SVHS

Let's not bicker, use the earliest version of the '81 crawl.

Then the question is... what is the Legacy Edition to Lucasfilm and Disney?

Put aside questions of it being released for now.

Is Legacy a proof of concept for just how good you bring the theatrical editions up to standard. Keeping in mind this is by definition a fan restoration which makes it all the more wild.

Is it, for lack of a better phrase, an audition tape so that Mike can get the commission for the trilogy and at that point utilise their best elements and scans. Maybe even work with a small team (under careful supervision of course).

Is it, when completed, able to be utilised as is for HD and 4K blu-rays which there is no doubt as Mike is working with a 16-bit 4K scan (I think). This would mean Star Wars would be presented and derived from an unofficial scan but there's no worries quality-wise judging from the samples posted up so far.

All in all, this edition has gotta appear and it'd be really nice and a real testament to the love and work put in by fans if they were able to step forward and say here's the theatrical editions that we grew up with and it was made possible by both Lucasfilm and the fans.

Limitations breed innovation. If there's no route to a $5,000,000 film scanner for us mere fans, someone is gonna have the bright idea of utilising a digital SLR camera and a myriad of sprocket guides and motors and construct a proof of concept for $500.

It's interesting what Mike said about the danger of releasing the Legacy edition. It's as if Lucasfilm have been keeping an eye on the fan restorations up to now but generally letting them pass. Then Mike appears and they start to get a sense that this effort might just trump what a multi-billion dollar company can release with access to the best negatives and the best scanning equipment and you'd presume the best people on the job.

I'll echo the sentiment that if the theatrical editions appear on HD and 4K blu-ray and are of a noticeably inferior or revised quality to the Legacy edition or Harmy's, I say we get vocal about it and assure people that this is yet another ruined chance to obtain what the audiences saw thirty years ago and in turn, a piece of cinema history.

Harmy, do you feel that we're now at a point where restored 35mm scans of the theatrical editions will go public by the time The Force Awakens opens?

If the Legacy edition was released, there'd be no need for Harmy's. That's not a negative against the Despecialized Edition as it represents thousands of hours of work from many dedicated people on this forum and a significant technical achievement to even pull together multiple sources, let alone have them work seamlessly onscreen.

Them's fightin' words.

I get the impression you're gearing up for a trip to Disney with the completed Legacy edition, switching on the digital projector and stating with no bravado, just the evidence in front of them, that you have the definitive theatrical edition all ready to be stamped onto both HD and 4K blu-rays and that you will take a commission to complete the trilogy.

The Enterprise 11 footer is currently being restored in the Smithsonian in time for Star Trek's 50th anniversary in 2016. Methinks the time has come to get the Lucasfilm Archives back into shape for the 40th anniversary of some barely known, limited release B-movie that came out in '77.

I want to see what Mike could do with a well played pan and scan VHS of Star Wars, now there's a challenge!

Actually, that'd be quite an insight into how much can be pulled from a VHS source and brought up to standard as there's a lot of vintage television and historical oddities that only exist on the videotapes of early video recorder adopters.

mverta said:

Really, though, it should just be an audition piece.  If I could get my hands on the negatives we could finally bring order to the galaxy.

Do you feel you could outdo what you've already achieved if you had your hands on their best elements?

Because you're already performing miracles. I had to have a sit down after watching the Reliance comparison today.

Watching the Reliance comparison video makes me admit defeat in regards to any hope for an appreciable restoration from Lucasfilm or for any well-loved film in the future. The moment Mike switches to his restoration after showing the blu-ray and Reliance showreel efforts, it's like being able to see for the first time. The stormtroopers just pop back to life and stop fighting for attention with the background not just in terms of colour but clarity. The colour of the background itself seems to instantly invoke Star Wars, as if that particular shade of 'gun-metal blue grey' was invented just for the film and I recall it from various making-of books and photographs. It's shocking that they would overlook such basics like that and I can't imagine it's an editorial decision at that point, more a team just wanting to push these shots out and get them finished.

Say the blue channel was missing from the separation prints, would it be possible to pull the blue channel from the next best negative and use it in place after a lot of fit and finish or is it completely incompatible? In my eternal struggle to create a surround mix of Pink Floyd's 'The Wall', I've certainly used parts of a deconstructed stereo mix with discrete left, right and centre channels where the movie surround soundtrack couldn't offer me the elements I needed at a given point in a song.

It's very surreal to think about. It reminds me of a few years back when fans were transferring unplayed vinyl boxsets of Beatles albums and very, very carefully restoring them so that they reproduced the warmth, EQ and general ambience of the vinyl editions in a digital format.

The Beatles remasters were released in 2009 but boy, there was heated arguments about how invasive the noise reduction was, how harsh the compression was and whether or not background errors like chairs and sniffs should've been edited out or left in. In a way, we got revisions, rather than a restoration much like the trilogy. I mean, for pities sake, they took away the crackle on John's wail during 'She's So Heavy', a crackle that was proven to be part of the original vocal take and not an error during the final mix as it can be heard in the isolated vocals of the multi-tracks.

So, yeah, it seems the fans have created the best quality versions of Star Wars available and may well be able to hold that title forever.

Mike, it's up to you to make them see sense...

Would the print they're working from be breaking down at a substantial level at this point in time? What negative would Reliance be working from?

Don't Lucasfilm hold a set of Technicolor separation prints that would be essentially as sharp and vivid as the day they were created? I know that the most recent 8K scan of The Wizard Of Oz came from a seperation print which held up beautifully after seventy years.

