yoda-sama

I only included burning discs in that rant for the times when the convoluted methods people choose involve buying hardware (for burning, playback or–strangely–both). I’m not even against Joey getting a good Blu-ray burner, he should, but he doesn’t sound like he knows what he wants. He sounds like he’s on the fence between burning discs, buying a Blu-ray player with a USB port (seemingly in addition to burning discs), and figuring out how to format a USB drive. He has said nothing I can remember about gifting copies of the DeEd to friends/family or having desire to make a display box for discs. The one concrete bit of information he does offer up is that he has plenty of extra HDMI inputs. I’d say he’s a good candidate for considering just hooking up a computer to his TV and being done with it, unless he does want to do some of those disc-specific uses you mention.

I don’t see how a Blu-ray player connected over HDMI to a TV is supposed to look dramatically different than a PC hooked up the exact same way, I think your calibration comment is moot in this instance.

I ask the world again, how is jumping through all these hoops to burn/play discs (if you have to buy the burners or players) or trying to force the files into things that don’t really want to play them (like smart TVs/Blu-ray players/cable boxes or PS3/4/XBOXes, etc.), considered easier or better than just hooking a computer up to your TV or, better yet, A/V receiver and playing the files unaltered?

Any number of cheap options exist, from hooking up a laptop you already have, buying a super cheap NUC or LIVA, or even grabbing a really inexpensive FireTV Stick and sideloading Kodi…

Arguably the best way to get MPC-HC and the necessary codecs would be to install CCCP (Combined Community Codec Pack… which is actually a filter pack, but they couldn’t pass up that acronym), which will take care of both. VLC uses its own internalized codecs, so it is more standalone. Kodi (a very nice media center program, formerly called XBMC) also does a great job, though best used on a computer you use often for media (it has a whole graphical interface) (oh, and you don’t have to depend on installing extra codecs with this option, either). Between those (and really, you should try them all) you should NEVER have to open that horrid Windows Media Player ever again, nor should you.

FrankT said:

Is this the Despecialized Edition I see!?

I wish I’d known to this extent about Dan Perri’s work on the Star Wars titles before I met him a few months back, all I could think to talk about was that I thought he designed the logo used in the poster (which I do also like) while they had him signing pictures of the title crawl (though, still offensively the '81 EpIV ANH version), he insisted he’d worked on the theatrical logo… Now I understand what he meant. Oh well, too late now to have a better conversation, but I can only imagine what I’d have asked him about the process instead…

Mavimao said:

From additional research I’ve done, the rest of the prequels were shot in 16/9 1080p using spherical lenses and then hard cropped to 2.35.

Technically speaking, those films WOULD have additional information on the top and bottom. Although where one could find a copy…

The more you know…

Let’s just go a step further here and cover all the bases. If you buy a Blu-ray burner you can write both to Blu-ray writable discs and to DVD writable discs. With a Blu-ray burner you can do anything you want, up to burning a working Blu-ray (single layer BD25 disc) from the full quality MKV (once you convert with TsMuxerGUI).

If you want to go cheaper on your drive purchase and just burn the DVD versions, you can get just a DVD burner. With this you can burn the AVCHD versions to a DVD9 (these are double layer DVDs, which are more expensive than single layer “DVD5”, but often comparable to or cheaper than BDR discs), these can be played in MOST Blu-ray players, but not in any standard DVD players.

If you want to burn a disc that you can play in any player, be it Blu-ray player or just a DVD player, then you’d want to jump down in quality all the way to the standard definition NTSC DVD5 version. It will play in anything because it is just a normal single layer DVD, no Blu-ray formatting of any kind and appropriately reduced quality. Not the best looking or sounding by a long shot, but it will work in anything.

Alternatively, if you skip disc burning and just want to play the files off a USB drive, just make sure it isn’t formatted to FAT32, or it will go over the file size limit.

Actually, I think The Phantom Menace was shot in 35mm, while framed for 2.35:1 and only ever presented in that fashion (and the only Prequel to even be shot on film), it may be the lone standout Star Wars film to have been matted and therefore have more picture to offer. You’ll never see that happen, and frankly who wants to see any more of TPM, but the material may exist out there somewhere.

