towne32

GlastoEls said:

Further info from Hidalgo’s Twitter:

1. Someone asked him if George made 4K versions of 5, 6 & 1. His reply: “@Sora96 @RealCGallant @druzod1012 No one’s said anything about those, so I’m not gonna be one to do it.”

• Hidalgo either doesn’t know about a 4K saga / OT / OOT set or isn’t saying

Well, at first I thought it was going to be the former, with “No one’s said anything about those”, but “I’m not gonna be the one to do it” clearly sounds more like he’s not going to be the source of a leak on that one. It doesn’t mean anything exciting in terms of it being pre or post SE. Just that he’s commenting on IV because it was already out there by Edwards (and the Reliance reel, presumably). Perhaps some progress was made on V and VI as well, or they were at least commissioned?

Definitely an improvement.

Hagdorm said:

JEDIT: I don’t see why ripping an MKV would be problematic, it just takes a program that can connect multiple files together like what I did. A little tinkering would show which file is which.

It’s possible that some of the previous MKV upload attempts had a long pause between the crawl and the second (main) video sequence.

Not sure what your issue is, there. It sounds like you’re just discussing whether it is the PS4 or the TV doing the upscaling (assuming you have a 1080p TV), and in your case the PS4 upscale looks poor? Even stranger that it would affect the color. Or do you have a 720p TV? I’m sure I’m pointing out the obvious, but do you have different color settings for your PS4 input? And/or do you happen to have it on ‘game mode’ to reduce input lag?

I’ve played these discs in my PS4 and don’t recall any issues. Though I’m not sure I watched through the entire film, I probably flipped through the whole thing (having been responsible for the color of it, it’s pretty much impossible for me to just start it up without scanning through the whole thing and criticizing my work. 😃 ). I haven’t noticed any issues with the PS4 upscaling 720p to 1080p or 2160p (it’s pretty sucky at DVD upscale and deinterlacing as I understand it), but I can check this disc again. PS4 is not an uncommon blu-ray player, so I feel like someone would have mentioned it already if there was a major issue.

moviefreakedmind said:

Yes that’s what I’m referring to. The only changes I’m aware of being in the DE are the missing shell casings, a panel on the floor behind Vader being lit up on the Star Destroyer, and a frame where the sky immediately darkens when Luke enters Cloud City (which isn’t really a change so much as a coloring bug).

There are some recomped shots as Luke hangs from the bottom of cloud city as well.

I suppose it won’t be too surprising if this doesn’t work out. I think I’ve seen a half dozen attempts on myspleen of people ripping it to MKV (just a single crawl version), each stating “okay, this is finally the one to get it right”, only to be deleted and soon replaced with another attempt. Not sure if anyone has actually nailed it yet, and they’ve got their usual error of too many users online.

I’ve had nothing but success watching the actual disc and ISO image for 1.6. But it seems there’s something funky enough with its construction that the standard tools meant to deal with commercial discs, even branching ones, aren’t quite configured for this. As far as I know, this and the Despecialized 2.6 disc I built (thanks to Williarob’s enormous help) are the only two “homebrew” blu-ray discs in existence with seamless branching. Of course, I could be mistaken.

Well, what I meant would have been that the software is smart enough to see that there are two playlists made up by seamless branching. Since it can’t do AVCHD seamless branching (in this scenerio I’ve made up), it instead encodes the film twice as two separate streams, doubling the streams visible to you for the BD5 and BD9 but not the proper blu-ray sizes.

Like I said, it’s a stretch. But it’s a weird thing you’ve noticed and I can’t come up with a better explanation.

Usually they just get unchecked, right?

Is it possible that the BD-9 (is it specifically AVCHD?) is not compatible with seamless branching? Going way out on a limb here, but it’s possible that it would therefore need separate streams for both versions of the film, increasing the count for the BD-9?

Wazzles said:

I think at this point they’d be more inclined to release each trilogy separately.

Or each film separately. If they were actually inclined to do any of this, maybe they would release SW for the anniversary. It’s not like Fox’s rights are ever going to expire, so it doesn’t matter if they do it now or later. For the sequels, obviously it would be in Disney’s best interest to hold off. But by the 40th anniversary of Empire, things will obviously be looking better for them there. And then they can get people to buy or rebuy box sets, etc.

It could be a content ID match

That is most likely the case. Especially if Harmy’s making of featurette isn’t blocked.

stealthboy said:

Does anyone have the feeling though that even if they released an “original” version it would still be altered in some way as to make people unhappy? Would they go 77 or 81 re-release? Would they feel the need to fix actual errors like Vader lightsaber rotoscoping?

Granted, if it were the true 77 version I would give them all of the monies.

