zombie84

Also, Adywan, I know I am pressing my luck here but...

...any plans for a dual-layered release? This thing looks so fantastic that the most complaints I have against the image are from compression artifacting. I don't even have a dual-layered burner but I'd either find one or just continue watching it from my HDD.

Just a thought. Even if it's at a later date, a dual-layered version would be something worthwhile IMO. It might even give you a chance to do additional work on it ;) .

Too bad, the SFX of the hatch is pretty invisible but the shirt was a bit jarring since I wasn't expecting it (especially since the "fix" is wrong in the first place). I'm not sure what it is, but I also thought "bring my shuttle" was a bit tinny and flat, maybe because it's a 2.0 mix patched into a 5.1, but it definitely didn't have the oomph I remembered. But oh well.

Anyway, this is an amazing, amazing piece of work. I haven't enjoyed watching ESB this much since 1997. The blends for the most part are first rate--I was scrutinizing the edges so I could usually tell how Adywan did it, (there's a lot of matte painting scans in Cloud City and Lando's announcement starts as the 2004 release and then blends into the GOUT pretty smoothly), but if I wasn't looking I doubt I would have noticed, it's that good. I do understand what he means when he says an HD version is out of the question--you can see some wobble and grain and detail smearing in the patches if you look closely, you get away with it in SD but it would stand out a lot if the surrounding material was native HD. Too bad. The transfer is so sharp that if you uprezed this for your HD set it would still look awesome though, it's obviously not as good as the native HD broadcasts but it gives them a good run for their money IMO, and it has no retarded coloring to boot. The official transfers look really soft when you stand them up next to Adywan's HD downconversions, and this one is exceptional once again.

Again, thanks Adywan--this thing is quite astounding. I was amazed at how well the footage all blended together and how great the image looks, I'll bet if you told people this was a new HD transfer from an original 35mm source people would believe you.

Ah, okay, makes sense.

PAR2 files are fix corrupted RARs if there are any, so you don't have to re-download.

Just finished watching this and its quite astounding! Thank you so much Adywan. I'm sure this was more work than it looks and everyone will appreciate your efforts immensely.

Question though, I notice Han has his jacket airbrushed off in the carbon freezing scene, this wasn't on the 97 SE but the 2004 SE. How much of this is color-corrected 2004, rather than the 97 AVCHD? And why? Is it because of sharpness? I've never seen the 97 AVCHD and I kept thinking, man I can't believe how good the 97 release looked, but now I feel doubtful since at least some of this is the 2004 HD re-transfered.

Lord__Vader said:

adywan said:

I used the 1080p master file that i used for the SE AVCHD and downscaled this to 480p.

Now unfortunately doing a HD version just won't work. Downscaling the 1080p colour corrected master to 720p still retains most of the detail, but upscaling the GOUT to 720p just really brings out just how bad the quality is when spliced in with 720p video. It just doesn't blend in at all. So the DVD version is all there will be, i'm afraid

 

Correct me if I'm wrong but IMHO as most people now have HDTVs, that means they will be watching this upscaled to HD anyway, only the quality of the upscale will be worse than if it was done in a computer. But I see your point, the LQ elements probably will stand out less, if the quality of the rest is also lower.

 The problem is that his source is native HD for most the film, except for the OOT elements, which are SD Laserdisc, so its not the same as uprezing them both from the same standard, the way it would be if you took the 480 final DVD and uprezed it to 720, the film isn't on equal ground all the way through. Someone could take the DVD that currently exists and make an HD uprez, yes, but what was being discussed was using his actual source material, which is natively HD, and uprezing the GOUT patches so that the whole thing could be natively HD, if I understand it correctly. Instead, Adywan has done the opposite--the main source (an HD SE capture) has been downrezed to match the standard-def GOUT, because it is the only way to blur the inconsistencies between the two sources used. Shame, though. I think if he--or someone else--was really ambitious it could be done though. You would need to plug in some grain reduction and play around with the detail level, and treat more shots as VFX comps, but ESB was among the more subtle SE editions and I think it could be done, it would just require a lot more work.

Wouldn't uprezing a standard def file have about the same effect as just upscaling from your player? Or was this downcoverted from an HD source in the first place?

The Hoth sequence definitely didn't have two or three shots re-comped. Probably more like a dozen. The cockpit shots look like they were just darkened to hide the transparancy though, but most if not all of the speeder shots were re-touched and in some cases had different compositional elements--subtle, yes, but nonetheless re-comped. That's why the sequence had very little grain in 1997. The thing should be grainy as hell, and the GOUT is a testament to that.

It's not really an analagous situation. The theatrical cut of THX was never on DVD, while the OOT was. No large group of people really care that much about THX and aren't vocal about its preservation, while the OOT is the most popular franchise in history and has activist groups and celebrity endorsers trying to get it taken care of. Don't get bummed out so easily.