Just to be clear, it is a rare circumstance where those black bars are hiding anything, and on the cases where they are, the covered footage usually was not intended to be seen and would be less polished than the portion originally framed for (especially in SFX heavy films, as there’s little reason to perfect effects in parts of an image not intended to be seen). Take 4:3 “Fullscreen” video (or “Fullframe” older films), on a modern TV you see black bars on the side, you can’t believe there is video they’re hiding on the sides (well, except for movies that WERE widescreen and then cropped in the CRT era to “fit your TV”), in that same way there’s not likely something hidden in black bars at the top and bottom of an extra wide video presentation.

n00b said:

Harmy said:
Yeah, I didn’t realize it, but as soon as CatBus mentioned the possibility, I remembered Jedi was the last one done of the v1.0s and I probably just used the same logos I already had from SW or ESB.
Actually, ESB v2.0 also uses the same logos as SW v2.0, which were taken from a 35mm print of SW, so if ESB also had the logos slightly different, those are also not perfectly accurate in v2.0 - this will of course be remedied in v2.5, now that we have complete 35mm versions of ESB thanks to TN1.

If I remember correctly, you also used the Fox logo from Alien.

You’re not wrong, but he’s talking about different logos, namely the green Lucasfilm LTD text and then the “A Long Long Time Ago…”

Harmy said:

One thing was the colors - not so much the color choices (even though there I will also want to make some changes, since it became apparent that the scans I used as reference, while still pretty close, were not 100% accurate to what the print actually looks like) but rather color errors, like whites being green, and these color artifacts on people’s faces and stuff like that. But mainly most of the GOUT sourced stuff just stands out to me and I should be able to get some 35mm scans soon and finally get it to the same level as what ESB and ROTJ v2.5 will be with pretty much no standard definition sources used.

By whites being green, do you possibly mean the occasional green tinting in the background while Luke is cleaning R2? That has been driving me crazy, I can’t help but notice it every time now.

Harmy said:

No, actually, v2.5 has always been my original vision - until v3.0 comes out, then that will have always been my original vision 😄

I watched “From Star Wars to Jedi” for the first time in a long while yesterday, and it is unbelievable how many times George put his foot in his future mouth throughout it. He shot so many holes in his Original Vision claims… The only thing he has been consistent about was not liking how the Cantina turned out, everything else he has since completely done the opposite of; from comments about the importance of pacing and the mistakes other filmmakers make of showing off scenery over telling a story (PT implications, all the way), to admitting it was best he didn’t finish the Jabba scene in original Star Wars as it gave him the chance to completely reimagine the design of Jabba. Overall, it was a strangely fun watch with the knowledge we have now.

Zer0Squared said:

captlancemurdock said:

@Zero0Squared - please post the paypal link to donate for the newsletter publishing. I will remain an occasional visitor but even so I’d like to support this effort. Thanks!

While I wouldn’t mind taking peoples’ money for this effort, since Harmy set up the Facebook page (and YouTube, etc), it really doesn’t make sense to continue with the newsletter. People can just 'Like" his page and be notified of his releases when they happen. I think the only people that would benefit are people that don’t have any kind of social media account - and even though there are a few people out there like that, they are in the minority.

Let me know if I’m wrong, guys.

Have you considered just starting extra accounts every time you hit 2,000 subscribers?

Harmy said:

Here’s something interesting:
http://screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/156826/picture:0
http://screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/156826/picture:1

The new logos are definitely 100% accurate to ROTJ, since they come from a 1983 35mm print and yet, the v1.0 logos, taken from GOUT, have very different spacing and fonts.

It is crazy that they are so different, I wonder if the home video intros of the other movies differ from theatrical, as well…

Okay, that’s a good point, if Disney does something “good enough” for the masses, then a project like this (while important to us), would only shrink in perceived importance and impact. In that case, the majority will be happy with their Disney BDs and the heat could be largely off of anyone that wants to tweak things back to theatrical accuracy, like open crawl, specific audio mixes and Fox Fanfare (which may well not survive to a Disney BD).

towne32 said:

yoda-sama said:

At this rate, there are probably only a few occasions to really be concerned about legal action… or during/after an official release of the OOT (if they feel the DeEd could harm sales of a product they’re finally trying to sell).

I love Harmy’s versions. But man, they’d have to really butcher their own release in order to make that a valid concern. Still, they may find a way to manage.

