Harmy

doubleofive said:

 

Erik actually archived the answer:

http://www.erikstormtrooper.com/adywan-anh/mos_eisley_mixdown_layers.zip

It's a PSD (photoshop) file of all of the layers he had to use in ONE FRAME of "rontoscoping" the butt out.

 

Wow, did he actually do it like that, frame by frame in photoshop, and not end up in an asylum? That is incredible!!! 

Topper Harley said:

 

1).. so the grain parts and their movement will be very small and work in 1920x1080 and make the picture appear more detailed than it really is.

2)But an effect like that will get lost on youtube, since the compression cleans it up again. 

I'm glad you said that too, because no.1 is exactly what I did in this clip and no.2 is exactly what happened.

But like I said, it was just a test of concept, which was done really qickly, so the final clip would look better. The problem here is, that there is a lot of ghosting caused by DVNR in GOUT in this shot (the speeder leaves a trail of artefacts behind it) and removing that was my main goal in this clip. And I figured that as I was adding a static background anyway, I'd photoshop some of the HD parts into it and that was done really quickly too, so it should look better.

I'm glad you just said that, cuz here's another taster. Again, it's just an experiment and is far from perfect but there you have it...

Yeah, I do all my work on a 2.5 years old laptop. That's why I absolutely cannot use lossless for editing. Can't wait for the MKV. Will it be complete with the comparison and all?

I think I was asking for stuff in my first post on the forum...

Does that make me a bad person? ;-D

Oops, it seems like while I was typing my post about the smile, there were like a thousand new posts.

ChainsawAsh said:

In fact, that seems especially pointless to me in this case.  If you're doing that, why not just download the DVD?!

Because, thanks to the better codec, it will have less compression artefacts at the same size. But like I said, I don't mind what size they'd be.

Oh, sorry vbangle you must have posted while I was typing my previous post, so I didn't notice yours.

Yeah, I totally get it and I wouldn't really mind whatever size they'd be, it's just that I like to put films I care about on disc because I like to be able to put them in nice boxes and stuff, otherwise I also have the majority of my MKVs on my HDD. But I don't know about usenet, but the majority of 720p releases I see on like rapidshare and torrent are usually either 2.18GB, 4.3GB, 6.5GB or 7.9GB to fit on DVDs, I guess it's kind of an established standard more than anything else.

Wow, it's awesome and a comparison like that was exactly what was needed too. 

Btw. Ady, did you make him smile subtly during the "yes, yes" line?

Because I think you did and I think it's totally awesome because the original 1980 emperor did that too and it totally works! 

I like the tweaked shots way better and personally I don't see any difference worth mentioning in those background details. And I think that the subtitles do need a little blur but as English is not my first language, so I'm used to watching films with all kinds of subs, I'm not really bothered about that too much.

Btw. are you going to do the MKV with the full batch of audios? It is incredibly easy to remux audio in an MKV using this freeware tool, so you could just release it with one audiomix and then make the other mixes available separately, so that everyone can mux in the mixes that they want. Because 4 or 5 audiomixes are going to increase the file size of the MKV quite considerably.

Well, yeah, that's the thing though, I for one am trying to fit it on a disc, so, the bitrate and the size aren't really the variable quantity here, it's the resulting video quality, because ideally, the final mkv file will be 4.37 GB (or maybe 2.18 to fit 2 films on a DVD5 or 2.6 to fit 3 films on one DVD9 but the file size should always be fixed) and if the resolution is higher, you'll get more compression artefacts at the same file size.

But I totally see your point, it's just that I don't take x264 mkv as a way to not need discs, it's a way to have better quality on the disc of the same size.

Nice!

vbangle said:

So maybe encoding to a  anamorphic size doesn't matter all that much anymore with latest hardware players/ computers? The media tank I use seems to be able to handle the high resolutions that he talks about, so I wouldn't need a anamorphic encoding....

Yeah, but if you're encoding from an anamorphic source, then you have to resize the video to make it the correct AR with square pixels, so you have to either have lower resolution (bad because it's lower resolution ;-)  ) or higher resolution (bad because you need more bitrate while you don't gain any additional detail).

Oh and btw. out of the black border and resizing solutions I listed before, I would personally actually prefer no.2 because it's best for both bitrate and resolution and I'll be playing it on a computer but people playing it on a standalone player might have trouble with aspect ratios.

Sorry, I can't help you with that, I encoded x264 straight out of Power Director for my ROTJ. But I'm sure that you can definitely encode a lossless AVI to x264. I use a program called RipBot x264, which is pretty easy to use and should be able to handle uncompressed AVI and can do any cropping/resizing you may want, but I'm not sure that that's exactly a professional solution.

Great, I would take an MKV over a DVD any day!!! But the resolution is the same problem I was facing with my ROTJ reconstruction MKV. You have a few choices:

1) Leave everything as it is for the DVD (720x480 with the black bars) -

Advantages: It should scale properly to 16:9 and it will be full anamorphic resolution

Disadvantages: The black bars will eat up bitrate.

2) Cut the black bars and leave the resolution as is (720x366 no black bars)

Adv.: Full anamorphic resolution of the actual picture area and no black bars.

Dis.: Probable problems with playback and scaling.

3) Cut the black bars and resize to 2.35:1 by down-rezing (720x306 no black bars) -

Adv.: No black bars and probably no problems with playback and scaling 

Dis.: Non-anamorphic resolution of the actual picture area

4) Cut the black bars and resize to 2.35:1 by up-rezing (854x366 no black bars) 

Adv.: No black bars and no problems with scaling. Full detail of the original anamorphic picture.

Dis.: Possible problems with playback + the added resolution will eat up bitrate without really adding picture information.

5) Cut the black bars and uprez to 720p (1280x544 no black bars)

Adv.: No black bars and no problems with playback and scaling. Full detail of the original anamorphic picture.

Dis.: The added resolution will eat up even more bitrate without really adding picture information.

There you have it, none of them is perfect - take a pick. I went with 1 because I wanted to keep all detail and leaving the black bars should eat up considerably less bitrate than adding resolution to the actual picture area.

PM sent :-)

Here's something I thought should be done, because I showed the clip to my friend and he didn't understand the purpose of adjusting the 2004 emperor's appearance:

Looks awesome! Can't wait! :-)

I believe that V3 will look much better than GOUT currently does and therefore when used for compositing such as in this video posted above, it should be better. Don't worry, I was going to ask permission, but now it is all on a theoretical/experimental stage :-)

Yeah, I'll also keep the project files for these comps and once V3 is out, I'm gonna dump the V3 footage in instead of the GOUT and it should hopefully yield even better result.

And congratulations to you too, good sir :-) Your comparisons are an amazing source and they're something that has been missing on the internet.

:-D

Your argument still stands though, like me, you were so distracted by the goddamn testacles, urm, I mean tentacles, that you didn't notice the skiff. Like I said, I had the two shots layered over each other and didn't notice...

Man, it even is in your comparisons:

http://picasaweb.google.com/doubleofive/JediSpecialEditionChangesHD#5529747274898839010

Or did you add it so quickly?

Yeah, I know that feeling :-)