Harmy

I really should go to bed now but remind me of this in a PM tomorrow - I think I may already have what you seek 😉

No, I’m basically just balancing the colors and getting rid of tints - you can pretty much see it in those comparisons.

Well, for the BD they added new black bars, so the noise isn’t outside the picture on the BD but this is encoded from the source file and there it clearly is.

As for the blue stars - all evidence suggests that the stars in ROTJ have always been blue but no as much as on the BD.

One other thing I wanted to mention is that I found ROTJ to be extremely noisy - more so than the other two (I notice these quality problems much more now that I’m looking at in on a large 4K screen) and also the crushed black are just completely unrecoverable in some scenes. But the noisiness is interesting, because the movie bears clear signs of having tons of automatic grain removal applied, which would never leave so much noise in it, so I figure some of it must be added on top and then I was comparing the BD to a few ProResHQ 422 clips from the original master from which the BD was made (don’t ask me where I got those and I’ll tell you no lies - but they are just three very short clips) and I noticed something interesting:
http://s25.postimg.org/olq4fyubx/Pro_Res.jpg
The noise (exaggerated in that screenshot for better visibility) that is in the image overlaps into the black bars, which is only possible, if it was added on top of the picture.

OK, so I started working on CC of Jedi - I haven’t gotten very far yet but here are some screenshot comparisons:

http://screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/150542
http://screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/150543
http://screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/150538
http://screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/150544

Right now, I’m pretty much only going for fixing the mistakes of the BD coloring - I might give it another pass using the scans I’ll get as a reference but that would probably be left for v2.0.

Here’s a quick and dirty fix for that carpeted shot:
http://screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/150537

I will make a more detailed post about ROTJ v2.0 color correction and other things about the BD source later.

Yes, in the ROTJ SE most of the wipes were unchanged, so there may be some softness there but that’s not what I’m talking about in the video - I’m talking about what joefavs said. Here’s a comparison of a shot of Han aboard the shuttle and the same angle from a couple of minutes later:

http://screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/150516

And this drop in quality persists for several minutes (joefavs has it right - up until the speederbike chase) and I’ve seen some HD scans of prints, which clearly show that this drop in quality wasn’t there in the theatrical prints, in fact, even the theatrical prints actually have much better detail in this section than the BD, so it’s definitely a problem specific to this transfer and it may seem too careless even for Lucasfilm but that’s what happened - my guess would be that the scan did actually go a bit out of focus in that section, but because the master was being done for DVD and for DVD the detail was still fine and they were in a big hurry, they probably just threw a sharpening filter at it and it looked ok on DVD. But this transfer should never have been used for an HD release.

Also notice what I call the carpet syndrome - thin vertical lines running through the whole image, making it look like it’s being projected on a carpet - this is actually present throughout the whole transfer but it’s most obvious in this segment, (which only goes to prove they sharpened it more than the rest, which would make this kind of artifact more visible). It can be dealt with using a slight horizontal blur, which is why it’s not visible on the HDTV captures, which are quite a bit softer than the BD but I’d really love to know what caused this, because I’ve actually seen this effects on many studio masters I’ve worked with in my job and it’s a bit of a mystery to me.

It’s not - Polish uses latin alphabet.

I just recently posted a video which should answer all these questions:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ykir-ExnnJc&ab_channel=PetrHarmy

Swazzy said:

Hello, Harmy! I’ve a technical question about the making of the DE

In your “Sources” documentary, you show how you cleaned a 35mm cell of Ben’s hut to match the blu ray footage. In the final product, the frame subtly shifts back and forth, as it should, to simulate the organic movement of a film reel.

How exactly did you achieve this? Was it a traditional avisynth script or through another editing program?

Thanks

I used After Effects - specifically a function called The Wiggler.

As to the making of doc - it is very much a work in progress - they are two separate docs spliced together. The plan is to one day have these on a bonus BD, selectable from the menu as separate featurettes and there would be two or three more five to ten minute featurettes between them, which is why some info is repeated.

It’s not just an m2ts file - it should be a complete AVCHD folder structure - you can burn this to DVD9 and it should work in BD players.

http://www.dvd-guides.com/guides/blu-ray-copy/260-burn-blu-ray-avchd-using-imgburn

LOL, I’m not even sure, if he thinks that I’m stupid because I think the prequels are terrible or because I think the basic story-line of AOTC is good 😄

It is a terrible movie without a doubt - I was just pointing out that when I thought about it from the point of having a coherent story, I came to the conclusion that the basic outline of the plot is much stronger in Episode II than the other two prequels. The things you mention are totally true but that’s all part of how badly this pretty solid story-line was executed.

