towne32

Darth Lucas said:

The issue with those shots are that they’re inconsistent. I’ll use the sand crawler as an example. Yes the still that the sandcrawler is rotoscoped onto is higher quality than the -1 shot, but it’s kind of distractingly obvious where the seam is. The -1 shot has the advantage of having consistent quality across the shot without being a dramatic drop in quality from the surrounding shots. I haven’t yet tried dropping the shot in, but that’s just my thinking behind it.

Would you cut from the first (night) sandcrawler shot to the end of the day sandcrawler shot, preserving the wipes as they are in TN1’s, or recreate wipes to switch from Harmy’s in the middle? I actually find the pink glow around the dewback in the previous shot more distracting than the sandcrawler. That and ‘I can’t understand how we got by those troops, I thought we were dead’ are the two most distracting in the film for me, as far as seams go.

Bahaha, it’s nice of you to to include the quote from our GOUT-loving friend on myspleen.

If you want BB8 to sing for some reason, Schwartz usually sings nonsense throughout his appearances on the Comedy Bang Bang podcast.

If you could put BB-8 behind some CG rocks, I think it would improve the film.

TV’s Frink said:

moviefreakedmind said:

Why have a veil of mystery?

Good question. Ask Williarob.

It’s funny how excited you are to pick up on something I figured you would have known for a long time.

2/10 - would not sleuth with.

Wazzles said:

Darth Lucas said:

towne32 said:

I would not consider inserting quick shots from TN1 for the sake of color.

I will not purely for the sake of color unless the color is unsalvagable in Harmy’s version and there is no other source. I have yet to come across a shot like this but who knows.
I will, however insert quick shots for the sake of quality and resolution, most notable during the battle of Yavin sequence where most of the space shots in TN1’s are very clean and where the jump in quality between blu Ray and gout upscales are most noticeable in Harmy’s imo. I will only do this if the shot has little to no noticeable damage on TN1’s and if the increased resolution and clarity is noticeable and improves the experience. And of course it will be color corrected to match.

I would recommend some of the more noticeable shots than the battle. Most of those are honestly great, despite being GOUT upscales. I think what needs it the most would be the sand crawler coming over the dune, the exterior shot of the cantina, and the detention block extension.

The issue is that none of these shots mentioned (aside from the Deathstar battle) are pure GOUT by the time V2.5 rolled around. Most of them are rotoscoped GOUT mixed with BD footage or 35mm stills that are higher quality than TN1’s release (even if it’s from them to start with). I’ve actually been doing some tests combining the two sources (along with some extra cleanup), and putting TN1’s work in there sometimes stands out as reduced quality of the overall shot.

The best candidates for replacement are the ones that are still fully GOUT shots in Harmy’s 2.5, and there aren’t too many of those. Battle of Yavin, and a few shots in the hanger preparing for the battle (used to replace Biggs scene) are main ones.

Not sure what cantina shot you mean. The static shot of the dewback? The dewback itself does look much better when you substitute in TN1’s version. But the rest of the shot stands out as a bit lower quality. So unless someone wants to re-rotoscope these things, it will be a bit of a tradeoff. I think the following shot would be good to replace, since I’ve found the color on Harmy’s (which is also 100% a TN1 shot, so there shouldn’t be much quality tradeoff) to be unrecoverable: http://tinyurl.com/zd379md but maybe DarthLucas has had better luck. Other shots, too, but I’m sure it will be obvious what version to use once you line them up in your editing program.

poita said:

I haven’t seen the scribble mentioned here specifically, but it is possibly the reason it is there.

It’s at the end of reel 3.

It’s definitely a reel change. I’m not sure why they sometimes appear to be handmade scribbles, such as that, rather than a clean oval.

Lust-In-Phaze said:

I only ask because of this comparison I made for various editions:

It looked like Legacy had a similar color scheme to the Silver Screen edition, and I thought that was based off an Eastman print. Maybe I just don’t have an eye for that sort of thing.

There are a few things to keep in mind. The three projects you compare of course are judgement calls by the respective people making them. For two, that means color recovery and adjustment. For Harmy’s, it was manual color correction. Furthermore, I don’t think we have seen a single frame of Mike’s finished version, though I believe the video you captured was specifically about color correction, so it’s probably not terribly far off.

Not every shot will look wildly different (especially one without any skintones, I’ll bet). After corrections are made, it wouldn’t be terribly surprising if some end up looking similar. I may be wrong, but I don’t believe Mike’s goal is necessarily to preserve the color of the Technicolor print in a way that sets it apart from Eastman prints.

All three fan preservation/restorations look relatively similar to each other when compared to the 2011. The main difference is that Harmy has got the saturation a bit higher. The general palette looks similar.

