Knightmessenger

poita said:

Just for fun, here are three captures from the same JSC disc all using the same player, a HLD-X9.

Has someone transferred the Special Collection set on a really high end player such as the X9 yet?

It's the best source of the original versions without the DVNR smearing on the THX master (and thus the unaltered dvd's).

I know the X0 project captured the Special Collection on the X0 and was hoping to merge it with the THX discs so they could remove all the DVNR and then restore any damage to the video image. 

I would think having a high quality rip of the JSC would be ideal if anyone wanted to use it for a future restoration project, or perhaps the merging technology the X0 team was utilizing will become more accessible on consumer equipment some day.

sorry to join the party late. This might sound basic but why would the Pal laserdiscs look any different (other than resolution) than the official unaltered dvd. Aren't they from the same source?

Same thing with how the DVNR looks less in certain areas, wasn't that done to a master source which was then used for PAL and NTSC videos?

wait, did Porco Rosso also have an older dub. The only ones I knew of were

Kiki

Laputa: Castle in the Sky

Totoro (I think the original dub is far better)

Nausicaa was dubbed before 2005 but only in a heavily edited form called Warriors of the Wind.

bkev said:

Does anyone know what source the footage shown in Dangerous Days comes from? The color timing is certainly radically different from the Final Cut, which is to be expected... however, I don't quite think it's quite the same as what's shown to be this HD broadcast either. I don't know when the documentary itself was made, but it's in widescreen and in the 4-disc DVD set so I can only assume it was made around the same time as the Final Cut.

I also noticed the color timing was different for the documentary. I really was disappointed by the color aspect on the movies. I thought it took too much color out, even on the archival versions.

I don't own any of the vhs or laserdiscs so to my eye, the 1997 dvd looks like the least tampered with, color wise.

I would be interested to see screencaps from the first HD broadcast or the laserdiscs. I've only seen sites that compare the dvd versions.

In the audio commentary of Phantom Menace dvd, they mentioned two errors that I haven't seen mentioned as being fixed.

Near the ship on Tatooine, Obi Wan's rat tail is on the wrong side because the shot was planned to be reversed but never was.

During the pod race, Selbulba's car is missing Sebulba and is basically being driven by nobody for a few shots in the background.

Have these been changed?

I haven't seen any of them in stores for a while. They officially went out of print in early May, right around when the cover art was revealed.

Since I did buy them all, I'm really tempted to find the best upscaled version with different audio mixes just so I can easily make copies for my friends who will be spared from having to consider wasting their money on more crap from LFL.

Is there any consensus on what the best fan made dvd from the 2006 discs is?

Yeah, I know that's piracy but in this case, George Lucas deserves it.

There will probably be a way to buy the extras discs separately, like there was with the bonus disc from 2004.

For a long time, you could find it for $3 on amazon.

And in those screencaps in the previous page. I have to say the color has significantly been corrected back to how it should look. It still looks too dark in some scenes and some details such as shadows on people's faces still look too pronounced. But it doesn't look over the top flat out wrong.

Can't say that the color is tinted properly everywhere. Hoth still looks too blue. But it's far more reasonable and not so extreme.

S_Matt said:

 However, I have a collection of the theatrical trilogy in widescreen format on a medium that won't degrade and capable of a presentation that is 100% digital. Boycotting it would have been a case of cutting off ones nose to spite ones face.

Exactly. And I do have a laserdisc sourced anamorphic version but the official dvd blows it out of the water in terms of clarity and lack of video noise. It also feels much more authentic because any of the grain or film tears is not obscured by a bunch of blurriness. It's one thing to watch a beat up and unrestored version of a movie since you are seeing the movie as it is or was at one point in time. But I find it unbearable to watch a video that looks like a vhs with generation loss. It looks like all this dirt is on a projector and you can't set it to focus on the screen properly, or like a flat screen tv with terrible blur and motion smearing.

The improvement of the unaltered dvd over the laserdiscs does show why the dvd format was such a huge hit. Without even putting any real effort, LFL got pretty much as good as a high quality studio master tape on a consumer medium.

