This is not a particularly sophisticated project, and indeed although it's watchable I'm not necessarily finished with it. It was basically my first shot at mucking about with AviSynth (with some advice from this forum, actually) because I couldn't see a better way of doing it.
This is the 1997 featurette ANATOMY OF A DEWBACK, about the process of doing ungodly "Special Edition" CGI modifications to the "look sir, droids" sequence in STAR WARS (1977). It was originally released in five very short (~5 min) "episodes" exclusively on the official Star Wars website (and yeah, this was 1997 so it was a really really awful 240p, 24fps RealPlayer stream) and although later released in its entirety on Blu-ray in both 2011 and 2020, they screwed it up pretty badly both times, which annoyed me enough to try to fix it up a bit.
The original 1997 web video is long since deleted, but I kept a recorded copy of the files and recently dug them out to have a look. The video appears to be 320 x 240 pixels (4:3) but this includes black letterboxing; without the letterboxing it’s more like 320 x 192 px, which is a somewhat unusual aspect ratio of 5:3. Although this is the native aspect ratio of 16 mm film, this featurette seems to have been shot on video so it’s probably more significant to note that 5:3 was used in some countries as an early “widescreen” format for a while, presumably as a compromise between theatrical 1.85:1 and 1.33:1 (a.k.a. 4:3) home video. This original version looks something like this, if you crop off the letterboxing from the top and bottom:
On the 2011 Blu-ray, the featurette was for some reason encoded to display as (almost) 5:3 “widescreen” on a 4:3 television screen. The trouble is, even in 2011, those were a dying breed, and definitely aren’t anywhere near as prevalent in 2020. The result of this is that the vast majority of people will watch this on a 16:9 screen, but the “widescreen” image will not even come close to filling the display on account of being restricted by the 4:3 box. The actual image is a very rough looking 700 x 430 or so pixels, inside a 720 x 540 pixel 4:3 frame. It’s “open matte” to some degree as it hasn’t been framed correctly for this release, but it’s also skewed toward one side, with the left side not cropped enough and the right side slightly over-cropped compared to the old web video. It also appears to have been slightly squashed horizontally. That one looks like this:
The 2020 Blu-ray is different again, with the image being about 720 x 440 but this time it’s been cropped much more noticeably on the right-hand side than the 2011 transfer was. As a result, it can’t be restored back to an accurate representation of the original framing, and to be honest, it looks like crap overall when compared to the 2011 version. It’s also noticeably stretched horizontally, from less than 700 px (I’m guessing 640 px) to 720 px:
Since the least cropped (and least aliased) reasonably modern source seems to be the 2011 disc, I cropped and upscaled that (without sharpening the hell out of it) to fill a 16:9 screen, in order to ditch the letterboxing and attempt to fix (as far as possible) the slightly deformed aspect ratio. Since a bit had been cut off the right hand side, I also cropped a little bit off the left to recentre the image, adding equal borders on the left and right to fill a 16:9 screen and upscaling to 720p. Since the source was interlaced, standard definition NTSC, I deinterlaced it with QTGMC. Do not expect this to look like HD footage, because it’s not, and it shows… but it’s a heck of a lot better than the 56k web streaming version and is framed better than either of the official Blu-ray Disc versions as well.
Here’s the 1997 web version with the letterboxing removed, then the remaining frame upscaled to fill a 5:3 frame inside a full-screen 16:9 display, to show what the ideal framing would look like:
Then the same thing but cropped in slightly on all sides to better match the available picture information in the 2011 Blu-ray version (since the 2011 BD version is slightly cropped on the right as well, I cropped in on all sides to restore the original 5:3 aspect ratio):
This was used to work out the most accurate crop and size adjustments for the 2011 video.
The end result is a precisely 5:3 frame with black bars at the sides to fill a 16:9 screen at 720p, instead of a tiny 5:3 frame inside a 4:3 box in the middle (which would have been great when we all used 4:3 TVs but is extremely inconvenient nowadays). It could most definitely look better and the image is still not 100% accurately re-warped to match the exact aspect ratio of the web vid but then it's entirely possible that was wrong in the first place anyway; if I knew more about upscaling and had access to tools like AI sharpening (rather than simple AviSynth filters that create ringing artefacts worse than what you already see below) then perhaps I could achieve better results. I did try just about every resizing filter I could find any info on, and this appeared to be the one that produced the least artefacts. I've also left it in the original BT.601 NTSC colour space rather than outputting BT.709, which may or may not be wise (open to suggestions, would be easy to re-render out BT.709 instead).
Anyway, here's how it ended up after the above:
THIS IS A FAN-MADE PRESERVATION OF BONUS CONTENT FOR A FILM I CARE DEEPLY ABOUT (AND HAVE LEGITIMATELY PURCHASED MANY COPIES OF). I DO NOT ENCOURAGE PIRACY. If you are downloading this, then I consider it a prerequisite that you already own an officially released version of what you are downloading. If you don't, then you should purchase a copy before downloading, as long as that item remains available for purchase. If it has gone out of print, then perhaps a digital copy is available. If no physical or digital copy is available to purchase and you don't already own one, then you are downloading at your own discretion. At time of writing, both the 2011 and 2020 box sets containing this video are still available for purchase.
Furthermore, THE CONTENTS OF THIS DOWNLOAD MUST NOT BE PARTIALLY OR FULLY REPRODUCED FOR PROFIT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES WHATSOEVER.
