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Harmy

User Group
Members
Join date
2-Feb-2010
Last activity
9-Jul-2025
Posts
7,232
Web Site
http://revengeofthejedi.wz.cz

Post History

Post
#748791
Topic
StarWarsLegacy.com - The Official Thread
Time

I'm sorry, I didn't mean to be a dick - what you've been able to do there is pretty amazing - in my original comment, I just wanted to say that the difference can't be properly appreciated at this resolution.

And I actually agree that preserving print quality is too low of a goal for a good restoration but since you have multiple prints, couldn't you just compare them and see, which flaws (in this particular case misalignment) they have in common and preserve those - In this particular case, the misalignment of separate elements could only have been introduced during the compositing and therefore was definitely a part of the original negative of the movie and any misalignment introduced at any other stage of the process would have to be consistent over all the elements, so if you looked at a Kodak or Eastman print and the over-all misalignment wasn't there, you could safely assume, that it wasn't on the o-neg and was introduced in the I.B. printing process and if it was there on three or more different prints, it should be quite safe to assume that it was on the o-neg.

This kind of scrutiny wouldn't of course be normal for a standard restoration but you set the bar so high with the level of scrutiny that you're doing for your project, that doing this doesn't seem that far fetched and, since as a result you could do a single alignment of the entire frame and arrive at something actually closer to the o-neg, it actually seems easier than rotoscoping and re-aligning all the elements separately.

Post
#748718
Topic
StarWarsLegacy.com - The Official Thread
Time

That is undeniably true but after a simple color adjustment the raw footage does look much better than before. Plus if the channels are off by a different amount on different elements, the misalignment must have been introduced in the original compositing and not in the making of the print and thus realigning the elements separately (not to mention harvesting detail from neighboring frames, which was never even on the negative) is an act of revisionism. All of that is of course ok for Mike's version, since he isn't going for 100% original and I completely agree that it is amazing what can be pulled from film but I don't think it would fit a proper restoration.

Post
#746953
Topic
TDS TRILOGY: Specialized Regraded Edition (Released)
Time

Interesting - I have the same problem with my OT Bonus disc - it plays fine in my BD player but my computer's BD drive refuses to read it and I have the same problem with a couple more discs (among them the bonus disc in the Blade Runner 30th Anniversary set). I was planning on getting a different BD drive eventually (the one I have is external) hoping that it would solve the problem with those discs but it would seem that it may not.

Post
#746844
Topic
Harmy's STAR WARS Despecialized Edition HD - V2.7 - MKV (Released)
Time

Well many BDs come from the same master as their DVD counterparts but that doesn't mean they are the same thing - the resolution is the main difference between the two formats after all.

Like it or not, the policy is that if you want to download an HD restoration, you have to own the BDs and it makes sense because since the added resolution is the main value added for the BDs, acquiring the film in higher than DVD resolution some other way without also buying the official HD release is piracy. 

Post
#746766
Topic
StarWarsLegacy.com - The Official Thread
Time

Thanks, Mike. And it's not so much about Despecialized being the #1 restoration available, which I never even claimed it was but about the fact that I tried to stick to those scans pretty religiously a waved them around as an argument whenever someone came up with some criticism of the colors in Despecialized and now it seems that I may well have been completely off base in some of those arguments.

Post
#746431
Topic
Harmy's THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK Despecialized Edition HD - V2.0 - MKV & AVCHD (Released)
Time

That is because the background in v2.0 is a still image from the SE. Also, the compression in the clip hides some of the grain in the cleaned up v2.5 version, of which there's actually plenty.

Plus I really don't see where any parts of the probe have "become thinner" in the filtered version.

Whereas in the v2.0, they certainly were thinner because of the way the probe and the smoke were composited from GOUT onto the SE HD background:

Thanks for the GIFs, g-force :-)