Harmy

PM sent :-)

I'm glad he likes it and I'm glad he took at least some pics :-) But it's a pity he didn't know before, not only could he have taken higher quality pics but he could also have taken pics of some more original matte paintings, as those would have been an invaluable source for this kind of thing :-(

Also, Looking for some SW pictures I randomly stumbled across this site and I found, to my surprise, that it featured my my HD crawl recreation video. So please give me a vote :-)

Anyway, having found out that it may reach a wider audience, I decided to write a detailed commentary for the crawl on you tube, so I'll repost it here:

Here is my May the 4th (be with you) present to all STAR WARS fans, to at least slightly compensate for the disappointment of the Blu-Ray announcement :-D

This is a recreation of the original 1977 crawl using the original elements - I took the STAR WARS logo and each separate line as they first appear in Dark_Jedi's 720p upscale of the 2006 DVD crawl, luma-keyed them out from the background, hand erased the remaining stars, straightened them up in photoshop and made the whole original crawl text in 2D. 

Then I used the 2D crawl as a 3D layer in AE, copied the movement of the original logo and crawl and superimposed it over the starfield in HD taken from the HD broadcast of the 2004 SE (which is surprisingly the same one as in the original, it just needed some brightening for it to show). Additionally I gradually sharpened the area of the first three bottom lines and slightly blurred the crawl at the top of the screen, to simulate depth of field. The result isn't 100% perfect but I think it's not half bad either :-)

And the 2D crawl I made for this can be found here as a photoshop PSD file :-)

Well, a combination of that, the GOUT and the SE.

Thanks everyone for the positive responses, it's nice to have my hard work appreciated :-)

Here's a new version of the Falcon in the DS bay matte enhanced using this technicolour screening photo (original GOUT matte is top, the new enhanced one is bottom):

Damn, is there any way to directly reply to something on twitter? I reactivated my account just for that :-(

1anakin said:

http://www.twitlonger.com/show/a8tj49

Katie Lucas

YOU can choose not to watch them! You can pretend like they don't even exist! He may have made three movies you personally didn't care about, but he was also responsible for three movies that inspired you and millions of others. 

 

And I can choose not to watch them but I can't pretend they don't exist and enjoy the three movies that inspired me and millions of others, because when I watch the only available versions of them, I'm constantly being reminded of the existence of the prequels.

Yeah, did someone say that to her? She seems to understand people's dislike for the prequels (and maybe secretly doesn't like them that much herself) so maybe she'd have some understanding for our case, if it was explained respectfully. Someone should give her the link to savestarwars.com. She may be especially interested in the  article about George's speech in congress.

OK, finally, I'm proud to present the original STAR WARS 1977 crawl in HD. It's not 100% perfect but I'm quite satisfied with it :-)

Oh, and as to the time-frame, I think weeks but I can't say for sure, I don't wanna rush this.

I think I'll just leave the trooper matte the way it is in the video I posted as using the pillar part of the matte would just make it too noticeable, this way you're only seeing the troopers peripherally, so it looks good IMO.

I'm still struggling with the crawl  right now and man is it giving me headaches! I thought it was all done now only to find out it speeds up weirdly towards the end, so I'll have to re-time and re-render it again and it takes like 3 hrs to render that one shot because I'm using two 3D layers :-(

1st let me say that the cover art looks awful! I would have actually preferred the original promotional pics (you know the ones with text on simple black background. One thing I always loved about STAR WARS was the awesome cover art of the various home video releases, but the last great one was the 97SE and it all went down hill from there and it doesn't seem to have changed here :-(

2nd, it's shameful that once again there is zero information about the transfers.

3rd, the lack of the DVD docs doesn't surprise me. Think about it, there's still millions of the 2004 DVD sets on the shelfs, they need to sell those too :-/

4th, the only thing that seems interesting to me are the matte paintings but I bet they will only be the special edition CG ones anyway :-(

What the hell is that? And why would anyone want a bigger version of it? Am I missing something here?

I'll be using the matte painting of the soldiers:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mR0NSOdzM4U

As to the lightsabres, I'm taking the same approach as with Empire, I'll be rotoscoping a few but most of the time just brightening and colour-correcting them. For some lightsabre scenes I'm actually gonna use Ady's AVCHD because he already fixed a lot of the issues with the lightsabres and it's just too much work to do all over.

I will be brigtening up the starfield and btw. in the 2004 SE it IS the same starfield behind the crawl as in the original non-ep.IV version. And the stars seem so much bigger and brighter because it is more cropped and therefore everything appears larger.

CP3S said:

You could make them just buy grabbing two pairs of sunglasses and popping and popping the lenses out and making one pair with two right eyes and one pair with two left eyes, right? Or am I over simplifying it?

That's definitely oversimplified. The lenses have to be polarized in a specific way, they're not simple sunglasses. And those 3D-2D glasses wouldn't work everywhere because for example one of the cinemas in my town uses active LCD glasses, (the same technology most 3D TVs use) so these 3D-2D glasses would be useless for that, the only thing that could help is an eye-patch ;-)

@ 005: Sure, I'm still tweaking it but I'll upload it later, when it's all finished. No problem :-)

I'll see. Maybe but I don't promise.

That's almost exactly what I did. But I actually took each line as it first appeared, luma-keyed it out from the background, hand erased the remaining stars, straightened it up in photoshop, made the whole original crawl text in 2D and then used it as a 3D layer in AE and copied the movement of the original crawl.

I'm now going to render the hopefully final version with slight sharpening of the first few lines at the bottom and a depth of field lens blur mask, so that it doesn't stay perfectly sharp the whole time, which looks un-natural. The rendering is going to take hours, so I'm gonna do it overnight.

Oh, sorry, the one with the y-wing is probably gonna stay, I think.

I'm finishing the crawl right now, so hopefully it will work well and I'll be able to use it :-)

I pretty much decided to leave that one.

And no comments on the crawl? Really? :-(

Erm, no, it was written next to the number 62% and was supposed to express what those 62% meant.

danny_boy said:

@Harmy

It implies that there should be room for improvement.

But you might want to underline where in the general conscensus it says it "is a piece of a shit film".

Well, ok, maybe piece of shit is a bit too strong but if the film is said to lack in the plot and character development, which are generally regarded as the most important parts of a good story, it basically means that it isn't very good, doesn't it?

@danny_boy: Sorry, but what you just posted just confirms that it was a weak film. Around 60% is quite bad and the comment "Lucas needs to improve on the plot and character development, but there's plenty of eye candy to behold" basically translates as: it's a piece of shit film with great VFX.

Here's an improved version including a side by side comparison.