n00b

Sorry, I just looked at the screenshots.

towne32 said:

http://postimg.org/image/51fdyzaiz/

Wow. A very nice update.

Indeed, is this background still from the GOUT or 35 mm? I mean, this was a really, really bad aliasing effect.

Beber said:

 Except that in the case I mentionned (Lando picking up Han and Leia for "lunch" with Vader as a secret guest), the continuity between the 2 scenes felt smoother in terms of definition and grain in v1.0.

Considering that the GOUT isn't even a proper SD release, I think we you should be glad about everything that looks perfect on a SD display - and still looks good at 1080p. The whole thing is the optimum one can achieve by using the existing sources.

Beber said:

Well, when watching the whole movie, some shots felt a little off to me, and since you're using various sources, I guess this is inevitable. And this one actually felt off to me in terms of definition (like the very last shot leading to the ending credits), grain, etc. in the continuity when comparing to the preceding scene.

This can only be prevented by adding artificial grain throughout the whole movie which may improve the viewing experience but is destruction of picture information. I also expect that the difference is less obvious at higher bitrates.

@ Laserschwert

Sorry, I didn't consider that. Seems that the DVD era finally takes its toll :-(

SirJonah said:

Is it not ITC Franklin Gothic? I was just making sure in case anyone knew the exact font.

It won't be that easy, even if you know the exact font. As you may have noticed, the letters are glowing and therefore, it's extremely difficult to determine their exact colour (not to mention the recreation of the glow itself). Furthermore, there are some logos at the end of the credits of which you need versions of better quality.

Then Laserschwert is the only one that already has the groundwork (as well as the correct settings) for creating the credits manually.

Colours are pretty fucked up at 167212.

@ Harmy

Did you create the credits for Star Wars yourself? It's possible that Laserschwert is already done with the German version of the credits of TESB but I'm not sure.

@ Harmy

Do you use OCR for the credits or is it all manually done?

Harmy said:

Awesome news! I got it to work! I tried restoring BIOS settings by removing the battery yesterday and it didn't work but then I left the battery out all night and now it works, so it was a BIOS issue, it seems.

Only it still doesn't work with the new RAM, so my friend is still coming tomorrow and we'll be trying to figure it out, maybe a BIOS update will help, but it's definitely not dead! Hurray!

That's good news. There's nothing more painful than doing exactly the same work once again.

Harmy said:

Yeah, I don't know, they don't look jittery at all to me.

I guess it's just the lower resolution and the noisy/grainy source but that's ok.

Harmy said:

My assumption is, that the tint was introduced to the original release in the grading process and isn't on the negative and then the GOUT was scanned from an IP, which was made later and to which, the same grading choices weren't applied in this scene.

Yes, this makes a lot of sense.

Harmy said:

And what do you mean about the speeders?

They look a little bit jittery too. Maybe I'm just used to the SE version.

Harmy said:

This and Puggo's version confirm this very clearly, because PSB is very orange in this sequence, while the whole transfer is actually biased towards the opposite side of the spectrum, so the orange here must have been pretty strong.

The reinserted backgrounds look perfect, it's an astonishing achievement! Would it be possible to make the snow speeders in their first scene any less jittery too by using the same method? I'm also fine with the very orange sequence but how about a small compromise (like the brightness level in the Jundland Wastes in SW)? How can it be possible that the GOUT material looks completely neutral if the basic source had been that orange? Doesn't the extreme tone destroy some of the colour information?

kk650 said:

That 1080p is inherently better than 720p is a concept that many hear are having a difficult time understanding. It's like trying to make children understand that 2+2=4, not 3 like some here would have you believe for their own interests.

That's not true as well. It's simply more but if you have any adversarial objectives (such as time or disc space), "more" doesn't always mean "better".

@ kk650

The only relevant truth is that redoing 1,5 movies from scratch is impracticable. Therefore, any further discussion on that subject is only there for the sake of feeding your ego.

kk650 said:

No, I wasn't planning to.

