Also, I’m pretty sure Harmy said he’s okay with someone doing it, he just doesn’t intend to do it himself.
gotcha
Well to some people like myself and others who grew up in the 80s and 90s, “Episode IV A New Hope” is as much a part of Star Wars as any of the original effects. You need to remember for us, that’s the first and only way we saw Star Wars until 2006 when the GOUT was released. It may not be technically original to the film, but it’s attached to our memories of the original film. I have to be honest, it feels kind of weird to not have it there when I watch Harmy’s Despecialized. I still usually prefer to watch it the way it originally was, but I understand the guy’s request and I don’t think it’s insulting to Harmy’s work because Harmy’s work is meant to recreate the experience of watching Star Wars as originally seen. Well to those of us who grew up then, that IS how we originally saw it. This is part of the reason why I’m trying so hard to recreate the 1981 crawl and pan-down for my blu ray project. To some people it’s annoying, to others, it’s a part of the Star Wars experience.
I get that… I too saw Star Wars in the theater for the first time when it was re-released prior to the release of Empire because I was born in 78. So, I too always saw it with the Episode IV header… However, I do believe that the spirit of this particular project is meant to maintain the original 77 version as closely as possible, and to alter it and still call it ‘Harmy’s Despecialized Edition’ without his approval is not right. That’s not to say I don’t think it’s a great idea to include a seamless branch that would include the 81 crawl as well. Maybe I was heavy handed with my initial salvo… If so, I apologize, but I do maintain that this particular version is meant to be the 77 original and it’s kind of a big request to alter it ( which the original requester may not understand ) for what is not a huge payoff. I think in the v3.0, if it’s possible to include an 81 crawl, that would be cool and cover all the bases… Again, not trying to be an a-hole. It happens sometimes anyway…
Hi. I have a request. I would love to burn this to a DVD or Blu-Ray, but I want the title crawl which has “EPISODE IV: A NEW HOPE” on it. It’s a banality, so I thought to add it myself, but apparently technology hates me because the only editing software that managed to import the movie without trouble was nerfherding Movie Maker for Windows XP (which is obviously a problem, since I don’t want my Star Wars in 4:3)
So I humbly ask, could anyone please edit and post a version with the “EPISODE IV: A NEW HOPE” in the crawl?
I may be wrong… But I doubt you’ll find anyone willing to do this for you as it is not in keeping with the spirit of the project. The absence of the ‘Episode IV’ header is what makes it the original, as-released ‘Star Wars’ and not ‘A New Hope’ which is just a bad subtitle. No one really ever referred to the Star Wars movies by ‘Episode’ number before the prequels came out and they sure as hell didn’t refer to the original film as anything but ‘Star Wars.’ No one went to their friends house to play ‘A New Hope’… They went to play Star Wars! You didn’t see rabid fans bragging that they’d seen ‘A New Hope’ 25 times in the theater… Just my two cents. Also, you had a lot more technical problems with your plan to attempt to use Movie Maker to accomplish this than a 4:3 aspect ratio! Also… I don’t mean to be an a-hole. Like I said, someone may be willing to do this, but I think it’d be a bit insulting to all the work that went into making this particular project a historical representation of the true original film.
Just a word of thanks to vfxhooker for the links to the BD, nice job. I really like the Ralph McQuarrie concept art for the menus. Nice idea of adding the “sources” video as a bonus. It helps when showing friends and trying to explain the various differences and why this BD is so important. And as usual, thanks to Harmy and all those who helped in making the DeSpecialized Edition.
Edit:
Just an addendum. I noticed that the fourth audio track (the '85 mix) is missing. It’s actually the isolated music track. Just thought I’d point it out in case you would like to make an update.
I’m glad you like it… I will fix the audio track and repost… I apologize for that glitch. I have been doing this a little at a time over the past month or so largely on very little sleep as we have a newborn and a 2 1/2 year old, plus I have to make a living. Good times! I’m gonna blame it on sleep deprivation!
