What is the source of "Empire of Dreams" ?

Last night I have seen Empire of Dreams after a long, long time (maybe even the first time since 2004). I have immediately noticed a few things about the movie clips :

Star Wars

•  original crawl, no "Episode 4 A New Hope"
• orange/blue binary sunset scene
• blue lightsaber during the training sequence
• correct colors of the final shot

Empire

• correct lightsabre colors
• orange tint in the corridors of the cloud city

Jedi

• correct lightsabre colors
• original "burnt-in" Jabba subtitles
• "correct" Darth Vader ending

The shots were desaturated, but their colors look just like the screenshots

from the theatrical bootlegs. Was there any official explanation, where do these shots come from ? Or any "good sounding" theory ? :)

I don't think anybody here knows where the clips in Empire of Dreams come from, but it's pretty much agreed on that it proves there is a higher quality source for the OOT than the LaserDisc master used for the GOUT.

Most of the clips are the 97SE - I can tell from little things like the recomposited trench shots, and the little pan on the "I think we took a wrong turn" wide shot. However, it's not the same transfer from the video releases and digital broadcasts. As you pointed out, the Jabba clips from ROTJ have English subtitles on the image. It seems to look closer to how the SEs looked in theaters. Some of the ANH clips don't look like they have the pink shift - can anyone compare to the digital broadcasts?

I'm not sure what the film source of the non-SE clips is. There doesn't seem to be any fading, but I can see dirt, hairs, etc. It's hard to gauge the film quality, because the quality of the video transfer isn't very good. It's very low-res, soft, fuzzy, visible aliasing. They're not from any existing video transfer, but there's stuff like ringing and color bleeding and chroma noise on the crawl, that make the clips resemble an analog video transfer from the 80s. It seems like they cranked out a quick-'n'-dirty 480i telecine for the non-SE clips; it may have even been at 4:3 non-anamorphic and upconverted to 16:9. (The excerpts of dailies and workprints look to me to have similar issues with image quality.)

There are parts where they cut from SE footage to pre-SE and back, like Red Leader's missed shot, where they cut in the original version of the X-wing pulling up from the explosion. We go from this:

To this:

To this:

Look at the second image: It seems out of focus, there's jaggies on all of the sparks (compare to the third image), there's haloes on everything.

It looks to my eye like the vertical resolution is even less than the GOUT. On the SW logo pullback, the lines in the logo start "bobbing" and losing definition very quickly.

Perhaps it wasn't deemed necessary to do high-quality transfers just to be shown as clips in a documentary (as I already said, other archival film in the documentary has a similar low-res look).

The "guys who created the menus" was actually the famous Van Ling and his team :-) Here is a short description about how they did the menus : http://www.eias3d.com/featured-artists/van-ling-star-wars-trilogy-dvds/

Van Ling didn't do EoD, Kevin Burns did. Someone would have to ask Burns where their footage came from.

Here are some more screenshots of the OOT footage in EoD. The actual 35mm elements must look better than these transfers (or at least they did when these were transferred).

http://imageshack.us/g/502/vlcsnap2011111308h15m21.png/

And here's a comparison of the same shot from two different places in the documentary - the original and the SE:

It's weird how the pre-SE clips look like an old video source, but they can't possibly be, can they? Look at how much more picture there is in the top image. They practically transferred the entire frame - sometimes you can even see the edges. And the fact that there's other footage in EoD (dailies, raw effects passes, etc.) that also has this jaggy, low-res look makes me think that these were transferred at the same time. Also, I don't think that LFL would have an old video transfer lying around with the '77 crawl on it. If they are old video transfers, I'd love to know the circumstances, since these clips do not come from any transfers that were commercially released.

Could the clips from the first film be from George's Technicolor print? The fuzzy, dense look of the '77 footage makes me think of late-80s/early-90s video transfers that were made from IB Technicolor prints. (Ones that immediately come to mind are the Image laserdiscs of the 1937 version of A Star is Born and the Fleischer animated Gulliver's Travels, or the Criterion LDs of Black Narcissus and The Red Shoes.) They had the same high-contrast look, with all the darker areas showing up as murky, and the bright areas being kind of blown out. As has been pointed out time and again on other forums, IB Tech prints do not transfer well to video because of their high contrast and density.

Also, is it just me, or does the Death Star explosion look better than any of the other pre-SE clips? I don't see any jaggies there - and that's the most accurate-looking color I've seen on any official video transfer of the scene. Could that clip be from an entirely different video source than the other clips? Lest we forget, pre-SE footage showed up in the original SE trailer (the original ROTJ DS explosion, as well as the original version of Wedge blowing up the TIE fighter - which only appeared in the first "President's Day weekend" version).

I still insist that LFL is not telling us the whole truth with regards to the condition of the OOT elements. It provides them with a convenient excuse for why they can't release them again.

TServo2049 said:

Van Ling didn't do EoD, Kevin Burns did.