You_Too

_,,,^..^,,,_ said:

You_Too, sorry, I live in Italy, one of the PAL lands... I have not access to the GOUT NTSC, but if someone could point me to the m2v file I'll be happy.

By the way, also if the NTSC GOUT has more details, at least the PAL GOUT *should* have more lines of resolution...

Yeah, I live in Sweden which is also PAL, and I only had the PAL GOUT until i read about it here on OT and saw comparisons. Even though PAL has higher resolution as a format, the PAL version of SW and ESB has worse resolution of the picture itself than the NTSC version. The weirdest thing is that for ROTJ it is the opposite, that the PAL version looks better.

Anyway, I think I got SW and ESB NTSC versions from tehparadox but that was back when megaupload was still alive.

_,,,^..^,,,_ said:

I'm thinking about the next step... making the same treatment I've done until here, but using the NTSC captures of the Definitive Collection (US, two copies, and Japanese) plus "Faces", and the Pioneer HLD-X9 as the laserdisc player... (using all the scenes not affected by the DVNR, of course) and then merging the result with the result of the PAL captures... what do you all think?

Every new step is a step in the right direction, and the more experimenting, the more and better results in the end!

g-force said:

Very nice comparisons, You Too!

Thanks. :)

I noticed the one with Han in the cantina when I worked on color correcting Mos Eisley in the TB version, but at that time I didn't realize it was worse than in the GOUT. Now that I saw you guys' posts here I thought such a comparison would be interesting and it did prove you right, at least in some scenes!

Yeah it looks good compared to the GOUT there, but for the comparisons it would be even better with the NTSC GOUT for SW, since it's got more detail preserved than the PAL version for some reason.

And the sharpening in your version seems a bit too strong maybe. And why is it only vertical sharpening? At least that's what it looks like.

I'd wait and see what negative1's team will bring us first. (And Disney if they're smart and want to make some money on us OT-fans!)

Though of course it's your decision since this was your idea. A nice idea.

I haven't compared ESB and ROTJ from the TB version with the GOUT though, but I can tell you that ROTJ has less resolution intact than the GOUT. It's blurred, horizontally or vertically, I don't remember.

AntcuFaalb said:

Do we know the names of the people responsible for this amateur work?

I'd be interested to see what they have to say for themselves.

"The 2004 SE (it has never been marketed as a Special Edition, though there really is no other label to describe it) had its color correction guided and supervised by George Lucas himself. Screening the film at Skywalker Ranch, Lucas went through the film with members from ILM, who would be color-timing the digitized film themselves at Lucas' approval."

Source: http://secrethistoryofstarwars.com/savingstarwars.html

AntcuFaalb said:

g-force said:

AF, just sent you a PM on what I can do (if anything) to help. I agree with you about the jaggies, but the TB has even worse DVNR problems than the GOUT.

I know it's been degrained to hell, but does it actually have smearing resulting from temporal DVNR?

In some scenes it's worse than the GOUT and in some not. Check these comparisons, GOUT on top, TB on bottom:

Stars leaving trails:

Look at the detail on R2:

This one's self-explanatory!

Look at the wall lines in the background:

Another thing I noticed when doing this was that the 97 SE is more cropped than the GOUT on all sides except the bottom.

AntcuFaalb said:

bkev said:

I'm of the opinion that it's not "if" as much as it is "when" on this one. However, I do have my reservations as to whether or not they'll treat it with respect. We could end up with an OUT release that has the same mangled colors as the SE.

True, but then we (OTcom) can fix them!

Also an idea we shouldn't give them!

Nah, joking. I'm 99.9% sure that if they release the originals, they won't look nearly as bad as the 2004/2011 SE. Those were based on the 97 SE and recolored in a horribly amateur-ish way. If they scan some original prints or negatives (or use whatever hi-def scan is on their servers) I'm sure it will look more natural like the originals should.

none said:

some of the old versions starting with GOUT.

Don't give them any ideas like that! :P

Mike Verta has at least given us hints in the past that Lucasfilm has far better scans on their servers than the ones used for the GOUT.

I don't know how soon, but DJ have just told me that he wants to add some more features. One of the DVD versions have some info files on each main actor, the theatrical trailer and such things. And apparently there was some bug with the menu or something that had to be fixed.

Here's a rough estimation of what the missing frame would have looked like, created using the plugin function MVflowfps on the GOUT:

Leonardo said:

I've watched that part on Puggo's transfer, and I didn't see any jump. I'll check more carefully.

