Tobar said:
"The successful re-release of Mr. Lucas’ STAR WARS Trilogy Special Edition in early 1997 helped to highlight the necessity of the preservation of contemporary titles."
*facepalm*
Actually, that statement is correct -- though not exactly in the way that this little puff piece intended.
I tell you, this is almost a case for use of eminent domain to take the rights to the original versions away from Lucas and give them over to Fox. Judging by the Alien Anthology, they would appreciate the importance of making available the original versions of *their most profitable movies of all time*.
It was the organizers of that Technicolor film festival who were threatened with having their print confiscated and destroyed. The article says that they were threatened after trying to clear the screening through Fox, but it doesn't make clear whether it was actually Fox who made the subsequent threat, or whether it was Lucasfilm. If it was Fox, I'd assume they were acting under orders from LFL.
I am assuming that the print that the LoC had but returned came from a private collector, not from LFL. Since that print was "returned to the owner," I am pretty sure that means that it was given back to said collector.
I hope this story gets traction, because this is inexcusable. To talk out of one side of your mouth about preserving our film heritage, then to not let your own film be preserved because of your petty, childish attitude toward the original films which made you the billionaire mogul you are. As someone once said, "A wizard should know better..."
Disney won't release Song of the South, but at least they've taken the effort to keep the film properly preserved. And this isn't something like The Alamo, where MGM literally hasn't been able to afford properly restoring the original version due to their financial problems. I am pro-business, pro-copyright, pro-property rights, but this is just beyond the pale.
Even if copyright extension is kept in place, there should be a clause for films, that if you're not properly preserving a work, even if you do not intend to publicly release it in the foreseeable future, you lose it. I'm all for copyright, as long as you take the responsibilities that come with it; film is not a permanent medium like print is, it needs special care. It feels more and more like Lucas' attitude towards the OOT is "let them rot," and I'd call that reckless endangerment of film.
Epic fail, Mr. Lucas. Epic fail.
lpd said:
Weird weres 3PO's face in that last picture????
The training remote is covering it up.
I have a memory of watching Star Wars once a year at Christmas on tv and the little monster chess pieces used to be black and white! Am i right?
No. They were always in color, they were just much less saturated before 2004.
hairy_hen said:
That music echo in the '77 stereo is rather strange, although it does have an interesting effect. I guess it's an early use of the surround channel in Dolby Stereo, but perhaps one reason they made the '85 mix was to tone down this element. Since it's delayed compared to the front channels, I don't think it would affect the imaging much, but I'm not sure.
Well, since the surround echo is a lower-volume mono fold-down of the music in the L/R channels, wouldn't it make the stereo field seem narrower if not properly matrixed, since it reduces the distinctness of the two channels?
But whether the stereo imaging of the music in the L/R of the '77 is as wide as the '85 - that we really can't know because all we have of the '77 is the LD's non-matrixed, non-Dolby analog stereo, just the straight LT/RT tracks in 2-channel.
Anything to say about my question about the "double" Death Star explosion sound in your 5.1, and whether that will be improved in the new version?
If the shake was an optical effect, the orange errors were not introduced with it. Comparing the JSC V8 and Technidisc SWE in slo-mo, the shake effect is exactly the same, frame for frame. If it were redone, there would be some visual difference in the effect, since the "law of human error" dictates that if this kind of optical shake effect were redone, there would be a much higher probability that there'd be some kind of difference than that it would look *exactly* the same.
Since it does look exactly the same except for the orange errors, I have to conclude that the effect was not redone; the same footage is on both.
Those frames were obviously screwed up somewhere on the path to the IP that was used to make the theatrical prints, and from which the dupier-looking IP used for the DC/GOUT was derived.
I still can't figure out whether the 1980s IP was directly derived from the O-neg. It is certainly sharper than the source used for the '93 Technidisc SWE/DC/GOUT, and it also has more horizontal information and a little more vertical info as well. The two IPs also have different-looking glue marks on the splices.
The reason why I'm skeptical that the 80s IP was *directly* derived from the negative is because of some additional damage I see on the JSC, like the weird translucent blobs scrolling up the right side of the frame after Luke puts on the blast helmet, when Ben says "Your eyes can deceive you, don't trust them" and when Luke turns on his saber (I mentioned this before - they almost look like water damage). It is not negative damage, because it's dark, not light. I can't tell if that problem was on the preceding generation, whether it was due to the lab screwing up while making the IP, or whether the damage occurred to the IP after it was developed. Do those blobs appear on that scene on any of the video releases prior to the JSC?
