Like many, I was unhappy with a lot the changes that were made for the Special Editions and most recently the blu-rays.

Harmy's Despecialised Editions are great for those that want to see the films exactly as they were when they were originally released theatrically, but some of the changes (especially the updating of special effects) actually make the films better IMHO, so I decided to make 'Semi-Specialised' editions of these films to remove what I considered the bad changes while keeping all the good changes/additions.

For this latest V3 release of The Empire Strikes Back Semi-Specialised Edition I decided to use the most recent 2020 blu-ray release of The Empire Strikes Back as my main source because I feel that it has far more natural colours than the previous blu-ray and all the Vader lightsaber colour inconsistencies have been corrected. Enjoy!

Below is a brief summary of the changes made to this film:

Star Wars:

The Empire Strikes Back:

Audio changes:

The emperor's original dialogue from the theatrical release has been restored

The original voice of Boba Fett from the theatrical release has been restored

Luke's line 'you're lucky you don't taste so good' after R2D2 gets spat out has been restored

Darth Vader's line 'Bring me my shuttle' has been restored

New lossless pcm audio track created to fit this semi-specialised edition, based off Belbucus's excellent 1993 Empire Strikes Back PCM audio mix

Video Changes:

The original emperor from the theatrical release has been returned (my thanks goes to Adywan for the original emperor footage taken from his Empire Strikes Back colour corrected 'purist' edition)

All extra shots of Darth Vader going back to the Executor and the arrival on the star destroyer that were not in the theatrical release have been removed so they do not interupt the escape of the millenium falcon

Lightsabers are more consistant so they are not constantly changing colour, Vader's lightsaber is now red all the time rather than turning pink.

Here are some screencaps for this release:

Regraded 1:      

[img]https://i.ibb.co/VTGvQ13/01regraded.jpg[/img]

Regraded 2:      

[img]https://i.ibb.co/RNRGkxc/02regraded.jpg[/img]

Regraded 3:      

[img]https://i.ibb.co/b5DPtvS/03regraded.jpg[/img]

Regraded 4:      

[img]https://i.ibb.co/PhcKFLJ/04regraded.jpg[/img]

Regraded 5:      

[img]https://i.ibb.co/W5hsyJ2/05regraded.jpg[/img]

Regraded 6:      

[img]https://i.ibb.co/K9M7nQk/06regraded.jpg[/img]

Regraded 7:      

[img]https://i.ibb.co/Y8Yv8k0/07regraded.jpg[/img]

Regraded 8:      

[img]https://i.ibb.co/3yw1k0G/08regraded.jpg[/img]

Video ID                             : 1 Format                         : AVC Format/Info                    : Advanced Video Codec Format profile                 : [email protected] Format settings, CABAC         : Yes Format settings, RefFrames     : 4 frames Codec ID                       : avc1 Codec ID/Info                  : Advanced Video Coding Duration                       : 2 h 6 min Bit rate mode                  : Variable Bit rate                       : 3 000 kb/s Maximum bit rate               : 10 000 kb/s Width                          : 1 920 pixels Height                         : 804 pixels

Audio ID                             : 2 Format                         : AAC Format/Info                    : Advanced Audio Codec Format profile                 : LC Codec ID                       : 40 Duration                       : 2 h 5 min Bit rate mode                  : Variable Bit rate                       : 180 kb/s Maximum bit rate               : 216 kb/s Channel(s)                     : 2 channels Channel positions              : Front: L R Sampling rate                  : 48.0 kHz Frame rate                     : 46.875 FPS (1024 SPF) Compression mode               : Lossy Stream size                    : 162 MiB (6%) Title                          : tesb.aac Encoded date                   : UTC 2021-03-07 17:25:35 Tagged date                    : UTC 2021-03-07 17:25:48