You_Too

A small update: Since the 97 SE cinema DTS was in 44100hz and synched to its original 24fps source, we had to convert it to 23,976fps and 48000hz. This was done by using the command line tool eac3to, which did it very nicely and it still sounds great.

After that, DJ has already synched both ANH and ESB. He synched the audio to the 2004 SE versions, since we use those as our reference to synch both video and audio.

Since all conversions and synching alters the audio in some way, we decided to go with encoding it to DTS-HD MA 5.1 for the blu-rays, to keep any loss in quality as minimal as possible.

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 agree with you thecolorsblend. When one tries to force the trilogies together, it simply doesn't work.

Just the fact that they turned the Force from "religion" into science in the PT is enough for me to not relate the trilogies to each other.

dlvh said:

You mentioned the SE lightsabers, what did they look like? Where those the ones that were incorrectly colored?

The most incorrectly colored one was Luke's saber in the scene in the Falcon. In the 2004 SE it was green.

In the shot you and I posted, it looks like this:

97 SE, TB broadcast:

2011 blu-ray: (I don't have access to the 2004 SE right now)

If you look closely, the angle of the bottom of the blade is wrong in the SE, if you compare to the GOUT and Senator shot.

Why not use a title generator site? :)

Here's an example: http://videogamena.me/

Even though that one's meant for video game titles, you sometimes get Star Wars and Indiana Jones titles.

After some clicks it generated:

Star Wars Cooking Conflict
Jedi Football Gaiden
Star Wars Makeover on the High Seas
Star Wars Speed - Hot Pursuit

Thanks Darth Mallwalker for that explanation.

And while it's lossy in theory then, it did sound pretty damn good and accurate after eac3to did both those conversions. Though it sure looked like it was doing them in one step. Maybe eac3to is that smart? haha

I'm looking forward to see this too!

Dunedain said:

It's so dumb of them to apply this odd coloration all over the place, gives a weird purplish look to everything. What is it about dvd and blu-ray releases that makes Lucasfilm always want to mess up the colors in both the Star Wars trilogy and the prequels?? It's bizarre..

Actually I think in the shots Alexrd posted, the color to the right is the blu-ray's color timing, or am I wrong?

I know TPM was very pink on DVD/HDTV.

@dlvh: About the brighter lightsabers: Harmy did rotoscope in the sabers from the GOUT.

Here's a shot from the Senator screening and the same shot from the GOUT:

So while the GOUT lightsabers are a bit blown out and not perfectly true to the original, like Harmy says: They're still better than the SE.

It would take an insane amount of work if one were to recreate the true original lightsabers. And while negative1's team might have a source where the lightsabers look even better, I don't think Harmy or anyone would wanna spend more hundreds of hours to rotoscope them again, at least for now.

CapableMetal said:

You_Too said:

There's an unknown frame missing there? I guess I could pinpoint it once I have it synched to the 2004 SE.

Its not unknown, its 3 frames from near the end of reel 3. 85223 and 85224 are the last two frames Alderaan exploding, and 85225 is the first frame of Luke lightsaber training on-board the Falcon.

Sorry, I got it wrong. I thought you meant that after those 3 missing frames there was another one missing at the end of reel 3.

That's a huge improvement if I compare it to your old version I got from myspleen. Good job!

A Space Odyssey? :)

Nah, but I thought about the old N64 game, Shadows Of The Empire. That would be a great title. Or simply Shadow Of The Empire.

Thank you so much guys for helping out with this.

Good idea about the 2004 SE. I'll probably try to synch the 97 SE completely to that, since it would make DJ's audio synch job a bit easier since we have multiple audio tracks. He could just synch them to the 2004 SE's, with the exception of ROTJ like you say about the Naboo shot, which have to be cut.

50193 - close-up on Luke listening after Ben says "...it binds the galaxy together." May not be exactly this frame as its difficult to tell but certainly a frame is missing from this shot. Middle of reel 2.

I compared it to the GOUT and it looks like the missing frame should have been the very first one of that shot.