See, higher resolution is not nearly as important as many seem to think. Lack of junk obscuring the picture is a far bigger deal. I've played How to Train Your Dragon blu ray and dvd on the same player hooked up to the same 1080i HDtv via HDMI and I barely noticed any difference. The trees in the background had more detail. But most people won't notice that.

This is why blu-ray has not been as successful as dvd. Salesmen will swear until they're blue in the face that the difference from blu-ray to dvd is far greater than dvd to vhs. By resolution capability, they may be correct. But that's not the real thing people notice as much.

Not being in focus is a much more obvious flaw. And that's what vhs fuzzyness did to everything. This is why if you ever have the choice between a standard def video camera with manual focus and a HD one of comparable quality with auto focus only, you should get the manual. Heck even my Hi8 camera with a manual focus can get sharper video than some tiny camcorders that might says HD on the side but only have auto controls.

http://youtu.be/lwsKeDI2ghk

In fact, assuming the Star Wars blu-ray is the same 2004 transfer, I bet the blu-ray will not look as improved over the 2004 dvd as the 2006 dvd did over the laserdiscs.

I'm pretty sure the 1993 THX was the first to do extensive color correction as the films must have been very faded at that time. It seemed like an attempt to bring the movies back to how they originally looked.

The special collection is probably the best transfer without any tweaking but without that, it is from a faded print without the full contrast.

http://youtu.be/7tvXaErqaUQ

I had never seen this promo about the widescreen video before. In this upload though, notice near the end that Obi Wan's light saber is green.

Just thought I'd mention another example of color inconsistency. It's really hard to find out what the true look of these movies is because the colors seem to have faded or changed so many times LFL just tried to do whatever quick fix was available at the time. Which might have changed other stuff.

Another upload on youtube of the same video is brighter and less saturated but the saber still has a green tint.

The guide is set by the cable provider. I noticed that comcast listed it as the re edit but other companies might not.

Spike tv has nothing to do with this as far as I know.

Another thing I have to add, anybody read MAD Magazine. Well they recently came out with a book compilation of all their Star Wars parodies and other articles. One of them was their speculation about what George Lucas should change for the upcoming special edition release in 1997. Their suggestions were mostly current references like using R2-D2 to download cyber porn, have the whole cast hang out in a coffee shop like Friends, Leia lap dance on Jabba (if she can find it)...

But what is interesting is their opening description.

MAD # 354, February 1997

"Updating Star Wars for the Future."

"Next spring, George Lucas is releasing a version of his Star Wars Trilogy, digitally remastered sound and never before seen clips from all three movies. In other words, he's going to make the lightsabers orange instead of red, turn up the bass on the soundtrack and add three minutes of scenes that should have stayed on the cutting room floor. Too bad, because Lucas had a golden opportunity to make the Star Wars Trilogy much more au courant!"

If that's not prophetic enough, try the Frank Jacobs article form # 230 April 1982 where it mentions a future movie number 2 in the series will be "Send in the Clones" and other future films will reveal Darth Vader might be half droid father of Han Solo and C3PO and Luke's father "is revealed as none other than the force."

yes there are margins where Jonathan Bresman (who worked for MAD and LFL, he was Jar Jar in the early video test) points a lot of this out.

thanks for sharing as much as you have Zion. Shame more couldn't be done but so much has changed with technology and computer effects and other people like Adywan doing amazing stuff that I'm sure someone else will be able to improve the films more, especially if they have the X0 captures.

Who knows, maybe someday the technology used by Black Magic will become commonplace and cheap enough to be sold as a consumer product. In 1993 when Robert A Harris restored My Fair Lady, they mentioned in the documentary that they spent a very significant amount of money to use a highly advanced computer technology to digitally erase a fairly large scratch from the title screen. Such a process can now be easily done in photoshop, and sometimes even look respectable with MS paint.

Zion, if I may ask, is your avatar a picture of you? I've just always wondered that.

Erikstormtrooper said:

So these are based on the broadcast versions (gkar, flunk, reviax, etc), right?

And more importantly, HOW TO GET?

what he said. I got the widescreen 97 vhs tapes for a dollar each at a small video store closing sale. I would really like to get a better version of those.

