Also of interest to this project might be the 1977/8 in-theater audio recordings of star wars by brianm and morgands1.

doubleofive said:

We really really really need to find an ESB theatrical bootleg.

This guy seems to have it: http://home.online.no/~frinilse/starwarsonvideo/ Check out Betamax, others... He seems to know about OT.com, too, maybe somenone should try to contact him?

none said:

Wow!  Added.  How did you come across the site? (search process notes)

The problem with contacting them, is how do you come across as not a douche.  

So now it seems that RotJ is the elusive one.

I wonder if it is of a 70mm showing?

none said:

Wow!  Added.  How did you come across the site? (search process notes)

He's a member on Rebelscum. I'll ask if he can join here, too.

Ah, well.  Still an item that would be interesting to watch.

Sorry, I misunderstood this thread, I thought we were looking for best theatrical versions, should've read more carefully. Still, isn't that the first bootleg of an original TESB? I'm not sure if there's a right thread for this, so sorry for a little OT. :P

none said:

Sluggo wrote:

I wonder if it is of a 70mm showing?

'Star Wars on Video' wrote back and updated his site with some details:

This bootleg was actually telecined from an anamorphically squeezed print


I'm sorry to disappoint you all, but my Qatar bootleg was a telecine of an 
anamorphic print, not camcorded. I'm not sure about the source, but it looks 
like 35mm film. Therefore, no theatrical experience there. Sorry.

No crowd noise for my curiosities, but a great reference of what once was.

 

 This is still a cool, rare item to get. Could give some colouring clues.

It would be worth checking out on the off chance that it might be from the 70mm. Plus, even if it's only 35mm, wouldn't that still be a verifiable source for the original 35mm soundtrack?

That was a mighty impressive collection! thanks for the link, LexX. That rare Empire bootleg could possibly be a great source for reference, I hope he have digitized it.

My Jedi bootleg is a CAM of the old-fashioned sort. It made the rounds in 1983, so it is a testament to how the film appeared at the time.

Washed out colour. Cropped. No crowd noise, so must be from some sort of private screening. Sourced from the UK. (PAL)

At least we can determine the original subtitle placement and size. (I'm assuming this would be identical in the states and the UK).

The grabs say it all:

As you can tell, this is in horrible condition, but for anyone who deems it of value...

Welcome to the board, Video Collector and thanks for the willingness to sharing these rare gems of yours. :) Even though the quality is crude, as you said the Jedi bootleg will be of a great reference to the subs, some will maybe find the locations of the reel-changes to be interesting etc. you never know what to find. This is great! :)

Agreed.  Welcome aboard!

Thanks for joining, cool stuff! :)

I'm loving those ESB caps.

This confirms, preliminarily, two suspicions I had prior: that Hoth had more blue in it than we would at times like to admit, and that the ATAT sequence had a pink tint to some of the elements; you can see this last one in the THX WOW footage. Very promising. It also gives further clarification to an issue that was raised in the SE Changes thread with that Luke-Vader ESB cap (i.e., home video lightsabers were fatter due to white level clipping)

To echo everyone's sentiments so far: welcome! Thanks for sharing what you have in your collection. These are always great curiosities.

Welcome to the forum Video Collector.

How did you make those screen grabs out of interest? The reason I ask is that they appear to be half-height grabs scaled up using a simple point resize (which is why there is heavy aliasing on diagonal lines). I suspect that one of the fields - half the resolution - got discarded somehow when you made your screen grabs. This would mean that the actual tapes contain twice the vertical resolution of your screenshots!

Very much looking forward to seeing these.

VideoCollector, thanks for joining and sharing your goodies. These will be a great resource!

Moth3r said:

Welcome to the forum Video Collector.

How did you make those screen grabs out of interest? The reason I ask is that they appear to be half-height grabs scaled up using a simple point resize (which is why there is heavy aliasing on diagonal lines). I suspect that one of the fields - half the resolution - got discarded somehow when you made your screen grabs. This would mean that the actual tapes contain twice the vertical resolution of your screenshots!

Very much looking forward to seeing these.

The screengrabs were made from VideoReDo (just because I'm using that program for basic trimming of the "raw" captures ).

I'm using a consumer DVD/Harddisc recorder that captures realtime MPEG2 to harddisk. Not an ideal solution, granted (even at the highest quality setting there is some compression-related blocking).

The captures are at their native PAL DVD resolution 768x576. Dumped to memory, pasted into Photoshop at 72dpi and saved as jpegs. That being said, I have no idea how the framedump function in VideoReDo handles the interlacing. The aliasing may be an artefact of the harddisk capture/encoding, and maybe WYSIWYG.

All the same, these grabs should give a general idea of the image characteristics of the tapes. I don't want  anyone to get their hopes up too high.

Oh, and everyone, call me Fritz, okay?