I’m still open to adding in the content from the .MKV, and in fact I would prefer that, but all the problems I was having made it prohibitive to continue the process. If anyone knows a definitive answer to the multiAVCHD issue ( where it destroys my menus and makes its own), I’d love to know it. Otherwise I guess it is what it is. If anyone wants the links I guess the best way is just to PM me.
I finished the BD .iso of SW Despecialized 2.5 with menus. I was not able to make the DTS-MA files work. I ended up using the AVCHD. It still looks and sounds great. This, I think, will be a good stop-gap for anyone that wants to watch a blu-ray with menus prior to the release of the 1080p 3.0 releases that are supposed to have all the bells and whistles. I have uploaded a multipart .rar to mega. I need to know what the proper place to post the links is.
If I get a positive response to this setup, I’ll go ahead and modify the project for TESB and ROTJ.
First, I don’t think burning a Blu-ray without available lossless audio tracks is the most attractive proposition. What really confuses me, though, is when you say you used the AVCHD, do you mean that you used the AC3 audio from the AVCHD and used the Blu-ray worthy/ready v2.5 MKV’s video, or did you make a “Blu-ray” from purely AVCHD sources? If the latter, I don’t see how that is any sort of acceptable “stop-gap” alternative to a full-quality DeEd without menus. If you want to tout it as an AVCHD release with menus, that’s one thing, but calling it a Blu-ray with menus will only cause confusion. Besides, I’ve already seen a menu’d v2.5 BD with a subset of audio/subtitle tracks on the spleen already, not to mention there’s plenty of talk on this thread about a forthcoming BD menu for v2.5 which does not omit any tracks.
If I read what you said wrong, enlighten me, and also please detail what your version does include.
Earlier in this thread I explained what I was doing. Many of us are not able to get onto the spleen as we are late to this party. I wanted menus to be able to have a somewhat normal BD experience on my TV. So I decided to make them and share out of a sense of gratitude to the community. I initially did this using the avchd that I demuxed before knowing the extent of the difference between the avchd and mkv in terms of quality. I was not, even though towne32 and DarthLucas were extremely gracious to help me extensively, able to overcome some bugs in Encore, when attempting to use the content from the .mkv container, initially that forced reencoding video that should have been compliant to begin with, and secondly as towne32 mentioned, multAVCHD, which was supposed to be my solution to that problem, kept throwing out my menus and creating it’s own no matter what I did. Eventually it became prohibitive in terms of time to try and figure out what was going wrong.
Please understand, this is offered exactly for what it is. It’s using the content from the AVCHD container file and has a menu structure that I tried to take some time with. Since there is no known date for when we might see a v3.0, I thought this might be nice.
Audio:
It also includes a first-play screen advising that the content must never be bought or sold and if the viewer did purchase it, to immediately demand their money back and report the seller to originaltrilogy.com members. It includes in the bonus features section an explanation of the project and Harmy’s mini-documentary ‘Introducing the Despecialized Edition’
This is not a flashy disc. It’s not super pro because I’m a VFX Artist, not a BD/DVD Authoring expert. I did try to make the menus attractive. I used Ralph McQuarrie’s concept art as the backgrounds and I used the proper font associated with StarWars. It’s good enough for me until I can obtain a 1080p BD50 release that Harmy decides to release as his final word on the matter. That’s all.
If this is not ‘the most attractive proposition’ to you… I couldn’t honestly care less. I hope someone out there finds it a good arternative to an autoplay disc. If not, like I said, it’s good enough for me and I’m still eternally grateful to the whole of Team Despecialized for taking on this project and making the content available to all of us.
I finished the BD .iso of SW Despecialized 2.5 with menus. I was not able to make the DTS-MA files work. I ended up using the AVCHD. It still looks and sounds great. This, I think, will be a good stop-gap for anyone that wants to watch a blu-ray with menus prior to the release of the 1080p 3.0 releases that are supposed to have all the bells and whistles. I have uploaded a multipart .rar to mega. I need to know what the proper place to post the links is.
If I get a positive response to this setup, I’ll go ahead and modify the project for TESB and ROTJ.
@Darth Lucas: Cool… I’ll check it out. I don’t mean to step on any toes… I just hadn’t found a set with menus yet and wanted to share the ones I made for myself. My initial inclination after reading the responses is to make different images to accommodate different potential wants/needs. The only issue then becomes hosting. I’ve never done that outside of dropbox.