And again, I think it might be possible to drop some of the unchanged 1997 footage into the worst shots (particularly the ones with DVNR smearing since that can't be easily removed like scratches) and create the best possible original version. The 1997 is close enough in color timing to mix with the gout and it's not super filtered or overly sharp like the 2004 versions are so there wouldn't be such a disparity.

Has someone tried that already? Mixing the gout with certain parts of the best 1997 version?

the problem is none of the 4:3 laserdisc releases were that good of a transfer.

If there had been a pan & scan THX on laserdisc (or somebody stole the master that LFL used only for the VHS) or if there had been a fullscreen version of the special collection, then it might help.

But I think even the X0 guys mentioned only the THX and Japanese Special Collection were good enough to work with.

Has anyone left an amazon review (or plan to in the future?) You might want to include the link (amazon lets you automatically embed a link to a different product on their site from your review) to the 2008 set which is a very cheap way to get the original versions in one set.

yet few seem to realize that. Even people I've talked to have said they like the theatrical editions much more but didn't even know they were out there legit at all.

If enough people mention it in reviews, don't you think some people will be tempted to buy the $25 set of the movies they really want rather than spend $65 more for the sets they already have, plus bonus features they would only watch once anyways and will show up on youtube eventually?

(fun fact: LFL does not seem to be very vigilant about having their materials taken down from youtube, compared to other companies and studios.)

zombie84 said:

Reading his statements is actually pretty scary. Scary because:

1) he predicted the precise problem in the situations we now face

2) it's amazing how much George Lucas 1988 feels the same about cinematic preservation as I do, but most importantly

3) he predicted every type of digital alteration that he would eventually put to use in the SE as a threat.

Listen to this:

"My name is George Lucas. I am a writer, director, and producer of motion pictures and Chairman of the Board of Lucasfilm Ltd., a multi-faceted entertainment corporation.

I am not here today as a writer-director, or as a producer, or as the chairman of a corporation. I've come as a citizen of what I believe to be a great society that is in need of a moral anchor to help define and protect its intellectual and cultural heritage. It is not being protected.

The destruction of our film heritage, which is the focus of concern today, is only the tip of the iceberg. American law does not protect our painters, sculptors, recording artists, authors, or filmmakers from having their lifework distorted, and their reputation ruined. If something is not done now to clearly state the moral rights of artists, current and future technologies will alter, mutilate, and destroy for future generations the subtle human truths and highest human feeling that talented individuals within our society have created.

A copyright is held in trust by its owner until it ultimately reverts to public domain. American works of art belong to the American public; they are part of our cultural history.

[snip]

People who alter or destroy works of art and our cultural heritage for profit or as an exercise of power are barbarians, and if the laws of the United States continue to condone this behavior, history will surely classify us as a barbaric society. The preservation of our cultural heritage may not seem to be as politically sensitive an issue as "when life begins" or "when it should be appropriately terminated," but it is important because it goes to the heart of what sets mankind apart. Creative expression is at the core of our humanness. Art is a distinctly human endeavir. We must have respect for it if we are to have any respect for the human race.

These current defacements are just the beginning. Today, engineers with thier computers can add color to black-and-white movies,

change the soundtrack,

 

speed up the pace, and add or subtract material to the philosophical tastes of the copyright holder.

 

 Tommorrow, more advanced technology will be able to replace actors with "fresher faces."

 It will soon be possible to create a new "original" negative with whatever changes or alterations the copyright holder of the moment desires.

The copyright holders, so far, have not been completely dilligent in preserving the original negatives of films they control.

In the future it will become even easier for old negatives to become lost and be "replaced" by new altered negatives. This would be a great loss to our society. Our cultural history must not be allowed to be rewritten."

That's George Lucas, I just have to remind again. That's only about 40% of his full letter, but it's representative of the whole thing. What the fuck happened to this guy? He sounds like was pretty cool.

I thought I posted earlier here. I posted some screenshots of the color screwups in a couple of facebook groups including Adywan's Empire Revisited. I would be more than happy to share any additional pics I've got or give suggestions to make it visually clearer.

