No Humor Man wrote:
If you have an opinion and can back it up you should be free to present it without fear.
Well I wish that were the true, but in England and France the burden of proof is on the defendant to prove the statement made is true. So actually the plaintiff doesn't need expert testimony to support a claim that a false statement was made which he found injurious to him personally or to his business interests (in the U.S. he would). Without the kind of access to the mask I described, which of course the owner is under no obligation to provide, a statement of "this mask isn't from ANH" would be virtually impossible to prove. And the defendant has 10 days to collect those facts to prove the truth of his statement. I don't think that qualifying the statement with "in my opinion" would matter. So I stand by my admonishment to not assert that in a public forum, even if the intent is to play devil's advocate offering an opposing view to spark some discussion and debate among ourselves. We just don't know whether the owner would take exception to such a discussion. So I'll strive to participate with objectivity, from an analytical point of view, without drawing any conclusions.
If we start with the premise that this is an original ANH mask, there should be a checklist of items to confirm in multiple categories that it should meet. Physical dimensions would be one category. I don't know the actual dimensions and weight of the original mask or the material and method used to cast the mask, but I bet someone does. I would think that the TM/TD mask would provide a good reference for the dimensions we'd expect to see, including any appropriate correction based on what generation pull it was made from. At this point who can conclude from the video captures that we're not looking at a mask with all the surface features in the right place but that the overall size of the mask is not 10% larger or smaller than it should be, for example?
We've only seen the mask from a few viewpoints. Yes, it's spot-on in shape from those we've seen. What about from other angles and distances? Would it still match what we expect to see, or would it reveal any deviations from the expected shape when examined from other viewpoints? This is where the 3D model comparison to original 2D reference images could be useful. Or even done manually without a 3D model. NHM, I took heed of what you said regarding movie cameras and lenses. Some can produce a different image geometry than the actual scene (e.g. perspective control/tilt-shift, fisheye, curvelinear lenses). But as long as the lens is rectilinear (straight lines in the scene remain straight lines in the image), they should render usable images for comparison. I put this to test by trying to orient my DPDLX in angle and in distance to match screen captured images of the ESB helmet. I posted this some time ago on youtube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EF2y1zvf4f4 I was able to place the helmet to match each fairly well. Some of them highlighted how the shape of the DPDLX dome differed, and it showed how the DPDLX mask was slightly warped left-to-right, among other differences. Some viewpoints showed this more obviously that others. With a 3D model of the mask and a computer program to do the number crunching, it could find the range and axis rotation of the 3D model that provides the best match for each 2D reference image. Image overlays could be generated for a human to review to identify any significant differences.