yoda-sama

For some reason I'd expected theaters would be getting much higher resolution content than what is available to us in a home video format...  Learn something every day.  But they're definitely using better projectors than I have, that much is certain, haha.

Interesting bit of relevant info I stumbled across:  "For Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith the more advanced Sony HDC-F950 was used, with higher resolution and better color reproduction than its predecessor. The film was cropped to a 2.35:1 aspect ratio from its native 16:9 frame. As a result only 817 of the 1080 vertical pixels were actually used."

So, they weren't even working with a full 1080 vertical lines on either digital prequel...  If anything, the Star Wars Saga being released on 4K isn't likely to be much of a concern for us.

There wouldn't be an UHD release of Star Wars unless there were a new remaster done, and that would be a whole new ball game.  Either new color problems, more "nnnnnnNNNNNNNNNNOOOOOOOOOoooooooooo"s, (who knows what else), or even an original version release, since they'd have to go back to the source elements to make the UHD remaster in the first place and George has given up control (how much influence he still has over the property is what remains to be seen).

Granted, Disney hasn't been great about putting out faithful original versions of things (Lion King, etc.), but a lot of their changes are to mask questionable content, so who knows how they'd handle the situation Star Wars is in (and Fox still has rights to Episode 4, which is another matter).

Oh, one question I have, if Lucas only had a 1080p master done, to which he made all his changes, what was he planning to use for the 3D theatrical release?  While I think the project has mostly been scrapped in favor of focusing on producing new movies, it still begs the question of whether he honestly intended to put out 1080p sourced footage to theaters...  Wouldn't that look awful?  And on that note, what kind of source did he use for the '97 theatrical release?  Since it was before the remaster, did he just slap some CGI on top of old film prints, I don't even know how that would all work at the time...  Did they scan it digitally at some resolution and add everything, then put it back on film at a quality worth projecting..... that was all done around '96, for reference Windows 95 had only recently come out... where did the CGI even come from?  Heck, how does Jurassic Park even exist, that was what, made in '92 released in '93?  Plotted on an Amiga Toaster and rendered on SGI Indigo running some form of Unix you say?...  then Toy Story came out in '95 using a Linux render farm, and Linux had only started just 4 years before that release, which is amazing feat of development...  *my brain is starting to hurt*   And even further more, Attack of the Clones was the first SW to be filmed all digitally, so I wonder exactly what resolution he filmed that at (it is not like he had RED cameras available to him), therefore limiting its maximum potential quality as the TV producers get more and more ultra fantastically high definitionally gimmicky....  Wait, where was I going with this?

Ipd, just stick to keep'n it real.

CLV smear shouldn't matter much to Star Wars projects, as the Definitive Edition is CAV (which'd be all around better anyway, what with every frame of the movie being present).

Harmy said:

You can't bypass analog on LD. LD is an analog format - or at least the video is. When you read about the players that could bypass the analog conversion and output digital, it was about audio only - video on LD is always analog.

Sorry, I didn't mean to indicate I believed LD video was stored in a digital form, I just thought I remembered talk of recording from LD's in higher quality by accessing A/V before it was sent to the analog outputs (like s-video was a better analog source than composite, and grabbing it before any of that processing might prove even better).  But now I think about it, it probably was just the DAC they were trying to bypass.

tortugash said:

I have an idea, and it relates to the shots that were omitted from the Special Edition. I was watching this DeEd, and great work! It keeps getting better too with the improved sources in Star Wars v.2.1.

There are some scenes in Empire and Jedi where there were shots outright missing, plugged back in from the GOUT. What a shame. I have been looking through eBay, and I see there are some laserdiscs of the OT, and because many of them don't say Widescreen on the cover, I presume that there are pan-and-scan copies on laserdisc?

Does anyone own these movies in full screen laserdisc? The reason I ask is pertaining to resolution. The GOUT, being non-anamorphic only has a vertical resolution of about 240 pixels. The pan-and-scan on the other hand utilizes the full vertical resolution of 480. Better yet, who owns a PAL pan-and-scan laserdisc with 576 pixels high? What if we rotoscoped the higher resolution subjects from the full screen laserdisc and inserted them over the upscaled GOUT?

Of course, there are parts of the screen missing on the sides in pan-and-scan, but the most important parts of the subject(s) are all there, and so what if the background items are relatively soft. I want to see "Lapti Nek" and discern more detail on Sy Snoodles. The GOUT version is like watching the scene through soup.

The same practice could be applied to many of the shots replaced in Empire and Jedi.

I realize that with older transfers, many other anomalies would still pervade, but the higher res would at least make the subjects clearer and in sharper focus.

While I understand the idea of "bigger must be better", there is the matter of quality.  Laserdisc is no simple medium to transfer from, the vast majority of players all convert the video to analog before outputting, it is only the very rare player that lets you at the A/V digitally.  In the earlier days of originaltrilogy.com there were big projects that were trying to get good laserdisc copies (Definitive Edition, mostly, with the Leia welding scene in ESB intact) to someone in a country (which, I forget) that had a super rare player that you could bypass the analog conversion.  In short, getting a quality digital recording from a Laserdisc source is more involved than you'd think.

Thank you, I'll be here all week.

*crickets*

I believe the first one can use whatever the translation is for "slavery", and the second you can use French equivalents for "equality", "emancipation" or "15th amendment".  Or am I on the wrong page?

Never said that have I, Imperial propaganda this is!