This also shows that Lucas has always been a great idea-man - he had a lot of help writing the script for Star Wars and for the other two he only wrote the story outline and had someone else write the actual script and direct and if he did the same with Episode 2, it could have been a great film.

So, I got into a discussion on my FB page about which of the prequels is the least terrible and I said that to me Ep3 is probably the most painful to watch - for Episode 1 I still have certain nostalgia, because I saw it as a kid and Ep2 is so bad it’s funny - kind of like Plan 9 From Outer Space. Ep3 is just sad - Anakin’s turn to the dark side is totally unrealistic and lame, the fights are so long and over-choreographed that they are boring and it ruins Darth Vader.

Then someone made the argument that at least Episode III is the only one that has a coherent story. But I disagree. As far as story coherence, I’d say Ep2 is actually the best (well, least terrible). It’s a story that can be retold as a coherent narrative most easily - let me try here:

After an assassination attempt on a galactic senator a young Jedi is tasked with protecting her, while his master follows the trail of the assassins only to discover a conspiracy of galactic proportions and get captured. Meanwhile the senator and her Jedi protector go into hiding and fall in love but when the young Jedi discovers that his master has been captured he flies to his aid and our heroes are rejoined for an epic final battle.

Written out like this, it actually sounds pretty great, too bad it was so poorly executed. But what I’m trying to show there is that there is an actual plot to episode II (change the Jedi in that outline I wrote up there into private investigators and it would make for a pretty good film noir), whereas the other two movies are basically just a series of events.

I think people have some skewed idea about what real skintone is - when I turn on the light and look at my hand, it’s almost precisely the color of the face in the corrected image. Sure, it depends on the light but in my experience, untanned white skin is this kind of orange under daylight and pretty much any light except specifically tinted ones. The color the skintone is in the BD footage is of course only seen in seriously sunburned white people.

Oh my god, I don’t even know what to say, Poita. I’m so sorry to hear that. I hope everything turns out ok. 😦

Well, that sucks.

Well, SSDs are actually far less prone to mechanical damage, since they have no moving parts - they do get damaged by repeated re-writes but if you’re archiving, you wouldn’t do that, so if they come down in price considerably, they could be better for archiving.

Yeah, me too! 😃

Good to see you back btw 😃

Where did you dig up that old fossil? 😉

Anyway, I agree with you - with 4K, we are now technically able to see more detail at home than in cinemas but for movies scanned from 35mm, we’re still seeing just the amount of detail that 35mm can capture. It’s a bit different with movies shot digitally but that’s just technology moving forward I guess 😃

I’ve never felt that the colors needed to get better and I’ve seen HDR TVs and wasn’t all that impressed - what bugs me in cinemas (and on my home 1080p projector) is that I can still see the projection grid, which is where 4K and above really makes things better, even if you’re only feeding it 2K signal, so I hope these new HDR projectors are also at least 4K.

What’s interesting is that my 1080p projector (with 10ft wide projection screen viewed from about 10ft distance) is actually much more forgiving of image flaws such as noise or compression than my 58" 4K TV.

The guy is actually selling other Star Wars fanedits and BTS documentaries:
http://www.freewebstore.org/sevsdespec/Despecialized_Edition_Blu_Rays/cat3466570_3005806.aspx

So, how do we report him to paypal? He’s clearly made a nice business out of this.

I already reported the site some time ago (someone pointed it to me earlier on FB). Maybe if lots of people are reporting it, FB will take more notice.

Yeah, I guess you guys got me there - it does indeed have some of the best but also some of the worst fx in the trilogy.

Yeah, whatever other problems there are with ROTJ, Special Effects aren't one of them - I think ROTJ is the absolute pinacle of optical visual effects and may be the most realistic looking space battle of all time, including CG ones. And only a couple of shots have been re-comped for the SE - most of the space battle you see on the BD is the original compositing. And it looks 100% more real than any of the visual fx shown in the TFA trailers.

And those composites you pointed out actually look really good for the time, especially the Tatooine ones - I've seen much worse greenscreen compositing of people in modern blocbusters. The hangar matte is admittedly not great but that's definitely the exception.

OK, I didn't want to admit it but I sort of forgot who they were :D