@Towne: Thanks for that! I just installed multiAVCHD and will give this a shot. I’m a little outside my area of expertise with the AV/TECH. I’ve been a VFX Artist since 1998 mainly working in CGI and compositing heavy pipelines on episodic, commercial, and film. Currently heavy in iOS game development… So this is uncharted territory for me.
Ok, cool. I will see what I can come up with and post an update as needed. Like I said, I was just looking at this as a stop-gap to fill the void between now and when the eventual 1080p v3.0 project(s) are completed. I may have missed this, but, is Star Wars going to see a 1080p release in v3.0 along with ESB and ROTJ?
Got it. I was just going to include the 8 most important audio tracks for primarily English speakers. Kind of a stop-gap measure for those that would like one. According to the Encore CS6 docs, it does support DTS-HD for blu-ray. If this is not something anyone is interested in I won’t bother. I just figured I’d already done the work and wanted to give something back to the community that made it possible for me to see these movies the way I did when I was a kid.
I was not aware of the chapter markers being exposed in the MKV. Will take a look. Yes the whole reason for these past couple posts has been because I did make menus and built an .iso from the AVCHD and wanted to make this image available to people. Now that I realize the MKV is higher quality, I was going to rebuild with that before I release it. From the few posts I’ve seen, I’m assuming that there are quite a few people who would like to be able to play a disc with menus in there hardware players. In any case, thanks for the reply, I’ll see if I can get the .dts tracks fixed and move forward.
So after my last post, it occurred to me that pretty much everything is on the internet… I found a chapter list that is close enough to allow me to go through and mark the chapter breaks quickly, so I will add chapters. I also found reference earlier in this thread that the .mkv is a better file to transfer to blu-ray.
So I downloaded it and demuxed it with tsmuxer. Somehow, the main .dts audio tracks are showing as way longer than the film. Track 1 is over 3 hours long according to the time slider. However if I scrub through it there is no dead air, and there is no distortion like anything got stretched. Whether I bring it into Encore or VLC, it’s still an hour longer than the film on the timeline. All the .dts tracks are long. Track 1) 3 hrs. 10 min. Track 2) 3 hours 14 min. Track 3) 2 hours 51 min. Anyone know why this is happening and how I can mux them to the right length? I’d like to be able to offer a BD .iso with the best quality content. I’m assuming that the DTS-HD audio is superior to the Dolby Digital offered in the AVCHD, and that the video track in the .mkv, being over double the size of the AVCHD, is higher quality encoding, and worth exchanging… Thoughts?
Hello all… I’m brand new around here. Lurked for a while now. This is my first post. I just got around to digging through this thread and realized I may be stepping on toes with what I’m about to post, but here goes. I wanted a Blu-Ray disc that would play in my player and I was successful in burning one that just played immediately but that was no fun. So after unsuccessfully searching for an .iso with menus, I decided to learn Encore in my spare time over the past few days. I just finished building an .iso with simple but effective menus. I do not have chapters implemented yet and at this point, have no plans to, as I lent my official Blu-Rays out and don’t have the proper marker times or chapter titles available. I see now, after the fact of doing the work, that another contributor here has been working for some time on menus that appear to be much more sophisticated than mine. In any case, I am happy to make this BD .iso available to the community but I would prefer if Harmy weighed in first before I let it out. I based the BD off of the AVCHD and I chose to eliminate the ‘isolated score’ audio track, in favor of including Harmy’s featurette ‘Introducing the Despecialized Edition and its Sources’ on the disc. I did not have room on the disc for both and the isolated score seemed like the least important track for a viewing experience. I feel it’s important that people that may acquire this disc know what went into it even if they are not ‘in the know’ about this community so I wanted to include Harmy’s youtube vid. Again, if you want me to take that out/off the disc, I can easily do that before making it available to the masses. Also, my projects are all easily updatable for the newer versions yet to come. I have not built the menus for ESB or ROTJ yet. I can post screen grabs of the menu pages if anyone is interested.
Thanks!