patrickmollohan

Somewhere, George Lucas is having a cold sweat and he doesn’t know why…
Ever wanted to experience the Star Wars Holiday Special like never before? Now’s your chance. Relive the magic of Life Day, awkward musical numbers, and Wookiees grunting through domestic drama, but in eye-popping 3D! Yes, you can now watch Chewbacca’s dad get way too into Wookiee VR porn… in actual VR. You’re welcome? And if that doesn’t do it for you, Bea Arthur’s here to pour you a drink and sing you through the shame. Put on your 3D glasses, lower your standards, and prepare for the most immersive bad decision of your life! Introducing the first ever release in the Project ThreeDee series: ThreeDee Seventy-Eight!

What is this? What is Project ThreeDee?
This release is part of a larger project I’ve been working on: a full 2D-to-3D conversion of the Star Wars prequel and original trilogies, using the 4K UHD Blu-rays as source material. Back in the early 2010s, George Lucas had begun converting the saga to 3D, with The Phantom Menace receiving a theatrical release, and Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith being shown privately at Celebration. But after Disney acquired Lucasfilm, the rest of the planned conversions were quietly shelved. With little sign that they’ll ever resurface—at least not in any official, home-released form—I’ve decided to pick up where Lucas left off.

The Holiday Special isn’t part of that six-film run, of course, but it’s a perfect testbed. The full conversions will take a long time to process, so I wanted to release something smaller first, to get feedback, refine my workflow, and let people enjoy the weirdness of this format in all its retro-futuristic glory. If you’ve ever wanted to experience this masterpiece in 3D… well, you might be beyond help. But you’re also exactly the audience I’m looking for!

Where to download?
For more info on where to download, please either PM me or search the other forum for my topic with the same title.

How was it done?
I first used MakeMKV to losslessly extract the Holiday Special from the EditDroid DVD. With a custom VapourSynth script and FFmpeg, I deinterlaced the special to 60 frames per second—well, actually 60,000 frames per 1,001 seconds—using the QTGMC algorithm. From there, I used the iris3 model from Topaz Video AI to denoise/dehalo the deinterlaced footage, but without upscaling. Finally, the Any_V2_L model in iw3 was used for the 2D-to-3D conversion, which also handled the final encode to H265.

Why was it done this way?
Lossless Intermediate Encoding
Throughout the process, I wanted to ensure there wouldn’t be further degredation to the Holiday Special; although the EditDroid release is said to be the cleanest, the quality is far from great. So up until the very last stage of the project, I used lossless encoding to prevent generational loss. This did require a lot of storage space, but I’m quite pleased with the results. The final H265 encode was with CRF 4 and on the “slow” preset, resulting in a 20GB file, which is reasonable for both doubling the framerate as well as doubling the horizontal resolution (original EditDroid rip: 5.86GB).

VapourSynth + FFmpeg + QTGMC Deinterlacing
In my testing, QTGMC was able to preserve fine details more accurately than any other algorithm I tried. nnedi3 was a close second, but would ocassionally miss some of the finest details. bwdif/yadif were nowhere close, producing combing and aliasing artifacts. I was able to fine tune the parameters of QTGMC to get a clean result with a custom VapourSynth script and take advantage of parallel CPU+GPU processing thanks to FFmpeg.

Topaz Video AI + iris3 Denoising/Dehaloing
Unfortunately, even with the best possible settings for deinterlacing, the result is still poor. Lots of compression artifacts, noise, ringing, and many more issues plague the EditDroid release. While I am not yet skilled enough to fix this myself, Topaz Video AI’s iris3 model did a wonderful job (for the most part) removing artifacts from the footage without removing fine detail. It isn’t perfect by any means, but I’m quite happy with it at this stage. It was also able to correct some of the waviness that can be seen on some straight lines in some scenes.

No Upscaling
While Topaz is typically used for upscaling, I don’t feel it provides much value here. For one, the EditDroid release has a vertical resolution of 480 pixels, which doesn’t integer scale well to the most common television resolutions: 720p (1.5x resolution), 1080p (2.25x resolution), or 4K (4.5x resolution). With integer scaling, pixels are crisp, and proportions are preserved; non-integer scaling, however, results in blurriness and incorrect proportions. Think of it this way: how do you display half a pixel?

