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Christmas Cheer Star Wars Prequels

'Star Wars Holiday Special' Upscaled To 4K 60fps (youtube.com) 60

Posted by EditorDavid from the happy-Life-Day dept.
"Millions of Star Wars fans get nostalgia pangs during the holiday season," reports the Washington Post, "when they are accustomed to seeing broadcasts of their beloved movies.... FX, now owned by Disney, has multiple Star Wars marathons on tap this month, including a marathon on December 23 and 24." The program-planning director at Disney's Freedom channel even calls Star Wars a "Christmas-adjacent" franchise.

And now, long-time Slashdot reader H_Fisher writes... Call it a Life Day miracle, even if nobody was asking for it. YouTube historian and retro-tech enthusiast Perifractic uploaded a restored, mostly-complete 4K upscale of the "infamous" Star Wars Holiday Special to his channel on Wednesday. From the video summary: "Using Topaz Labs [Video AI] with a few other techniques we've meticulously upscaled & restored the infamous Star Wars Holiday Special to 5120x3840, with stereo elements, to the best quality the technology currently allows."

Jokingly labeling the resulting file "5K" (8K video height, but tagged "4K" by YouTube due to its original 4:3 aspect ratio), the upscaled version unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your point of view) replaces some songs and omits some segments that were flagged by YouTube's copyright watchdog.
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'Star Wars Holiday Special' Upscaled To 4K 60fps More

'Star Wars Holiday Special' Upscaled To 4K 60fps

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  • Oh Gods! (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Why? Why would you do this?

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by sjames ( 1099 )

      It came out in 1978, riding high on the humongous hype from Star Wars. You could STILL see it in the dollar theaters. A zillion toys advertised 24/7. Totally unrelated things with the Star Wars logo stuck on them were selling. I was 12 at the time, so everything was primed for me to not notice assloads of flaws and a fully one dimensional plot and fall for it hook line and sinker. But it was SOOOOO bad, I didn't and neither did anyone I knew, not even "that kid".

      • Because Star wars had finally left the theaters outside of a few that probably shouldn't have been showing it and that was starting to have an effect on toy sales. Empire was still a ways off so the holiday special is apparently pushed by Kenner as a way to create a new toy line. You can find prototypes online of the toys they planned.
      • So bad! Why go thru the effort of upscaling it. I couldn't finish it. It's just all wookie moaning without subtitles.
    • This feels like it should be an ITAR violation.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Equuleus42 ( 723 )

        This feels like it should be an ITAR violation.

        Indeed... in some countries it could probably be considered a weapon of mass psychological warfare. It's rated 2.2 out of 10 on IMDb...

    • Because the special is a wholesome story about the gang getting together to give Chewbacca a party, and it deserves to be enjoyed at 4k.

      Leia, Han, Luke, Fred, Daphne, Scooby, Shaggy, Velma racing through hyperspace and being chased by Star Destroyers in the Mystery Millenium to Kzzzisk, or whatever Chewie's planet is called, to wish their friend a "Happy Life Day" on the beginning of his 245th cycle.

      Thank the great maker that Lucas didn't choose that plot for the second movie.

  • Spatial upscaling is perfectly fine.

    But frame interpolation is generally a bad thing. Your interpolated frames are always going to be linear interpolation, and often malformed.

    • >"But frame interpolation is generally a bad thing."

      Came to post a similar thing. Higher res is fine. Widescreen is fine. But I absolutely despise high frame rate (either real or made up). Makes everything look either fake or "too real" (like a stage play or a home video). Just give me 24fps (or 30 in this case). And yes, it is probably because I am just used to it my whole life, and I am too old to change now :)

      First thing I do on any TV I encounter is find and turn off that stuff! All the TV's s

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Guspaz ( 556486 )

        If it was TV and not telecined, it'd have been 60, not 30. 480i only had 30 distinct frames per second, but each field in a TV broadcast represented a discrete point in time.

        • Well, yeah. Interlacing was/is an abomination. Always has been. But viewing it wouldn't have looked like 60fps. It is actually hard to describe but looks more like 30. Best thing ever is when DVD came out and anything worth having was no longer interlaced. Of course, if the source material was originally interlaced, nothing one can do to it will make it ever look right. Just somewhat better. So a lot of later analog TV to DVD still sucked horribly. But movies to DVD were so much better, as were TV

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Guspaz ( 556486 )

            480i60 content when viewed on a CRT does indeed look like 60 FPS. In fact, compared to modern displays, it would have looked even smoother than what we think of as 60 FPS due to CRTs being low persistence displays. The only time it would look like 30 FPS is if it's poorly deinterlaced for progressive display.

            As far as I can tell, there is no motion interpolation going on here. The 24 FPS telecine'd film content of the special still looks much lower framerate than the 60 FPS live action scenes.

      • Went to default frame rate be 60 since this was a TV special for ntsc TV?

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          It depends how it was shot. On video tape you got 60 frames per second, interlaced. On film you would get 30 FPS, with each frame converted to two interlaced fields.

          Depending on which it was, you would need to de-interlace it differently, resulting in either 60 or 30 frames per second to upscale.

    • Re:Upscaling (Score:4, Informative)

      by Ichijo ( 607641 ) on Saturday December 23, 2023 @05:14PM (#64101907) Journal

      Spatial upscaling is perfectly fine.

      It didn't seem to help in this case.

      But frame interpolation is generally a bad thing. Your interpolated frames are always going to be linear interpolation, and often malformed.

      Deinterlacing always creates artifacts, and interpolation helps to reduce them, whether you're deinterlacing from 60i to 60p or to 30p.

      • >"It didn't seem to help in this case."