It definitely is the SE only. At least the special edition of that film is actually pretty good.

Also, just to give another bit of info regarding ED2 vs LFL Pwnage:

-LFLPwnage has most of the edge enhancement as well, it's just less severe. I must imagine this must be on the source file (GOUT). Probably because ED2 is slightly sharper the edges are a bit more apparent.

-LFL Pwnage has the correct Greedo font. The ED 2 looks similar to the official font, but it's bigger and has different layout in some lines. The ED2 subs are much better looking IMO, but they are technically less correct as far as I can tell.

I really wish someone else could see the new Editdroid so opinions on it aren't so one sided (i.e. all of them mine). I recently had the chance to watch this on a large screen television and I was very impressed with how well it held up. I think if it weren't for the aliasing and occassional video noise (and the DVNR stuff) this is the sort of quality many of us would have accepted as a sort of bare-bones OOT-on-DVD official release before the 2004 set. I certainly wouldn't have complained. It looks comparable to many movies from the 1970s transfered to DVD from the earlier days of the format--a bit rough around the edges in the print and not as sharp as a newer film, but appropriately watchable. I guess the same could be said for LFL Pwnage as well.

Okay, so I think I have this figured out. It IS the GOUT. Basically, what they did is ripped the GOUT and put it into photoshop, where it was uprezed to 720p and made 16:9. The gate weave was filtered out, the grain was reduced a little bit, they boosted the fine detail by 75%, and color-corrected it to better match the levels of the Laserdisc itself (a little less saturation, a little less contrast, and a hair red shifted; possibly the black levels were brought down a bit, but the caps I have posted have been black-level crushed in the caps, not the video itself).

So, that's what the video is, as far as I can tell.

I also just finished watching the LFL Pwnage edition, thanks to Kurgan.

I can tell you that IMO, I would prefer ED2. In terms of grain, I would say they are close, Pwnage may be a bit less, but the difference is not really that noteworthy IMO (I was actually a bit disappointed at how little grain reduction Pwnage had, they could go about 10-20% further). However, Pwnage has much too much saturation, at times it pops and becomes distracting like in 2004 SE, which disappointed me and I like the levels of ED2 much more, even if its saturation is a bit washed out at times (I actually thought GOUT was the best representative of color--more than the LD, but not to the point where it was popping); Pwnage has a better luminance to it, but sometimes the black levels crush out detail that ED2 and GOUT preserve. In addition, Pwnage still has aliasing issues--they are reduced, but still there (an improvement, nonetheless though). The clincher for me is the detail level though. ED2 still has more detail in most shots than any other version I have seen. See the example listed before (R2). Pwnage has the exact same detail level as the GOUT (naturally), but ED2 gives some scenes more fine details, such as the extra dirt smears on R2 that are less apparent (or not apparent) on the GOUT/Pwnage since it was treated in Photoshop. Also, because Pwnage is single layered, I definitely noticed some subtle compression artifacts; ED2 is dual-layered and has none. Obviously we are splitting hairs here, but both transfers are so good that this is what it will come down to.

So, I guess whether you like this or LFL Pwnage depends on what is more important to you--a little bit more detail in ED2, or a little less aliasing in LFL Pwnage. But IMO because Pwnage has a bit of compression, too much saturation, and still-apparent aliasing, in addition to its lesser detail, I would still say ED2 is the best transfer of Star Wars to date. I do like that Pwnage has the 2.0 soundtrack though. If someone re-authors ED2 with hairy_hen's 70mm mix in place of the 5.1 here we would be all set.

My girlfriend had never seen a Star Wars film. She helped edit my 600 page book on the films, but she had never actually seen them! She kinda knew the general story, though, since most of her friends would make references to it throughout her life. I finally showed her Star Wars last summer, which she didn't really like. A few weeks later I showed her Empire Strikes Back, but she liked it even less. I stopped there. :p Not her thing, I suppose. Which is weird, because she loves LOTR, Harry Potter, and those sorts of books, and her favourite film of all time is Wizard of Oz.

Moth3r said:

zombie84 said:

He said it was done by a professional editor, who restored the film himself from the LD using professional-grade tools.

This is what your friend said. Not very specific at all.

The DVD video was created using the 1993 non-anamorphic LaserDisc version...

This is the text from the disc itself. Note it say "laserdisc version" and not just "laserdisc". I take this to mean it is sourced from the GOUT DVD.

 Hmm, possibly. A bit misleading if true.

"Then I'd say it has nothing to do with Editdroid - someone somewhere wanted some kudos without the hard work, I guess. Fail ;)"

Perhaps. I don't know why they would want to represent Editdroid, though, if you have a decent thing then you will get the kudos, look at everyone else.

