towne32

Jp4195 said:

yes I started this thread and sort of seem like I need to put my input in and I think no matter how people feel about the walkie talkies, they should be included along with every new shot, its meant to be a preservation a HD version of the 20th anniversary 100%

Oh, absolutely. In my opinion, this isn’t a situation like Star Wars where lots of people will be interested in a ‘semi-specialized’ version. The intent would just be to preserve the weirdness that was the 20th Anniversary thing.

I believe Mike has said that he heard directly from people at Disney or Lucasfilm that made it clear what the repercussions would be. As great as those other projects are, they would not compete with an eventual official release the way that Mike’s would.

But the other issue that you’ll see come up, if you read through this thread, is that the people who contributed to the knowledge and assets Mike used (including the film itself) were clear that they do not want it distributed illicitly. They made that a condition of their helping him, I believe. And Mike may also be concerned about career-related effects.

Also, if anyone is familiar enough with the “SE”, and could mention any changes absent from this list it would be helpful: http://www.movie-censorship.com/report.php?ID=5229907

Also also wik, a 1080p version of the same Universal logo would be ideal to not start it out on an upscaled shot (which probably won’t look good with a circular logo like that).

I could probably work on that if no one else wants to do the assembling. I’ve got the blu-ray (which includes the weird deleted scene) and would just need the HDTV source.

What is the source of the DTS track you’ve mentioned (20th version I assume?). Is it muxed with video that can be used as reference for editing? I don’t know anything about the ET audio. Edit: Oh, it’s from the DVD? Well, I would need that muxed to the video. Even if it’s a low res sample, but just to make sure it syncs.

Colson said:

Why is the DCP copy not considered a fantastic copy? It’s certainly better than the Blu-Ray and is pretty much perfect. It’s already available on the spleen.

I believe some people find it to be ruined because of the color of the skateboard wheels in one shot.

We are indeed a fickle bunch.

Arnied said:

Personally, I think you hardly notice the audio cuts and fading is not necessary. Even at the “That’s good. You’ve taken your first steps into a larger world. / doors open, officer enters in to deliver message to tarkin” reel change where you loose almost 60 frames I hardly notice it. That’s just my opinion but I think it’s much more noticeable to insert almost 60 blank frames.
But you can try for yourself if you notice the audio cuts 😃

Yeah, the ones between reel changes should definitely be fine. Was wondering about some of the others (mostly since I don’t know where they occur!).

Seems like a good idea.

How jarring are these audio cuts, though? I have considered that adjusting the audio might indeed be a better idea. But sometimes that is done more smoothly with crossfades and such.

kk650 said:

towne32 said:

I think the only thing we’re all going to be able to agree on when it comes to the colours of Star Wars is that we’ll never be able to agree

Agreed! 😃

haha indeed! 😉

I just feel bad for The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, there’s so little discussion about how they’re meant to look in comparison to Star Wars, they should be shown a little love as well.

ESB gets a lot of discussion for how Hoth at Night and the first interior Cloud City shots should look. Jedi probably gets less discussion because, although they seem to have given it somewhat bluer timing from 1997 onwards, they didn’t drastically change the look of it in my opinion. Since the film sources have come about, there is the issue of whether the Rancor is more brown or blue I guess.

Lord Haseo said:

EDIT: I’m surprised no one has said anything about me presumably pirating Sony Vegas…

Well, I don’t think you posted evidence of that one.

Plus isn’t getting a copy of something whether it be a fan edit or not legal so long as you have a original copy? You want to see my receipt or something?

Well, it depends on where you live. Under US law and the DMCA, no, not technically. If you circumvent the copyright protection yourself by ripping the disc, for legal/fair use reasons it is technically legal, but the distribution of those materials for others is not. It’s a level of nit-picking that’s not really relevant since what we’re doing is already even less ‘grey’ than that.

But not using ‘scene’ releases is a requirement for participation in sites like fanedit, I think. And using the original encode is ideal for the sake of the quality of your own project. It would have also been relevant if there really was something wrong with your file or AV streams.

For the record, there is not a grindhouse SW release. TN1 put up a preview of a reel or two which had some of the cleanup done and the color was not corrected.

I think the only thing we’re all going to be able to agree on when it comes to the colours of Star Wars is that we’ll never be able to agree

Agreed! 😃

I’ve never used Vegas, but maybe someone else can help. It’s pretty hard to see what’s going on because the image is scaled down, but it’s possible that it won’t matter for someone familiar with the software.

edit: and your image is presumably from before you remove or mute the audio tracks, just moving clips around as you described earlier in your post. Are you certain that your audio and video cuts are in the same places? I can think of multiple reasons why that could have gone wrong. What’s harder to imagine is still having the audio if you really did remove those tracks.

