Laserschwert

I’m proud to present the first fully German 4K version of the Original “Krieg der Sterne”-Trilogie! All three releases come with the same audio tracks included in the German Despecialized Editions (huge thanks again to cvs and J.J._McQuade for their help on these back then!).

Over the recent years, with several 4K projects emerging, people kept asking me if I would consider doing similar work for those versions, and I’ve finally found time to work on them. I am using ohteedee’s D+77/D+80/OTD83 as my base, which I’ve picked because they are the cleanest and sharpest of the 4K-releases, so this is the image quality bar I needed to match. Should I ever do German versions of other releases (especially 4K77/80/83), I “just” need to dumb them down to match their respective image quality.

Now, for some of this stuff I was able to re-purpose the After Effects projects I’ve created for Despecialized (especially the KDS end credits and some of the subtitle timings), but under the hood all sources are brand new. I’ve re-created all three crawls from scratch once again, now in Blender, trying to keep the 35mm/70mm optical compositing look (and preserving the ZÜRUCK-typo). For the Greedo subtitles I FINALLY found the correct font (Granby, in case you’re wondering), which I still had to modify a lot to match all the weird substitutes used back in the day.

The MKVs are encoded to be UHD-BD compatible, so you can just use tsMuxeR to convert them into ISOs which can be burned on 50GB BD-Rs. At least on my PS5 they played without a hitch, including working chapter stops. Here’s an overview of the audio tracks included for each movie (as said, they are identical to the tracks included in my Despecialized Editions):

Krieg der Sterne:

TRACK 1) 1978 2.0 @ 384 kbps [German]
TRACK 2) 1993 SilverScreen LD 2.0 @ 384 kbps [German]
TRACK 3) 1995 THX LD 2.0 @ 384 kbps [German]
TRACK 4) 2011 Blu-ray 5.1 DTS-HD @ 768 kbps 24-bit [German]
TRACK 5) 1977 5.1 @ 640 kbps [English]
TRACK 6) 1977 1.0 @ 128 kbps [English]
TRACK 7) Isolated Score 2.0 @ 640 kbps

Das Imperium schlägt zurück:

TRACK 1) 1980 2.0 @ 384 kbps [German]
TRACK 2) 1993 SilverScreen LD 2.0 @ 384 kbps [German]
TRACK 3) 1995 THX LD 2.0 @ 384 kbps [German]
TRACK 4) 2011 Blu-ray 5.1 DTS-HD @ 768 kbps [German]
TRACK 5) 1980 5.1 DTS-HD @ 1536 kbps [English]
TRACK 6) 1980 16mm 1.0 DTS-HD @ 192 kbps [English]
TRACK 7) Isolated Score 2.0 @ 224 kbps

Die Rückkehr der Jedi-Ritter:

TRACK 1) 1983 2.0 @ 384 kbps [German]
TRACK 2) 1993 SilverScreen LD 2.0 @ 384 kbps [German]
TRACK 3) 1995 THX LD 2.0 @ 384 kbps [German]
TRACK 4) 2011 Blu-ray 5.1 DTS-HD @ 768 kbps [German]
TRACK 5) 1983 5.1 DTS-HD @ 1536 kbps [English]
TRACK 6) 1983 2.0 DTS-HD @ 640 kbps [English]
TRACK 7) Isolated Score 2.0 @ 224 kbps

Resilio-Downloads can be found on the TSWT.com forums, while you can also contact SnooPac on here for download links.

And here are a few screenshots (with the black bars cropped out):

Krieg der Sterne

Das Imperium schlägt zurück

Die Rückkehr der Jedi-Ritter

By the way, the director of photography on this show is Greig Fraser, who also was DOP on Rogue One. So that’ll give us a similar look.

Watching Harmy’s DeEd of SW was the first time I’ve noticed Han shaking his head in disbelief when 3PO first greeted him. I don’t know why I didn’t notice that all those years before, but it’s so funny 😄

alexp120 said:

@Laserschwert,

May I ask you to give a link on where you got this info from?

A user in one of my Discord chats posted it. Sorry for posting it in the wrong thread first, I didn’t know it was the same Cinema as in this thread 😉 Ah, found the source, it’s on the cinema’s Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/events/2427720870842866/

Since it’s just a theory, there’s not much fact to knock holes into.

George’s answer might just have been “Heck, I don’t care. I don’t have a say in this anymore anyway.”, which wouldn’t sound as good, so they made this a “He said yes.”

Edit: Never mind

If anybody is still interested in these, the posters can now be found here:
https://www.adventure-treff.de/Features/14067-hochaufloesende-adventure-poster

I don’t think they have the ANH Falcon in any of the newer films though.

I guess recreating the SE shots would be a relatively easy task, if they could just salvage any of the camera and object animations of the old data. The shots themselves are much less complicated than what they are used to do today. Were they still using Softimage for the SE?

Anyway, re-rendering with updated models and rendering software would certainly open a can of worms and create just another SE.

