hairy_hen

Carnivorous eyeballs are totally going to be the next big thing.

Testicules.

All of pittrek’s observations about those shots are quite correct. Some of them look really good, and some are just wacky.

Don’t forget that Star Wars was never consistent from shot to shot in terms of color. There was often considerable variation between scenes, and sometimes even in the middle of scenes. Using references from one part of the movie to correct unrelated shots may end up yielding results pretty far from what they should be. It looks like that is what has happened here.

The shots that do look good are pretty amazing, so it’s worth rethinking the others until they all reach this same level.

Clearly this particular Technicolor reference is wrong for that shot. In the pictures from the Senator screening, which used a different Tech print, it had a pale blue sky and was not overly bright.

(insert standard disclaimer about photographs of a projection screen not being completely reliable)

Editing to add: remember how Harmy’s 2.0 was very bright and washed out in this scene? That print definitely has some errors on it, which also included two shots of the lightsaber duel being ridiculously blue.

I agree, using the video from the AVCHD and putting it in a different container will give far better results than re-encoding.

Also, I saw reference earlier to transcode settings that would downmix the 5.1 audio into stereo with Prologic II matrixing, which made my head hurt. The surrounds in the 5.1 are already phase-shifted as it is, which makes for less-than-ideal sound quality when downmixed again, owing to the way it was made. I tried to minimize this as much as possible, but putting additional phase-shifting on top of what is already there will most likely sound even more weird. I strongly recommend using the actual stereo mixes instead, and leaving the 5.1 for listening on an actual 5.1 system. The results will be much better.

Dear Sir,

I wish to complain about the number of complaints on this forum. They are clearly not written by the general public, and are merely included for a cheap laugh.

Yours Sincerely,

William Stoat-Pamphlet-Jones-Incubator-Kensington-Stool-Sample-Smythe III [deceased]

1. The kind attended to by beautiful women.

2. The kind not attended to by beautiful women.

3. The kind trees are made of.

Not just the dirt: there’s also a significant buildup of grain that occurs from combining multiple layers of film in that way.

Colson said:

REPORT-ROTJ-v2.5 - At the screen wipe at 4:57, there appears to be a weird glitch in the audio where it skips (for lack of a better word) momentarily. This appears to be present on all the audio tracks, so it may be native to the film. It’s present on 83 and 93 mixes.

This is a defect in the source tracks. I tried to get rid of it while assembling the audio mixes, but was unable due to lack of suitable material to patch over it. I found that while it is quite noticeable on headphones, it’s harder to hear it when listening on speakers, and not actively hunting for errors.

It could be a dropout in the music stems, it could be a bad edit of different takes, I’m not really sure, but it’s there in all versions as far as I can tell. There are also a few other things of that nature scattered through the film, but I’m not going to say where they are.

The 1986 US laserdisc I used for the '83 stereo mix had a large number of dropouts in various places, as well as a spot where the tape distorted pretty heavily for a moment. I patched over all of those with the 1989 SWE laserdisc, since they are not actually part of the mix itself and are just errors in that particular copy of it. If I hadn’t done this, there would be a great many more defects to point out.

. . . dafuq?

What was most likely done was to input the front LCR channels into the 5.1 exactly as they were, without alteration, and drop the Lc and Rc due to not being needed. The mono surround would go equally into both rear channels at -3 dB, so that when played back out of both speakers it would maintain its proper level. It is possible that some sort of de-tuning or other de-correlation effect may have been applied to the rear channels to prevent them from forming a phantom center image in the back of the room, thus making the surround effects more diffuse and less localized. (THX home video releases of old sound mixes have done this, but I don’t know if any other companies ever did it.) The original didn’t have an LFE channel, so it may have been left blank.

I haven’t actually heard the original mix of 2001, so this isn’t a firsthand account of how it sounds; it’s just what I’ve learned about how these formats tended to be dealt with. I do know the 5.1 on the Bluray sounds rather good, and its aural aesthetic matches my memory of watching the film on VHS—I think its changes come mainly in the form of the directional dialog having been all moved to the center, and the addition of some bass to the ending sequence. I’d certainly like to hear the original and compare them directly at some point.