Chouonsoku said:

The settings used on the current 1080p essentially neuter the release. Even scene groups are required to use better quality presets these days. The motion estimation settings alone cause a huge amount of grain shift from frame to frame. There is so much more to x264 encoding than CRF values and bit rate. I already contacted TM-1 with baseline settings that would dramatically improve their video quality. I just hope they use them.

It sounds like they’re more willing to do some trial renders if they’re willing to give a 50gb aimed bitrate a test. And fortunately they’ll let us see the result. So hopefully they’ll test your settings as well. And hopefully they’ll adopt the moniker you’ve suggested of Team Megative 1.

Use multiavchd if you just want to have multiple video features play without a menu. (I think it can actually do a simple menu, too, but I would probably figure out some other software to use if I was going to go through the trouble of making a menu).

moviefreakedmind said:

towne32 said:

team_negative1 said:

towne32 said:

Thanks. As it was pointed out, the images and video have been shared before (and I may even have them myself on a HDD). Was just asking if anyone has them handy.

But the information part might be interesting, when it comes time that you can share.

We’re not talking about video captures from the demo reel. We have the actual scenes, videos, and comparisons of footage without grain, and processing.

We’ll see what happens, when the time comes.

Team Negative1

Well then, given the team’s collective belief that the OOT isn’t coming to home video any time soon, it sounds like there might not be good news in store.

No disrespect intended, but unless he works for Lucasfilm or knows someone who does, I don’t see why his belief regarding the OOT holds any more weight than anyone else’s on this forum.

If they do indeed have any other footage from RM’s demo reel that we haven’t seen yet, it could be extremely informative as to what the 4K restoration was exactly. Depending on the shot.

cheddarhead4 said:

Quick Burning question:

how can I create a BDMV folder from the mkv?

I just popped the file in an iso and that worked on one Blu Ray player but not a PS4 (and I’d rather have a “video disc” rather than “an mkv file on a disc”). I have Toast Titatium and one of the options is to burn a disc from a BDMV folder. I just don’t know how to create a bdmv folder.

I’m on a mac, so my specific software options are a bit limited. I can find a PC if I need to.

If you find a PC, use TSmuxerGUI.

pittrek said:

Visual changes :

Star Wars : https://picasaweb.google.com/102542760950977079734/StarWarsSpecialEditionChangesHD
Empire : https://picasaweb.google.com/102542760950977079734/EmpireSpecialEditionChangesHD
Jedi : https://picasaweb.google.com/102542760950977079734/JediSpecialEditionChangesHD

Not sure about audio though. There are so many threads about it but there’s no search functionality right now, try to google something like “audio changes site😮riginaltrilogy.com” or something similar
EDIT : The smiley face is actually " : o" without the spaces

I think none’s spreadsheet has audio changes annotated. Don’t have the link handy, though.

team_negative1 said:

towne32 said:

Thanks. As it was pointed out, the images and video have been shared before (and I may even have them myself on a HDD). Was just asking if anyone has them handy.

But the information part might be interesting, when it comes time that you can share.

We’re not talking about video captures from the demo reel. We have the actual scenes, videos, and comparisons of footage without grain, and processing.

We’ll see what happens, when the time comes.

Team Negative1

Well then, given the team’s collective belief that the OOT isn’t coming to home video any time soon, it sounds like there might not be good news in store.

Williarob said:

Harmy said:

That would be awesome because of the different language and other alternate audio and subtitle tracks. But how would you handle the frames missing at the reel changes?

Well I can think of several options:

1. Insert Black frames - which is perfect for the missing frames between Reel 1 & 2 because they are black anyway, but possibly a little jarring everywhere else.
2. Duplicate a few frames, or use some sort of interpolation technique.
3. Recreate the missing frames perhaps by using another source, e.g. Upscaled GOUT or the Despecialized Edition with added grain or something to make it look like the other frames in the shot.

Personally, I think option 3 can be made to work in such a way that most people wouldn’t even know that’s what we did, but at the same time, it feels like cheating. We vowed to use nothing but the film sources and I think we need to stick with that, so I expect we will just insert black frames.

Whichever option we choose, there will be people who don’t like it, but one of the best things about this forum is that there will be somebody ready to step up and implement the alternative options. They will feel strongly enough that the short black “flash” is not good enough for them personally, and there will be others who agree, and between them they will find their own way to smooth it over, and hopefully they will share that with others.

Perhaps this is why Lucasfilm / Disney can’t be bothered to do it themselves - we (the experts) can’t all agree on what is best - some like grain, some can’t stand it, some like the “invisible CGI” fixes like the digital recomposits of the SE but want other changes removed… There are already so many different versions of the film and none of us can agree on the correct color timing, cropping, or audio tracks… The only solution is for us all to come up with the version of the film we want to see.

