Harmy

Wow, 5 hours of footage on an mpeg2 DVD5, that can't possibly look remotely good. But to each their own of course :-)

Yeah, the word trade kind of implies that you're expecting something in return, hence the confusion. I would personally prefer all the bonus material in a folder as mp4s or mkvs, so that I can just put it on a BD disc alongside an mkv of the movie with the commentary added, which I want to make for myself but other may prefer something else. Another factor is that to create a DVD, you'd have to re-compress the already compressed files and so you'd downgrade them further, especially with MPEG2 DVD encoding.

It's probably a hoax anyway but it's interesting.

So, what do you guys think about this?

http://geektyrant.com/news/2013/4/15/new-star-wars-reclamation-series-holds-clues-to-episode-vii.html

That I would consider a tragedy. Revisited is great but I really don't think that it should be the version that is viewed a 100 years from now, just as the SE shouldn't be.

Actually, the hold up is on my head - I'm doing the color correction for Puggo and reels 2 and 3 (there are only 3 for 16mm) are already done but reel one posses a much greater challenge with the need to combine different captures for different scenes as there are both very dark and very bright scenes and it's sometimes hard to pick the best capture and I didn't manage to find the time to do it yet.

http://uloz.to/xcQe8NPD/1981-crawl-mp4

Here's a work in progress version of the '81 crawl - it will still need some serious stabilization and a bit of cleanup and to be cropped correctly but it could end up looking quite good.

I think it was done with manual rotoscoping, judging by the much sharper edges around Luke's face. Whether the sky was completely replaced, or just recoloured separately is hard to tell. Your attempt is very successful in bringing it close to the original colors - the problem is with these heavy color shifts is that correcting them usually brings out artifacts, which is just the case here.

NeverarGreat said:

Another test to see whether the original sky color in this shot could be recovered:

I'd say so. But unfortunately for the DVD, most of the detail on 3PO's shoulders is on the blue channel, so it's a compromise.

JEDIT: I've updated the image. This one keeps almost all the blue detail by turning it red.

The problem with this shot is that it wasn't just recolor-timed, the characters were cut out of the background and the background was swapped, so you can't "pull out" the original colors, because they're just not there.

Also, I was horrified by how bad v2.1 looked in your comparison, so I checked and this is what the actual v2.1 frame looks like:

As you can see, not only are there some really ugly compression artifacts in your comparison, but the colors and brightness are wrong as well.

I saw it and it's definitely not an upscale. Plus it's not only the ghost but the entire ending celebration - it's scanned from a slightly faded source and it's pretty dirty but it should be very useful, at least until I can get my hands on the N1 footage, which for ROTJ it seems it won't be any time soon.

Totally, no problem - I will be converting it to lossless though, so if there was a possibility to re-encode straight to lagarith or UTVideo, that'd be best.

Yes, of course.

I am not sure. Never tried.

Great, thanks for the update! I hope you manage to do it.

That's the catch - N1's video was of the crawl only and I really don't want to do the flyover again, so if someone wants to faithfully recreate the '81 version, they'd still have to deal with that.

AntcuFaalb said:

Harmy said:

Also, I should finish a complete HD restoration of the 1981 crawl sometime next week (I want to use it in one of my docs) so I'll upload it when it's done. Here's a screenshot:

Is this with the 1981 starfield?

Yes. I took the N1 video that was posted some days ago and extracted the crawl from it and pasted it over the proper '81 starfield restored from a combination of ESB, which uses the same strafield but shifted slightly to the left and NTSC '93 LD for the missing part. It's still a work in progress though.

deepanddark20 said:

In the very near future, a new thread will be started in the forums to discuss a Star Wars preservation with "A New Hope" opening crawl.

I know Harmy has said he doesn't mind pieces of Despecialized Edition being used, but just to make sure I want to ask: is permission granted to basically take the entire Despecialized and just change the crawl at the beginning? It would be much easier to just make this a spinoff project instead of starting from the ground up.

Sure, no problem. But since it's basically going to be the DeEd, just with a different crawl, I'd like you to call it Star Wars Despecialized Edition 1981 or something to that effect. Also, I should finish a complete HD restoration of the 1981 crawl sometime next week (I want to use it in one of my docs) so I'll upload it when it's done. Here's a screenshot:

pittrek said:

And would you have a problem if somebody else would do such an "unofficial" bonus disc?

Well, no, I wouldn't have a problem with that at all, but this has been discussed before - it would be a generic SW bonus disc, not a DeEd specific one. All known OT SW bonus material on say one BD25 in the best available quality is something I'd be personally very interested in, actually - but while it could certainly be used as a bonus disc to put together with the DeEd, it would have nothing to do with the project itself.

No.

Looks fantastic guys. It's too dark of course, but I assume that it's not final and otherwise the colors look great.

No, I quite agree.

Tatooine appearing on the wrong music cue after the Episode IV A New Hope crawl.

I never noticed it until it was pointed out to me.

This looks really promising - maybe I'll use you correction when making v3.0 one day :-)

No, I'm pretty sure that the audio stays exactly the same and it's the picture that is out of sync.