towne32

digitalfreaknyc said:

Memorex said:

digitalfreaknyc said:

At the risk of getting bashed for this, I’ve talked to several people who, like myself, have calibrated monitors and we all agreed that the contrast/brightness on both Empire and Jedi is way low, for some reason. SW looks perfect but both Empire and Jedi just seem to be quite dark. Did something change there?

I’ve had similar issues with certain movies looking a bit dark on my calibrated monitor, but look just fine on my calibrated tv?

It looks very dark on both. Certain Jabba shots are far too dark.

Do you have specific shots in mind? Also, dark compared to what? Surely not the blu-ray, but compared to 1.0? GOUT? Or not compared to anything but simply dark enough for you that you can’t view it properly?

Also, what method do you use for calibration? It looks good for me, but I just use a simple x-rite colorimeter, so quite far from anything fancy. It was certainly not made as bright as SW 2.5 was. But that release was an enormous change from the blu-ray, and went too bright for some scenes in my opinion.

chyron8472 said:

MrPib said:

Harmy said:

I’m definitely taking a break but not a long one - my optimistic estimate is that ESB v2.5 could be done in like a month.

Crap. My plumber’s accountant’s nephew’s birthday is in two weeks, and I wanted to give him a complete set of V2.5s. Maybe you could at least make a cake?

Touche. :\

Were you the original dad’s birthday guy? How did it go?

Edit: Oops, wrong post.

You notice things like that a bit less when it’s all blurry anyway.

Harmy said:

I think the '97 is clearly an uncorrected scan.

I hope that’s the case!

Are the most recent 35mm IB sources corrected? They look much better than others.

saf1916 said:

I hate to be that guy (I will be anyway), but is it worth getting ESB v2.0 at this stage or should I just be patient and wait for v2.5? I’ve seen v1.0 (I think. It was an unofficial, compressed file, from a public tracker) and thought it looked great.
I’m not a videophile by any stretch of the imagination so the updates may be negligible to my untrained eyes.
Hopefully Harmy takes some well deserved time off after the phenomenal task of completing RotJ v2.5, so I wouldn’t expect the updated ESB in the immediate future.

Harmy thinks ESB will be a relatively quick turnaround. But the keyword is relative. He may indeed take a break for all we know.

ESB looks fantastic at 2.0. If you want to watch it, there’s absolutely no reason to hold off. If you don’t go poking around in these threads trying to learn what’s wrong about 2.0, you won’t ever catch the couple of flaws that exist. If you do, you’ll be inclined to notice the imperfections. But they are indeed minor.

Dek Rollins said:

The description of his correction says (if I’m talking about the same upload you guys are) that it’s Harmy’s Despecialized 2.0 color corrected to a compromise between DeEd and Grindhouse. Not DeEd with total grindhouse colors, and nothing very confusing.

I think it would be confusing for anyone who has seen how faded the Grindhouse release is. Don’t get me wrong, I think the project looks pretty nice, I just don’t understand how it got to where it is using a red faded scan.

The other confusing aspect, for anyone who followed his thread, was that it was originally supposed to be Harmy’s colors applied to Grindhouse. I’m confused at how it could be not confusing. 😉

Molly said:

I know a friend commented that teh credits on my encode of grindhouse - and I don’t think I touched the colors - looked green instead of blue, so yeah, grindhouse’s color is a bit off me thinketh.

Yeah, they’re green. The Fuji/Kodak film stocks are quite faded, so it’s surprising how much has been shown to be possible with those scans, but for that release itself, it’s pretty raw.

The diffuse glow is there on the GOUT, too. But it’s white (or very light blue). Wouldn’t be very noticeable, except that it’s clearly a very soft shot, if it weren’t for the 2004 process making it green for whatever reason.

yoda-sama said:

No, I’m pretty sure he was saying your colors were almost perfect to him and he didn’t change much. So, it is something else than that. It actually looks pretty good… too good.

It’s indeed pretty confusing. He started out wanting to color the TN1 grindhouse like Harmy’s release. But it was proving impossible (this was before Dre’s tool). So he instead did a 180 and re-colored Harmy’s based on Grindhouse in a way that is not quite clear (an adjusted grindhouse version he didn’t share?). The end result was that he made some shots look more neutral. I thought some of the shots looked pretty good, but the skin tones were a bit messed up and I think there were some other problems.

Harmy said:

And yes, the colors of v2.5 (and all the following versions) will stay largely the same as v2.0. 😃

That’s great! Color-wise, it’s my favorite of the three (Rotj looks great, it’s just not as interesting visually to begin with). I know there will always be controversy with how the early shots inside Cloud City should look, but it’s not really a scene I’m picky about and yours looked good, as did the Hoth color timing!

