- Laserdisc Player not working. Seems like it will take some time (1month+), until I can make captures of my laserdiscs.
- SVHS still @ service.
I've done another two test captures of the first movie with another vhs-recorder. The "CBS/FOX Silver Screen Collection 1990" and the "Widescreen 1993 Release" were captured.
At the moment I am discovering a lot of things about all the little differences between the several german releases.
The biggest thing I have encoutered, The 1995 THX German Audio Track is not the best way to experience the old trilogy. There has been inserted some awful cheap "echo effect" on all the deathstar-indoor-scenes. Those "echoes" aren't on any previous release and are not on the Special Edition either. Of course they haven't been in the cinema this way. There will be some audio examples very soon. Now I am more curious, which audio track the OUT-DVDs will feature. As there will be only one german audio-track on the OUT-DVDs, one is not preserved properly. My project will feature both audio tracks, of course!
Some details about the first movie:
### "Alien language" of Greedo:
I have encoutered four different Greedo-translations. Simply every release has it's own. Does anyone remember, what colour did the subtitles originally had in germany? The video releases all have big yellow letters while the broadcast premiere features small white letters.
1) CBS/FOX Silverscreen Collection 1990 Release (4:3)
2) Widescreen 1993 Release (2:35:1)
3) THX Widescreen 1995 Release (2:35:1)
4) Broadcast Premiere on "Sat.1" (cropped to 1.85:1)
The project will feature all of them, at least as a bonus feature. Maybe I can even make a menu selection.
### Title crawl - "Krieg der Sterne":
You can forget the THX Widescreen Release, it only features cheap CGI-made in germany-letters. Those aren't the original crawls!
The Widescreen 1993 Release seems to feature the title-crawl exactly how it was in the cinemas, but as everybody knows: a letterboxed VHS only features limited resolution.
The Fullframe CBS/FOX Silverscreen Collection features the complete title-crawl, nothing is cropped to my surprise, because the original 2:35:1 picture was stretched to 720x576. This stretching is kept until the first cut [TCR+01:02:38:13]. The end titles are featured the same way. As a result, I get a lot more resolution if using this one!
The following pictures will show you, what I mean:
[left = Full Frame of the Silver Screen Collection - VHS]
[right = Letterboxed Frame of the first Widescreen VHS Release]
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If I use the full frame title crawl and resize it to it's original aspect ratio (or anamorphic), it will look a lot better than just using the crawl from the letterboxed tape. Same goes with the german end titles, which were exchanged by the english ones since THX1995.
I don't know how the 1993 Laserdiscs look like. Can anyone, who has them, compare the crawl from "Krieg der Stern" to my screenshots. Do they look the same? How is the quality of them on Laserdisc? If they are of better quality, I will use them of course.
It's funny that the famous four dots on "A long time ago" and at the end of the title crawl were not inserted here in germany til the 2004-DVD-Release.
### Awful Audio Cut
There is some awful audio-cut in the pre-thx releases. The frames from 01:26:33:02 to 01:26:34:04 are simply cut away. It's in the scene where Luke is searching for R2D2 with his binoculars. C-3PO is talking about R2D2. Wondering, if I can fix this.
Is there some program, which let me compare two audio-files for offsets/starting of voices in order to "visually" sync them etc?