This sounds like an issue with the editing software you’re using (and should probably be in the how-to section for better responses). I don’t know if you’re using software that doesn’t care about separate streams in the same file or if you’re not actually removing it the way you think you are, or if you’re simply not grouping the tracks so that your cuts affect both the video and audio. Or maybe you’ve got several languages loaded and don’t know it. Will need to know the software being used. But the audio is not embedded in your video track.

ksakacep said:

Is it just me, or does 2.7 have more artifacts than 2.5? Like at 42:22-42:26 as Obi-Wan moves his head the artifacts around it are visible and move as well. But again, it could have also been his way in 2.5, I don’t have a copy right now so I could’nt verify it.
Otherwise, especially color-wise, I see a huge improvement. Awesome work!

I have no problems with people pointing out stuff like this. But I would request that people do please try to make the comparison before bringing it up, just to make sure that we can focus discussion on things that are definitely occurring. There are a bit of artifacts in this shot for both versions. Overall, I do not think 2.7 has more throughout the film since it was made from the same master using the same settings. But yeah, as far as blu-ray shots, those artifacts you point out are the most noticeable in the entire film for me and I’ve seen them in a variety of different encodes. I don’t know if it’s a matter of the VBR being low for the very low-movement shot and then needing to rapidly ramp up for the wipe or what.

toykyle said:

Not sure if this issue was noticed to death already, but on the Death Star scene, right before the shot with Stormtroopers searching the Falcon, there seems to be some sort of screen-torn brightness (blue color fade?) on the top right (and maybe the rest of it?). It looks like that brightness was slightly bumped up.

http://puu.sh/ojG3m/1d87dfd1af.png

On some of my calibrated displays it’s not very noticeable. But on a display with kind of blown out black levels I see what you’re talking about. It’s there on the blu-ray as well. I’m not sure if it’s something they screwed up in 2004 or if that’s just how it was composited. Also, I’m pretty sure your image is from 2.5. If it is indeed an error it probably belongs in Harmy’s troubleshooting thread so that he can do something for 3.0. It looks like it might not be an error, but maybe its appearance can be optimized like some of the garbage mattes and slugs.

edit: Yep, I think it might be a 2004 thing.

Edit: Again probably just me, but there seems to be an audio glitch (pop?) for the 1977 70mm six track mix (5.1) at 33:07 (Occurs in Windows Media Player and Media Player Classic, but not in VLC).

The audio mixes aren’t done by me (or even Harmy) and they do have their own threads, I think. I don’t do any encoding of the audio (and believe me that you don’t want me messing with that!). But you are probably right that it might be a WMP specific thing. I didn’t even know it would run the mkv or DTS-HD. But then, I haven’t used it in many many years.

The SSE shot is much lower quality than the surrounding material from the BD. It would need to be re-rotoscoped (i.e. ‘stamped in’) using a cleaned up, stabilized SSE shot. And even then I think it would be a lot of work to get it looking better. It’s probably on Harmy’s 3.0 to do list.

Everyone has different standards for video quality. There are plenty of people who are happy to watch youtube videos that are strongly cropped, flipped, played at the wrong speed, and watermarked. There are people who won’t download anything larger than 700mb for a 1080p 2.5hour movie, and then they’ll rate the video quality a 10 out of 10. We have higher standards here, which makes sense. It’s where these things originate from. If someone wants to make any lower quality version, they can, and they don’t need to do it from the original files, because it’s not going to make a difference when you drop the settings to such low levels.

But if you can’t see an enormous difference in those screenshot comparisons, that’s rather interesting. I can see how you might not care how they look. And that’s fine. That’s just stating that there’s almost no point where video quality becomes poor enough that you won’t watch (which, again, is fine). I think the only thing those compressed shots have going for them is the fact that you can still see what’s happening on the screen and you can see that it’s a frame of the same thing. For some people, that’s really all that matters.

But for the newcomers who don’t understand why anyone would download a large file, keep in mind that the people around here are interested in versions that will replace the original blu-rays that they own. Not in copies that are simply the smallest in which you can still see what’s happening on the screen, or getting the entire trilogy to fit on your phone’s internal memory or your dropbox account or a CD-R or whatever. For the rest of us, it’s 2016 and large files aren’t a big deal. But I understand that circumstances vary.

Dumb question: is it really fading that’s the issue in blue frames like this? It’s not the scan or preliminary correction or something that happened in the duplication of the print?

It sounds like he doesn’t want any dvd, even single layer. More likely, he wants something fat32 compatible.

I definitely do not think we should strive to represent the look of a dupe print that was either seen once on Spanish TV or a few times in a single theater that showed bootleg films.