About the Lucas testimony above, someone said it would be nice to make a video but you'd need Lucas' voice. You could impersonate it or you could just do something like the voice over in the Red Letter Media reviews.

Actually, Mike Stoklasa is pretty clear that he's not a fan of the special editions, I wouldn't be surprised that he hasn't done a review of those alterations. Maybe he might be willing to do so. Or not.

Either way, I don't see why somebody couldn't make an interesting video showing the difference between letterbox and animorphic, explaining how it is possible to see the films restored without changing them and how no, 1993 video tape master is not the best a 1977 film can look. Movies shot on 35mm film are actually better than HD but some people seem to think oh digital must be better.

In fact Episode II looks the worst of any Star Wars movie because it was shot on video.

I could make a video but I don't have the time at the moment like I suspect many others.

What if we thought about making a script together and having all the photos and videos compiled so that one of us would only have to record the thing?

About the splitscreen trailer, I saw an excerpt of it on some website in a really low quality, low color space. This was the days before youtube and internet video.

Might have been the same site that had clips of the holiday special, part of the making of the SE, and the deleted scenes from the CD rom. I'm talking late 2004, early 2005.

So they used the same NTSC master but deinterlaced them differently for the video formats?

Actually, the deleted scenes might look better because they weren't copied endlessly and handled as much. By simply being left alone, they might not have suffered as badly.

I agree with the Don't Buy it. Aren't the deleted scenes from the prequels still on youtube? You know they will be posted eventually and I'm sure you could rent the blu-ray to watch them once.

Other than that, It's A TRAP!

If the OT does indeed use the same 2004 master, then that should be pointed out as much as possible and emailed to people like Bill Hunt of the Digital Bits with screencaps for comparison.

Are you going to upload any of the commercials or short segments to youtube if any are not there already?

Also, did you get the 1995 THX commercial that used a split screen to compare the improvement with the new digital mastering? (it's not the One Last Time ad)

Mielr said:

Also, my "Han Shot First" clip has gotten over 5,000 additional hits since the CNN article. I changed the text last nite to drive the point home more forcefully for the benefit of anyone who isn't aware of the history.

If anyone has any suggestions, I'd like to hear them. :-)

I sometimes wonder if you should remove the zoom tag so that it stays boxed in on all four sides like on the official release.

I wish somebody would make a youtube video that skillfully shows non anamorphic vs anamorphic in the same video.

Until then, I think Spice Girls "Stop" is the best example. Both are official uploads but the EMI one is a much higher quality that takes advantage of the widescreen frame. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GpPyBXMxeb0

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5JD6ejmlpa8

Why would fantasia have a widescreen version? It came out in 1940 when movies were shown in standard.

I also boycotted the release and left a negative review on amazon.

I have the LD sourced dvd of THX.

zombie84 said:

Backlighting it is a bit tough because of the dye layers, but with modern scanning tools it can be done. Not ideal, but more than doable. Take a look at all the films that are Technicolor negatives--Wizard of Oz, for example. Looks pretty kick ass to me. The bigger issue is that the layers shrink at different rates, so you often have to seperate them and scan them individually, but for something 33 years old that's probably not an issue. The biggest issue is that the 100% fade-free claim is a bit misleading. It doesn't fade, but it never gets printed 100% faithful. You can see in the clip, there is a bit of a tint to it, although the white balance on the video camera is probably making it worse. The problem is that the color balance of the dyes is never 100% the same, so no two prints are exactly a like. If you want to use Technicolor for color reference, it's the best source possible but it will always be a tiny bit off if you want to start splitting hairs.

Still even if someone could just record with a high quality video camera off a projected screen (where the camera was properly centered), that might be helpful to have another reference.

It would be free of DVNR, would have the original colors and a print like that might be less faded than anything Lucasfilm had in their archives. I hope the owner has some digital copy of the print.

I love the screenshots on the first page, I haven't seen many captures of those laserdiscs that are very clear. The color does not look as faded as I seem to remember past caps of. The only thing is the edges seem to have some white glow around them, almost like a halo effect. I'm sure you didn't add any but it almost looks like edge enhancement.