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towne32

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3-May-2014
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6-Aug-2025
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Post
#916545
Topic
Harmy's Despecialized Star Wars 1977 - Color Adjustment Project for v2.7 (released)
Time

joefavs said:

Faithwyn said:

For what it is worth, I don’t think the ANH crawl has ANY place in a Theatrical Reconstruction of Star Wars.
I saw the film opening week in 77’ and it was called “Star Wars” LOL!!! If I want to see ANY of Georges evil changes I would watch my S.E. copy (cursed that it is). There… I said my piece.

You do you, but I’m sure at least some of the VHS children like myself feel differently. After all, I don’t think the 77 crawl ever made it to home video before the GOUT in 2006. Us folks who weren’t around for the four years before the crawl was changed ought to have our Star Wars too.

Right.

My post could’ve probably been clearer. But I didn’t intend it to mean “please chime in if you support suppressing the release of an Episode IV crawl on princple”. It just meant that if there is no interest, or no interest beyond a perfect 1981 starfield, I can always not bother doing it. The ANH MKV was much less popular last time, as can probably be expected. But it seems there is some interest, even if it’s minimal.

DL: What did you have in mind for your V2 crawl? We’ve discussed the 1981 crawl before, but for the benefit of everyone else: I like what Darth Lucas has done in general. He got a cleaned up 1981 crawl from Harmy (I think originally from TN1?) and then used the ESB starfield and redid the pan and rotoscoped the flyover elements in.

I’d like to use it. But I considered the crawl just to be way too shaky. Not just a little bit of gateweave, but when you see the text in the far distance (just before fading out), it really bounces about a lot. But the starfield stays relatively still. So if it’s stabilized, it will need to be done with the separate elements. I am not actually sure how to do that stabilization, since normally you want a stationary element to focus on, like the stars. But we could make some guide lines based on the path of the text and manually do it I guess.

Secondly, the crawl is mostly cleaned up, but there is still a bit of noise and damage that pops up throughout. If needed, I can try to have a pass at this myself. But it would be better to do on the stabilized material and at as high of resolution as we can.

There also might have been an issue of the Tantive overlapping the Star Destroyer for a frame or two as they cross paths. But I might be mis-remembering, or it might look how it’s supposed to.

Post
#916280
Topic
Harmy's Despecialized Star Wars 1977 - Color Adjustment Project for v2.7 (released)
Time

I’ve corrected from the BD before for that scene. But I have a hard time getting it to match the last shot. I did only a so-so job even in 2.6, but felt it was good enough.

If I get it looking okay, I’ll use your template but might need help getting the grain and weave looking good.

There are two other scenes in 2.6 that I used the blu-ray as a starting point for, and no one seems to have mentioned yet. 😃

Post
#916275
Topic
Star Wars Trilogy SE bluray color regrade (a WIP)
Time

Harmy said:

Yeah, I think I’m on the record that the colors in v2.5 are far from ideal and I even said in my post above that we did go a bit crazy hunting for that technicolor look for a while, but we need to find some sort of mid-way, not just take one reference that in someone’s subjective opinion looks good and run with it - that’s just repeating the same mistakes, except at the time, we only had that one reference and there was no evidence that it may not be 100% accurate, whereas now, we have much more than that, so the mistake would be even bigger.

Yeah. I mean I get that it looks more neutral and therefore familiar (I agree and I do like the look of it). But that makes me wonder exactly how/why it exists and where it comes from. It looks more like we might expect an Eastman print to look (ish). But that’s obviously not possible. Or, if an Eastman print was in cold storage from 1977 until now and immediately was chopped up, that’s the saddest most ridiculous thing ever. But the color of the soundtrack, if I’m not mistaken, shows that it shouldn’t be Technicolor either.

Post
#916256
Topic
Harmy's Despecialized Star Wars 1977 - Color Adjustment Project for v2.7 (released)
Time

Nope, subs are baked into Harmy’s.

ANH is just sort of a bonus version, not 1981 accurate. I’m actually using a regraded BD version next time. the increased resolution helps the color adjustment when the text is very far back. The aliasing in lower res versions kind of interfered with that last time.

If anyone can get me a more polished 1981 crawl and flyover I’d be happy to use it.

Post
#916098
Topic
Star Wars Trilogy SE bluray color regrade (a WIP)
Time

Darth Lucas said:

Those grey Death Star walls make me happy. Justifies what I’ve been saying that they’re probably not as cyan/green as some people like to make them.

I wish somebody here had managed to get their hands on that print. Looks like the best print in terms of color I’ve seen, whether it’s tech or not.

However, isn’t it true that some films/segments are printed for the purpose of being cut up and sold? I don’t know much about that, but could that be what we’re seeing here?

Post
#916095
Topic
How accurate are the Harmy versions?
Time

CatBus said:

towne32 said:

I know of very few things that he ‘missed’ in “Star Wars” 2.5, but the quality of many of the shots he restored is far lower due to the sources he had at hand.

