OMEN-_-

I'm with You_Too on this one personally. Harmy, the blacks and shadows in your shots have turned cyan. It's especially noticable with Han's boots and IMO looks kind of weird and out of place. When I started regrading the star wars original trilogy, the first thing I did was lock down the blacks as the base and modify the colours from there, so as not to tint the blacks.

In case you're at all interested, this clip below shows how i've regraded the scene with greedo in my own project (pretty much my final regrading settings for this scene). Sorry about the lack of subtitles for greedo, they'll be optional subtitles that i'll add later so the greedo subtitles can be in different languages without the original english subtitles always being there. I think you should do the same thing but your call of course.

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=NG06OO92

Harmy said:

OK, here it is:

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=8S5F9NP1

 

Also, did you guys notice this? :-)

1) GOUT
2) SE
3) DeEd 2.0 

Again one frame closer to the original :-)

Actually two, I also restored the flash frame of Han just before this one :-)

 

Wow, fantastic job guys!!! It's pretty much seemless now. Harmy and You_Too make a great team! :)

Harmy said:

Guys, are you out of you minds? I will not, under any circumstances, edit the audio because as it stands, any audio track synced with the GOUT (which the wast majority of soundtracks intended for the original version are) will work as that's the whole point. I'm not even using the actual GOUT audio at all. Oh, and the Han scene was done exactly this way in v1.0, I just decided to try and smooth it out a little. And it is definitely not 14 seconds out of sync with the GOUT at any point , in fact, the whole edit is in frame for frame sync with GOUT, with maximum one frame shift - the only explanation is that the timings of the chapters got somehow shifted when you ripped them DT. 

And cutting audio is absolutely different from the selling speeder scene, where the only difference is the colour of the sky.

My suggestion about slowing down the whole final shot of Han before Greedo fries would not require any alteration of the audio, you would be slowing down the video slightly to be in sync with the audio. I'm pretty sure the slight slowdown would not be perceivable to viewers and would be far less noticable than slowing down just the first few frames of the final shot like in those clips you posted IMHO.

If there's some flaw with what i'm suggesting that you can see and that i've overlooked Harmy please do let me know.

Darth Tater said:

doubleofive said:

OMEN!-_-! said:

I know Harmy is trying to recreate these films exactly as they were theatrically but I have to agree with Darth Tater (cool name/avatar btw) on this, they are all pretty noticable, though like others here have said, method 1 is definately the most obvious and jarring. I think it might be worth compromising here and cutting those missing frames and that part of the audio where the missing frames are to not disrupt the flow of what is a very cool/iconic scene for Han Solo. Another option of course would be to take the whole final shot of Han before he shoots Greedo from the GOUT rather than just the few missing frames, that would certainly be less jarring than changing between two sources of differing quality in the same shot.

I'd rather have the slow motion frames at the beginning than removing the "yes". More fans will notice the "yes" being gone than the strange frames.

 

I agree, and I don't even think this would be necessary. I just broke out the SE DVD, and the whole scene seems fine (until Greedo shoots, of course). There is a camera cut right before Greedo shoots, so splicing it back to where Han shoots alone seems relatively simple, as is it already done in v1.0. In the SE, Han already says, "Yes, I bet you have," and there is no noticable cut in frames (to my untrained eyes).

Ah, I´d forgotten that the ´yes´ is also included in the 2004 special edition dvds. I´m leaving the audio for last on my project so I wasn´t 100% sure whether the ´yes´ would need to be cut or not due to the missing frames. Even better then, you would just lose a few frames that most would never notice were even gone.

The only problem in relation to this project is that such a change would definately be a little step away from recreating the theatrical release because this was one of the changes that was made for the special editions.

Harmy, have you considered slowing down that final shot of Han slightly when he says ´Yes, I bet you have´ to make up the missing frames while leaving the audio unaltered? I haven´t tried it but it could possibly be less noticable than the other methods you´ve used, due to the slowdown being spread out across the whole shot rather than just the first few frames.

msycamore said:

You_Too said:

Darth Tater said:

How does this green light/blue light thing happen in the first place?

I think it must have something to do with them adding some color setting over the whole movie without checking for side effects. Probably the same thing as Luke's saber being green and grey shadows being blue. Just a guess of course.

I think it's alot more complicated than that, see this: http://originaltrilogy.com/forum/topic.cfm/Crushed-Blacks/post/539032/#TopicPost539032 That is just a few examples of the inconsistency that is going on with all the levels throughout the film, that's why one single setting cannot correct the damage, just from one moment to another it goes from being extremely saturated to being very desaturated, what should've been blue are green and vice versa and what should be bright is dull in another moment, I don't know if the blu-ray release have corrected some of this but that's what's going on with all the levels in the 2004 DVD, which create a wonderful mix of disaster.

I'm no expert on this, but one color setting added over the whole movie cannot be the culprit for this.

That is what my experience regrading the first film has let me to believe that as well, the colour grading is too inconsistent to use just one filter to regrade the whole thing, but if I had to choose just one filter to apply to the whole film, it would be remarkably similar to the one You_Too has created in his blu-ray regrading thread.

Hal 9000 said:

Then it wouldn't be in sync with the GOUT.