Another problem with upscaling is it gives Topaz more room to mess things up. AI artificially “creates” detail, which can sometimes look good, but mostly, tends to look awful. It’s usually not too noticeable from far away, but up close, it can add smudges, “brush stroke”-like patterns, or other artifacts. These “hallucinations” I want to avoid as much as possible.

Finally, I’m sure a 20GB file is already gonna be too much for some of you. I get it! But now imagine if I simply doubled the resolution. That would be quadruple the file size (2x width, 2x height). Would anyone want an 80GB file that isn’t even 1080p? All the while, not adding any real value in terms of detailing? Sure, I could use a higher CRF value on the final encode, but I would much rather release it in 480p with a lower CRF and more detail preserved than a larger resolution with less detail preserved.

iw3 + Any_V2_L
iw3 is free and open source, unlike many other 2D-to-3D conversion tools. In my testing, it mostly gets the depth shockingly correct (with a few minor stray hairs every now and then being out of place). I haven’t tested many other tools, but I did try out the free demo of Owl3D and can’t say I would shell out money for it when iw3 exists (I wouldn’t even shell out money for it if iw3 didn’t exist, to be honest). The Any_V2_L model appears to have been trained well, and there are only a few minor issues with depth that I’ve so far noticed and, believe me, I’m checking every nook and cranny of this creation (you wouldn’t believe how frightening it is to look a Wookiee in the mouth in 3D)!

What’s next?
I’d love to get some feedback on ThreeDee Seventy-Eight before proceeding with the first six Star Wars films. On my i7-5930k (yes, a CPU from 2014), this process took, from start to finish, about four days. Granted, I wouldn’t have to do any cleanups, but rendering them in 4K UHD (and possibly doing both HDR and SDR if iw3 can handle HDR) will take a considerable amount of time, space, and if my CPU blows up, money.

In the mean time, I do have several improvements I’d love to make to the Holiday Special/ThreeDee Seventy-Eight. First, I’d like to figure out a way to eliminate Topaz Video AI. If I can figure out how to denoise, dehalo, and correct the wobbles of the video with other tools, that would eliminate the need of AI, which would result in a more accurate presentation without the hallucinations. Second, I’d love to learn the process of colour correction; I have yet to see any version of the Holiday Special that isn’t either washed out or way oversaturated. I’d ideally love to replicate the colours as shown in the previews of That Guy With No Name’s 4K77 work in progress restoration project—really great work! Third, figure out how to improve clarity of the video without reintroducing haloing and other artifacts from oversharpening. It’ll take a long while, but I think a higher fidelity release of the Holiday Special is possible with the EditDroid release as the base (at least until we can convince Carrie Fisher’s estate to sell her personal copy).

The ThreeDee will be with you, always…
This project isn’t just about converting old sci-fi oddities to 3D; it’s about honouring a strange, curious corner of Star Wars history that was nearly forgotten, then rediscovered, then memed into oblivion. It’s about continuing the weird path George Lucas started down, even if it ends with a coked-out princess and a space parody of Julia Child.

If you’re still reading this, you’re probably either a fellow 3D enthusiast, a die-hard Star Wars fan, or just someone who enjoys watching people pour hundreds of hours into things no one asked for. Either way, I salute you! Thanks for checking out ThreeDee Seventy-Eight. May your eyes survive the experience, and may the ThreeDee be with you, always!

SKot said:
I know there’s a new “5K” up-res of the Holiday Special that may look nice on Blu-ray.

Fun fact, that 5K upres was done by actor Christian Simpson, who played Lieutenant Gavyn Sykes in TPM along with other roles throughout the prequels, sequels, and anthology films. He’s a really cool dude; great channel to watch if you’re into retro computers and gaming.

@oojason, thank you very much! I have heard of a few other attempts before, but I’ve never personally been able to track down working links. I’m very excited to eventually have something to contribute to back to the community 😃 After some feedback on what I have so far and tracking down a Bluray drive that can rip UHD discs (or can be modified to), I’ll be putting my GPU to good use finally haha.