What I don't get is why does the technical description get into some very, very specific information in deriving from an LD? If this is just the GOUT, it seems to reason that they would just state this; most people already seem to assume that it's better than any possible LD capture anyway, so it might even make you seem more legit. And even if you used the GOUT, why fabricate a fairly elaborate process of capturing from an LD? There's no way there could be "confusion" here--either this is more or less as it says, or they simply fabricated it all, and why would they do that? The description of the audio is correct at least, it is the 2004 5.1 with 1993 surround patches, and a mono mix from the Mono Restoration Project.

Something really doesn't add up here.

Also, the GOUT has way more aliasing on R2's red glowy thing. Look at ED2--a tiny bit, but only a bit. But ED2 clearly had zero aliasing filters done to it. This again tells me that ED2 started from something different than the GOUT. But then there is the Leia framing issue. So maybe it's an LD base with certain GOUT shots? I don't know now.

Red5 said:

zombie84 said:

Moth3r said:

From closer examination of the screenshots, I believe this is actually another GOUT-sourced Custom DVD, and not a laserdisc capture at all.

 Why is that?

Also, if they had taken the GOUT and re-worked it, why wouldn't they just state that, as that would, on the surface, seem like a more sensible solution to most people?

 

The screenshots are framed exactly as the NTSC GOUT DVD although upscaled to 16:9, and they show the exact same amount of picture information.

The known LDs (faces and DC) have slightly less picture information left and right and slightly more up and down compared to the GOUT.

Maybe the term "LD source" or "LaserDisc version" have been somewhat confused by LFL GOUT 'DVD' release as they used the old 1993 master that was in fact only intended for LD and VHS releases.

 

ED2 top, GOUT bottom

 

See, this is what I meant when I said ED2 was more detailed in some shots. Look at the dirt marks on R2. Look at the scuffs on his right arm--ED2 clearly has more detail there, while in GOUT it is soft. Look at the dirt under his front blue chest pannels--ED2 again shows more detail while the GOUT has them smoothed. Could it be possible to get this extra detail from the GOUT as a source? I know the GOUT is the LD, but it's a transfer with it's own qualities,  which makes it an intermediary just like the LD, which means the LD could in theory offer an advantage of more detail to be pulled. To me, this shot looks like a whole new transfer itself, rather than a spruced up GOUT. Anyone else?

I sent an e-mail to Bill Hunt at Digital Bits. He was a big supporter and voice of public criticism back in 2006. I'm hoping he can maybe give us a spotlight and provide us with a more specific address/person to direct our protests to at LFL.

The DVD itself doesn't look that way. The frame was squeezed when I exported it from Virtualdub. The proportions when I play the disk are as it should be, the way Apt Irrelevance shows it.

Darth Editious: You misunderstand me--the technical description with bold titles in the first post is taken from the DVD itself. It is onscreen text when you go to "extras". This describes capturing from an LD. I can't confirm any of this, I'm just reporting what the DVD says. This is my only source of information, aside from what my friend told me.

Also: "The vertical cropping, at least on the first couple of screenshots, is wider than the GOUT - or the PAL GOUT, at least." So are you saying this release has more picture area than the GOUT? The PAL GOUT is cropped compared to the NTSC keep in mind. Also, as for the screenshots, yes they are taken from the DVD but the characteristics always change for scrutinizing the shots when you capture--in actuality, the black levels are not quite so dark, there is a bit better mid-range detail (for example, the second star destroyer shot has the stars much more visible compared to the cap), and the caps seem a hair softer as well. I captured using VirtualDub and pasted them into photoshop where I created a JPEG, so its not 100% exact what the images look like, but its close enough.

However, back on topic, even if this is from the GOUT, it has clearly been re-worked in some manner. The coloring is slightly different, first off, the gate weave is more or less gone, and the grain has been reduced a bit. In addition, the contrast and black levels are a bit different, with more burned out highlights but more mid-range detail. And Editdroid burned in the subs using a recreated font. So it's clearly been heavily tweaked in post if this is the case. Moth3R is right about the framing, but I'm not sure this is the case in every shot--the rebel trooper shot, for instance, looks the same as the Cowclops framing. But the Leia shot clearly matches the GOUT with its extra space on the right where you see most of the stormtrooper's eye. Is it possible that some shots are GOUT? The opening shot/crawl clearly is. Could this be why Editdroid was only working with 120,000(+) frames, insetad of 200,000+ or whatever the proper amount would be? I'm hesitant to believe its 100% the GOUT simply because the DVD explicitly details using the LD as a base because it was felt to be the best available version, and has all sorts of details about using photoshop to upscale, extract detail, etc. Again, the technical description of the transfer's creation is not mine, it is taken from the DVD itself.

Moth3r said:

From closer examination of the screenshots, I believe this is actually another GOUT-sourced Custom DVD, and not a laserdisc capture at all.

 Why is that?