It is there, look:

You're right! There's glue on the bottom of the frame before the cut in the GOUT. Maybe something happened to the frame inbetween them on the negative so they cut it out?

CapableMetal said:

It does lead to huge file sizes but the result you get is generally faster and more compatible than MPEG2 (which is very compatible itself, but slower to edit with, at least on all of my systems). I have 6.5TB of storage so space is admittedly not much of an issue. It all depends on what you're trying to do, if you're looking at frame differences then MPEG2 is a perfectly acceptable choice. I've done similar things with h264 encoded videos on occasion, its just slow at seeking frames. For capturing or editing, however, I never stray from lossless codecs; files aren't as big as uncompressed AVI, and you aren't compressing to a lossy format (such as capturing straight to MPEG2) before filtering/editing.

Yeah, but since the TB version which I'm working with is in mpeg2 I thought what would synch up best would be another mpeg2 file. And I'm getting really short on space with all these Star Wars projects! haha

As far as I know, DJ hasn't visited this site since he was banned a while back. But I'm sure he will upload it soon, it's just that he's been busy with his job and we've been working on multiple projects.

Amazing improvement on the lightsaber! I love that you managed to remove that cyan-ish glow and make it pure blue.

What upscale method are you using? The best one I've found so far (at least in avisynth) is:

nnedi2_rpow2(rfactor=2, cshift="spline64resize", fwidth=1280, fheight=544)

After cropping of course.

Some people say nnedi3 is better at upscaling but somehow I found nnedi2 being smoother.

By the way, the youtube link says the file is deleted, and the other one is extremely slow to download. May I suggest using sendspace instead?

While I think George is way too stubborn and principled for his own (and everyone else's) good, he doesn't deserve all the hate and bashing that's been going on for many years. It's ok to criticize the guy since he's obviously made lots of very bad decisions, but hating is a different thing. Without him we wouldn't have these films we love so much.

Yes, never buy anything like that from ebay. The sellers there are usually just taking the work of others (which has often been shared for free) and sells it to make money of it to themselves. There are always places on the web where you can find it, like myspleen.

Send me a pm if you want an invite for that site.

SS4DarthPayne said:

CapableMetal said:

Thanks for clarifying that. h264 can be a real pest to edit because it has so much lag, probably due to its complexity, its generally a good idea to convert to a 'friendly' format first; Lagarith lossless AVI's are good because they're nice and quick. ;)

Related to this, doesn't converting to something lossless lead to HUGE file sizes? Or way back when I was trying to do such a thing, was I doing it wrong? Sorry I'm pretty new at all this

It does. That's why I chose mpeg2. I only needed to see the frame differences, and a lossless file of ANH 2004 SE in DVD resolution would be about 14gb or something.

You_Too said:

Ok here's something I don't understand.

DJ gave me the 2004 SE NTSC version of ANH, so we could use it as a reference to synch to. The SW title card appears at 719, not 711.

I just wanted to correct what I said here. It seems that this was caused by some kind of lag when decoding the h264 file I got from DJ.

To make it synch better when running stacked vertically on top of the 97 SE I had to convert it to mpeg2, and suddenly the title card did appear at 711.

I agree that After effects has some of the best grain plugins ever made. Me and DJ were restoring a very badly treated blu-ray release of Night of the living dead 1990 remake, which had crushed blacks in most scenes. The original had grain constantly moving in the picture all through the film, but in almost all scenes the grain had been removed along with the shadow detail. After effects could copy grain from less destroyed scenes and put it back in the rest. Awesome stuff.

Actually, why you feel it looks "dead" is because the grain is also a bit smeared and upscaling it like this shows it even more. Remember, it's the GOUT, the 8th wonder of the world! haha

Ok, now the final shot has been fixed for the first film, and I decided to upload a sample so you could all see the difference!

It's that horribly dirty second wide shot of Luke in the Falcon, before and after http://www.sendspace.com/file/prokuf

I agree. It sure is much better to spend money on a hobby like the Lego Falcon! Make sure to post photos once you have finished building it. :)

@snicker: I do understand what you mean about the highlights! I have my monitor calibrated to reference so I can see the difference very clearly.

It's just that from what I've seen the original had more "blended-together" highlights like the 2.1 there. The noticeable edge in the specular highlights that you mention is something I think Lucasfilm created by balancing the highlights very badly for the 2004/2001 SE. In every single scene on the blu-ray those brightest highlights are too separated from their surroundings.