Harmy

I think the story deepens in the original verson.

Thanks. I quite understand your stance as well, I'd also prefer a proper restoration of the original but for the time being this is better then nothing for me because it bothers me that the shit SE version is out there in HD and I couldn't watch SW in that quality because it's ruined by CGI.

Oh, right ;-) What's with the deepening then?

Awesome, welcome back Ken, we missed you :-)

Could you clear something up for me? When you said:

It deepens some like the SE changes...

what is that "it" that gets deeper a little similarly to the SE changes?

This sounds really interesting, I'd definitely like to see it when it's done.

I'm just curious, what are the tech specs of this project? I understand you're using DVD? Will you be colour correcting the sources to match together? From what I saw (I never did a direct comparisson, but I watched all the versions short of the US cut) the colourtiming is quite different on the final cut than the other versions.

And also will you be cropping the workprint to be the same AR as the rest?

Sorry if this has already been discussed before, I skipped through the thread but didn't read everything thoroughly. 

Joke?

@msycamore: I tried, but unfortunately the graininess of the V8 made the transition look even worse. And also it's one thing looking at it as separate clips and then watching it as a movie, that way these things don't seem to stand out far as much as when you're specifically looking for them. And in most shots, the GForced GOUT that I'm getting from DJ is the closest to HD I'm gonna get.

@joshdv: I don't know yet, didn't get that far.

Yeah, I'm most definitely cutting Jabba out.

I think I already figured out how to do it using the HD footage only but I'll have to test it to confirm. I want to avoid using the GOUT footage as much as possible but slowing the footage down considerably seems even worse, so if it doesn't work, I think I'll just keep the straight cut.

hairy_hen said:

What sort of colour correction will you be doing?  Since from the Technicolor photos we know about the Death Star interiors actually being blue in some shots, it would be good to see that preserved, but I do think the '04 is the often the wrong shade of blue and makes it too strong sometimes.  And then of course there's the other rubbish like heavily oversaturated reds, dark/weird skin tones, laser blasts being too pink or missing colour altogether, and all that.  (And the crushed blacks, but those aren't fixable.)

I'll be doing the same kind of colour correction as I did on Empire i.e. I'll be using colour boosted GOUT as a reference (with some restraint of course, as the GOUT colours are not completely accurate either). I'll also use the technicolour print photos wherever possible.

Mike Verta's site has a lot of good notes on colour correcting the opening scenes of the movie.  (This is where I first learned exactly why the image looked so messed up--before I couldn't really describe what I was seeing.)  http://www.starwarslegacy.com/

I checked that out and there definitely is some interesting input there.

I'm also wondering whether you'll be using the G-force'd GOUT for the beginning crawl and Star Destroyer or not

I'm not quite decided on that yet. I think I'll try using the GOUT crawl but rotoscope in the SE stardestroyer and Tantive IV and see how that works.

along with msycamore's subtitles (since they are very accurate to the originals).

Not sure about that one either. I managed to erase the yellow subs from the HD footage of the Greedo scene using the 04DVD and I'll definitely try making more screen accurate subs. I'm just not sure if I'll be able to use msycamore's subs. It would actually be awesome if someone could encode a video with msycamore's subs on plain green background

The Mos Eisley test looks quite good.  I'm really looking forward to this.  :)

Thanks, I'm working on some more tweaks right now to make it even better. Also, did you notice that the NTSC DVD version of Empire is now available?

Erikstormtrooper said:

Harmy, the latest clip is awesome! I'm glad you posted it, since I was starting to have withdrawals.

Thanks :-)

In the scene where the stormtroopers are looking for the droids behind the locked door, will you be tweaking that any more? The background around the corner (where people are walking) seems a bit blurry. I understand it may be as good as it gets though.

Yeah, that shot was actually quite a challenge and I'm afraid there's not much more I can do about that, because the droid sort of hovers up and down in front of that area, so it's either replace the whole background with GOUT like I did, or have a blurry blob hover up and down all over the place.

I'm also quite proud of the shot where Falcon leaves the dock, because there was a camera movement added to it, so I had to undo the movement, stabilize it, replace the whole background and add the bottom part that was missing due to the camera movement and add the original Falcon and also reconstruct first 5 frames, which were cut off in the SE.

This was a test to see how the shots work when put in the film and it helped me find out which shots still need some tweaking but over-all I think it works pretty well.

Like most of the other shots, rotoscoping the SE part out of the HD scene using GOUT and various other different sources.

PMs sent :-)

Check out their other videos, these guys are great (if you don't mind a bit of crude humor that is...).

Yeah, I'm going to try and recreate the original wipe where Jabba is in the SE but if I can't pull it off convincingly, I'll just leave it.

As to Ben's lightsabre, I didn't rotoscope it, I just increased brightness and contrast, just like I did to fix the lightsabres in ROTJ.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_4UflRW0uO4&feature=feedu

OK, here's the whole Mos Eisley sequence:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sSt_xEpK7mo

It is just work in progress. There are still a few bugs and Greedo is missing subtitles. Also the colours are not final.

Yeah, I thought it would be weird for a 6 minutes long MKV to be over 1GB.

The file is too big for non-premium members to download. You'll need to split it up to under 500MB parts.

Hey, I just remembered that that's actually how I got rid of the pulldown on Ady's reconstruction DVD. Just load the VOB file into TS muxer and check the "remove pulldown" checkbox and remux as .ts at any framerate you choose. Or you can just demux the raw .mpv file.

PM sent.

As to the MAC problem, I honestly have no idea. There was another member here, who had the same problem and I think he never solved it (well, there seems to be no free software for this available for MAC).

God, reading all this, I'm glad I'm working with HD for my edits. I use TS Muxer to convert everything to 25fps progressive before use and then convert the final 25fps output to 23,976fps again in TS muxer. But I guess that's not really possible when working with DVD.

Thanks, Moth3r :-)

Guys, check out this thread, please.

Hey, guys. I remember there was a thread discussing possibilities of cleaning up a still image in photoshop using several successive frames but I can't find it now.

Does anyone know how to do this?

It would be great for restoring the original matte paintings from GOUT.