Towards the end of reel 3 (reel 4 begins at 90295).

There's an unknown frame missing there? I guess I could pinpoint it once I have it synched to the 2004 SE.

32645 - General Rieekan "prepare for ground assault" (actually around this point, I have been unable to pinpoint the exact frame as there is very little movement where the frame is missing; somewhere just before the officer he is talking to nods, I duplicated this frame in my synch source).

The frame missing should be between 32732-32733. (I have the SW title appearing at 711 now so it should be correct.)

We'll probably use mvflowfps to recreate that frame. (Part of avisynth package mvtools)

Thank you so much for that info.

Should the Star Wars title appear at 711 in all three films?

And doesn't ROTJ miss any frames? Other than the reel changes.

EDIT: Isn't the logo on the top right of the TB versions the Canal+ logo? If I remember correct, they don't have commercial breaks in movies since it's a pay-channel.

CapableMetal said:

Have you reinserted the missing frames into the TB broadcast you're working on?

Synch should be very easy if you have, I managed to synch all three films in less than 6 hours to a frame-accurate video at its native 24fps frame rate, then just ran a sample rate conversion to 48KHz when they were all done. If you haven't then you may have to adjust/mix the DTS tracks in places to match it; I know that in the TB broadcast of Empire most of the missing frames are in the middle of reels, something like 12 frames out of the 15 or so that are missing. The rest of the time they are missing frames around reel changes, which should be much easier for you to work around should you choose that path.

Actually DJ is the one who is synching them, but we don't even know where all those frame drops are? Obviously some are at the reel changes and since your audio is divided into reels it should be easy to synch them reel by reel, but I didn't know they were missing frames in the middle of reels. It would be very nice if you'd point out where.

I saw Jetrell Fo posted about film being 24fps, though I still wanted to post this.

Me and DJ are going to use this audio in our 97 SE project, and DJ had already synched the first reel of ANH but told me it was very hard. Then I got that idea that it might need a conversion from 24 to 23,976 fps, and I tried it myself and it was an almost perfect match with the digital broadcast version we're working with. (TB version, converted from 25 to 23,976 fps)

Though the software I used to convert the audio from 24 to 23,976 (BeSweet) is old and felt very outdated, since it forced every mono file to be converted to stereo during the conversion.

I also wonder what would be the easiest way to convert this from 44100hz to 48000hz? Or does a blu-ray accept audio being 44100 if we'd make a DTS track from this?

EDIT: Found out that eac3to could do this conversion properly. It was hard to find out how to make a script that would convert all audio files at once though.

Alexrd said:

BmB said:

The whole image is uniformly brighter. That one part is not changed anymore than the rest of the image is.

That's what I thought as well. The contrast looks fine, the brightness was due to the general colour correction made.

I'll have to prove you guys wrong there.

Here is the old vs new, with the old now being color matched to the new so you can see it even more clearly:

Alexrd said:

AotC teal shift was a very last minute change (like the humdinger glitch) since according to people who were at the Comic Con presentation and the press junket, AotC didn't have that teal tint at the time. Even the small clips of the movie shown in the extras look fine.

That's weird. But of course it's Lucasfilm we're talking about...

Looking at the comparison screenshots, it looks like blue has been shifted to teal, but the hue of yellow/red has been shifted to pink. This makes me think colors were shifted individually.

LexX said:

Are you really saying that you'd rather leave more image out than that small change?

That was not my point. The point is who knows how many small changes here and there like that one are in the blu-ray release? Just take that little thing about the green clothes being changed to red in the Cantina scene in SW, which was pointed out just before Harmy released his version.

That's one reason why the blu-ray version probably shouldn't be used to create a theatrical version in HD. At least from a purist perspective.