        LOL! It really is horrible. I couldn't watch much of it. Not just horrible looking, but horrible content as well. I do have nostalgia.... but not for THAT.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Guspaz ( 556486 )

      I don't see any evidence of motion interpolation here? This was a TV production, which means 60 fields per second. A giveaway is that the film elements are visibly at a lower framerate (because it was telecine'd 24 FPS).

    • When you're already dealing with something as malformed as the Star wars holiday special I'm pretty sure the extra frames would go 180 and start to look correct

    • A cubic spline interpolation is easy and a much better approach.

  • " replaces some songs and omits some segments that were flagged by YouTube's copyright watchdog." So it's edited. It's incomplete. It's worthless. If they're going to cut parts of it out, why should it even exist? This isn't a matter of cleaning up some foul language that should have never made it to the final version. Someone might accidentally replace the full version with the edited version.

    • >" If they're going to cut parts of it out, why should it even exist?"

      If they hadn't cut out parts of it, then it wouldn't exist on YouTube. In fact, I am quite sure the WHOLE THING is copyrighted.... so it might be taken down anyway.

      Of course, when it ultimately is taken down, nothing of much value will have been lost :)

      • "WHOLE THING is copyrighted" Exactly! So either way you should be only breaking one rule for the benefit of the audience. If it's going to be taken down, then it's going to be taken down no matter what, so they should have posted the whole thing. Making some 4/5ths version which still fails to appease this rule is just stupid.

        • The difference is that the automatic takedown only "listens" for copyrighted music. So it will stay up for a lot longer this way.

    • You upload the whole thing to Archive. That's what it's for.

    • Well, crap. I saw this after I already told yt-dlp to grab it.

      Guess I might as well watch it once it downloads, but I'll keep my older copy.

      It's 6.66 GB, for anybody who finds that amusing.

  • I recently sampled the holiday special. Although it was interesting to have a look back at that period of television, I don't think I could stand to watch the whole thing. I'm not even sure I could have watched it back when I still took the world of American sitcoms for granted. I think watching that dated, cringe-worthy fossil, without the fuzziness and visual artifacts of 70's video cameras and analog TV, would be too much of a mind-fuck.

  • That "special" was so mind numbingly bad when it came out, why would anyone in their right mind think this was a good thing to spend GPU cycles on?

  • YouTube is obviously not the appropriate platform.

  • Every upscaled video I've watched is generally weird and glitchy. This is acceptable for restoration of 100-year-old films where it would otherwise be almost unwatchable (see the YouTube channel Nineteenth Century Videos for some great examples -- https://www.youtube.com/@XIXba... [youtube.com] ) but here? Hardly worth the compute time.

    • If unwatchability is the metric for whether something is worth upscaling, I think the Holiday Special fits the bill quite nicely. ;)

      • I mean in terms of missing frames or damaged film. Early silent films had frame rates of 16-24fps which could vary during filming because the cameras were hand-cranked. Upscaling those can really make them easier to watch and let you notice details you wouldn't be able to see before.

  • I was the video controller and Ultimattist for the Holiday Special. I still vividly remember what a nightmare production that was! We spent a very long week on stage three at Warners...
  • In other words.. worthless. Give me the whole thing or Iâ(TM)m not interested.

  • This is just pathetic laziness, please let me know when this bizarre shortfall has been corrected and the holiday special has been upscaled to 360FPS at bare minimum, why would anyone want to suffer from a horrendously slow 60FPS, us true gamers know that a frame rate this low is an insult to our eyeballs.

  • Give us more naked young Leia footage, like the secret tapes from Jabba's liar, Han Solo's cabin hidden 3D cameras, the Ewok drawings of her hot sex with Luke.

    It's been all deep-fake add-ons and stupid animation that ruined the better, original movies for 20 years anyway.

  • That special was the cringiest thing ever inflicted on fans of a sci-fan franchise. Now after 45 years I had finally forgotten that abomination, but now slashdot just had to put 00 grit sandpaper on a belt sander to that old mental wound.

    The years 1977 - 1983 had the only quality Star Wars movies, before the whole epic went into decline. The Holiday Special was the one aberration in that period, a profoundly idiotic work that insulted the intelligence of even early teens such as myself.

  • He's not just an youtuber, he's also a professional actor who has played multiple roles in the Star Wars franchise since The Phantom Menace. See here. [fandom.com]

  • Took a quick look and it's actually missing the *only* "good" portion of the Holiday Special - the animated sequence that introduced us to Boba Fett.

  • I just took a quick look, and it's nowhere near a proper 4K movie. Everything looks visibly blurry.

    Though I believe the tech still has a long way to go. If you look at experiments with using AI to generate modern, high res version of DOS game characters, it does seem like one could do a better job.

    Of course that probably takes lots of work and tuning, and who wants to do that for the Holiday Special, frame by frame?

  • You dont want to see in 4k, its wookies with lipstick.

  • Now that's what I call "News for Nerds"!

  • Oh boy! I haven't seen this since the original broadcast as a lad!

    "His father, Itchy...his son, Lumpy...special guest star Bea Arthur..."

    I'm out.

  • It's remembered fondly by fans like you remember fondly a deep cleansing bowel movement: we all loved the characters and in the days before VHS, seeing them again was thing to be looked forward to.
    What resulted however stunk so bad that it's left a psychological scar.

    It is notable that I believe it's probably Mark Hamill's first complete performance 100% on cocaine.
    Check out his eyes in the entire show.

  • As if George Lucas suddenly cried out in terror and was suddenly silenced. I fear something terrible has happened.

  • The problem Topaz AI isn't a high quality program. Avisynth+ would have done the job in a better way.

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