Star Wars coming to Blu Ray (UPDATE: August 30 2011, No! NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!) — Page 190

It's pretty much a waste of time believing anything they say until we see/hear it for ourselves. :( (the reversed audio in ANH '04, supposedly done on purpose, comes to mind)

I just finished updating my visual comparisons, just in time for people to find more changes in yet a third Special Edition.

The bit of that interview that really makes me laugh is this:

Luckily we are both huge star wars fans(Wood and Dave Accord--clone wars sound designer) so it was not hard to do because if things were not right you just felt it.

We used our huge fandom as well as our professional prowess to make it work.

I guess they aren't such big fans as they thought then because if they thought that the swapped surround channels and the effects coming out of the incorrect left & right speakers in certain parts sound right, then they don't know the film at all. lol

Yet the audio mixes for the Clone Wars cartoons is amazing, so why was the 2004 mix so bad?. If only, when they remix these movies, they would do it the same way as the cartoons, with clean dialogue and effects in the centre channel without any music bleed. They are a fan editors dream

What did they do with Terminator? Too much bass or something?

Baronlando said:

 

The audio for all the films was tweaked.  It was readily apparent that it was a labor of love for Matthew Wood who worked with Ben Burtt.  Episode 4 got the most attention since originally it was a mono mix with no separation.  

Anybody else very confused by this?

It might have it's genesis here:

Burtt says. "On Star Wars, everything--music, dialogue, effects--was combined into one master recording. You had to undo it and make changes with surgical precision. But on Jedi, we had separated stems: Music was separately recorded from dialogue and from effects, so if we wanted to change something independency of one of the other elements, we could do it."

http://lavender.fortunecity.com/hawkslane/575/starwars-advanced.htm

adywan said:

The bit of that interview that really makes me laugh is this:

Luckily we are both huge star wars fans(Wood and Dave Accord--clone wars sound designer) so it was not hard to do because if things were not right you just felt it.

We used our huge fandom as well as our professional prowess to make it work.

I guess they aren't such big fans as they thought then because if they thought that the swapped surround channels and the effects coming out of the incorrect left & right speakers in certain parts sound right, then they don't know the film at all. lol

Yet the audio mixes for the Clone Wars cartoons is amazing, so why was the 2004 mix so bad?. If only, when they remix these movies, they would do it the same way as the cartoons, with clean dialogue and effects in the centre channel without any music bleed. They are a fan editors dream

/Tired Rant On.

Here's a crazy thought, but perhaps the company doing the audio / video encoding screwed up?

If the discs were somehow rushed / or someone was not paying attention it would be very easy to accidently point the wrong files at the encoder.

The guys mixing the audio aren't going to QAR the encodes themselves, and if they did notice it, but it was too late to change anything.  It would be pretty unproffesional of them to start pointing fingers at Deluxe / Technicolor / Whichever high profile company did the work.

Likewise with the Humdinger glitch - worst case scenario it's a head error on the master SR tape, in which case they've had to go back and fix it.  Otherwise it's an error on the safety copy and they've just gone back and patched in from the master.  What's sad is that it was never picked up in a QAR at either the layoff, tape dub, encode or any subsequent stage.

I was watching the True Grit bonus features on Blu-ray a while back, and I noticed for the girl's audition footage they hadn't de-interlaced before upscaling, so the footage had big blurry toothcombing.  There are people working in this industry who just make flat out mistakes.  I don't blame lucas for the swapped rear channels anymore than I blame the Coen Brothers for a basic video processing error on one of their films.

It's frustrating that we're not getting the original films at this time on Blu-ray. It's going to be annoying when the various errors show up on these Blu-ray discs, because I very much doubt they will be technically perfect when the come under the gaze of communities such as this one, and the Blu-ray online community in general who (perhaps rightly so) expect that each release should 'be all it can be'.

10 years ago, DVD Production in the UK was Five Figures per title, and they recieved an asset QC before encoding and then at least one more QC for each video / audio stream on the disc.  Now, you're lucky if a title costs £1K and everyone makes the assumption that the QC stage can be skipped because someone else will have done it before you recieve the tape.  And I know from first hand experience that some companies have poorly maintained decks and you will always get Tape / Channel Condition errors.

George Lucas doesn't have his hand in the DVD / Blu-ray Production process anymore than most other directors - if the head of your company insisted signing of everything every employee did, they would be considered 'paranoid' or 'micro-managing'.  You employ Producers and Product Managers for that sort of role.  And you know what they're human, probably spread too thin and they'll make mistakes.

The sad fact of the matter is that we live in a 'good enough' environment now - mp3 and the convience of Video on Demand is what most people want.  A DVD Producer at SDCC a few years back suggested double disc sets will go the way of the Dodo soon, as sales figures had shown on (I Think) Superman Returns there was a 5:1 difference between the movie only and movie and bonus versions.  It might have been higher than that.  If you were a studio and you saw numbers like that, why would you spend money on bonus content, when five times as many people will by the bare bones edition?

BTW This isn't aimed at Adywan, I love his work and his attention to detail, but his post is a shining example of the (I believe) misdirected frustration when it comes to High Profile DVD / Blu-rays that we see in all online communities.

/Tired Rant Off.

I would also think that Lucas is far more involved than most directors, especially as he is so bent on killing the originals. If he left that all up to others in the company, we'd have what we want. (then he'd have us shot or something after we bought it)

SilverWook said:

thejediknighthusezni said:

     Speaking of bonus discs...

     I watched the THX 1138 SE recently. Outstanding restoration and enhancement.

     I'd like to see Amgraf and THX included in an SW saga set!

     I suppose that would create problems with the different studios and lost profit on the single sales.

     OTOH, it would make the saga sets even more appealing and provide vastly greater distribution and awareness for those two great films.

I think I'm going to go out and get drunk now. ;)

Agreed, Lucas destroyed Thx 1138 the same way he did star wars.  CGi lizards and monkeys, wtf.

none said:

Going to be interesting attempting to explain inconsistencies in these releases when most people will be completely dazzled by the new found resolution.

Yeah, kinda like explaining why someone doesn't like the PT. 'But it looks so cool!' 'A cool, rapidly aging video game, maybe.' (especially AOTC and ROTS) 'The story is so good!' 'It's confusing, full of holes and fanservice, and disregards the originals in so many ways.' '...but it looks so cool!'

Ripplin that is a perfect way to describe star trek 2009 too, and i admit i liked the movie as a movie of the week action piece, but i rated it poor as a star trek film.

"It's confusing, full of holes and fanservice, and disregards the originals in so many ways.' '...but it looks so cool!"