To supplement poita’s earlier post-
The film was massively rushed, particularly towards the end. It had quite a few composite shots, and was shot on varying film stock and even formats. The result is the grade is pretty awful, even shot-to-shot balancing isn’t great in some scenes.
It was always the Lucasfilm way to cut corners and do things their own way. That’s how Star Wars was made, and without that it never would have been the film it was. For example GL wanted to use lots of matte paintings and didn’t care they were rushed and low quality - no one else in mainstream film-making did that.
- The Special Editions on home releases.
This is where it gets problematic. Again, people assume “STAR WARS” they will get the best in the business to do the colour grade, and spend lots of time, money and love on it.
Sadly, not so. The colour grade was rushed, and the tools used were new, and mistakes were made. This was the first time the film was fully digitally graded, and there were many problems along the way.
Which is what you get when GL prioritises other matters like getting the films released to cinemas in that year, their resources to work on the home release for the same year would have been stretched thin.
I hate to argue with you, Poita, but I don’t think the colors in Star Wars/A New Hope are as bad as you think. I think what you are referring to are the Technicolor prints which I have seen are quite messed up. But with the process winding down and Star Wars being the last film with commercial Technicolor prints, it isn’t a surprise that they screwed up the colors.
No, Technicolor would not have produced mediocre prints simply because they were closing up. The dye-transfer process was meticulous and specialised.
And I don’t think you are correct about the telecines. While it is true that a telecine operator can tweak things on the fly, the overall consistency between the various transfers indicates that is not what we are seeing. Team Negative 1 and Puggo have both transferred multiple 35 mm and 16 mm prints to arrive at the Silver Screen and Puggo Grand presentations.
The SSE is one print. And it’s not a theatrical print, it’s a dupe print. A print struck from another print. And there’s no guarantees TN1’s colour timing is correct. With all due respect to the team, their equipment wasn’t the best and certainly didn’t deliver them a projection-accurate result.
all the transfers show are marked similarity and a stark difference from the Technicolor prints. That many different telecine operator cannot all have done exactly the same corrections on the fly. That color timing has to be from the prints themselves.
Right, and the reason why is because telecine operators don’t transfer theatrical prints, they transfer prints specifically struck for telecine (as poita says with different colour timing, often low-contrast, and useless for any other use other than video transfers). That there is consistency amongst the various home releases simply means the telecine prints are themselves consistent with each other, which is hardly surprising.
That the 35 mm and 16 mm scans agree with that says to me that the Technicolor color timing is very screwed up. The sources appear to vary between original May 1977 prints (Puggo Grand US, Moth3r, and the early US/UK telecines), later 1977 prints (all the non Technicolor 35 mm prints and early foreign telecines), and the fresh interpostives done in the mid to late 80’s. But the results are all pretty close. That body of fairly consistent color timing in all those transfers vs. what we see in the Technicolor scans to me indicates that the Technicolor prints, while low fade and high resolution, are not representative of the color timing of the optically generated prints. The scene I have taken note of is where Ben and Luke are talking in the canyon. It is so washed out in the technicolor scans while it is so vibrant in every other scan and telecine.
I don’t see why you would think poor colour timing would have anything to do with the dye-transfer process? If you start with a correctly timed print, even if something did go wrong it would effect the whole reel (or even movie) not scene by scene. Also there are many other colour references for Star Wars - 35mm LPP from 1983, 35mm Kodak SP from 1977, 16mm prints (likely in both Kodak and Tech) and 8mm too.