There is nothing that they could possibly release or imagine that would not have some of the people here complaining. But a reasonable pre-1997 version of the films would be good enough for most people who simply dislike the SE changes (not necessarily members of this specific community, who are more perfectionist). Still, it would be a version that only “needs” small tweaks instead of massive changes implemented from disparate sources.

nickyd47 said:

Sony stated why they didn’t use the newly remastered mixes for the CD release that coincided with the digital collection. They said and I paraphrase “Younger generations grew up on the SE scores so we decided to use the SE mixes for the CD release” youtube.com/watch?v=YuH7uznb2bU. But now I guess they decided to release the original soundtracks for streaming. I think this is a sign of cool things to come bois

Young people love compact discs.

Thanks. It’s not so strange that it’s blue. Just of course unfamiliar to most of us, having seen the home releases for so many years and decades. For so long we had been arguing about a blue cast on Hoth, unaware that there is a much more drastic blue cast in Jedi. 😃

I suppose the best thing to do for projects like Harmy’s will be to use the best possible scans for all shots within the pit, or else to conform the usable blu-ray shots to look like the blue 35mm, rather than attempting vice versa! But that’s a discussion for another thread.

Alderaan said:

Jonno said:

Try muxing to an m2ts instead (tsMuxer is the easy option here). But be warned, it’ll be sluggish as heck - Premiere doesn’t handle h.264 all that well. You’d be better off converting to lossless (e.g. Lagarith) for anything serious.

towne32 said:

That or just demux it using tsmuxer.

It depends entirely on your system, but you’re right that it doesn’t handle it nearly as well as a lossless file. H264 isn’t too terrible in Premiere if it’s only 720p, at least for me.

OK I have tsmuxer and MKVExtractGUI and MKVToolnixGUI. I imported MKVExtractGUI into Toolnix and used it to extract the MKV file of Empire Despecialized. Am I on the right path so far and what steps do I take next?

Thanks again for your help guys!

I haven’t used mkvtoolnix to demux MKVs, only to make them. But, assuming it worked (as tsmuxer does), you should be left with a 264 video stream. Just import that directly.

Deloreanhunter12 said:

This is a bit of an unrelated question, but it is pertained to BD-Rebuilder. Is it possible with the program to replace the main video, but keep the menus and everything else in tact?

I’ve tried this a few times and the resulting image only seemed to work on my laptop, but not in any real blu-ray player (it fails when loading the replaced video). So I would say it doesn’t patch it to be fully compliant.

Multiavchd will do the trick.

Hagdorm said:

Man, I haven’t used BD-Rebuilder in ages, I can’t believe I didn’t think of it though. I’ve used DVDFab in the past with good results, but it didn’t seem to like the original ISO. I’ll test out my modified one with BD-Rebuilder and report back. I definitely plan to do a BD-50 later, I just don’t have the spare cash for any at the moment.

Yeah, I’m sure it’s optimized for commercial discs, and I also don’t know if Williarob’s seamless branching will throw a wrench in anything either. Worth a shot, though.

Hagdorm said:

Thanks for the info, guys! I ended up going with Williarob’s crawl since it’s pure 35mm, it seemed to fit the SSE better IMO. Now to burn it, lol. Does anyone have a suggestion for a program to convert it to BD-25? I don’t have any BD-50 discs at the moment, but I plan to get some eventually. I need a quick fix though 😛

BD-Rebuilder will do that and leave the menus intact, although I don’t know for sure that it will work on the ISO Williarob has built, or how the compressed video will look. So, mount the ISO and test it out before you burn it (or load the BDMV into software capable of playback, if you have it)! And make sure you do save the original to eventually burn properly. 😃

Poita, I think you mentioned at some point a bit of doubt in some of the color in the darker scenes for the previously scanned Jedi print, as they’re quite blue. In particular, the Ranor scene is bizarrely blue in a way that makes it pretty hard to use for projects like Harmy’s (at least when combining it with other footage). Have you figured out if this is indeed an anomaly in just some of the Jedi prints, or if they all look like this?

Hey poita, I saw a sample of both the UK and the German print of TESB and to be honest the UK print looks quite green throughout.

It might need a bit of mild color correction as you’ve seen it in a fairly raw state. That’s always the case, and the type of discussion suited for final outputs rather than determining the potential of a print. But compared to any other sample, it is brilliant and vibrant. Other prints need to be pushed very far to look normal, and surely there is some amount of color in them that just can’t ever be retrieved (though recent techniques have been very successful).

Tyrphanax said:

Tobar said:

Mithrandir said:

NeverarGreat said:
Furthermore, in the case of Tarkin, he distracted from the primary villain: Krennick.

I would say the main villain was supposed to be Tarkin all the way, and then Krennick was created just because by the very premise of this movie, the villain would have to be defeated and shown as incompetent, and going by his rank, position and reputation in ANH, Tarkin wouldn’t have been the case.