As far as I can tell, the same IP was used for all video releases between 1982-92, even if it was telecined multiple times. If this is the "1985 IP", it wasn't actually made in 1985. If there was a new IP made in 1985, it must not have been ever used for video (and the 1985 complete-trilogy limited reissue used existing prints, right?). Using none's site, there seems to have been the P&S telecine used on the '82 VHS/Beta and the '85 LD (also shown on CBS), the time-compressed P&S telecine used on the '82 LD and CED (also shown on HBO), and a different P&S telecine on the '92 LD dark_jedi preserved (the cropping is shifted a bit to the left, and the corridor walls don't have as much of a pinkish-brownish tinge as the VHS/Beta/'85 LD. I don't see enough visual difference to suggest it came from a different film source, though.
At some point, it'd be interesting to do a visual comparison of EVERY SW video release, P&S versions included. Anybody got the 1987 and 1990/92 P&S VHS releases?
OK, so then the term "1985 IP" is a misnomer. Still curious as to the origins of the 80s IPs...
BTW, looking at the V8 again - what is with the additional damage? If the JSC was sourced from the '85 new IP (which, correct me if I'm wrong, was made from the negative while it was still in usable condition?), why is there new damage, like the weird spots when Luke turns on his lightsaber when he has the blast helmet on? What is that, water damage? Some kind of warping?
That particular damage does not appear on any of the pre-ANH bootlegs, or Puggo's transfers, or the Technidisc SWE, or the DC/GOUT. I'd expect a new IP to be cleaner. Was it actually transferred from a dupe made from the IP, and it got mucked up when it was being developed? Confusing...
Cary Elwes, is that you? :)
The weird thing about Luke's saber in that scene is that, if you look at the compositing test clip that appears in ILM: Creating the Impossible (the one where we see a series of various partial composites and individual elements on black), in the portion that has the saber blade animation by itself on black, the blade has a real blue glow. Then in the clip of the composited image (which seems to be from the same test reel, not a different source), it's that aqua color that we know from most of the old transfers.
The only versions I've seen where the saber actually seemed to look blue throughout in the Falcon scenes were the Moth3r and Catnap telecines. Even with the lossy quality, I can still make out that it's blue in those, and even in the scenes where the optical glow is kind of weak compared to the white glow of the on-set prop, the blue glow still looks the proper shade of blue. (Though I'm not sure if those have accurate colors anyways, due to not being properly timed.)
For anybody who saw the Baltimore screening of the Technicolor print, what did the saber look like on that? Did it, in fact, look properly blue on the original theatrical prints (as it seems from the bootleg telecines)? The glow was apparently blue at some point, when did it start looking aqua or turquoise or whatever?
I think the O-neg has a larger image field than what we usually see - framing around the edges is not always the same on every print or every video transfer (like the scene with the Tusken scouts, where in one transfer - JSC? - we can see a sliver of sky at the top that we usually don't). Maybe they just framed it a little farther to the left when they did the restoration.
If the IPs used for the THX transfers were dupes, then yes, the PAL could have used a different dupe.
It really baffles me how they wanted a source with a closer generation, but the prints they used may well have been more generations removed than the ones used for 80s video releases. Yet everyone back in the 90s, myself included, saw them as looking superior to the old releases - was it just due to the improved video mastering? (DVNR aside, of course...)
That list seems right, but wasn't a new IP made in '85, and wasn't that the element used for the JSC transfer? So that means that the '82 release would have used a different IP, right?
My guesses about the presence of the '81 crawl on the "original" IP:
1.) When the 1981 reissue rolled around, the ANH crawl could have been spliced onto the IP so it could be used to produce a new internegative for foreign reissue prints without the English subtitles.
2.) The IP they used for the DC actually had the '77 crawl but it was simply replaced for the video transfer.
3.) It wasn't an original 1977 IP, but a later dupe of said IP with the '81 crawl on it. (Which would account for both the presence of the flaws from the '77 IP, and the additional grain/wear/damage.)
I'm not sure. All I know is that the negative could not have had the "errors" because the IP(s) used for the 80s video transfers did not have them. If it were on the O-neg, every single film element made from it would also have them.
What exactly do you mean, the scene was altered for the SE?
And I thought that none's comparison shows that both the NTSC and PAL THX transfers used the same element, but in the NTSC the errors were DVNR'ed out.
I'm as confused by all this as you are - I don't pretend to have the answers, I'm just guessing.