Probably, I just must have missed it.  The important thing anyway is the 2.5 feature quality, everything else is just gravy.

How is school going, you finish your semester yet or are you still facing finals?

So, if you're open to accepting subtitles, does that mean what you showed us is the full documentary rather than a teaser?  Either way, it was enjoyable, though more is always better.

Matt Smithed.

HanDuet said:

Harmy said:

So, I checked out the clip on youtube and it looks like ass due to the horrible compression, so I still highly recommend downloading it from here, because on youtube you can't really appreciate the differences at all.

Hi, Harmy!

As I'm the one who uploaded your Video Sources Documentary to YouTube, I'd be happy to try re-encoding the video at a higher bitrate and upload it again. I'm not encoding master, though I hoped my conversion of your .mkv to an .mp4 container (to allow uploading to YouTube) using the program Handbrake preserved sufficient quality. Unfortunately, I think most of the lost quality is due to YouTube's re-encoding rather than on my end.

Still, I agree with yoda-sama; I think that watching the video at 720p on YouTube shows more than enough detail for your hard work to be appreciated, though even watching lower resolutions allows for the novice to become aware of the incredible effort put into this project. Regardless, I provided plenty of information, including your download link for the video on uloz.to and a link to this forum thread, in the description of the video on YouTube; so those who are truly interested will be able to easily find a better copy.

What limited feedback the video has obtained on YouTube has been generally positive and thanks you for your work, and I've pointed at least one person, who contacted me in response to the video, in the right direction on how to obtain the Despecialized Editions.

Once again, thanks for everything you do! Please let me know if there's anything I can do to help.

Actually, when I process my camcorder videos with Handbrake I always have it output to .mkv (my preference between the two), and upload it as such straight to youtube.  So, in the future, you need not worry as much about what container the video you want to upload is in.  I can understand the confusion, though, since, if nothing else, youtube seems to convert what they receive and store it in a .mp4, which is what they'll let the uploader download it back as...

michealkirschner, I hope that wasn't an attempt at a jedi mind trick on Harmy, I would think he the least susceptible here to such things.

On Youtube, set at 720p quality, I think it looks good enough to get the point across.  Very impressive featurette, showcases the extent of your and everyone's efforts quite well, also very well narrated.  I hope this was just the beginning and that we might see many more side-by-side or before-and-after shots between the BD and the 2.5, also the batha/cantina sequence with all the layers on display was just amazing to watch (though, I'll never be able to look at the head animation the same way now).

Thanks for the anniversary treat.

I believe 'partly' despecialized was a term used a long while back when he was first trying to despecialize from a DVD source.  When he dropped that project in favor of putting his effort into an HDTV-based despecialization (and, I assume, with more confidence that he could do better than just 'partly' put things right), he adjusted the naming scheme.

So, yes, 2.1 or 2.5 of SW, and then 1.0 of ESB and ROTJ for now.

Without Rifftrax it is not as good, though, do you not agree, friend?

Friend, friend, friend...

Your focus is too narrow when it comes to what fixing the holiday special really could be.  Instead of just lightly polishing up one segment, a few years back a brave group addressed the issues of the ENTIRE special, please enjoy (since without their efforts that wouldn't even be possible) http://www.rifftrax.com/rifftrax/star-wars-holiday-special

When you remove a Ronto from a scene, is it fair to call it rontoscoping?

There was so little activity on this thread over the weekend, that obviously we'd have to go out of our way to come up with something to derail the thread with and, in the process, keep ourselves busy.

So, Harmy, this extended silence can only mean amazing things are in the works, right?

I know, but what I found odd was that they bothered to, more or less, add the "the" so they could translate it to French, when it can be argued it didn't really need to be translated in the first place.

Mavimao, that's pretty funny, I hadn't heard about those butchered renamings.

So, knowing the French people were smart enough to figure it out, they didn't think twice about naming a magazine "Starfix", but someone thought a world wide box office smashing film titled "Star Wars" would be confusing?  Always weird how hit and miss translations are on these things.  Something very relevant, now that I think about it, is Eddie Izzard's standup bit about how it makes sense that the Keanu Reeves movie "Speed" would be translated to the French word for "Speed", but instead they inexplicably just left it as "Speed".

Oh, and I love (at least from this scan) how it seems Luke has a red saber and Vader has a blue one.

EDIT:  LOL, Google Translate won't translate "Star Wars" to "la guerre des étoiles" unless I specifically type "The Star Wars", otherwise it just spits out "Star Wars".

EDIT: Is it possible to delete a post?

Also, for movies that have credits at the beginning that are all over the screen, while actual stuff is happening, they often go widescreen for those portions, just look at the DVD of the Burt Reynolds movie Gator (for all you Archer fans out there).  If you ask me, that kind of inconsistency is more annoying than "not having it fit my screen".

When I watched the SE of Empire theatrically in '97, the projectionist screwed up at the beginning playing it horribly squished (not sure how multiplex film projectors work, but it was like they didn't put an anamorphic lens on), well through the Star Destroyer flying by and shooting out probe droids.  They stopped it, said they'd fix it, which they did, but didn't start the film over, and then refocused it on the fly while we're trying to watch the movie *shakes fist*...  Anyway, talk about what seemed like one heck of a weird SE change at first, LOL.

So yeah, perhaps they could show it theatrically a little different than how I remember it from '97...

Oh, and why would you even want them to release it theatrically, they'd just show the crap version we're trying to undo on this site...  But in THREE DEEEEE *whooooooooooooaaaaaaa*