You_Too

At least Lando didn't start rapping... I somehow was expecting that to actually happen! haha

Ok I finally followed the advice of many users here and got myself this version.

I don't know if this has been discussed before, but after watching some of it and comparing with the GOUT, I suspect they might be sourced from the same master.

I remember reading somewhere that the GOUT was DVNR'd in realtime while they scanned the reels or something, but this makes me wonder.

I made some comparison pics that speak for themselves:

Here's a couple with the same dirt spots. Stormtrooper helmet side and Obi-Wan's mouth. (Though the one in the Obi-Wan frame seems partially cleaned by DVNR in the GOUT)

Here's a couple with the same glue marks and stuff:

In these two the colored "flashes" look the same, also look at the dirt at Chewie's left side in the second frame:

And here's another thing I found which had been reduced slightly by the DVNR:

Now, I found one thing that made me wonder though, and that's this frame:

Thoughts?

I agree with doubleofive.

I always thought the reason they had no lightsabers was because they were so powerful with the force that lightsabers would be primitive in comparison.

I remember everyone cheering in the cinema when Yoda took out his lightsaber in AOTC, but I don't think that suited him as the character he is.

I'd love to hear it as it is. Please post it raw. Then people could make what they want out of it.

@g-force: Sharpening or not, it's a matter of taste of course. Though it looks much more smooth when in motion.

@RU.08: I'm sorry if I misunderstood your intentions. Maybe we just have different preferences when it comes to upscaling.

@RU.08: I hate to sound like a grumpy critic, but I get the feeling that you're almost trying to recreate the result me and DJ have gotten so far.

If you're just curious about our methods, I can tell you that we might reveal some more of it once the project blu V2 is finished. If you just wanna try and make your own preservation, maybe you should start an own thread.

Cobra Kai said:

if only this was Lucas talking about the SW blu-rays...

Would be a dream come true.

Anyway, it's nice to know that at least Indy will get a worthy blu-ray release!

Davnes007 said:

It's amazing how many people you need to film someone laying on the ground.

Haha true! :)

By the way, I find it weird that Obi-Wan's robe looks grey in that production photo and brown in the movie.

@Darth Editous: If they're upscaled NTSC there has to be some blurring involved because I have tried upscale scripts on both NTSC and PAL and it's like PAL is missing detail somehow. The PAL versions are also cropped differently.

And yes, PAL ROTJ is the exception and actually has more detail than the NTSC version.

RU.08 said:

DJ's version has had substantial grain reduction and anti-alising applied before upscale and getting that right is definatly the key to improving the upscale result; however as I mentioned you still need to handle different types of scenes differently, espcially space scenes and scenes where the DVNR was very heavy.

I wrote the script for V2 and there was no grain reduction at all in the script, and no antialiasing before the upscaling. The key for detail preservation vs jaggies reduction was to upscale before doing the processing.

RU.08 said:

Here is that scene with some grain removal and aa applied to the raw PAL gout (notice how the framing is slightly different, I would expect better success for NTSC especially in regards to anti-alising). NNEDI3 is then applied.

Yeah, the NTSC has more detail intact than the PAL. Weird.

In that picture you posted there is way too much detail being removed by the antialiasing though. (plus it's the PAL version)

I can tell you from experience that generally, EEDI2 gives a much better result when done in multiple passes with tweaked settings than NNEDI2 and NNEDI3 will ever do.

Especially if you use a plugin called QTGMC with EEDI2 as antialiaser:

TServo2049 said:

I was trying to match the warm, muted look of this picture Mike Verta took from that private IB Technicolor print screening he attended

Good job! On the other hand, I remember Mike saying those photos from the screening only had the correct hue. I don't think they have the correct saturation and luminance, so maybe they actually looked as saturated as the Senator screening. Though, the Senator pics are photos from a camera as well.

@c0ss3tt3: I think all three Despecialized Editions are timed to the GOUT. They're in 23,976fps though, so if your soundtrack comes from a PAL DVD you'll have to convert it from 25fps to 23,976 and hopefully it'll work.

Interesting. When I read this I thought it would be nice to really listen to some of the voices, so I took the center channel from the blu-ray and enhanced the voices a bit in Adobe audition.

Anyone interested can pm me for a lossless file. It sure is interesting because you even clearly hear how they switch between dubbing sources here and there.

@snicker: I'm really looking forward to your thread! I wanna know how you "faked" the detail in the clipped shadow areas.

You know, if you wanna have some stuff to check frame by frame, read IMDB's part of this page "Revealing mistakes": http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0076759/trivia?tab=gf

There's a lot of stuff listed there.

TheObi said:

And I just don't want someones own interpretation of how he thinks Star Wars has to look. Or even worse trying to make them look "modern and cool"...

Believe me, that is not the point of the restorations on this site. Most restorations are aimed for the original look of the movies. There are lots of sources which can guide us and we all try to make the best of it. No own interpretations there.

On the other hand, both the GOUT and the blu-rays can't be completely corrected to look like the original prints, unless someone was to repaint them by hand, frame by frame. But you'll be surprised how much can be done with them.

By the way, you might be interested in looking at this site: http://www.jedi1.net/

They have some pretty nice scans of some original prints. Though the color isn't balanced in all of them, they give you a hint of how colorful the originals were back in the day.

Here's the curve file: http://www.zshare.net/download/99414424f1f64331/

Don't worry, it's not your fault there's been trouble with those file hosting sites!

Thanks for those frames TServo, that confirms it's an FX "error" or whatever to call it.

A bit off topic, but speaking of weird things appearing in the frames, here's 3 frames from the battle of the death star, a closeup of Biggs in his cockpit. Does anyone know if this was in the original prints as well?

The code is not repeated, I double checked it. Gotta have happened if you pasted it in notepad.

CatBus said:

As for color correction, these both are color corrected, because the color on the 2004 DVDs is simply badly inaccurate by any objective standard.

timdiggerm said:

The 2004 DVDs are awful in terms of color.

Actually, he said 2006 and meant the bonus DVDs. (GOUT)

@TheObi: Color correction is a good thing, it's just that Lucasfilm has had some people believe otherwise. Their so called color correction is actually the opposite. They've moved away from how the movies are supposed to look.

The original movies were colorful but much more realistic-looking than the special editions, and in fact, the 2006 bonus DVDs you're mentioning isn't even close to that since they're very washed out.

I think you would enjoy both Harmy's and dark_jedi's version. And if you can wait for a while, me and dark_jedi are working on a blu-ray upscale of those 2006 bonus DVDs where we've restored and balanced the colors and fixed lots of errors.

What would be interesting is what such a device would do with the raw GOUT. I'm not criticizing g-force, his script has been a huge step towards a quality improvement, but that script does involve heavy antialiasing and other things that eat up some of the vertical resolution.

Here's my whole plugin folder: http://www.zshare.net/download/99393704c8cd6a0b/

Better than trying to dig up which exact ones were used for this script! haha... And all the other ones can come in handy anyway.

I don't know if this has already been fixed, but I thought about the first line in the English SDH subs for SW being "Did you hear that?", but no line before it telling what sound it was. (The alarm, explosion?)

CatBus said:

If you're talking about just scaling the existing DVD subtitle graphics, that's something You_Too may be doing for the Blu v2 project (not sure).

Actually, I OCR'd the additional subs and they'll be re-rendered in high quality.

RU.08 said:

That itself is a recreation, no?

You mean my pic or Mike's project?

Anyway, mine is a recreation but it is (at least from what I can judge) very accurate to the original, and that's why I thought it could be useful for those who try to make a custom font of it.

I did create it in slightly higher resolution but unfortunately it seems I have deleted the work files.