Whether or not it should be an “ultumate” experience is another matter and you’re right that it’s tricky. But I think we should at least try to get it looking like the Eastman style it was copied from, that thousands of people probably watched. I would argue that other things like reel cues can go too. Especially the hand made scribble/scratch mess they made as a reel3 end marker. But opinions vary.

Edit: but it depends on the purpose. A lot of what you’ve done is for the sake of good color template to convert the BD to, and some of it is for SSE 2.0.

For the former, the ultimate home video experience method makes sense. And the SSE shots used in it should fit as well. Will the SSE contrast issues carry over to BD using your color matching tool?

For SSE 2.0, it’s of course up to the team. I would say fixing the contrast and saturation makes sense for the reasons I mentioned above, but only to the extent that it can be pushed without looking funky. But some of this is simply going to look better once you have poita’s scan anyway, so the point may be moot.

UnitéD2 said:

Perhaps I am a little naive but… Dr. Dre, if you wanted to upscale 2.7 to 1080p with the last version of your super-resolution algorithm and make it match to the corrected and contrast-adjusted LPP, would it be long ?

If it’s quick, it could be the first 1080p version of Despecialized (“DREspecialized” ?) before Harmy’s release replacing remaining GOUT elements by SSE (unless Poita’s scan images are yet usable) and proposing a choice between Neverar’s technicolor mode and your LPP mode.

Maybe you’d be allowed to call it 2.99. 😉

I’m not dre, but I think this would be not quick at all and not really worth the time. Plus the upscaling process is about a month of dedicated CPU processing time from what I remember. And that power is better spent by dre on these new projects rather than upscaling a 720p image (I don’t think it would improve anyway). From a workflow perspective, it just doesn’t make sense to use an intensive upscaling process on something that is mostly present on the BD at 1080p, and the rest is soon to be redone anyway.

Dre is working with Harmy, as is Neverar on the manual correction side of things, to get the best possible looking version of Star Wars ever for 3.0. 2.7 is just to hold people over and round out the 2.x set.

DrDre said:

darthrush said:

Ugh these colors are just gorgeous. They honestly are my favorite color palette done so far. Harmys 2.5 is too yellow and I thought 2.7 fixed everything but for some reason the colors here are better looking to my eyes. Do you know if there’s any color differences between like those tatooine shots versus 2.7 colors?

The yellow color in Harmy’s 2.5 is probably the result of using the Technicolor print scans that have been our main reference for the color of these shots. I’ve suspected for a while that those colors were not accurate, and I think these results confirm those suspicions. The reason I’m so sure is that I calibrated the model on the Tantive IV scenes only, and these colors came out naturally when I corrected the rest of the reel. So, I believe these colors are far more representative of what people saw, when they went to see Star Wars in theatres in 1977. I think towne32 was able to undo most of the color issues of 2.5 for 2.7, so it should be closer at least. It would be nice to do a gallery of comparisons at some point.

Really apples and oranges to compare it to 2.7. All i did was manually remove very strong tint that was at times applied to whole shots. Fortunately, the correction that was ‘underneath’ that layer of correction (when I removed it with the right changes) was often great and perhaps reminiscent of SSE/GOUT type neutral timing.

But my approach was definitely not an unbiased one. Your most recent ones look great, and much better than some of your other recent tests IMO. Might need some adjustments in contrast (your comparison to Mike’s makes that clear) or maybe saturation, but it’s a starting point that I would’ve thought impossible, and honestly needs little extra work done anyway.

The joke is dead, long live the joke! 😛

Sorry, I’m doing this all from my phone this week and some people will have fallen through the cracks, but I’ll message you.

^ yep, good summary. But it’s actually the mkv I’ve sent to some for now.

Darth Lars said:

SilverWook said:

These elementary schoolyard level antics really need to stop. Mikeluv80, consider this a warning.

I think there are more than one poster around here that deserves a warning, some more than one.

Seriously, of all the discussion forums I visit frequently, this is by far the least mature – and I think that the actual age of most posters is not relatively low. People should know better. I think it has gone downhill quite a bit only in the recent year.

I know I can be quite crass with some members, but by default I think I’m quite respectful to people around here. However, some people think the relatively laid back moderation is a fantastic chance to slip in vitriolic comments of various types. That is why you notice that it’s a mostly mature forum except for when it really, really isn’t.

Mike knew exactly what he was doing, and made sure it couldn’t be mistaken for something more innocent by telling Frink to Google the first slur. And he continued to post backhanded ‘I don’t care let’s move on’ comments that were intentionally coupled to ‘I don’t care that you’re homos’ to slip in more slurs as his final word (literally, in the end).

I’ll try to post less commentary when the inevitable next case happens, and just do more reporting to mods (which I also did this time). Though I admit that it’s far from unlikely that I’ll someday get myself banned for lashing out at a troll.

Edit: and yes, sorry OP, I won’t post on it again here.