I noticed that though the telecine fold-downs have the echo effect (I don't think the two channels are folded down exactly in sync), but when I use "Audio Device -> Mono" in VLC to combine the two channels of the '77 stereo track on DJ's release, it's cancelled out. When I use "Cancel vocals" in GoldWave, the echo is left behind, and it sounds very odd. It's almost like they mixed in a low-volume mono fold-down of the music out of sync (creating a reverb/echo effect), with the two channels being inverse to one another (meaning that if the end result is folded down to mono in exact sync, the echo would be cancelled out). I tried that in GoldWave with the end credits from the OST, and the end result sounds similar to what's on the '77 stereo. Was it some sort of artificial reverb effect put in intentionally, or possibly some weird artifact from the fold-down from 4-track to 2-track? I think all the mixes have *some* added reverb in the music, but the '77 stereo is the only version to have this peculiar "wall of sound" echo. (I can kind of hear it in the music in other parts besides the two mentioned, but it's most pronounced in the Falcon battle and end credits. Skimming through it, I notice it during the opening crawl, the Falcon in the tractor beam, the Falcon takeoff from the Death Star, and the throne room music as well. Again, it's most noticeable if you listen to the brass in the music. And I was wrong, the '85 is wider - in fact, maybe this weird echo is part of what makes the music sound "narrower" in the '77.)
Speaking of echo, h_h, what's with the odd echo effect in the Death Star explosion, and is it going to be changed in the new version? I like the added LFE punch, but as I said, there's a strange echo almost like two sounds playing at the same time, slightly out of step with one another. (Was that due to combining elements from the '93 and SE explosion effects?)
The revised Fox logo debuted in the summer of 1981; the reissue of SW was in April, so I am now certain that the new logo did *not* appear on it in theaters; thus, it was just edited on for the initial video releases. (Which would make sense, since there's a video edit from the cropped Fox logo to the squeezed Lucasfilm credit.)
All versions I've seen except the original '82 video had the correct fanfare. So I guess it was just dubbed over for the initial video release. Why? No clue.
Watch the very end of this clip of the network TV premiere of SW: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79Du-s3jmJU
You can see the 80s Fox logo fade up, and if you listen to the drums of the Fox fanfare, you can hear that it's not the Newman recording, or the Williams recording, but the anemic re-recording that Fox used through the 80s and into the early 90s. Thinking back, yes, I think that was the version I heard on the '82 VHS. I remember it because I had *never* seen a version of the first film that didn't have the classic 50s recording of the fanfare.
As a kid, I had the 1990 VHS of ANH - it definitely had the logo seen on ROTJ, coupled with the 50s Newman fanfare. I remember wondering back then why ESB had a different logo than ANH or ROTJ, and it was only when the THX releases came out that I saw that ANH had that "tilted 0" like ESB did.
Looking at the clips of the time-compressed CED on YouTube, I can see that it has the correct Fox logo - I'm assuming that the first compressed LD was exactly the same. Thus, it would have been only the original VHS and Betamax (which weren't compressed, right?) that had the replaced Fox logo and fanfare (later P&S releases, at least on VHS, would have the logo replaced, but with the original fanfare intact). Can someone check the Starkiller Rental Library preservation?
I understand that this is getting off the subject of the Orange Errors, let me bring it back by saying that all the video releases prior to the Technidisc SWE obviously came from newer IPs which were made from a source that did not have the errors. This means that the errors were not on the original negative - as I said before, they must have been introduced on the original IP (since the Technidisc SWE and PAL THX LDs have them, and they came from a generation before the addition of the alien subtitles - see below).
From what I've gathered, the '85 IP was used on the '85 P&S releases and the JSC/"shrinking ratio" SWE. In '93, they went back to an IP from '77, according to that Widescreen Review article - this was what would have been used on the Technidisc SWE and the '93 transfer. Though here's what confuses me - they said they didn't have IPs without the subtitles, but the IPs used for home video obviously lacked them. I'd assume that those IPs were either too faded or too worn to be used again (and by 1993, the negative had reached the poor condition that they'd find it in when they exhumed it to prepare the SE).
The code on the Rental Library VHS says "FOXVID" something. VHS tapes in the early 80s sometimes had these codes superimposed in the upper part of the image (maybe it had something to do with the duplication process?). I know that Warner also did it, there's a similar code on the old "Nelvanamation" video that had A Cosmic Christmas on it.
This information would be overscanned out on the CRTs of the era, but watching on an LCD or a capture makes them more visible. (I think the top of the code is in that part of the image you don't see unless you "scan", i.e. rewind or fast-forward while the tape is playing.)
I seem to recall that I used to have a Magnetic Video copy of The Making of Star Wars which had a similar code that said "FOX" and some numbers.
I think the 1982 video releases must have come from the IP of the 1981 reissue that introduced the Episode IV crawl. Like most (all?) of the pre-THX pan and scan releases, it had the 1981 Fox logo instead of the classic one, but the '82 VHS I checked out from the public library about 5 years ago also replaced the 50s fanfare with that John Williams re-recording done for ESB. Was that on theatrical prints of the '81 reissue too? (All of the non-THX P&S versions I'd seen had the logo replaced, but not the fanfare.)
