Harmy

Well, that cropping was already applied in the WP, only the matte also had the rounded corners. And actually, it's a 2 pixel wide matte on all sides - the old videos had a one pixel wide matte with rounded corners and I decided to tighten the cropping a bit more. And yeah, that's part of why I found the argument about losing picture information ridiculous - it is perfectly normal to crop the video a bit.

Well, I found out that it may not be that hard after all - a lot of the shots done had the round corners but that was before I decided to tighten the cropping by one pixel on each side (this was done for technical reasons - to hide some artifacts), so when this new cropping is applied to those shots using a matte with rectangular corners, the rounded corners are all but gone - only in the upper left corner, there's a tiny trace of the rounded corner left, which shouldn't prove distracting when switching from/to a shot with the rounded corners removed completely.

Well, the artificial part of it is only for a few shots - some despecialized shots I still have all the project files for (hopefully including the 35mm ones) I can re-render with a straight matte and with the part of the movie, which I didn't alter beyond color-correction, I can also just replace the matte, so it would be only a handful of shots, which would need the painting out of the corners.

CatBus said:

AntcuFaalb said:

FWIW: It should still be possible to implement the rounded corners as a graphical subtitle track, as Laserschwert said.

Yeah, I could throw one of these together pretty trivially, I believe, if there's interest.  The problem, of course, is that you couldn't use this overlay and also use graphical subtitles at the same time.

 Yeah, that's exactly the problem with that solution.

OK, there will be some cases, where going back to the original files and re-rendering won't be an option anymore - in those cases, would you prefer I

A) Keep the corners just in those shots

B) Crop the corners out by zooming the shots in a bit

C) Try to paint them out invisibly (that is the option I'm personally leaning towards)

OK, although it makes me quite unhappy and I still disagree with most of the arguments against the corners, the backlash from so many people invested in this project makes me even unhappier, so I'm gonna get rid of the corners. It will be quite a lot of work though, so I expect it to push the release a bit.

You know guys, the WP has a timecode for a reason - can you provide times of the shots you think should be fixed? I don't really see any places, where the snow would be purple - I tried to stay away from cyan, which is the predominant snow color of the 2004 master, so I guess I may have gone too far towards the other side of the spectrum here and there but I need particular shots.

Or too far - ideally, you should only see the edges of the screen with your peripheral vision - that is why the scope aspect ratio simulates the AR of human vision :-)

Well, what I was trying to say with the pictures was A) how I got the idea in the first place - I noticed in many cinemas, that the screens had rounded corners, just like film prints do. And B) that it's not a change to the movie itself at all, it's a change to its presentation - exactly like if you went to see it in a cinema which had rounded corners on its screen and then went to see it in one, where they had straight corners - you're still watching the exact same movie, only with slightly different cropping.

And losing picture information isn't really an argument - losing a small part around the edges is not only not altering the movie, it is proper. And how exactly this cropping is done depends on the venue you're in.

Except for the music, I quite liked what Ady did with the duel in ANH:R but I think filming new stuff would be going a bit too far.

Well, yeah, actually, these shots in particular definitely do look better than what's left of them in the BD, and I suspect that it's because they were scanned at only 2K in '97 (which also means '97 level of scanning technology) then put back on film and then that film was scanned again (with 2004 level of scanning tech) and then all the DNR and color eff-ups of the 2004 version were added and in between several lossless re-encodes must have been done and then in the end h264 compression for BD, so on the 2011 BD all the shots altered in '97 were probably though more generations of detail degradation, than your average theatrical print could "dream" of. I'll post some comparisons with the BD after this weekend.

As to the rounded corners, they were there from the very first WP and no one's complained about them until now, so they are obviously not a big deal and since I like them and it would be a serious hassle to remove them now, even if I wanted to, I don't see any point in discussing them any further.

Yes, this has been discussed before - the bleeding seems to have always been there.

OK, I guess I'm gonna have to spell it out :-) The first picture is a comparison between the GOUT and the SE, which means it is a comparison between the ORIGINAL and the SE! The second picture is an HD scan of a 70mm frame from the ORIGINAL version, so while the SE may look better from a certain point of view, it looks that way because it was redone digitally and thus looks nothing like the ORIGINAL version. Now, remind me, which version am I trying to approximate here? ;-)

@Turisu: Yeah, me too :-)

@Zer0squared: I don't think you understand - I edited my previous post - check it out again.

You mean this shot:

(From 005's gallery - top GOUT, bottom SE)

Or better yet:

(From the jedi1.net 70mm cell-scans)

The sources are stated in the screenshots too ;-)

The sources are clearly stated in the video.

OK, here's a comparison video of the announced surprises from the WP and here's a gallery of screenshots from said video.

Here's a 1080p picture of the Kershner credit from one of N1's videos. The quality isn't very good but it should still be a better reference than the GOUT:

Oh, crap, I must have uploaded the wrong file. Here's the right one:
http://uloz.to/xqyrHZcy/deed-v1-0-covers-and-disc-labels-rar

I said it before and I'll say it again - the SW BDs, whatever their other problems (and there's a copious amount of them) certainly don't lack grain - there's plenty of it.

Yes, because, the definition was worse over-all and grain was scrubbed by compression.

Well, I'm actually a bit surprised by the lack of reaction to some of the improvements seen in the workprint...

*off to make a comparison video... ;-)

Yes, definitely. Not only because I like it - and I do - but also because the despecialized shots have already been rendered with the matte in place.

Yeah, I realize that but it's more about the feeling you get from it - just like this whole thing isn't really about restoring the true original, because that just not possible using those means, but to make the viewer feel like they're watching the original as much as possible. Plus it is hardly adding them in the middle of the 35mm frame, more like 1% from where they were originally. Also, another thing I noticed is that cinema screens very often have rounded corners, so this is also meant to kind of simulate that.