- Star Wars Despecialized 2.5
- Star Wars Despecialized Versions
- Star Wars Despecialized Edition Torrent
- Star Wars Despecialized Edition Poster
- Star Wars Despecialized Torrent
- Star Wars Despecialized Mega
By Daniel Miller
Updated December 15, 2015 14:35:10
Director George Lucas used special effects to make controversial changes to his Star Wars series. Now one fan is trying to restore the originals.
In April 2011, a dedicated Star Wars fan named Harmy released a landmark film edit called the Star Wars Despecialized Edition. Where most fan edits seek to build new stories out of existing footage or 'fix' films by cutting out unpopular scenes (like the majority of Attack of the Clones, for example), the Despecialized Edition did something novel. Half in the Bag: George Lucas/Star Wars discussion episode - Reviews Hello Greedo (Despecialized edition + Film review) Jeremy Jahns (Despecialized edition + Film review) Chris Stuckmann (Film review only) Star Wars IV - A New Hope DISC 2 - 25GB Blu-ray Disc DOCUMENTARY DISC - Jamie Benning’s ‘Star Wars Begins’ Filmumentary (2hrs 20mins). There have been various fan-made restorations of the original Star Wars trilogy over the years, most famously the 'Despecialized Edition,' which just released an updated Return of the Jedi earlier. It is my telecine transfer and restoration of a 16mm print of Star Wars Ep.VI, Return of the Jedi. The film was borrowed from a source who wishes to remain anonymous, and who for now will go by the name Jaxxon. This is the same Jaxxon that provided me with the two prints used to make the Puggo Grande, and the print that is being used to make.
Introduction
'People who alter or destroy works of art and our cultural heritage for profit or as an exercise of power are barbarians.' — George Lucas, 1988
A long time ago
In 1988 George Lucas issued a statement to the US Congress rallying against movie studios releasing altered classic films, and urging the preservation of the unaltered works.
'Tomorrow, more advanced technology will be able to replace actors with 'fresher faces', or alter dialogue and change the movement of the actor's lips to match,' he predicted, emphasising 'our cultural history must not be allowed to be rewritten'.
Decades later fans are now trying to preserve the cultural history of the Star Wars films, which Lucas blotted out with successive 'Special Edition' revisions.
Academy Award-winning practical effects were covered up with 1997-era computer graphics (CGI) that now look sorely dated. Actors and voiceover work were replaced and story elements changed, most famously the 'Han Solo shot Greedo first' debacle.
This would all be fine, says 'Despecialised Edition' project creator Petr Harmy, except for the fact that Lucas made it his mission not to make the classic versions of the films available again in decent video quality.
In a 2004 interview Lucas famously said, 'I'm sorry you saw a half-completed film and fell in love with it. But I want it to be the way I want it to be.'
Harmy and other fans have been painstakingly restoring the original trilogy, frame by frame in high definition, as close as possible to the version released in cinemas.
He has been sourcing and splicing footage together from 35mm film, a 1993 master released on DVD, HDTV broadcasts and the high-definition Special Edition Blu-Ray release, in order to produce a HD version of the films without any traces of Lucas's changes.
A fan emerges
Harmy, a 27-year-old former English teacher from the Czech Republic, seems an unlikely candidate to lead the charge to restore Star Wars.
He was not even born when audiences were first introduced to a Star Destroyer crawling across their cinema screens in 1977 and he has no background in film editing.
'I remember seeing Star Wars on TV when I was about five,' he says. 'I have a distinct recollection of seeing the [Death Star] trench run on TV.
'Then later I got a copy of an old VHS of the original version of Star Wars which I watched so much as a kid that I totally wore it out.'
For the sequels, The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, he watched Lucas's Special Editions first and then later hunted down the originals.
'It took a lot of effort to find the original versions on VHS here in the Czech Republic,' Harmy says. 'It was one of the greatest Star Wars moments for me when I finally got to watch it.
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'Though it also made me pretty angry when I realised that some of the special effects shots I was admiring so much were actually re-composited digitally [in the Special Editions] and thus lost much of their historical value.'
The last look Star Wars fans got at the original unaltered trilogy was in 2006 when old, un-restored masters also used for the Laserdisc versions were again used to make a limited run of companion DVDs for inclusion in a set with their Special Edition variants.
These editions also had their issues: the frames were not cleaned up, they were based off a master that was made with 1993 technology rather than the latest advances, and importantly, the DVDs were not anamorphic - enhanced for widescreen TV - or in high definition.
Star Wars Despecialized 2.5
Until fans took charge, the original Star Wars trilogy had never been released in restored quality without Lucas's changes.