I’m pretty sure it’s the theatrical versions, because all new effects shots (including all recomposed space scenes) would have been only at sub-1080p resolution, which would look worse on a 4k version than the original optical effects. That being said, this doesn’t mean we would get this and not the SE in the end.

In theory it wouldn’t cost Disney a fortune to have ILM re-render the new effects shots in 4k. Re-compositing all the shots involving live-action material might be a bit more work (IF they actually have 4k scans of the newly 1996-filmed material).

Z6PO said:

The Last Jedi is actually referenced in the first paragraph of The Force Awakens opening crawl:

Luke Skywalker has vanished.
In his absence, the sinister
FIRST ORDER has risen from
the ashes of the Empire
and will not rest until
Skywalker, the last Jedi,
has been destroyed.

A fitting title I must say! (Before the release of the movie everyone was speculating who were the last Jedi, was the title plural, when the answer was there all along)

What are you talking about? The “last Jedi” in the TFA crawl refers to Luke, so it’s singular. The “Last Jedi” in the title of Episode 8 is plural (which is proven by several international translations of the title), so it HASN’T been there all along…

So, regarding the German ROTJ audio tracks, I’ve synced at least the main, Silverscreen and THX audio tracks to the DeEd myself using bit-perfect German Laserdisc audio captures. Quickly muxing them into 4k83 to me appears to be in sync “enough”, but I guess sensitivity to out of sync audio might vary.

Is the SE’s color timing worth leaning on in terms of other projects? What I specifically mean is if you choose to despecialize this SE scan using 4k77, would you retime the SE to match 4k77 or the other way around?

Here’s a new angle to the problem: why not calibrate your monitor? I know, it’s a controversial idea, especially amongst the people in this thread, but it’s definitely another option.

“Vor langer Zeit in einer Galaxis weit, weit entfernt…” was only used in ROTJ.

“Es war einmal vor langer Zeit in einer weit, weit entfernten Galaxis…” was used in SW and TESB.

This is true for the theatrical versions (that’s why the Despecialized Editions have these title cards). I don’t know if the SE, DVD, Blu-ray released changed these lines.

No, fair enough. We are just trying to avoid this being on major news sites.

I’m one of the team members of the XWVM project, and while we have a pretty much playable version, we are still missing quite a few 3D models (which we are all building from scratch). For the videos we are using many models from the X-Wing Alliance Upgrade Project, which we are replacing piece by piece with our own models before release (since we are not allowed to keep all the XWAUP models in an eventual release, PLUS they don’t come with the level of detail we are aiming at, which is totally the old XWA engine’s fault). With the recent Lucasfilm C&D against the KOTOR-remake by Apeiron though we’ve decided to lay low for the time being, while also stripping the project from any copyright protected logos and names. So if you don’t mind, don’t advertise the project.

Ronster said:
well I just caught a quick gimpse of the special edition broadcast and it is very true to laserschwerts trailer.

Hey, don’t pull me into this clusterfuck of a thread!

Will this be using your new grain management technique?

I’d be very interested in HDTV versions of these.

dvdmike said:

Chewielewis said:

Just had a hunt for some, found some german versions with german audio. 720p 16:9, is this what you have?

Edit: They are pillarboxed, but they do seem Highish quality.

Edit2: On closer inspection, they look to come from the same SD masters as the DVD and dont have much more detail.

They have English audio, I can cap later if needed?

Wow, this is really a fantastic find! Can you give us some info about how it was scanned? What resolution, color depth, etc.?

SilverWook said:
I recall a shot of the set without any opticals or foreground matte paintings got published somewhere back in the day. You could easily see the Y-Wing in the foreground was three pieces not really attached and a smooth dome where an R2 unit should be!

I’m kind of surprised Lucas didn’t have them SE this shot.

He was busy putting CG rocks in front of R2. Priorities.

mverta said:

getting Star Wars is why Disney’s trying to buy Fox in the first place

That’s very hard to believe though… Fox’ involvment in SW is tiny compared to all the other assets that deal encompasses.

Still, sounds like an huge step forward and I hope you’ll manage to get the presentation filmed the next time.

UnitéD2 said:

Laserschwert said:

they could’ve just taken a promo photo from right next to the camera lens.

Were there two suns in the sky ok Tunisia that day ? 😉

I’m not saying the photo wasn’t airbrushed for promotional purposes afterwards 😉

But if it is the actual shot of the film AFTER the optical effect of adding the second sun, why is it looking so different? Why is it this clean? Why don’t the prints of the movie even come close to this crazy high resolution?

I was always wondering where this shot came from:

… and how much of a color reference it could provide (or why it does look so different from the movie).

Perspective-wise it does line up exactly with the scene in the movie, but they could’ve just taken a promo photo from right next to the camera lens. And timing-wise this exact frame would come 2 or 3 frames AFTER the cut to Lukes close-up (judging by the position of his left arm).