Harmy said:

towne32 said:

Laserschwert said:

I’ve got a question regarding the ROTJ-Grindhouse: Why exactly is it the best option to leave missing frames black, instead of just holding the previous frame? I’m pretty sure a little stutter would be less distracting than a blackout…

I agree with that. If it’s only a couple frames, I’m actually a fan of slowing down a few of the adjacent frames and frameblending, but I realize that’s controversial (you end up with fewer total pure frames, but it views better).

It’s not only a couple of frames, so holding over previous frames would introduce the image freezing very noticeably. And interpolating frames could work for low motion shots but the point of a Grindhouse release is that it’s pure with no alterations - And when working on a cleaned version, rather than introducing an alteration like that, it would proabably be purer to just replace the shots with the BD, if they were not altered.

I mean, I think the ideal for viewing purposes in some cases is to alter the audio. But, as we were reminded from TN1’s last release, this community is large and international/interlingual, so there are big benefits to having GOUT sync. And, especially for a grindhouse release, some visual imperfections like black frames aren’t the end of the world.

EGOvoruhk said:
That being said, I’d much rather have a BD50 than an anamorphic MKV. It would serve far more people than just the niche Ultrawide crowd

Ah, okay. Is VLC something you’d rather not resort to using? I’m not really familiar with MPC, but VLC’s cropping has worked well for me when watching non-anamorphic widescreen DVDs/LDrips on a 16:9 display.

EGOvoruhk said:

Harmy said:
Also, my master-file for the 1080p release would be somewhere around 300-400GB with my current AVI masters but since I’m planning to move to image sequences for master for v3.0, the master will probably be more like 1TB.
So I’m not likely to release that and anything else would already be a re-encode

I didn’t mean the RAW source, just similar to what TN1 is doing, using Chouonsoku’s x264 settings and releasing a verge large MKV that other encoders could use as a source. That way someone could make a BD50 with it, a small 480p encode, or anything in between

I think what was discussed in TN1’s thread as ideal (whether or not they actually do it), was releasing both:

1. 50GB DL version
2. 25GB cropped version.

No one wants the primary BD compatible format to be a ‘third party’ re-encode, even from a high bitrate file. Might as well get it right the first time for something that’s going to be sitting on people’s shelves as their go-to copy. And as Harmy said:

If your 2.35:1 TV doesn’t have a function to zoom in letterboxed video, so that it fits exactly I’d be very surprised, because that would be incredibly stupid, since all 2.35:1 Blu-Rays are released with black bars, and even all streamed media on iTunes, Netflix and Ultraflix and such have them AFAIK, so without this function there would be zero point to such a TV from the legally purchased media point of view.

I just don’t see the point of the cropped version.

Laserschwert said:

I’ve got a question regarding the ROTJ-Grindhouse: Why exactly is it the best option to leave missing frames black, instead of just holding the previous frame? I’m pretty sure a little stutter would be less distracting than a blackout…

I agree with that. If it’s only a couple frames, I’m actually a fan of slowing down a few of the adjacent frames and frameblending, but I realize that’s controversial (you end up with fewer total pure frames, but it views better).

Not bad. But, and I know it’s kind of your theme, I’m not a huge fan of the leatherbound look. Maybe it reminds me too much of Ronto butt. 😛

I like the images, though.

Darth Lucas said:

Each of the discs will feature a different piece of Ralph McQuarrie artwork.

Also a question about distribution. Each of the discs will probably snugly fit on a 25gb disc. At 4 discs, that’ll be around 100GB give or take to download.

Would it be preferred to release each disc as its own torrent, so everyone can download disc by disc as they see fit? Or would it be preferred to just release it all in one massive torrent?

There’s also the factor that one disc might be ready long before another. The bonus materials will probably take the longest to get together.

Separate discs will probably be best for re-seeding requests and general torrent shelf life.

bromeo said:

I have been browsing through the most beloved edits and I was surprised how many of them include Jar Jar even a little (in Episode I at least). I just can’t handle even a single line of dialogue from JJ Binks. The Anti-Cheese edits seemed very awesome (Jar Jar had subtitles and his voice was changed to an alien one) but sadly I didn’t remember to download them… and now they have been deleted from YouTube. What a pity.

It’s just about the limitations of working with what is available. Everyone would love a movie where there is not one appearance or line from Binks. One ambitious guy here posted a few videos with JarJar rotoscoped out, and plans to do TPM. I think he may have given up, but am not sure.