Yes, it would be rather silly to use different audio for the '81 crawl in a seamless branching mode. Prints that had the newer crawl spliced on still used the same original Dolby Stereo audio track for the whole movie.

To get the six-track mix onto home video without any alteration at all, there would have to be a home video format that supported having five channels across the front. There is no home video format that does this, so it would be both impossible and pointless. The left-center and right-center fronts most likely only contain a mix of the LCR channels anyway, which was only done to fill in the space in a gigantic cinema environment. In a smaller home viewing space, there would be no purpose whatsoever to hearing this, for it would just make everything phasey and weird.

The extra front channels on 70mm not having any discrete information of their own is one of the reasons why, beginning with Star Wars, they were reassigned to the purpose of being dedicated low frequency channels instead.

I always worry when I hear about stuff like this. Since my tracks were made with the official DTS encoder, there shouldn’t be anything wrong or incompatible about them, unless they’ve been extracted improperly. It must be an problem with the authoring software.

The only possible reason for it on my end could have been not selecting ‘embed timecode into file’ as an encoding option. I can’t remember whether I did that or not, and I don’t know if it actually makes any difference. That might explain the program’s inability to determine the true length of the file. Other programs aren’t having this issue, so it could well be something else entirely.

The 70mm picture quality could potentially be quite nice, though with an aspect ratio of 2.2:1, some image would be missing from the sides.

The soundtrack is quite the most desirable aspect of it, of course. I know there is at least one privately owned 70mm print of the first movie out there, but nobody seems to know who actually owns it. Most likely this person would be unwilling to loan it out for scanning. I’ve never heard anything about whether there are any existing copies of the other two.

How about ‘urethra extension’?

Of course the world is flat. This whole ‘round earth’ business is just what the liberal media want you to believe.

The 35mm and 70mm ESB mixes are actually very similar for the most part. Only a few small differences between them, with the exception of the very last scene of the film, which is significantly different due to the change in editing.

The 16mm mono has a number of changes that later ended up in the special edition, as well as the foreign language versions.

We could talk out of our penis holes instead, if that would help . . .

I wouldn’t mind checking out the workprint as well. I never saw the first one, so it would be great to see the improvements in a side by side comparison like this.

(No need to get fancy with the soundtrack, I reckon: the stereo mix in AC3 ought to do it, to keep the workprint’s file size down.)

Puggo - Jar Jar’s Yoda said:

What if they had included a Jabba bathroom reference?

Maybe that’s why Jabba is so fat: he isn’t able to go to the bathroom at all, so all his excrement just builds up inside.

I have yet to see more than a few pieces of the LPP version, but holy crappe, that Technicolor preview looks amazing. If the whole movie was available in that quality, I would watch the hell out of that!

Very interesting to see how closely it matches the colors of Despecialized 2.5, as well. The inconsistencies from shot to shot are in exactly the same places: sometimes the Death Star interior is blue-green, sometimes straight-up blue, sometimes a bit purple-ish, sometimes even light grey. Every time it changes it’s in exactly the same way as Harmy’s version, and it looks a bit green-tinted more often than not. Clearly that is just the way those prints looked—I think it would be doing them a disservice to ‘correct’ those inconsistencies or biases out of it. So what if it’s a bit green? I think it flatters the overall cinematography quite nicely.

I really like seeing the grain levels go up on the opticals, also: it reminds me I’m looking at the real thing and not an overly-scrubbed version.

All edits for the 5.1 are now finished. I’ve done everything I can think of to make it great, and I’m really happy with the way it sounds. To me the improvement over the previous version is pretty substantial, though it’s mostly apparent in the small details of how everything blends together, but I like it much better.

All that’s left now to do is record the upmix (a real-time process) and add the LFE; then after one final listening check, encode to 5.1 and upload it. My brain is currently exhausted from listening to these things on endless repeat for the past few weeks, so I’m going to take a day off to recharge before I finalize it. But it won’t be long now, folks.

Didn’t the last episode of The X-Files actually show Cigarette Man’s body disintegrating in an explosion? How can he come back from that?

I know he’s been apparently dead before and come back, but seriously.

When Luke falls down the trap door to the Rancor in RotJ, does it sound to anyone else like Jabba says, “Stinky Jedi! Stinky Jedi!”?

I’ve thought so ever since I was a kid . . .