@Patali, I shall! Mind you, I’m far from an expert and I’m still very much a learner myself. However, one thing I did learn through testing more files is that the “Edge Fix” option was actually causing more issues than it was solving. Will take some comparison pics later on tonight, but disabling it, so far, has resulted in much cleaner results.

Hello there!
For a while now, I’ve been fascinated with the idea of converting 2D movies to 3D. I’ve tried a few programs over the years, but sadly my trusty ol’ GTX 970 was not cutting it. Recently, it made like the Death Star and went kablooey, forcing me to replace it with the more capable RTX 4080 Super. As such, I am now able to start playing around with these programs again and contribute to this wonderful community! In particular, I would like to (eventually) convert the first six films to 3D.

My plan is to use the latest 4K UHD Blu-ray release of Episodes I - VI to more accurately recreate what George Lucas was working on before selling Lucasfilm to Disney. As I understand it, that release in particular (also on Disney+) was the base for the official conversions, so that’s what I’ll be using as well. I know that the modern releases may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but I would like to be as accurate as I can be with this. Additionally, from what I gather, the 3D effect was said to be subtle by those that had the opportunity to see TPM 3D in theatres, or AotC and RotS at Celebration. While I personally would love a stronger effect, I think I will try to keep it on the subtler side for the sake of accuracy.

So far in my testing, the program iw3-gui has created great results in converting 2D videos. While not 100% perfect, I believe it can provide a good base for working with. Before I start working on the 3D conversions of the films (which may take a wee more spare time and money than I currently have at the moment), I would love to gather some feedback, as I didn’t get the chance to see any of the 3D films back in the day. As such, I’ve converted a couple smaller videos to 3D as a testbed. I would especially love to hear from anyone that did get to go if the strength is roughly correct, but also any feedback in general!

An obvious choice for testing: The Phantom Menace 3D trailer, as graciously provided by Forcefreak from the other forum. There are a couple areas I would love to improve, but overall, I’m quite pleased with the result, especially considering this took maybe ten minutes to render, if that.

As for a not-so-obvious choice, I decided to test the program on one of williarob’s Ken Films Super 8mm scans of ANH. I heard the reason for the excessive DNR on the latest release of the films was because it was necessary for the 3D conversions, so I decided to see what it would look like with something more raw. I dunno, I kinda like the results! If your video player only supports 16:9 for whatever reason (Bigscreen VR), I also rendered a version with pillarboxing baked in.

You can get the links either by DMing me here or searching the other forum for my topic with the same title. Please do let me know what you think! For a first test of the program, I personally like the results but I’m sure there’s a ton to learn. The settings I used for the renders are included below. I imagine this should also be sufficient for the final renders, but if you have any suggestions for improvements, please let me know. Many thanks to both Forcefreak and williarob for providing the base files for testing!

May the Force be with you all!

Can anyone send me the links to all the deremastered releases as well? Thanks in advance!

Sorry for the necrobump, but can someone PM me the links to these? I would love to check them out. Thanks in advance!
Edit:
Someone graciously sent me the files and now have them archived!

towne32 said:

Some, like this guy on movie-censorship, say the DVD was produced from the digital theatrical master. I’d really like to find more information written before the DVD was released, though, to be certain. Padme’s awful “Yes” line had to have been a later fix, after reviewers mocked it, right? If nothing else, there would have been people arguing and defending the film as they did not witness it with “yes”.

Can you give more context for the “yes” line? I’m not finding any references to this anywhere in my searches.
EDIT:
Right after posting, I ended up finding the answer to my own question.

After Padmé falls out of the Republic gunship, a Clone Trooper asks her if she is all right. Her original, energetic response of “Yes!” (which actually elicited laughter in some screenings) was changed to a more realistic and groggy “Uh-huh.” for the DVD.

Can you send me a link as well? Would love to check it out!

Can you send me the link, too? Sounds like an awesome cut!

Hello,

I am posting to ask if anyone has links to Kerr’s Red Book of Westmarch Lord of the Rings Fanedits from 2009? The most I have been able to find on them is one torrent file that is dead. Although I like Sharkey’s Purist Editions, I found the changes to be rather subtle at best in comparison to what I have read about Kerr’s edits. I would certainly like to see for myself but cannot find links.

Thank you much for your time!