However, a Star Wars movie centered around the Death Star one week before the beginning of ANH without any trace of Tarkin would have raised a lot of questions as well.

I think the solution they found to solve this issue was, among many other things, elegant, regardless of how good CGI was.

^This.

And it all depends really, when it comes to CG. I still say Jurassic Park looks stunning to this day. I think RO’s Tarkin will age fine.

Good points. I think the lighting in the Tarkin scenes lends itself to the CGI and its aging well. Leia’s scene perhaps not as much.

It was brief enough that it worked, though. She may not have looked exactly like Carrie (as I understand it, the actress’s eyes shined through to prevent the “dead eye” effect), but from what I remember seeing she didn’t look like she wasn’t a real human. Tarkin’s did for brief moments, usually with more complex movements as he turned about and such.

I saw the movie with someone who is not familiar with Cushing or Tarkin, and they didn’t question it being a real person for the first few scenes. Leia obviously stood out as everyone knows Princess Leia.

L9B5 said:

So from what I’ve been seeing around there is going to be one final release of each film which will be 3.0 using the 35mm prints that poita is getting and these will be in 1080p (or higher)?

Is this the case or is this going to be an ongoing project forever?

It’ll be 1080p because it will be the blu-ray merged with those scans, and nothing of lower quality included.

No one can ever say for sure what the final release will be for projects like these. If you look at anyone’s project threads here, you’ll see them suggest something is a final release, followed by years of updates on continuing work and additional releases, etc. There’s always room for improvement, so it’ll be done when Harmy is completely sick of it. 😃

(but yes, 3.0 is a ways off and no one has ever suggested anything to come after 3.0)

You’re definitely not the first to post that bit about what Edwards said (but I think this might be the first time I’ve seen someone post a slashdot link in about ten years! haha)

There are discussions in a few threads here already. Basically, it is nothing confirmed at this point and Edwards didn’t go into any real detail about the version he saw.

I found it pretty disturbing that he described all these reels of 35mm film laying around in the archive, including out takes and such, that had never been digitally scanned whatsoever. He used some of that footage in the film (I think I have to leave it at that for now, with the spoiler rules in place). Hopefully all of the footage is being dealt with properly now, but I doubt it.

_Shorty said:

So what do we think of the mention of the 4k restoration mentioned by Gareth Edwards here? Do you think this is something they did themselves? Or do you figure it is the result of the much sought after “presentation”? http://lwlies.com/interviews/gareth-edwards-rogue-one-a-star-wars-story/

Are you referring to Mike’s presentation? Gareth’s rummaging of the archive would have occurred much, much earlier.

I’m pretty sure there are other threads where this is being discussed, but I forget where exactly. 😃

L9B5 said:

Hey guys I’m new to this, can someone just give me a quick summary of everything that has happened?

In the beginning, the Universe was created.

This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.

When you close the program, it usually updates the plugins. Harmy recommends Free Rapid Downloader, though.

SMCol1 said:

What annoys me is that Attack of the Clones literally has a few seconds of extra dialogue that wasn’t in the theatrical release that Lucas just felt he had to put in even though there’s a perfectly nice Deleted Scenes section on the DVD (and later Blu-Ray). This isn’t much, but it’s just enough to make it a different film than the one shown in theaters. Hopefully this would be a significantly easier fix than going through TPM and taking out the extra shots from the pod race and reinserting the original puppet Yoda along with the other aggravating difficulties.

For reasons that have been described in a few of the other threads on the same topic, AoTC is actually the more difficult one. There are a few shots which do not exist as in the theatrical version, except on film (though the digital theatrical release did have the updated robotic hand, so that could be considered fair game). To get it perfect, the scene you describe with the additional dialogue also needs to be modified. To insert that dialogue, they shortened the shots before and after.

Jonno said:

Try muxing to an m2ts instead (tsMuxer is the easy option here). But be warned, it’ll be sluggish as heck - Premiere doesn’t handle h.264 all that well. You’d be better off converting to lossless (e.g. Lagarith) for anything serious.

That or just demux it using tsmuxer.

It depends entirely on your system, but you’re right that it doesn’t handle it nearly as well as a lossless file. H264 isn’t too terrible in Premiere if it’s only 720p, at least for me.

joeyniji said:

This is so funny as i was just trying to look up info online about this very subject? but really couldnt find a definitive answer? so this brings up another question; with the re-release of SW in 1978 did they change or edit the opening crawl? also does anyone know if they already starting making any changes or alterations to the film at that point?

regards, joey

ps-i too also want to acknowledge the incredible work by Harmy and anyone else who assisted on the DE trilogy! thank you, thank you!
also hello towne32 , are you actually the legendary Harmy himself?

Nope, Harmy simply goes by the name Harmy here. I just edited a few things and did a bunch of changes to the color to change Star Wars (not Jedi) v2.5 to v2.7.