You could cut every scene with him, and be left with a movie that makes even less sense. Or you could try to minimize him as much as you possibly can, but then you’ll notice a weird silent rabbit thing that is always around the main character and makes no sense. These kinds of options appease the fans in us, but they don’t make for a complete or coherent film in the way that Hal and L8’s edits do.

EGOvoruhk said:

Any chance you can start making the MKVs anamorphic/without black bars in 2.6/3.0? I’ve got an ultrawide monitor coming in, and the current releases are non anamorphic so you get black borders on all sides. Not to mention, leaving black bars can lead to issues with the pixels in the surrounding border when encoding

It’s important that they have the black bars for all the people who are burning these to BD without losing quality by re-encoding.

For the very few who want it bar-less, isn’t it easy enough to crop in real time using options in VLC, etc?

Memorex said:

Harmy said:

joefavs said:

Watched this last night, and good lord does it look wonderful. All of the 35mm stuff is integrated so much more smoothly than it was on the workprint. Now I’m really hoping that debated SW 2.6 actually happens, because this near-GOUTless wonder is so far ahead of the other two.

Actually, instead of making a v2.6 SW, I’m thinking about making v3.0 a quick 1080p update for all three movies. Essentially, for color correction just upscaling the 720p masters and applying it as a chroma (color) layer over the 1080p BD and replacing the Despecialized shots with just quick 1080p 35mm cleanups and then making v4.0 the final polished versions with new color corrections and more careful cleanup and rotoscoping and stuff (for SW, this would basically be almost the same as working on v2.6 and for the other two, it should be a fairly fast process, since by that point I should have all the 35mm shots ready at 1080p anyway).

“You must do what you feel is right, of course” If you’ve got the energy to revisit both V and VI again before you start v4.0, I’d say go for it. I would probably settle with 2.5 for V and VI and enjoy the hell out of SW v3.0 until the v4.0 trilogy is released. But then again I know how badly some people here long for 1080p 😉

I agree with that, but am always happy to have more of Harmy’s releases. I think a pretty quick update for ESB and whatever within reason can be done to bring SW up to the new standards is fantastic.

For quick and dirty 1080p versions of V and VI, I think maybe only if the bulk of the work going into it is also moving things along for V4, as the resolution upgrade isn’t critical. But, whatever Harmy wants of course.

Smithers said:

even if the image is lower resolution, it still looks really good!

On another note, HelloGreedo finally did a video on your despecialized editions: https://youtu.be/UPX_ZDy_9Fs

Warning: Like most youtube videos, avoid scrolling down to see the apocalypse in comment form.

digitalfreaknyc said:

Harmy said:

joefavs said:

Watched this last night, and good lord does it look wonderful. All of the 35mm stuff is integrated so much more smoothly than it was on the workprint. Now I’m really hoping that debated SW 2.6 actually happens, because this near-GOUTless wonder is so far ahead of the other two.

Actually, instead of making a v2.6 SW, I’m thinking about making v3.0 a quick 1080p update for all three movies. Essentially, for color correction just upscaling the 720p masters and applying it as a chroma (color) layer over the 1080p BD and replacing the Despecialized shots with just quick 1080p 35mm cleanups and then making v4.0 the final polished versions with new color corrections and more careful cleanup and rotoscoping and stuff (for SW, this would basically be almost the same as working on v2.6 and for the other two, it should be a fairly fast process, since by that point I should have all the 35mm shots ready at 1080p anyway).

I’m confused. What good would upscaling 720p be? Why not just start with the 1080p masters that we have?

It sounds like the chroma is being upscaled.

Maybe something is a little bit goofy about the end credits. I skipped to them, for entirely selfish reasons, and the video (in VLC) started playing at 2x or 4x or something. It seemed locked at first, but then it did allow me to skip backwards.

I think there have been bugs in the post-credits for Harmy before due to the audio tracks not extending this far. It might just make the muxing kind of wonky, but it’s definitely no problem if the main video plays fine.

Well, I guess this is up next! It’s crazy that it has been almost exactly 5 years since the fully despecialized range was first announced in the first post of this thread.

Just wanted to say that I hope the color timing is generally the same as 2.0. It’s bright and dynamic and doesn’t go too far in any direction.

corre said:

Harmy, when you continue your corrections for new versions do it in 720p releases, please.
or at least keep that option, since you want to do 1080p versions as well.

He usually exports in multiple formats. Even if he didn’t, someone could always render at 720p if you have an aversion to 1080p for some reason.