Thank you for understanding.
(This post was last modified: 2020-08-18, 02:36 PM by pipefan413.)
This is the 1997 featurette ANATOMY OF A DEWBACK, about the process of doing ungodly "Special Edition" CGI modifications to the "look sir, droids" sequence in STAR WARS (1977). It was originally released in five very short (~5 min) "episodes" exclusively on the official Star Wars website (and yeah, this was 1997 so it was a really really awful 240p, 24fps RealPlayer stream) and although later released in its entirety on Blu-ray in both 2011 and 2020, they screwed it up pretty badly both times, which annoyed me enough to try to fix it up a bit.
The original 1997 web video is long since deleted, but I kept a recorded copy of the files and recently dug them out to have a look. The video appears to be 320 x 240 pixels (4:3) but this includes black letterboxing; without the letterboxing it’s more like 320 x 192 px, which is a somewhat unusual aspect ratio of 5:3. Although this is the native aspect ratio of 16 mm film, this featurette seems to have been shot on video so it’s probably more significant to note that 5:3 was used in some countries as an early “widescreen” format for a while, presumably as a compromise between theatrical 1.85:1 and 1.33:1 (a.k.a. 4:3) home video. This original version looks something like this, if you crop off the letterboxing from the top and bottom:
On the 2011 Blu-ray, the featurette was for some reason encoded to display as (almost) 5:3 “widescreen” on a 4:3 television screen. The trouble is, even in 2011, those were a dying breed, and definitely aren’t anywhere near as prevalent in 2020. The result of this is that the vast majority of people will watch this on a 16:9 screen, but the “widescreen” image will not even come close to filling the display on account of being restricted by the 4:3 box. The actual image is a very rough looking 700 x 430 or so pixels, inside a 720 x 540 pixel 4:3 frame. It’s “open matte” to some degree as it hasn’t been framed correctly for this release, but it’s also skewed toward one side, with the left side not cropped enough and the right side slightly over-cropped compared to the old web video. It also appears to have been slightly squashed horizontally. That one looks like this:
The 2020 Blu-ray is different again, with the image being about 720 x 440 but this time it’s been cropped much more noticeably on the right-hand side than the 2011 transfer was. As a result, it can’t be restored back to an accurate representation of the original framing, and to be honest, it looks like crap overall when compared to the 2011 version. It’s also noticeably stretched horizontally, from less than 700 px (I’m guessing 640 px) to 720 px:
Since the least cropped (and least aliased) reasonably modern source seems to be the 2011 disc, I cropped and upscaled that (without sharpening the hell out of it) to fill a 16:9 screen, in order to ditch the letterboxing and attempt to fix (as far as possible) the slightly deformed aspect ratio. Since a bit had been cut off the right hand side, I also cropped a little bit off the left to recentre the image, adding equal borders on the left and right to fill a 16:9 screen and upscaling to 720p. Since the source was interlaced, standard definition NTSC, I deinterlaced it with QTGMC. Do not expect this to look like HD footage, because it’s not, and it shows… but it’s a heck of a lot better than the 56k web streaming version and is framed better than either of the official Blu-ray Disc versions as well.
Here’s the 1997 web version with the letterboxing removed, then the remaining frame upscaled to fill a 5:3 frame inside a full-screen 16:9 display, to show what the ideal framing would look like:
Then the same thing but cropped in slightly on all sides to better match the available picture information in the 2011 Blu-ray version (since the 2011 BD version is slightly cropped on the right as well, I cropped in on all sides to restore the original 5:3 aspect ratio):
This was used to work out the most accurate crop and size adjustments for the 2011 video.
The end result is a precisely 5:3 frame with black bars at the sides to fill a 16:9 screen at 720p, instead of a tiny 5:3 frame inside a 4:3 box in the middle (which would have been great when we all used 4:3 TVs but is extremely inconvenient nowadays). It could most definitely look better and the image is still not 100% accurately re-warped to match the exact aspect ratio of the web vid but then it's entirely possible that was wrong in the first place anyway; if I knew more about upscaling and had access to tools like AI sharpening (rather than simple AviSynth filters that create ringing artefacts worse than what you already see below) then perhaps I could achieve better results. I did try just about every resizing filter I could find any info on, and this appeared to be the one that produced the least artefacts. I've also left it in the original BT.601 NTSC colour space rather than outputting BT.709, which may or may not be wise (open to suggestions, would be easy to re-render out BT.709 instead).
Anyway, here's how it ended up after the above:
THIS IS A FAN-MADE PRESERVATION OF BONUS CONTENT FOR A FILM I CARE DEEPLY ABOUT (AND HAVE LEGITIMATELY PURCHASED MANY COPIES OF). I DO NOT ENCOURAGE PIRACY. If you are downloading this, then I consider it a prerequisite that you already own an officially released version of what you are downloading. If you don't, then you should purchase a copy before downloading, as long as that item remains available for purchase. If it has gone out of print, then perhaps a digital copy is available. If no physical or digital copy is available to purchase and you don't already own one, then you are downloading at your own discretion. At time of writing, both the 2011 and 2020 box sets containing this video are still available for purchase.
Furthermore, THE CONTENTS OF THIS DOWNLOAD MUST NOT BE PARTIALLY OR FULLY REPRODUCED FOR PROFIT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES WHATSOEVER.
Thank you for understanding.