Harmy

No, I'm pretty sure he meant the Luke and Biggs scene before the battle of Yavin, that was partly reinstated for the SE. Although I still don't believe it true, he probably just watched the SE for a while and forgot that it wasn't there before.

Yeah, but the old Predator Blu-Ray is pretty bad too, so when I showed it to my dad, he liked the new version better. In the particular image you posted above, Chainsawash, there actually is no extra detail in the old version image, just a lot of extra grain. Make no mistake, I'd take the old version over the new "wax figurines museum" one anytime, but to most people the new one seems better because they associate grain with analogue video artifacting rather than film and when there's no extra detail to point out to them, they'll just thing it's basically the same image, just without a layer of grain.

One of the really good examples I saw is the Gladiator. The old BD version had heavy DVNR, while the new version doesn't and is, well, new, so it's got a lot more detail than the old one at first glance. It is especially visible on hair and stuff like that.

http://www.youtube.com/user/OneMinuteGalactica#p/c/B899325CC0DAE363/11/Jr5TtQk2hsI

This video is mainly funny because of the contrast between the white snow it the x-mass town bit and the blue snow in the SE... :-)

Yeah, but removing the letterboxing would mean reencodig the source yet again, which I don't want to do because with my computer I just can't work with lossless  video. I'll have to see what I'll be able to do about it, maybe, when encoding the DVD files...

And yeah, I already further adjusted the unmasking scene after the workprint and made the contrast levels closer, so now it shouldn't be very noticeable but the GKAR quality is still lower than the 2004 and I that's also why I don't want to use GKAR for the whole scene.

Also keep in mind that (sadly) the different sources are much more noticeable in the DVD than in the workprint, because of the compression, so you can't really judge that based on the workprint.

Here (Czech Republic) they made an all new dubbing for the SEs but they kept the "Bring my shuttle" line as it was in the original and the "You're lucky you don't taste very good" too. And the 2004 SEs were never dubbed to Czech.

Thanks, work is going pretty slowly now, cuz I just started school and it will take a while for things to settle down but I hope to resume the full tempo soon. :-)

Yeah, I just compared the two side by side in SD and I think I will go with GKAR after all.

So, has anyone else had a chance to check out the workprint?

Well, it's actually not that expensive to rent that stuff and if he had everything ready and tested, he might need to rent it for just a few days.

EDIT: OK, I just checked, it actually is pretty expensive... Around £300 per day for HD :-(

Hardy??!! LOL. Come on, that hurt my feelings a little bit ;-) :-D

Yeah, I was wondering that too. It seems like you have to delete the original sabres before you rotoscope the new ones in some shots.

Also, it seems my previous question got lost in a lot of off topic rubbish, and as I'm very interested to learn, here goes again:

That's a pretty good idea and it should be easy to find a fanboy with a complete Boba Fett costume to pull it of convincingly.

Well, yeah, I guess it would be best for a really proper restoration (although I am sure there are problems that must be inherent to scanning a sep. master, like having three different grain patterns for each frame) but it would also be really difficult and expensive.

Technically Tatooine and Endor are locations, DS is just a set.

And also I posted these some time ago, I think they fit the current topic nicely:

If I understand correctly what a separation master is, it is the film copied to three separate monochrome (black and white) copies each of which represents a colour (R,G,B). So while it is a perfect colour-timing reference because it shows the levels of each colour separately and doesn't fade, it would be a really bad source for scanning the film as it would mean doing everything that is normally done for a film preservation three times and then you'd have to align the three separate scans => three (maybe four) times the cost of a normal release.

Well, I'm gonna put in that one shot that I already made but I'm not gonna make the other shots that way, the rest of the shots where you can see Shaw's eyebrows is just gonna be from GKAR.

Yeah, it makes sense, doesn't it, if they made a 70mm IP from o-neg, it should practically hold up all the detail in the 35mm o-neg because it's like 10 times bigger and if then they stuck to 70mm throughout the whole print-making process, the 70mm print should contain a lot more detail than a 35mm print.