'I wanted to be able to show people who haven't seen Star Wars yet, like my little brother or my girlfriend, the original Oscar-winning version but I didn't want to have to show it to them in bad quality,' Harmy says.
'Cultural vandalism'
Ffserver windows binary download. Lucas changed a myriad of things in his Special Editions: from adding in CGI characters and backgrounds to changing audio — like bounty hunter Boba Fett's voice and making Darth Vader scream 'Nooooo!' during Luke's final confrontation with the Emperor.
The ghost of Anakin Skywalker, played by Sebastian Shaw, was expunged from the end of Return of the Jedi and replaced with Hayden Christensen.
Lucas even went so far as to make nuanced changes like removing Anakin Skywalker's eyebrows during the scene where his helmet is removed by Luke.
Plus there is the issue of whether Han Solo shot Greedo first in the cantina on Tatooine (he did), and the inclusion of Jar Jar Binks's race, the Gungans, at the end of the final film ('Weesa free!' one of them cries).
'I have no problem with extended or director's cuts of movies at all but only as long as the original cut is also available in comparable quality,' Harmy says.
'Like Blade Runner, when you buy that set on Blu-Ray, you get beautiful HD transfers of all five existing versions.
'The original visual effects in Star Wars were completely groundbreaking at the time and trying to suppress the original versions is, in my opinion, an act of cultural vandalism.
'It's an attempt to bury the work of those artists who spent thousands of hours working all the Oscar-winning art that was altered or replaced in the Special Editions.'
Restoring a legend
'Sometimes some of the smallest changes were the most difficult to undo,' says Harmy, who taught himself film editing skills as he went.
Some shots have taken him an hour to restore, others hundreds of hours — it varies with the complexity of the scene.
One of the most difficult scenes was in A New Hope where a CGI droid from Lucas's Special Edition moves through the background as Stormtroopers walk along on the planet Tatooine. Wellhead control panel iom manual pdf.
'The little droid flies through the scene and I had to replace everything it covered up, but also make sure that everything that is supposed to be in the foreground is there,' Harmy says.
'I would always find some new problem - some edge of some object would move wrong, or the background would warp, or the shadows on the ground were wrong and there were like 50 layers, so it was difficult to find where the problem was. That one gave me a lot of headaches.
'If I had a 35mm HD source for it, it probably would have been a piece of cake, but this way it was super difficult.'
Harmy used the limited 2006 DVD release of the untouched trilogy, which was based on a 1993 master, to patch footage without the droid into a shot from the HD Blu-Ray release. He also had to create custom layered 'mattes' to make the patchwork scene appear seamless.
Aside from patching footage from a variety of sources, one of the major tasks was colour correction.
Lucas's DVD and Blu-Ray releases did a poor job of keeping the colour palette of the original films, and also introduced 'glaring errors', Harmy says.
In one scene on the Millennium Falcon Luke's lightsaber is tinged green in the Blu-Ray release, but it should have been blue.
The entire trilogy on Blu-Ray also has a magenta tone that messes with the look of the film, he says.
Star Wars Despecialized Versions
Harmy had to colour-correct each shot to how the original would have looked using a scan of a Technicolor print.
The Despecialised Edition project has been helped along by the works of other Star Wars fans dedicated to the same cause, who Harmy knows online as: Dark Jedi, YouToo, Pugo, Team Negative 1, Belbucus, Hairy_Hen, CatBus and Laserschwert.
Fans have provided audio restorations, scanned 35mm film reels, upscaled footage and redone subtitle tracks.
Work needed to be done cleaning up scanned film reels to remove visual artefacts like scratches and dirt, and some of the aged footage was severely pink-faded, requiring the original colour palette to be sourced elsewhere.
Punch it
It has taken years to the restore the films to the point they are in Despecialised, but even now they are not perfect and likely will never be 'complete', Harmy says.
'Despecialised is not a true restoration, it's a mashup of different sources of varying quality and it has always been meant to only be a placeholder until such time that a true restoration from 100 per cent authentic original sources becomes available.'
Harmy has no plans to revisit his edition of A New Hope any time soon and Empire Strikes Back has had its 2.0 release, leaving a redo of Return of the Jedi's 1.0 version with better tools and footage the next focus.
What should I read next?
Harmy's Despecialised Edition is well known among Star Wars fans online but it is only available to download as a legally questionable torrent.
So far, Lucas and new Star Wars franchise owners Disney have let Harmy be.
Since the franchise was sold, Harmy hopes it now means an official release of the original trilogy is possible.