A year ago and Star Wars Despecialized 2.5 was this ridiculously close to perfect version, and now it’s the warty stepsister of the trilogy. Such is the price of progress. I agree Jedi is now the one that’s currently most ridiculously close to perfect, no doubt soon to be surpassed by Empire, and so on.

It’s crazy when you consider how we would’ve seen this progress ten years ago. I first started lurking during the XO project days, and left for a few years. But the early suggestions of using 35mm were basically laughed out of the room.

I still think Empire 2.0 is fantastic as well. I don’t tend to notice the 97SE Falcon cockpit shots the way other people do, which is often the main or only complaint.

Post
#916068
Topic
How accurate are the Harmy versions?
Time

Wazzles said:

Charles Daniels said:
I worked with various teams on trying to reconstruct various missing Dr Who stories, and while that is very hard stuff to do well, it would be peanuts compared to what Harmy has done.

Really? I’d think that would be harder, since so much footage is actually lost, unlike Star Wars, where much of the footage was just low-quality.

It’s easier in the sense that the same quality of result is impossible. Doctor Who reconstructions are made from the best material available, but it mostly means it’s a slideshow.

Off-screen 8mm recordings exist from australia, but they’re generally only a few seconds long. Fortunately, the maker of them captured some absolutely critical moments.

A guy called John Cura was comissioned by the BBC to take official off-screen photos of episodes. So there are many hundreds of those, for most, but not all, missing episodes (generally about 60 made per episode).

For the few episodes not well represented by the above, promotional shots and on set shots, as well as tons of other material, have been used with the camera scripts to reconstruct what the episodes might have looked like.

Every episode’s audio, fortunately, was recorded by fans. Some of the earlier ones are of lower quality, but they’ve been restored very well anyway. Later in the 1960s, some fans managed to use fancier direct line-in recording setups.

As a Star Wars fan, the most frustrating thing is that people go through such incredible measures for Doctor Who, because of a mistake made in the 1970s (trashing the episodes). And everyone would kill for those episodes to be back. For Star Wars, it exists and we’re watching the mistakes happen in real time, and for no good reason.

Post
#915848
Topic
How accurate are the Harmy versions?
Time

Return of the Jedi 2.5 is ridiculously accurate, because Harmy seemed to be comparing every shot to the 35mm print. He discovered recomposited shots that no one had ever noticed before, because they never had a high enough quality source. He also discovered that some shots that we presumed were re-comps were actually not, just well restored.

I know of very few things that he ‘missed’ in “Star Wars” 2.5, but the quality of many of the shots he restored is far lower due to the sources he had at hand.

Empire Strikes Back 2.0 has many recomposited shots (from the Blu-ray) remaining. Since it only slightly affects the positioning of things, he was right to not downgrade them to the GOUT’s sub-480i low quality image. But they’ll probably all be upgraded using 35mm shots in the near future.

But if you’re asking ‘how close is it’ experience wise, focusing on the kinds of changes that the general fanbase would notice, like CGI ships and creatures and other nonsense, then you would consider it 100%. Anything less is what we around here would call ‘semi-specialized’. It’s the finer details that we obsessives notice that end up getting saved for last.

Charles: I know you have a common name, but you wouldn’t happen to be a Doctor Who fan and a film collector? Edit: Based on your posts, I suspect you may be. Great to have you here and welcome to the forum (even if you’re someone else 😃 ).

Post
#915830
Topic
Star Wars Trilogy SE bluray color regrade (a WIP)
Time

You’ve touched on some good points, Williarob.

Despite working on a color correction type project, I’m not terribly skilled at the process, though I’ve learned a lot along the way. I can absolutely relate to staring at the same thing for so long and getting lost in it, coming up with something I see as perfect. And then looking at it the next day and it is quite clearly terrible. I’m making large enough shifts towards colors that, generally, were present at another stage along other people’s color correction process. So I can bring some of that back out when I’m lucky.

But working from the blu-rays (and not simply to remove the magenta and fix the contrast, but get it looking properly like other sources), requires patience that I am quite impressed by.

And I, too, am probably less picky about color than many people here. While “A New Hope” looks quite awful, in its 2004 master, for many other films my eyes/brain adjust to them quite rapidly even if they are less than ideal. If we didn’t all do that to some degree, I doubt we would ever find a single film to be watchable. 😃 And I agree that there are cases where I either don’t see the difference as substantial, or don’t care. And then there are cases where it seems huge and one version looks very wrong.

And there is definitely always going to be a need for judgement calls, because complete accuracy is unattainable. But I think that striving for it anyway, as people in this thread have been, gets things on as close to the correct track as possible. Mike Verta will definitely have made some judgement calls based on what he thinks looks right, and he has said as much. Though no one can achieve perfection, I do not think that they need to with how good things are looking. If Disney ever does anywhere near as good a job as Dre, Neverar, or (presumably) Mike, I’ll be quite happily surprised with them.