And there's a flaw in your argument about different IPs being made in '77 - all pre-ANH prints and bootlegs we've found have these marks, whether from 35mm or 16mm, stereo or mono, domestic or foreign, with the original or revised end credits. If I had to guess, the marks were introduced when the lab did the '77 interpositive, or internegative, or whatever was used to make the 35mm and 16mm prints pre-ANH. (Did the print shown in Baltimore have them, I wonder?)
Listening to dark_jedi's release through headphones, cycling between the '77 and '85 stereo mixes during the end credits. There is reverb in both, but it seems much more pronounced in the '77. In that, it sounds like it's not just reverb, but an actual echo. Listen to the horns in the beginning. There is still reverb in the '85, but the '77 almost sounds like it's in a tunnel. (Though in the end credits, the stereo in the '77 almost seems to me to be wider than the '85?)
You can also hear the echo in the Moth3r and Catnap telecines (in fact, I'd say that the mono fold-down makes it more noticeable...)
I know comparatively little about this stuff, but I'm wondering if they did go back to an earlier generation - the '77 stereo mix has that echo effect in the music in the Falcon battle and the end credits, while the '85 mix doesn't.
I don't know anything about color correction. Adywan, Harmy and Lee Thorogood all utilized it in their projects, maybe they can help you out.
Which one looks closer to the previous LD and DVD releases of the theatrical cut?
The Blu-ray timing reminds me of the Star Trek II BD. Same cool, desaturated look (but like Trek II, the grain structure is intact).
Not sure which is more accurate either; the theatrical looks more "right" to my eyes, but that's just me.
I know Garrett Gilchrist had 35mm reels transferred for his "Thief and the Cobbler" project, funded by donations from forum members and fans, so it can be done. Though I'm not sure it'd be wise to take prints of *these* films to a professional Hollywood facility like Garrett did; Adywan warned against it before, and we all know what happened to the print he saw a screening of a few years back...
Not related to Star Wars, but related to this LD - anybody up for trying to obtain and rip any of the Japanese SFX Museum LDs which were done by the same company?
This site has them: http://www.urabanchou.com $40 each for volumes 1-3, $65 each for vol's 4 and 5.
I would be most interested in volumes 1 (Richard Edlund), 2 (John Dykstra) and 5 (models and miniatures).
That Verta scan looks interesting, but something looks off. I can see grain in the text, but especially at the top, the text doesn't seem to blend in with the starfield, almost as if the text were cut out and pasted over a new background.
I am in no way dismissing it as some kind of hoax, it is definitely real, but it looks strange to me.
I'd love to see a 35mm/70mm print preservation almost as much as a real theatrical screening.
I saw that, thanks.
Still, I know someone (maybe not here) has the AMC versions...
Sorry to bump this up, but can Lee or anyone else possibly take the '95 PAL THX preservations and slow the video and audio down 4% to 23.976fps?
I'm not even sure it would require re-authoring from scratch; would it be possible to just take the .VOB files, change the framerate from 25 to 24, and apply an audio slowdown to match? If it's 25p, it shouldn't be hard to simply slow it down to 24p. (Sort of like how in Avidemux, you can take a 25fps video file and slow it down to 23.976, and apply a sound filter to slow the audio down 4% to match.)
I'd love to be able to burn copies of the '95 PAL THX preservations that are in 24fps instead of 25...
Hello,
Does anybody happen to have recordings/rips of the versions of A Hard Day’s Night and Help! that AMC used to show (back when they showed movies uncut and commercial-free)? The versions AMC showed were the original theatrical mono mixes, which have never been included on any commercial release. I’d love to hear how the films originally sounded, rather than the modern mixes’ jarring contrast between mid-60s optical for the dialogue/effects and modern digital masters for the songs.
Also, Yellow Submarine used to show up on local TV stations in the 70s/80s - does anybody have an off-air TV recording of that film, or any kind of tape copy predating the first VHS/laserdisc release? The reason I ask is because there is no official release of the film with its complete original mono soundtrack. The original VHS/LD was a stereo remix, and the mono track on the DVD is not completely mono; for some reason, there’s a 15-minute segment about between “All Together Now” and “Nowhere Man” which is a 2.0 fold-down of the 5.1 remix.
U.S. TV airings of “YS” from before the late-80s video release would have had the original mono soundtrack (and would also be the only way to get the U.S. exclusive “Beatles to battle” scenes in mono). I’m not sure if it ever aired in the UK or Australia (or any other country that would have shown it in English) back in the 80s, but I’d assume those broadcasts would have been mono as well (though possibly the UK cut).
Any Beatle fans here who might have any of these?