A Criterion or 'historical cinema' type release would signal to the fans that there may very well be disagreement within Lucasfilm and Disney that the original trilogy is either three films with agreed upon and locked-in versions (the Disney 201x 4K restoration) or multiple versions of three films in terms of restoration method and choice of visual, audio and supplementary elements (Reliance 4K restoration, Criterion restoration, Mverta restoration and so on).

It's another reason why I don't have a great amount of faith in Disney ensuring the theatrical releases appear on blu-ray as possibly close as they were on the opening nights more than thirty years ago. I think they'll get them to maybe 85% which is not bad at all for any release but they know how many versions of each of these three movies are not just publicly available on analogue and digital formats but now in the hands of fans at a level of resolution and clarity unseen before. So it's my belief that they'll strip back past the pre-1997 Special Edition but tinker with composites, scrub major visual and audio goofs and try to provide a less 'this is how it was back then' version and a more 'workmanlike' version which will look undoubtedly beautiful as a scan but ultimately another revision, another version, rather than a chance to let both fans and cinema historians see exactly what this meant and was in 1977, 80 and 83 in terms of intent and capability.

It's why I feel we're approaching the beginning of the end in a good way when it comes to fan restoration of the theatrical releases. We've now got scans and we have the ability to take publicly released material and utilise it in such a way that we can build beautiful restorations that are so exact at a frame by frame level that even the next official release won't get near them when it comes to accuracy of colour, audio and overall presentation.

If Lucasfilm used a fan preservation, no matter how good, even the Legacy project, they would get hammered critically and by fans for not being up to the task of preserving and presenting their own work. In fact, I wouldn't like it as it would not represent how they wish to ideally present the original theatrical cuts of the films to the world using their own scans and restoration decisions.

This will look like shit and I know exactly why.

I've tried this before, more than a few times and I had to come to terms with the following as I waved my white flag.

Standard definition footage of any kind does not scale kindly to HD either through simple upsizing or any number of super-resolution techniques. It introduces shimmer and shake where the video has been de-interlaced, it provides artificially sharpened edges with no boost to detail in any other areas which further creates a strange and disconnected look to it all and unless you're using the upscaled file as a template for some serious post-processing work such as colour grading and grain addition, it's not gonna look markedly different from simply playing a carefully restored SD version.

The reason I enjoy and support projects such as Harmy's Despecialised Edition is that they are utilising the best publicly available source (the blu-ray) to pull back the various Special Edition enhancements and really focus on providing high quality, high definition versions of what audiences saw in '77, '80 and '83. They're already working with a high resolution master and bringing in high resolution elements from various other sources with a keen eye on keeping the standard definition elements to a minimum.

So I suggest, as much as I wish I could get behind this project, to give up and lend your technical and creative skills to other projects utilising the best sources we have.

That's what I fear about the Disney endorsed 4K restoration of Star Wars.

The blu-ray restorations of their animated features are unashamed revisions at the best of times with redrawn cels, flattened colour and removal of vibrant compositing details. All of these quirks and by-products of working in a wholly hand-crafted environment before the use of digital cel colouring and compositing really brought life to the animation. Gave it a shimmer and feel that we were watching 24 very unique frames per second, rather than a more perfected but paradoxically blander set of images.

It's like watching new Simpsons episodes. I believe the cels are still hand drawn but the colour, compositing and editing are all done digitally. So what you get is a strange 'flash animation' feel about it all which stands in complete contrast to the earlier seasons that have a very atmospheric and hand assembled quality to them that helps assist the storyline and ability for the audience to indulge in the characters and the show.

Now, to Star Wars. In my estimation, it's gonna be difficult for Disney to put out a very pure, unaltered restoration much like Mike's without having more than a few people within the company asking to recomposite effects shots, remove wires, fix the obvious visual and sound errors and grade the colour more in line with what a present-day audience is used to. In that effect, we may very well get another Special Edition in all but name. It'll be free of the 1997 and onwards CGI additions, but it will still be a revision and still not adhere to what audiences first saw in 1977.

I've figured out Mike's plan. He's gonna put up before and after videos for each shot and scene and let us piece together his restoration of Star Wars right under the noses of Lucasfilm!

It's genius...

Mverta, I've spent three hours reading through this thread and watching your Legacy videos and I must congratulate you on taking the time and having the patience to really put the effort into preserving what is arguably the world's most analysed and argued over film. Everybody has their own version of Star Wars projected in their head in terms of tone, effects inclusion and soundtrack and to be honest, you seem to understand that there shall never be a truly universally agreed upon version by fans and Lucasfilm alike. However, this Legacy project will ensure there shall always be a pristine and '77 era Star Wars, regardless of whether it sees the light of day.

Your work, amongst other parts of the process, in removing only what is not meant to be in the final shot spurs me on to continue work on my own projects. I'm in the process of restoring a myriad of Pink Floyd and Kate Bush music video releases. Sadly the best resolution and quality to be had for many of these is from VHS and your earlier comments on how grain allows the brain to infer detail and perceive greater sharpness where is there none and the subtle use of contrast and colour has really assisted my work.

Essentially, I'm foregoing and distancing myself from a lot of other fan releases where people have pushed contrast, dialled in drastic colour changes and used really heavy de-noising to the point where it looks like a badly compressed YouTube video. I'm allowing the original video to sit alone, cleaned up, stabilised and with greater dynamic range but there'll be no historical revisionism. I'm not the person to question the author's intent, I only wish to allow it to be presented as clearly and accurately as possible. The amount of work to not only go back to the foundations of a video or 35mm scan and rebuild the image and soundtrack is quite shocking at times though but like you and many others on this site have found, it's a very rewarding and happy process to be part of and accomplish.