'[Disney] have the resources and I think if they hit the right nostalgia strings with the marketing, they stand to make huge profits from the release,' he says.
But for Harmy, the project is a hobby that has changed his career trajectory.
The former English teacher has now taken a job at Ultraflix, where he is working to prepare and restore films for Ultra-HD 4K streaming.
Credits
- Reporting: Daniel Miller
- Pictures and video: Lucasfilm/Petr Harmy
- Design: Ben Spraggon
- Development: Colin Gourlay
- Editor: Matt Liddy
Topics:film-movies, arts-and-entertainment, science-and-technology, computers-and-technology, czech-republic
First posted December 14, 2015 06:57:55
The real Star Wars--the original film, with all its imperfections visible for all to see--is finally here.
Star Wars Despecialized Edition Torrent
In April 2011, a dedicated Star Wars fan named Harmy released a landmark film edit called the Star Wars Despecialized Edition. Where most fan edits seek to build new stories out of existing footage or 'fix' films by cutting out unpopular scenes (like the majority of Attack of the Clones, for example), the Despecialized Edition did something novel. It tried to make Star Wars Star Wars again. No CG Jabba, no touched up special effects. Han Solo guns down Greedo without the blink of an eye.
It's not so much a fan edit as a fan preservation. Harmy went on to give The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi the same treatment, cobbling together footage from HDTV rips and upscaled DVD and laserdisc footage. Fans rallied around the Despecialized editions around the time Star Wars was released on Blu-ray with even more unnecessary changes.
Amazing as it was, the Despecialized Edition wasn't perfect, and Harmy spent another year working on a huge 2.0 release. This time he had the Blu-rays as a source, and he based an extensive color correction of the entire film off a very special fade-free technicolor print. He made countless changes to restore every element of the film to the way it was seen 35 years ago. The result: Despecialized Edition Remastered looks even better. Better than version 1.0. Better than Blu-ray.
A thread on the Star Wars Original Trilogy forums chronicles Harmy's progress throughout the preservation project. Like all their fan edits, this one is meant to be viewed by people who already paid for and own a copy of Star Wars in some form--this is not meant for public sale or distribution.
Want to know more about the Despecialized Editions? I did an interview with Harmy about the 1.0 version last year. Read on for a detailed look at the history of the project.
Behind the Scenes of Harmy's Star Wars 'Despecialized Edition' originally published on Screened.com September 22, 2011
There are pieces of Star Wars that will forever be ingrained in my mind. 20th Century Fox's opening fanfare can only herald the beginning of John Williams' iconic score. The sorrow and power of Binary Sunset in A New Hope and of Han Solo and the Princess in The Empire Strikes Back will stay with me forever. But somehow, one of my strongest memories of Star Wars was never in the films at all; it's from the trailer attached to the 1995 VHS re-release of the original trilogy. Even if they were never uttered in the films themselves, these words had a gravity to them. They felt like Star Wars.
For those who remember. For those who will never forget. And for a whole new generation who will experience it for the very first time..
The 1995 release, unchanged but for the remastered THX audio, was dubbed 'The Original Star Wars trilogy on video..one last time.' That was true enough--Special Edition followed two years later, and those who will never forget the original trilogy have fallen into a cycle of disappointment and dismay with every subsequent re-release. There are countless justifications for hating the Special Editions, from shoddy coloring mistakes to unnecessary CG alien additions, but one towers above the rest. The original Star Wars is a cultural landmark worthy of preservation--along with films like Birth of a Nation, Metropolis, and Citizen Kane, Star Wars had an incalculable impact on the language of film, and Han Solo stepping on CG Jabba's tail had nothing to do with it.
George Lucas has, perhaps, lost sight of that fact. His fans haven't. While most of us can't do more than complain, one member of the Original Trilogy Star Wars forum has gone above and beyond to restore Star Wars to its original (imperfect) form. Harmy, a 23 year-old student living in the Czech Republic, has spent most of 2011 working on his own Despecialized Editions of the original trilogy--ironically restoring the vision Lucas wandered from in the past 15 years.
With new changes in the Blu-ray releases stirring up rage and Vader Noooos across the Internet, Harmy's work has suddenly exploded in popularity. Fed up with CG insertions but desperate for a better picture than the letterboxed Laserdisc rips included on the 2004 DVDs? Harmy's Despecialized Editions are the closest you're going to get.
And here's the crazy part: Harmy didn't spend seven months undoing Lucas' damage with state-of-the-art editing software or a beastly octo-core desktop workstation. As he explained to me in an email interview, he works with the humble tools available to him: an old laptop, outdated Adobe After Effects, and consumer-grade editing software. Why? Because the original films deserve to be preserved.
