I'm happy to announce the 1080p bluray is FINALLY rendering. After all this time.
I feel I should give a bit of an explanation as to why it's taken such a seemingly unnecessary long amount of time.
A few months ago my pc tower went down. The one I did the edit and had all my files on. Yes yes I know, back up your files etc. But I didn't do that, and anybody that reminds me that I should have will be ignored. I know.
Anyway, I had for what I could tell lost everything related to this project. No project files, the wip bluray author, everything. I thought I was going to have to do the whole thing over again. And I really, really didn't want to. For starters, I had already done it twice. Because after finishing it once, I decided I wasn't happy with the color grade. But I had already deleted my project files for some stupid reason, so I had to redo the video portion from scratch. I didn't have to redo the audio, but visually I had already basically done the whole thing twice, and I did not want to do it a third time.
And I didn't really have the desire to break the news to everyone so I just let the thread sit and dodged peoples questions.
But, luckily, recently, I got a wild hair and opened up the tower and took the internal hard drive out and connected it to another computer. Not everything was there, but some files were accessible. Miraculously, incredibly, among them was a 20-ish gb 1080p export of the final project I had done on a whim. It was the final version, the same as the 720p version that's already out there.
Unfortunately, the specs were not bluray compliant, so it is having to he re encoded for the bluray. But it is 20 gb in size, and will be encoded to roughly the same size, so the difference should be pretty well negligible. Would it have been technically superior if I had been able to author the bluray from a lossless source? Of course, but the difference should not be a deal breaker for anybody and it should still look great on big screens... We're talking a 20 gb encode to another 20 gb encode so there's a decent amount of bitrate to go around. I've viewed it on my 120 inch projector screen and it looks good. So then all I had to do was re gather the bonus features I had wanted to include and make the bluray. (I'm intending the bluray disc to be sort of the whole package. But since I wanted to keep it single layer and wanted the movie to be at least 20 gb all the bonus features are SD and squeezed into 3.5 gb. So while some of them could probably be found in slightly higher quality elsewhere, they should still look pretty good and having them all in one place should be worth something)
But it sure in the hell beats doing all this over again, which I am not willing to do. So it's set in stone now, I don't have the project files anymore so I won't be making any changes foreseeably. The bluray should be available in the next week.
Now with this mess behind us, here's hoping production of the Empire Strikes Back Possessed Edit goes off much more smoothly. I suspect it will.