If by GOUT you mean the audio, I have found that its fairly easy to remove the 'yes' part of the original 'yes, I bet you have', which is where the missing frames are, so it all flows nicely. With a simple 1 ms audio fade-in and fade out around the audio cut, i've found the audio to flow pretty much seemlessly to me, with Han now saying 'I bet you have' then bang, fried Greedo. I'm no audio expert but i've found that this works for me and the audio cut is not really noticable. It certainly helps that there's no musical score in this section, would have made the audio cut more tricky otherwise.

I know Harmy is trying to recreate these films exactly as they were theatrically but I have to agree with Darth Tater (cool name/avatar btw) on this, they are all pretty noticable, though like others here have said, method 1 is definately the most obvious and jarring. I think it might be worth compromising here and cutting those missing frames and that part of the audio where the missing frames are to not disrupt the flow of what is a very cool/iconic scene for Han Solo. Another option of course would be to take the whole final shot of Han before he shoots Greedo from the GOUT rather than just the few missing frames, that would certainly be less jarring than changing between two sources of differing quality in the same shot.

You_Too said:

Darth Tater said:

How does this green light/blue light thing happen in the first place?

I think it must have something to do with them adding some color setting over the whole movie without checking for side effects. Probably the same thing as Luke's saber being green and grey shadows being blue. Just a guess of course.

Yeah, Lucasfilm/Lowry were not at all subtle about how they went about changing colours willy nilly without caring too much how it affected the rest of the image and the continuety with the next shot. The first film is a nightmare in that regard.

BTW You_Too, I've just seen the colour grading thread you started based off the blu-rays and I think the filter you've used looks really really good, very similar to the one i've used in fact! :)

Harmy said:

Sure, like I said, the colour are not final.

In MPC, just press ALT+i to get a screencap at the actual resolution of the video. You can save it as either JPG, BMP or PNG and choose the folder :-)

I know but in the past I've had issues with the colours changing slightly and even the ratio changing when I use the save image function in mpc, so now I always use the PrtSc button now to get exactly what I see when playing the video.

As for the colour grading, from my personal experience with these three films, i've found that its very easy to get carried away and take away too much blue (I hate the blue tint introduced in the 2004 lowry masters as well). This tends to lead to yellow overwhelming the other colours if you're not careful. Having pretty much finished regrading all six films to my satisfaction now, my experience has been that Star Wars is by far the most difficult to regrade because the 2004 dvd/hdtv/blu-ray colour grading is very erratic. I was not able to use a single regrading filter for the whole film, many scenes, especially the blockade scene at the beginning, required different grading on a shot by shot basis to make it consistent colourwise.

Harmy said:

Oh and the colours aren't final there but quite close, but you're probably right about it being a bit too yellow, it's a side effect of trying to make Greedo more green.

Hi Harmy, thanks for the warm welcome. :)

How do you know that Greedo is supposed to be more green though? If trying to make Greedo more green makes the flesh tones of everyone else too yellow and out of whack, surely that's counterproductive?

This is how Greedo looks in the same scene taken from my own little project:

http://img842.imageshack.us/img842/966/greedo.jpg

And this is how Han looks:

http://img52.imageshack.us/img52/2300/hanf.jpg

And this is how Han looks in your clip, with his flesh tone a little too yellow IMHO:

http://img259.imageshack.us/img259/778/handespecialised.jpg

Sorry about the size of the images, I find it easier to print screencaps in fullscreen mode on mpc with the PrtSc button and my monitor's resolution is quite large...

You_Too said:

He's replicated the way the subs looked, moved and where they were placed in the original theatrical print.

Ah, I see. Thanks for explaining that You_Too! It would make sense then seeing as he's trying to recreate the original theatrical print as closely as he can with his despecialised editions. I still think the subtitles would be better off being optional though for all non-english speakers watching his releases.

Harmy said:

Here's the latest rendition of Greedo's subs:

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=ES0LNQNV

Hi Harmy and everybody at originaltrilogy.com, this is my first post here on this forum. I've been lurking here for a while now (mostly looking for information about changes made to the star wars special editions/blu-ray) but only just got round to registering. Harmy, I'd just like to say that I and i'm sure everybody here really appreciate all the time and effort you've put into making these despecialised releases. I have been doing a similar project to yours on and off with the star wars original trilogy films myself (regrading and editting them) for the last fews months so I can really appreciate how much time and effort you've put into these!

I just watched the clip you put up of Greedo with the subtitles and a few things struck me as strange. First was the height of the subtitles relative to the bottom bar. The subtitles seem really high up in the image to me, intruding too much into the scene IMO. I'm sure that subtitles are usually a fair bit lower than that. Another thing I thought was strange was the way the subtitles fade for a frame when they appear and disappear, I found it a little distracting. Did you make them do that on purpose or is that just what the program you use does as default? As for hard-encoding the subtitles into the image, wouldn't it be better to have them as an optional subtitle track on an AVCHD so non-english speakers can have their own alien subtitles without the english subtitles being there? The scene also seems a little too yellow to me. This scene from my project is also a little yellow due to the removel of the blue tint running throughout the film but this clip seems too yellow to me IMHO.

Apologies if I come off as very presumptuous for nitpicking from my very first post. If I see something that seems strange I can't help but point it out. I liked what you did with your initial releases and I'm really looking forward to checking out the latest versions of your despecialised editions and want them to be as good as they can possibly be. If I can help in that, all the better.