'I used to have a copy of a copy of an old VHS (the original version) which I watched so much as a kid that I totally wore it out,' Harmy wrote. 'Actually in the case of TESB and ROTJ I saw the Special Editions first and it took a lot of effort to find the original versions on VHS here in the Czech Republic. And it was one of the awesomest STAR WARS moments for me when I finally got to watch the original versions of these films (though it also made me pretty angry when I realized that some of the Special FX shots I was admiring so much were actually recomposited and thus lost much of their historical value).'
Harmy originally got the idea to 'despecialize' Star Wars when he found out an old girlfriend had never seen the movies. He wanted to show her the original, rather than the Special Edition, and ended up settling for the Laserdisc rip on the 2004 DVDs (often referred to as GOUT, or George's Original Unaltered Theatrical versions).
Long before starting the Despecialized project in 2011, Harmy had tried splicing the GOUT DVD footage into a 720p rip of Empire using Windows Movie Maker. The results weren't pretty, but he came back to the idea three years later and started work on a Partly Despecialized Edition of the trilogy, removing the most egregious SE changes. Those edits eventually rolled into the full Despecialized Editions he worked on this year, beginning with The Empire Strikes Back in February and ending with Return of the Jedi in August.
In addition to cutting out Special Edition scenes, Harmy color corrected each film--which involved matching up all of his disparate source videos--to mimic the original versions as closely as possible. Working with an HDTV rip as a base, he upscaled content from the GOUT DVDs, created custom mattes to hide Special Edition changes, and used extensive rotoscoping to piece the changes together.
Star Wars Despecialized Edition Poster
Just a few of his most impressive edits are scattered throughout this article--hundreds more are compiled in a Picasa gallery here.
Even with Star Wars finally out on Blu-ray, Harmy doesn't plan to start the projects from scratch.
'I also decided against using the Blu-Rays as a source for the new versions, as I’d still have to work in 720p and from the comparisons I've seen between the Blu-Rays and the highest quality HDTV captures, the difference is so small (being the same resolution from the same master) that it wouldn't be worth it,' he explained.
But the Despecialized project isn't over and done with just yet.
'I’m working on a new version of SW with some glitches fixed, some shots re-despecialized and some additional changes (for example I’m currently working on restoring the original lightsabers in the Ben vs. Vader duel or the original hologram of Leia, both of which were recomposited in the SE and given a very different look in the process),' Harmy wrote. 'Then I’m going to do some further tweaks to ESB (some more changes were recently discovered and added to Doubleofive’s comprehensive SE change lists: SW, ESB, ROTJ, Blu-Ray).'
Harmy's initiative--and the passion of the Original Trilogy forum crowd, who kept him going through the more tedious editing moments--are rare examples of Internet dissatisfaction leading to something genuinely amazing and productive. The Save Star Wars website is a fascinating resource for changes made to the series over the years, and its story about a 2010 screening of a one-of-a-kind Technicolor imbibition dye-transfer print sparks a tiny hope that one day a 4K or 6K scan of the original film will digitally preserve Star Wars for decades to come. It may be a forlorn hope, considering the time investment and equipment (nevermind the legal issues) involved in digitizing the film.
Star Wars Despecialized Torrent
Until the day Lucasfilm or a very rich, very bold fan scans that Technicolor film, the Star Wars community subsists on edits like Harmy's, put together with the Special Edition and GOUT DVDs and HDTV rips from satellite broadcasts. If you're interested in diving into the deep, deep world of Star Wars fan edits, Harmy's Despecialized editions are easy to find with a little Googling. Most editors aren't nearly as exacting--or as subtle, anyway--and instead focus on having fun with Star Wars instead of preserving it.
Star Wars Despecialized Mega
Harmy's own Star Wars Trilogy: The Very Special Edition, available in 12 parts on Youtube, mashes up real footage with Star Wars parodies from the obvious (Blue Harvest and Robot Chicken) to the obscure (random Youtube parodies). One edit removes excess Ewoks from Return of the Jedi. Another cuts the prequel trilogy down into a four hour affair, lopping off about 40 percent of its original runtime. And, of course, there's the famous Phantom Edit, which pushes Jar Jar into a small supporting role and excises about 20 minutes of the film.
For now, Harmy's edits represent the closest thing to George's Original Unaltered Theatrical we can watch in high definition. And with another round of editing on the way, the Despecialized edits will only be more faithful to the versions that drew moviegoers to theaters again and again and again--the versions we'll never forget.