Also, if they had taken the GOUT and re-worked it, why wouldn't they just state that, as that would, on the surface, seem like a more sensible solution to most people?

doubleofive said:

Who in their right mind is going to sell the OOT versions separately, or the OT at all? "Man, I bought this giant Blu-ray set, but I only wanted the prequels! Maybe somebody online wants the crappy old ones..."

;-)

 The one time the OOT has been sold since VHS/Laserdisc has been as separate titles, so... :p

Also, Kurgan asked what this released is called. I don't know what the official title would be. I'm calling it Editdroid2, but I guess it is actually the third Editdroid disk of the film, but I believe the first two were the same transfer.

The disk file shows up as STAR_WARS_1977 and the menu titles it as Star Wars 1977 Theatrical Release, which may be the name it should be considered under (perhaps along with an "Editdroid" suffix or prefix).

All I know is what is written there, since I don't know the Editdroid team personally.

Knightmessenger: I am guessing they used the LD because there are some advantages over the official DVD. For one, there is better mid-range detail compared to the GOUT. The GOUT may have used the master, but the GOUT is still a transfer with it's own qualities, which makes it an intermediary, just like the LD. Since the detail level is the same as the GOUT but the grain level is not, I am guessing the GOUT transfer was put through sharpening processing to make it look better, which is why the grain is so overly coarse. Because ED2 is not just a straight capture--they put it in photoshop to use sharpening filters/contrast manipulation to boost the detail by 75%. But I am guessing the GOUT used a similar process by the equivalent of 100%, except there is a threshhold where picture detail does not increase and you just keep making the grain more outlined. So in this sense, it seems Editdroid's decision to go with the LD was a wise one. Number two, I think the LD itself had stabilization applied to it, while the master which the GOUT is based on did not. So again, the LD is superior. If you say that the aliasing is on the GOUT as well, then there really is no reason to start with the GOUT. The notion that it is more detailed is eroneous, as long as you can pull the LD into photoshop and tinker a bit (and, I must assume, have a really good LD hardware to begin with--no clue as to what they used). I guess Editdroid suspected that the GOUT transfer itself wasn't as good as the LD, and he kind of is correct.

As to if he used the same techniques on the DVD instead: all he did was really tinker with some contrast to bring out fine detail. But there is only so much detail to recover. The GOUT reached the point where no more image detail was coming out and you kept revealing successive grain layers, so there is a distinct ceiling. Working from the GOUT as the starting point, instead of trying to get more detail you are just trying to hide detail (grain reduction), which is a main premise behind G-Force project. Plus the stabilization, which was the starting point of G-Force, which you avoid if you go to the LD. You only have aliasing, which apparently GOUT has too. It was a missed opportunity by Editdroid to not smooth out some of that though, not sure why he didn't.

Darth Editious: Why would the floating probe droid indicate it's the 1997 SE mix. He says he used the 2004 mix, which has the droid. Also he said 120,000+ frames, the + being key. I don't know, maybe he had some friends of his cover the image restoration, and so the description is off. Or maybe he just did it that way. Is there a particular reason why you can't uprez it first before you start manipulating it?

G-Force's script obviously is cleaner looking, but IMO it's too clean. It looks like video from some of the shots I've seen, I don't feel like I am watching a film from the 1970s. I guess it depends on your taste. I like that I can see the shimmer of the film density and grain from the emulsion, personally, the cleanliness is nice but you can only take it so far. The other issue is that g-force's stuff it's so impossibly technical for many people, I have absolutely no clue when it comes to scripting stuff. Not to take away from his work, it is extraordinary. But then the source video has it's own set of problems; this one has more clipping in the hot spots, but it has more detail in the darks and the mid ranges. The only real strike against it IMO is the occassionaly laserdisc jaggies--maybe someone could do a script to solve that. I've also been noticing that a lot of the g-force scripting experiments result in scrubbing out some detail, which is almost inevitable when you start trying to erase grain through automated processes. You can see this with the R2 shot with 3P0's arm, DarkJedi's encode scrubs off that great detail just to get rid of the grain that shouldn't be a huge problem in the first place (again, not to take away from the great work they are doing). The script needs further work, but I'm not sure if it will ever get to the point where it could preserve sharpness, preserve some grain, while also not introducing contrast and artifact issues. I suppose it comes down to preference here. The Lucasfilm pwnage version looks very promising, it preserves detail and seems to have left some grain, but I have yet to see it. I think it's good to have the new ED version as an alternative.

hairy_hen, I am guessing the 2004 mix was used because it is the only way to watch the film in 5.1 without making your own mix from scratch, which would be either impossible or too much work. I look forward to your 70mm mix though, maybe one day someone will re-author this with that mix replacing the current 5.1, I would certainly love that.

Yeah, this is the sister project of People Vs George Lucas. It's pretty hilarious, a lot of the clips are in the movie, probably to avoid copyright by showing the real scenes. Good stuff!