Personally, I’m old school. I want it to look as close to watching a 35mm film print at the cinema in 1977 as possible because that is the film that won the Oscars. That is the film that became a phenomenon, and that is the film I want to watch. I think we’re getting closer to that goal.

And I think that between Harmy’s Despecialized Editions, our own 35mm preservations (and we have more coming), Poita’s and everyone else’s projects, and all of the hybrid projects that will inevitably spin off from all of these, we will eventually get there. We will all find our personal Star Wars Nirvana.

Am I making any sense at this point or am I just so tired I’m delirious? It’s 2 AM, I’m going to bed! I gotta get up and go to work tomorrow… “Star Wars Nirvana…” If we find that, what the hell are we gonna do with all that spare time?

It’s great that you found 85 of the 111 (or so, I think) frames.

Blank frames (or better yet, looped black frames from the same segment) are perfect for reel 1 to 2.

2 to 3 is a bit trickier, but I think you can rate-extend the reel 3 head to fill a few frames, frame blend, etc. The start of the shot is static iirc.

3 to 4 is the real trick, as discussed earlier. I hope you’ve gotten a lot of this one back, because there’s movement on both ends of the cut that will seem jarring when modified. As a side note, it would be nice to clean up some of the huge markings even if you leave the actual reel marker.

4 to 5 might be tricky as well as it’s in the midst of action. I can’t think of what the character motions are, so it might be possible to tweak the surrounding shots without hurting things too badly.

5 to 6 would be easy to extend the x-wing start on the reel 6 head.

I’m just hoping it can be done without relying on things like the GOUT. But hard cuts to black frames are the most jarring of all, and not really suitable for a final BD release in my biased opinion.

moviefreakedmind said:

team_negative1 said:

towne32 said:

Does anyone have the image capture from that 4K demo reel?

We have more information, and the actual videos and screen captures also of it.

But currently, they remain private. When the time comes, we can shed some light on it.

Team Negative1

Several comparison shots are in the first couple pages of the old “4K Restoration on Star Wars” thread

Thanks. As much as I am reluctant to trust the GOUT, now, that glow still seems to go beyond anything that should’ve been present originally.

team_negative1 said:

towne32 said:

Does anyone have the image capture from that 4K demo reel?

We have more information, and the actual videos and screen captures also of it.

But currently, they remain private. When the time comes, we can shed some light on it.

Team Negative1

Thanks. As it was pointed out, the images and video have been shared before (and I may even have them myself on a HDD). Was just asking if anyone has them handy.

But the information part might be interesting, when it comes time that you can share.

It is an unfinished workprint designed to get feedback for the (not yet released) final version.

Plus, we haven’t seen any of Mike’s final output. The videos on vimeo are degrained, but he has said he is adding back grain as well. TN1’s of course has varying level of grain for effect shots, etc, and then an extra bit of grain due to it being a dupe. So, different goals and approaches indeed. And I’ll suggest something else that’s extremely controversial: different folks have different preferences with regards to grain and it’s perfectly fine so long as no one’s bitching about it, demanding to have someone else change things for them. 😃

What tool did you use in AE for grain? Looks nice, and not as ‘plasticy’ as when I’ve used some adobe plugins , even at their lowest settings.

Harmy said:

There’s definitely something to that Technicolor look though 😃

http://screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/158521

Was the grain removal your doing, or the result of using Dre’s tool (if you’re using it).

I know there are a lot of grainophiles here, and I understand the appeal and agree to an extent, but the reduction in this image does look good. 😃

Wazzles said:

Well, I think it’s time to revist that old RMW debate. Just looking at the SE next to the show reel and SW Silver Screen, they all look completely different. The cores look more like what’s on the print, but the glow is a little closer to the SE. Any thoughts?

The cores definitely look more pronounced than I previously figured they ever did in the original. What we got from the gout and similar sources seems to have been an over-exposed blur of core and glow from the lightsaber (which admittedly, looks pretty great).

Does anyone have the image capture from that 4K demo reel?

poita said:

marvins said:

poita said:

If someone wants to post images of the missing frames using the GOUT as a source, I’ll see if I have those frames on film anywhere. Probably don’t, but I will check.

Maybe you could too respond to my mail…

I am back again, and am going through my email backlog. Check for a reply 😃

Welcome back. Hope you’re well!

86658-715 (inclusive)

Ouch. That’s a big one and will not be easily fixed to GOUT sync with anything we’ve discussed here. It’s the end of a reel and major change of scene, though, with no audio score to worry about. So a fade in/out could do it. Revisionary, but smoother.

Fortunately, there’s really no impact here if the audio is altered.

Nice work, that was the most problematic scene.