It doesn't stand out so badly when watched on it's own, but when watched after the 2004 HD, it kinda does. I did that shot in AE (while I'm not particularly fond of it, because it's a bit too complex for me, it's still the best software for things like that.) It would be a lot of work to recolour the eyes, because I'd have to animate the mask very precisely, frame by frame. With a wider area I was able to use just a few keyframes. But it was just an experiment. I am gonna put it in the reconstruction since it's already done and it should be much less noticeable there because the resolution will be the same for both sources (GKAR is PAL anamorphic and the HD footage will also be downscaled to that). But I'll consider doing it the way you suggested for the Blu-Ray sourced version of PDE. Or maybe as that is partly despecialized edition, I'll just reinstate the eyebrows and leave the eyes blue.

With the recomposites it's not so much an issue of time as of the necessity of having a lower quality shot where the SE change is practically unnoticeable. I did of course reinstate the original Sarlacc, Vader's eyebrows and the DS explosion. I even reinstated the original Rancor composites where they were tweaked in 2004, it is one of the few SE changes that I feel actually benefited the film but it is a glaring change and it would feel wrong not to have the original in a theatrical reconstruction.

Oh, right, I see where you're coming from, one does always loose some quality when reencoding, but it should be really minimal when dealing with uncompressed files.

If hairy_hen releases his new NTSC GOUT synced Jedi 5.1 I'm actually gonna be using that, so it's rather gonna be an NTSC to PAL conversion. And yes, NTSC GOUT synced sound fits PAL when sped up, so it should work the other way round as well. I'm not gonna be doing any pitch correction either way, because I have no idea how and frankly have no interest in learning but if someone wanted to make a pitch corrected PAL sound from hairy_hen's 5.1 and upload it somewhere for me, I would appreciate that.

Also, I'm not sure if that is common practice but it would make a lot of sense to use the same anamorphic principle used for film on HD projections, in other words, have the 2,35:1 picture stretched to 1920x1080 and unsqueeze it optically upon projection.

Actually, as far as my knowledge of the matter goes, films for cinematic projection are delivered to cinemas on huge external HDDs because they are uncompressed HD. A losslessly stored digital film at 1080p will have somewhere around 300GB, which by today's standards is not that much, a 300GB HDD is considerably cheaper than 2hrs worth of 35mm stock and the transfer of the digital data to the HDD is virtually free, so there is no reason for the cinemas to project from compressed sources, that wouldn't make any kind of practical sense.

But I agree that the picture quality depends greatly on the quality of thedigital projector in question and also on the size of the screen. Where film simply looks less detailed on bigger screen, digital will reveal the atrocious projection grid, which really annoys me...

Oh, and concerning the frame rates I can't agree with Mr. Cameron. It is only in 3D where the frame rate is important, because of the motion blur which the human brain perceives as natural  in 2D and when you increase the frame rate in 2D it looks more fluent but less film-like, now in 3D, which tries to look less like film and more like reality and that is how it is perceived by the brain, the motion blur is felt as a disruption and so they need to make the frame rate higher in order to minimize the motion blur while retaining the illusion of fluent movement.

I have a TV with the 100Hz function, which basically means, that the TV shows 100fps even when you watch a 25fps or 30fps video and makes up the missing frames more or less successfully, which results in a more smooth, fluent movement. But when this function is used on a movie, it immediately ceases to look like film and starts to look like a soap opera, so to me the current frame rate is a part of the magic of film and I'd hate to see that change.

The thing is, there are many different factors involved. In other threads we discussed the new transfer of Aliens and how important the quality of the transfer is. What I'm trying to say is that under ideal conditions you shouldn't be able to tell the difference between a high definition digital projection of scanned film and a projection from a good 35mm print. A high quality digital projection of a really well done digital transfer should look exactly like a projection of a very pristine 35mm print. It doesn't have to be one or the other, they are both just different ways of achieving the same thing.