Harmy

@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.

Actually, it's more than that, here's a comparrison screenshot, top is the GOUT upscale from Dark_Jedi's latest sample a bottom is my version. Click to see in full resolution:

1. this is not the place.

2. Alex, with all due respect, we already know that you like the prequels and you already know most of us don't. It seems like you set out to retort to every single post that says something bad about the prequels and frankly, it's getting old.

Here's a new little experiment. Right now it's just a concept but with some more tweaking I think it could work very well (compare it with the crawl in the previously posted video, which was just Dark_Jedi's scripted upscale of the GOUT).

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

Stinky-Dinkins said:

Yeah, by 24 I mean 23.976.

Yeah, sorry, I thought you meant that, it's just that true 24fps is also possible with AVCHD and BD standard, so I wanted to avoid confusion.

And like I said I use the remove pulldown function of TSMuxer wherever necessary and until now I had no idea how it worked but I know it works aces :-)

OK, I'm entering the editing and colour correcting stage, while waiting for some clips from the battle of Yavin from Dark_Jedi's project blu. Here is a clip of a quick assembly of the 1st 5 minutes, it isn't final but should be quite close.

@none: Yeah, I see your point (although all the links and stuff in your post were a bit confusing). These past announcements for both DVD releases sounded f*ucking awesome and we all know how disappointing was reality. Especially the 2006 GOUT announcement still pisses me off to no end when I read it in retrospect (in contrast to the euphoria of reading it for the first time in 2006).

I like may the 4th be with you :-)

And whatever the picture they used is, the colours sure look better to me (although it certainly doesn't mean that's what the film will look like).

I also liked some of the little ones, like where Sam and Frodo see the petrified trolls and the broken statue of the king or the one where they pretend to be orcs. What I didn't like was the additions to the scene where Aragorn and co. come to recruit the dead army or the death of Saruman scene (more for the way it was technically executed, than the content).

Yeah, I don't really care about the EE of FOTR and ROTK, I think both versions are equally good (and there were some additions I really didn't like in ROTK). The only EE I consider way way better than the theatrical version is TTT.

Well, it is in the sense that BD is no better in this aspect, but like I said, I don't mind and one has to realize that the EEs of LOTR are indeed the lenght of two regular movies.

Just out of interest (as it definitely doesn't concern my country :-( ) does anyone know if the theatrical release of the EE is digital only or if they made new prints for it? (They would have to make new prints since it's the EE). 

Looking after the great-grandchildren Frink? :-)

PMs sent :-)

Actually it seems that TTT and ROTK will use the same master, which is OK because it was only FOTR that had a crappy transfer with tons of DVNR applied and that will get a new master derived from the 2K DIP, which is probably the best quality copy there is short of the o-neg, but that doesn't have CGI and colour timing applied to it.

And the films being split over two discs is actually great, it means the highest quality possible and switching discs doesn't bother me, as I like to make a cigarette break half way through a really long movie like this anyway ;-)

So I just found out that an official date has been announced. Does anybody know whether they're gonna be the same poor transfers like the theatrical Blu-Rays or if they made new transfers for this release?

To be honest, I don't know, it's something to do with the way old TVs and monitors work I think. Blu-Ray supports true 24fps but there's not much to be gained as the difference is absolutely imperceptible and it's risking compatibility problems, so I just stick to 23.976fps for my projects.

Stinky-Dinkins said:

On a completely unrelated note how the fuck do you make these 24p? I noticed when playing back Empire it was flagged as 24p. Do you use some kind of wacky 2:3 pulldown on the interlaced broadcast/DVD/LD sources?  

Sorry, I somehow overlooked this before.

I work at 25fps progressive and if some video isn't 25p, I convert it before I use it. I usually use TS Muxer for it, because no reencode is required and it has a remove pulldown function, so I use that when necessary.

And then, when everything is finished, I use TS Muxer again to convert the final output file from 25fps to 23.976fps (which is what ESB is in, not 24p).

Well, I had to do that in order to make it fit with the rest of the image.

Speaking of rotoscoping, I wasn't very happy with the roto work I did on the forest shot, so I decided to redo it. I think that while it's still not 100% perfect, it's pretty damn close ;-) Check it out here.

Cool B-)

If you don't want to go into any AviSynth scripts and stuff, I would suggest makng an mp4 or mkv with a program called ripbot, it is easy to use, has many options and encodes very well with nice quality.

Awesome. It's a pity about the burnt in subs but it beats VHS quality.

Awesome Mattman, thanks.

And Shawn, I actually found that in many cases the roto brush probably wouldn't work so well anyway becuase even I can't tell where the edge should be, so how some automated system could. But for a few shots like eg. the one with the stormtroopers in the corridor it would probably work really well.