mverta

Tie on Luke

I did do a double take!  :) 

Nah, a little Beatles derailment never hurt anybody. 

However, there is a new BTS on clean-up in the Legacy forums if you want to get back on topic. :)

Yes I have found the incredible depth of detail knowledge and hawk-like eyes of people here and on the Legacy site to be an amazing resource.  Nothing gets by the group's scrutiny.  My personal feeling is that if Legacy can make it here, it can make it anywhere. :)

^This.

And, in this capacity, I'm not a fan; I'm a professional - I've been doing this for 20+ years plus, creating/preparing/restoring assets for marquee commercial projects. Legacy could absolutely be taken straight from my workstation to distribution, and at the minimum is superior to the current Blu-Ray... not that this is hard to do, obviously. :)  But these facts are also why Legacy might garner somewhat more scrutiny.  

But as it is, this thread is 11 years old. And in all that time, what's kept the project alive and prospering is the fact that I have kept it behind the walls. It drives people crazy; it drives me crazy.  I've been called all kinds of names.  The only thing I've been more committed to than keeping it safe is being committed to the work.  And the only thing I've been more committed to than the work is a deeply-held belief that all of this effort spent over all of these years will one day see the light of day.  When Legacy is finished, I will be contacting my friends at both Disney and Lucasfilm.

Harmy's edition has set a bar, raised expectations, and brought the restoration community's efforts to attention in a way that hadn't been seen prior.  He struggles, as we all do, with resources and technology, and this isn't a competition. To his point, I think attempting a restoration from released materials, versus scans of prints is an entirely different beast.  But there have been no shortage of people who are deeply grateful for his edition, and rightfully so.  I support everything about the sentiment behind its release, it's just too dangerous for me to do myself.  But I think it should be quite clear by all the sharing that I'm doing now that I want Legacy to be seen, to be useful, either to an official restoration or other fan restoration as a guideline, and if it does indeed end up to be a faithful representation of the original film, then I want it to be shared.  I trust in the crazy, unpredictable nature of things that one way or another this will come to pass.  

Wedge Rescues Luke

Gus Lopez, and I hadn't heard that.  Last I heard he had loaned it to a museum. 

It's just how it is.  You know, a bunch of stuff in the Archives was mislabeled and mis-identified until a particularly obsessive costume/prop fan got the chance to go in there and straighten it out.  

If I had the negatives, I estimate I could get about 5-10% more detail, color fidelity and dynamic range.  10% at the outside; probably being generous.  I'm basing that on the difference between the best looking official shots I've seen and my best attempts at them. But there are many times in which I'm outperforming the official releases (like some of these Reliance clips) just for the simple reason that I give a shit, know the material, have tools specifically designed for this film, and will take the time and go to the lengths necessary to get it right. Mostly though, it just bothers me on principle, how far I have to go; I'd rather be spending the energy finessing the negative than trying to turn a print into one, that's all.  But it's an evolutionary process.  Just last week I stumbled upon a refinement that's giving me another couple percentage points of a quality bump.

I'll go on the record and say this: if the Reliance restoration is a 4K OT, there will be sections better than I can do, and sections for which Legacy is better. Also Legacy's color will likely be more historically accurate end-to-end. I can almost guarantee that.

ray_afraid said:

It would be a shitty move, but if they steal Mike Verta's Legacy Edition, at least we will know we're getting a proper restoration.

Really though, they just just pay him for it when he's finished and give him proper credit.

Really, though, it should just be an audition piece.  If I could get my hands on the negatives we could finally bring order to the galaxy.

And yes, I just do the composing - the recording is handled by Academy-Award-Winner Shawn Murphy, who has recorded all my orchestral stuff.  He's JW's engineer as well, and for good reason.  He's unbelievably skilled.

Regarding some of these Reliance clips..  I made this video for you guys:

Reality Check

The password is: reliance

The first time I ever visited the Archives and saw the condition that Luke's Red 5 X-Wing model was in - a condition mirrored by no shortage of artifacts there - my heart broke.  And I realized that nobody in any official capacity has the kind of reverence for this film that its most dedicated fans do.  I did not enter in Legacy lightly.  It's too late for Red 5; it's not too late for Star Wars.

Regarding some of these Reliance clips..  I made this video for you guys:

Reality Check

The password is: reliance

If somebody wants to share it to that RPF thread, feel free.  It was some of their "at least somebody did it right" nonsense that inspired this video.

If you would like to download a raw sample of this clip here it is:  Raw Sample Clip

_Mike

Meanwhile:

X-Wings Pass Turret Cannon

Mixing and matching of channels and elements is possible -  Legacy does it all the time -  but it did require me to have very robust custom registration and analysis tools developed to do it. 

Nobody's 100% sure what they have, but we can deduce from a thousand clues they do NOT have pristine, intact anything.

I'll pull the Legacy version of that shot soon so we can at least see what was in theaters originally.

We will just have to wait and see. However I can tell you that at least a couple of the shots on the Reliance showreel - if they are final - are inferior to even the current state on Blu ray. A couple of them have flat compressed highlights and saturation issues like the  shot of C3PO and R2 in the Death Star alcove. It's a mess. so whether one's intent is restoration or preservation or whatever, they're still having basic  image quality issues. 

4th one down, Ultra Galaxy Legends.  But whatever.  Yes, I've been writing music professionally since I was 16 - became a composer because of... Star Wars. :)  I do this sort of thing, generally:

The Race - Live Orchestra

(Gets going at 1'26"...)

Ha.. yep. Ultra Galaxy Legends. My first exposure to Ultraman and my first trip to Tokyo.  It was fun!

_Mike

About 20 years ago or so, when I was running my own post-production company, I used to do my film outs with a company up the street called Pixel Magic, which also did restoration work.  Disney came to them and challenged them to participate in a shoot-out with Lowry to win a contract for a bunch of restoration work.  Pixel Magic, and their by-hand approach vs. Lowry with their relatively new automated approach.

The Lowry approach obliterated gradients and ate all the glints out of people's eyes, while Pixel Magic's hand-crafted results were vastly superior.

Lowry got the contract.

_Mike

Thank you for the kind words - sharing the work is my dream; restoring it is the mission.  

There actually is a documentary about the project in the works, being shot by an insanely talented up-and-coming cinematographer named Laura Beth Love, with interviews with all the people who've helped, breakdowns of the process, clips, etc.  If everything goes according to Murphy's Law, the final scene should be Disney announcing a pristine 4K release of the original, just as I'm finishing up, for your sort-of Scorcese ending.  :)

_Mike 

The best looking shots in the film are on the Elstree stage, and they're not part of opticals, and they're uncharacteristically sharp and clean.  You can't miss them when scrubbing through a print, it's like somebody just slipped the negative in in places.

Geez, I don't know, but I know it's not JUST that, because there are shots from the Elstree shoot that exhibit the same quality.  The film really takes a large step in quality when Gil Taylor stopped using filters to soften and diffuse the photography (behind the back of GL, and at the behest of the studio, which pissed GL off, apparently).  You can instantly see it - shots of C3PO and R2 hiding in that little alcove looking at the Falcon - you can instantly see how much sharper and clearer those shots are. 

_Mike