 Just an advanced troll or something...

kk650 said:

No, I wasn't planning to. Do I need your permission to post my thoughts in threads now n00b?

Of course not, but as already said: Harmy's done the evaluation already. This is his project, no democracy and none of us has any claims against him. Do it yourself if you can do better. I doubt you can.

kk650 said:

I don't see why the image quality of the footage taken from the blu-ray should be reduced just so the difference in quality between the GOUT footage and the blu-ray footage is less. That doesn't make much sense to me, that the blu-ray footage image quality should suffer for the sake of the GOUT footage, so the overall image quality of the encode is less.

The GOUT uprezes fine to 1080p, I should know, I reinstated Lapti Nek and the original Jedi Ghosts scene with Sebastian Shaw from the GOUT to my Return of the Jedi Semi-Specialised Edition, they look fine in 1080p alongside the blu-ray footage, I've never received any complaints. Harmy should be able do the same with his Despecialised releases now that he has the processing power.

Those are really bad examples, you know? The ghost scene looks good because there's nothing wrong about blurry ghosts and the Lapti Nek pictures that had to be taken from the GOUT are 100 % GOUT, so there's basically no compositing of both sources within the same picture. Furthermore, there's a second argument that was already presented by CatBus. Are you going to start another never-ending discussion as you did in Adywan's thread?

kk650 said:

If that's the case I think it would be a real shame because you now have the processing power to create a high quality 1080p encode of The Empire Strikes Back Despecialized Edition.

It wouldn't be because in that case, the gap between GOUT and blu-ray material would be much more visible. This has been discussed more than a dozen times.

Harmy said:

These shots where the cloud city corridors were extended present quite a challenge - in part, because they look pretty bad in the GOUT (I had to use quite heavy denoising, but had to manually extract elements, where I couldn't afford to loose the already lacking detail) and also, because there's a lot of gate-weave in the GOUT and the camera keeps moving, so it has to be stabilized manually, frame by frame (this is why a functioning image registration software would be awesome) - this is also the reason why there is still some amount of shakiness to those backgrounds but it should be a huge improvement over v1.0 in that respect as well.

Looks great. In my opinion, picture 04 v1 had been the most obvious despecialization of all. Can't wait to see the new version in motion. Do you think some kind of manual stabilization could be used for Sebastian Shaws eyebrows too?

Harmy said:

No way, you'd never get the edges right.

 Ok, that was to be feared. Of course, the whole thing is a minor problem either way, so let's forget about it.

Harmy said:

The problem here is, that the garbage mattes are actually visible in the bright areas of that shot (on the star-destroyer) - slightly crushing the dark areas in space shots (actually increasing contrast - lowering contrast makes the mates more visible) usually takes care of the garbage mattes on the black backdrop of space but there is no practical way I know of to get rid of them from bright areas.

Yes, not to mention that the hull of the ISD is far more complex than space shots. I watched the scene again and only the darker starboard side of the ISD seems to affected. Would it be possible to isolate the most visible garbage mattes and to lower their brightness frame by frame?

AntcuFaalb said:

It would probably be best to lower the contrast in a non-linear way (e.g., lowering the contrast more in "dark" parts of the image and "less" in light parts). This wouldn't be too hard to accomplish with Avisynth.

Sounds good, but I thought the light parts are affected as well (considering there's a star destroyer in the background).

yoda-sama said:

Well, what source are you even comparing this with?

 GOUT, G'Kar, 2004, DeEd 1.0 and the new workprint.

AntcuFaalb said:

Harmy did not restore all of the original wipes in SW DeEd 2.0/2.1/2.5 and, in many cases, left in the optical wipes that were created by Pacific Titles for the 97SE.

Some picture elements can't be restored without distracting the viewer from the rest of the movie. That's a necessary compromise.

AntcuFaalb said:

So maybe the best solution is for Harmy to not remove them, but to lower the contrast significantly in his color-correction.

Does that sound like a reasonable compromise?

I guess he already did that but lowering the contrast has its limitations, especially if the damage was done during the transfer from analogue to digital material.