But knowing the PT is not as old as the OT, there should be lots of unfaded prints out there which would look better than both the HDTV version and blu-ray.

pittrek said:

Episode 1 should be quite "simple" - all we need is to take the official BluRay, replace the scenes with Yoda with the colour-corrected HDTV capture, cut out all added scenes, and re-create the transitions using an upscale of the TB capture. The original 5.1 DTS track was released on some LD in Japan if I remember correctly. But I'm not sure about the cropping

The blu-ray has lots of DVNR, but of course, the HDTV version has lots of edge enhancement and both are bad in different ways. The best would of course be a scan of a theatrical print.

But for creating a theatrical version in HD, I would not choose the blu-ray as a source. With that blu-ray like with all other Star Wars films, Lucas has usually made some small changes here and there that people find much later.

Take this shot from DVDactive's comparison for example:

When you first look at it you think "Oh, they fixed some of the pink tint and it's less cropped too!" but then if you look closely at the path in the middle:

See how they made this little part brighter?

Those small changes are enough of a reason to not use the blu-ray for a theatrical HD version.

@Jetrell Fo: As far as I know, we don't have access to the true theatrical versions of these films. At least in full HD I mean.

What I think could be done to the ones we have is basically:

Episode 1: Use a combination of normal blur and the avisynth plugin BlindDeHalo to get rid of some edge enhancement. Do a basic color correction to get rid of the pink tint.

Episode 2: Use the chroma from the HDTV version and merge it with the luma of the blu-ray. If they match, that is. Were any scenes altered in this release?

SS4DarthPayne said:

Well no one else has posted, so here goes. I just grabbed the 97 sample and watched it. I think it's pretty much what you'd expect it to look like, an upscaled version of one of the broadcasts (that's the TB, right..?) Visuals-wise, that's exactly what it looks like. Let's be honest here, it isn't miracle-level like what you guys have done with the GOUT, but from what I can understand you've put in 5% (10%? Less?) of the effort in on it as you have put in on cleaning up the GOUT. 

Yeah, it's the TB since that was the cleanest version. Flunk was oversharpened and had crushed shadow detail, Gkar had edge enhancement and hardcoded german subs, Reivax had the frames blended into each other.

And yeah, it's a pretty simple upscale but with the same upscale-treatment as the GOUT, making sure all detail is preserved. And no miracle-level on the color correction either (actually that wasn't possible because the colors were pretty screwed up) but seeing the raw TB together with ours, it does look a bit better. Especially the Mos Eisley part since I did some additional correction there. Here are some comparison samples:

EDIT: Sorry for the pixellated reds, that's media player classic's fault.

Thanks in advance for those lossless files. They'll be a great addition to mine and DJ's project.

Ok, looks like a double post but I just wanted to tell you that DJ has put up a sample of the 97 SE on myspleen.

The look of the sample is most likely final, and the audio used is the cinema DTS. DJ is working hard to synch it, and he said if anybody has trouble with the audio or has some valuable feedback, please post it.

Oh, and once again the sample is compressed so it might not look as clean as the full bitrate render will.

Gomu69 said:

Is there any chance of passing on this project to anyone equally capable in precision and passion or does the future of it rest on the shoulders of you and DJ?

AntcuFaalb actually came up with the idea of revisiting this project later using an alternative method to clean things up. We'll see what happens but at this time it strongly points at just cleaning up color errors and then release it. I'm currently discussing it with DJ.

djchaseb said:

Personally the glue marks and imperfections never bothered me much, whatever you guys decide to do it's going to look world's better than what we have now! All the hard work is very much appreciated.

Actually it's never bothered me either. But when I joined DJ when he was about to start this project, he told me about some glue marks and stuff which adywan had helped him clean up, and that he had a list of such frames for ESB. That made me interested in doing such a full-scale cleanup project and it ended up with me analyzing the films completely for such things. And working extremely hard in photoshop to clean them up.

While we might take a step back in that sense, we have still taken many steps ahead on the way. For example, if we had just released our raw renders back then, we hadn't found out about the chroma shift in ESB that msycamore pointed out. We hadn't known about some of the color errors and other things that really needed to be fixed. And I've developed our scripts further along the way, to make the colors look even better and balanced.