You never know what greedy people will do. There’s already people trying to sell it for a profit as it is, but they could try to pass it off as an early release of the official version or something silly closer to the release date… Product confusion is not looked pleasantly upon. Granted, at that point, they’d probably have better results coming down on those sellers, than messing with Harmy. After that, if Disney screws up an OOT in enough ways that could use the Harmy touch to make it more authentic (using the new official source), then things could get really interesting…

At this rate, there are probably only a few occasions to really be concerned about legal action, that being after The Force Awakens has had its theatrical run (so as not to hurt those ticket sales by upsetting fans who are already unsure about how Disney will treat Star Wars), or during/after an official release of the OOT (if they feel the DeEd could harm sales of a product they’re finally trying to sell). You’d think notoriety would be bad for something in this legal dark-grey area, but it’d be foolish to think this project is at all under the radar, surely people who could do something about it already know about it; they are either choosing not to do anything or biding their time. The damage is done (and they know it is their own fault), and Harmy might as well keep rolling out his improved versions until told otherwise. If anything, Harmy is proving there’s an audience for the OOT (and keeping the faith alive for us die hard OOT fans), which is valuable market research Disney is getting for free; it is not outside of reason for the DeEd to in some way help turn the tide in the right direction (and Disney could just be sitting back and seeing where things go).

blunt182 said:

Is there a possibility of getting a single file for ROTJ?

I want to ideally avoid having to get up and click on parts 1-15.

Is there a way around this such as autoplay?

I’ve tried ‘right click’ --> play all, with VLC before, but it wouldn’t work.

Are you not aware of what a rar is? It is basically like a zip that is split across files (for various reasons, classically used to fit a large file across lots of smaller media, etc.), you’ll need to extract it so as to see the .mkv container file (which is a single file, as you’re hoping for). Just open the first file with an archive extracting program, like 7-zip or winrar or whatever works for you, and it’ll read in the other 14 files automatically and let you extract the full archive. There’ll also be a password to enter before it will let you extract it, and I’m not sure if harmy wants the password mentioned here, so I won’t point it out specifically without his permission, but it should have been stated wherever you got the download links.

That’s exactly the shot that jumped out so well to me that I knew even my wife would be able to tell the difference (she has a certain amount of apathy). It is really nice to see a glimpse of what it should be. Here’s hoping you put as much of that as possible into v2.0.

I think it could also be taken that he thought the guy wanted like a workprint of the films from before they were originally released. But even still, it does show a surprising amount of ignorance about the Star Wars versions (particularly not being aware of the obvious SE transition), especially if he worked in a freaking entertainment store.

00:37:12 Is this where the TIE fighters are supposed to disappear? If so, they don’t.

Wazzles said:

yoda-sama said:

Wazzles said:

What constitutes a glitch in this case? Are SE changes that have been left in considered a glitch?

In response to this edit, yes, an SE change that slips in should be reported, not sure if it is a “glitch” or not in this context, but it would be a must fix for this sort of release.

All I’ve noticed so far are some recomps left in. I won’t point them out since they’re not noticeable unless your going along with the complete changes photos.

Recomps should be noted, as long as they aren’t screen wipes, I believe.

Wazzles said:

What constitutes a glitch in this case? Are SE changes that have been left in considered a glitch?

In response to this edit, yes, an SE change that slips in should be reported, not sure if it is a “glitch” or not in this context, but it would be a must fix for this sort of release.

Wazzles said:

What constitutes a glitch in this case?

He just means unknowns that crop up. Overall, it is better, and he thinks it is good enough to show us, we’ll end up picking it apart and strangely enough make it better.

This is clearly the version to watch, from what I’ve already seen. Just don’t go out of your way to archive it and make it a part of your permanent collection, things will change for the better shortly, but this is better than we could have hoped for even a week ago for pre-TFA viewing.

00:29.30 is that edge enhancement on the people on the skiff outside the window?

00:27:36 pretty sure there is a missing sub about “bring me Solo and the Wookie, they will all pay for this outrage”.

Oh, and to be clearer about what I was saying earlier in my praise of Mega, I literally got parts 2-15 in the time it took to get part 1 from uloz.

Man, I really hate to say it, but I’m liking the film scan parts more than the Blu-ray parts, I think… Would not mind a cleaned up full film scan, I’ll tell you that much, that would be ultimately classic. Anyway, this is all great so far, Harmy.