OmegaMattman said:

Unfortunately, I don't have a copy of these LDs to work with myself.  I'd love to get my hands on a raw, untweaked, high-quality LD-to-digital transfer of the PAL editions to toy around with ;)

Hmm... I might be able to help. Eventually....

Somewhere in my basement, I've got what's probably the best PAL LD player ever made (Pioneer LD-V4300D) and three copies of each of the 1993 PAL discs (two French and one German, I think).

The PAL versions aren't a panacea, but they're pretty good. And better than the NTSC verions in a lot of places.

Hi Karyudo!

Great to hear about this.

As far as I know in 1993 only pre-THX discs were released in PAL countries. Are you sure those contain high quality video?

I bought a Pionner CLD-2950 PAL player last week, it should arrive soon. I am planning on doing a german preservation project. However I will be using the GOUT as main video source. Only opening crawl, end titles, alien subtitles and PCM audio will be taken from the german discs.

Remember the GOUT only features the english crawl.

Let's hope it's him

pittrek said:

Let's hope it's him

Agreed. "Let's hope," indeed. Has anyone sent a PM or message of some sorts to this laserman on the Star Wars Legacy Forum?

Laserman said:

When I worked on Babe Pig In The City, a *lot* of scenes were shot and never used, we even built a beautifully elaborate set for the opening sequence, had the motion control camera all set up, did a few test passes and then the director changed his mind.
He decided that as it was a sequel the opening sequence was no longer required, so it ended up not being shot, even though we had spent 3 months setting the shot up and were ready to roll camera. Had he been on another part of the set that day it would have been shot anyway, and then in edit may have ended up in the film.
Pre-vis has allowed shot ratios to be reduced in some instances, but it is a staple of film making to get as much 'coverage' as possible. Films cost big bucks, so shooting some extra scenes when you already have the set, the actors and the crew in place makes a lot of sense. Pickups and reshoots cost a fortune in comparison to grabbing an extra couple of scenes when you have the chance.
Even in post a lot of CG work was created that was never used, but was wanted so they had options when going into the final edit.

This little comment on Babe 2: Pig in the City always stuck with me and when somebody said Laserman was too sick to work on the X0 project any more, I remember trying to work out who he was.

Anyway, I just read that Philip Hearnshaw has passed away after dealing with Motor Neurone disease which he was diagnosed with five years ago. Realise that I'm just jumping to conclusions here but wasn't that around the time Laserman got sick? Hearnshaw worked as 1st Assistant Director on Babe 2 as well, which would explain the involvement of him preparing the sequence detailed above.

Apologies for posting in such an old thread, just thought that if anybody could confirm this theory they'd read this post. Apologies if I'm way off and Laserman isn't Philip Hearnshaw.

Laserman is alive, he posted on Mike Verta's forum a while back.

I didn't know the guy, since I joined the forum about a year ago, but has anyone considered the possibility that maybe he got involved with Lucasfilm or something similar?

Like, maybe he is not allowed to continue posting here. Or maybe he got an offer from somebody/some company for his method of combining sources for a restoration?

I couldn't answer that any more than you could. He only posted there a couple times in March.

Perhaps he gave up and decided to pursue other ventures. That's a very real possibility.