is far more likely to be closer to what the original prints looked like than any old home-video release or severely faded print color-corrected by eye. And when I have several sources, which I have reasons to trust, pointing towards a certain timing of a scene, I am, hopefully quite logically, gonna take the timing in that direction, especially when the sources pointing to another timing have very questionable colors. There is no definite reference for Empire (and having more experience with these matters now, I agree with Puggo that there is no definite perfect color reference for any movie), which is why even in v2.0 I didn’t stick to any one reference religiously, like I did (quite misguidedly as it turns out) on SW v2, but instead, I studied the various references and came to a conclusion on which general direction to take the timing of a certain scene. You’ll be happy to hear I am dialing down the blue in the Wampa scene for v2.5, but nowhere near to the level of the Grindhouse, which is at least as far from a trustworthy color reference as the official BD. I already have the new Wampa scene nearly done, so stay tuned for some samples in my own thread - sorry about hijacking yours, Puggo but I didn’t start it 😉

God, am I tired of this debate - I just watched the whole scene in v2.5 and it is my honest to god opinion that those shots don’t stand out at all in the sense that they’d look like they don’t belong - they do stand out however in that, unlike the other shots, which are not composites, they do show clear signs of pretty sub-par blue-screen optical compositing (like harsh edges and color discrepancies between the background and foreground elements), just like they always did in the original version (probably much more so in a large-screen 70mm presentation, but memory is a fickle friend) and that is really the whole point here.

And because these are probably the most obvious optical composites in the entire trilogy and so their digital re-compositing is also some of the most obvious, if someone looks at those shots in both the GOUT and the BD (or '04 DVD) and claims to see no difference and doubts whether they’ve indeed been recomposited, I absolutely can’t take their opinion on this matter seriously, no matter what credentials they claim, because they clearly have no idea what they’re talking about.

Oh, and that Bambi story is horrific BTW. I’m not surprised about Disney doing it - they have a long history of awful revisionism with their animated classics’ “restorations” but I would never have believed Mr. Harris would condone something like that.

Oh, yeah, ROTJ v2.5 is BY FAR the best of all the currently available Despecialized editions, exactly because it uses the 35mm print for most shots that were replaced in the SE.

Despecialized is supposed to be a recreation of the ORIGINAL version in HD and the 35mm print is very much representative of what the original in HD is.

The Rancor shots were brightened when they were re-composited and I couldn’t rotoscope-in the mattelines, exactly because the shots looked so different in the original version. Here’s a gallery I posted a while ago, showing that I actually had to make the 35mm shots darker in order to fit with the black levels of the BD: http://picsurge.com/g/ow51Oo

The Sarlacc shots weren’t rotoscoped, because there would be practically no benefit to doing so, as they look great on the 35mm print.

There are a few shots, which probably could benefit from the rotoscoping approach, but those will be addressed in v3.0 and there will only be a few of them, where it truly will improve the quality without compromising the originality of the shots.

Oh, yeah, most old home video releases were undersatured with unnaturally boosted reds.
As for Grindhouse, the point there is that the print was faded and so it had to go through color correction and they had no good reference, so they had to do it by eye and just decided to make snow white, which all evidence points to that it wasn’t in the original ESB prints.
Also, when a snowy landscape is dark, it does usually appear bluish, even in real life.

Based on what do you figure the blue was added later? The terribly under-saturated laserdisc, or the faded Grindhouse print, which has terrible colors with magenta shadows and green highlights? Or, and this is the least trustworthy of those three super untrustworthy options, your memory from when you were 5 years old?

Great! Thank you!

Well, I’m hoping to use Dre’s tool to match the Grindhouse to my colorgrading, if I can actually get it to work.
And I think I will probably replace whole shots in the Hoth battle - most of them are fast moving shots with lots of motion blur, so there’s usually very little detail to be gained from combining with the BD shots.

But I thought this problem was already fixed? I think I actually tried using a LUT generated in one of the older versions in AE and it worked.

Once again, with the latest version I’m getting an error using the LUT in AE 😦
And this tool would be so useful for ESB for matching the TN1 release to my colors, so I’d really love to figure it out.
Here’s the LUT I generated, if that’s of any help:
http://uloz.to/xaZKcMoZ/luke-cave-hanging-cube

Mainly replacing some of the SD sourced shots with Grindhouse.

I’m only just starting and I’m very busy time at work as well, so there’s definitely some time before I’ll be needing subs for release.

To head off any potential problems right at the start, were there any GOUT sync problems with ESB v2.0?

Why doesn’t it support menus?

Unofficial, third party media players that support blu-ray almost never can do menus. As is, I guess it’s hard enough to get them to work with AACS on encrypted discs, so it’s a bit of a hack job. And they need to keep up with changing keys, etc.

Hang on, are you saying that MPC HC can play BDs without a third party software to get rid of the encryption first?

You can have seamless branching in MKV. I’m not sure how but it can be done - I once experimentally downloaded a couple of episodes of ST TOS and they were MKVs where you could choose which version to watch and it played perfectly smoothly in MPC HC and I’m pretty sure it wasn’t that the whole video was muxed in twice.

Colson said:

Harmy said:

Actually, in that particular shot, the channel misregistration is different on the models and on the background, so it was clearly part of the original compositing and in order to fix it, Mike had to cut everything out of it’s background and shift each element separately, thus literally re-compositing the shot.

Any chance you can point me to what shot you’re referencing? I’m watching the legacy videos on Vimeo looking for it.

Edit: I believe I found it. Is it the shot of the X-wings on top of the Death Star? The original version has a stain in the top left corner that he fixes.

https://vimeo.com/117582796

Actually, in that particular shot, the channel misregistration is different on the models and on the background, so it was clearly part of the original compositing and in order to fix it, Mike had to cut everything out of it’s background and shift each element separately, thus literally re-compositing the shot.

2.0 uses GOUT and looks bad - I totally stick by 2.5 until an actual 35mm shot can be used.

And that shot of the figthers pulling out looks good, but I’d make its color-timing a bit closer to v2.5, so that it doesn’t clash with the surrounding shots.

Totally! I can’t promise any specific date but I’m definitely doing a v2.5 of ESB and I’m hoping it won’t take too long - I need to figure out how to install Dre’s tool first though.
And for those wishing for a quick update of SWv2.5, check out Towne32’s project here

Well, if he wanted something around the size of the AVCHD (6-7GB with just one audio track) he’d be best off remuxing the AVCHD, as it is encoded from lossless source using very high quality, very slow settings.

I think they’ll all look great when you’re not comparing them side by side with v2.5, which is probably actually over-saturated.

I partly hand-animated it but it has lots of artifacts - the TN1 footage looks much more natural there.
And the lightleak is only really a problem in these shot until you adjust the colors to make space properly black.

One shot I always felt like it seriously needed an upgrade was this:

Replace that one and I’d be happy for you to call this DeEd v2.6 by Towne32 or something like that.