Originally posted by: Knightmessenger
Wasn't it mentioned here earlier that for one of the widescreen releases, they had to search for a print before subtitles were burned in? And I'm sure the X0 team would be able to tell if any grain was added for the dvd release. I think it was just on the master tape that was used for the laserdiscs. I'm sure someone would have noticed if the X0 screens looked drastically cleaner.

The X0 doesn't neccessarily have to look the same. Different format and different physical copies--ie sharpness enhancement could have been added just for the DVD, especially since it looks like the image has been visually tweaked.

I had forgotten that its sans-subtitles. Were the previous releases burnt-in? Was the 1995 LD burnt-in? I ask because the VHS of the THX release has burnt-in subs that I always assumed were from the print itself and not overlayed by video. The subtitle issue raises a number of questions, firstly where the hell would you get a print. One possibility is that there was a "blank" IP made with foreign distribution in mind, as foreign versions have their own subtitles and thus would need one without the english--so you would create this master blank IP and then from that each country would generate its own IP for its respective version.

In any case though one need only look at that great film scan that Arnie provided--and see how grainy it is. Now the image is faded and scratched and all the color layers have eroded but you can clearly see that there is substantial grain throughout. Now you will also notice that the grain is different from the GOUT. That is because it is 70mm--the chemical structure of 70mm release prints are different from 35mm, the grain structure is different. 70mm has a very fine grain structure, which is why 70mm looks so crisp and clean and why Bryan Singer originally wanted to shoot Superman Returns in this format before opting for HD. Thats why the 70mm frame has more or less the same amount of grain as the GOUT, but why the 70mm frame has very fine grain (smaller, less intrusive in other words) while the 35mm GOUT has very coarse grain (bigger, more noticeable in other words).
They both have an extra mask of grain on top of the native image, but the GOUT is sourced from a 35mm stock which gives us the coarser grain seen in the GOUT. I don't think there ever was any doubt that the GOUT had more grain than was inherant in the O-neg, but to say "grain is added" is about as correct as it would be to say that Arnie's 70mm scan has grain added--the grain is "added" because its from a nth-generation duplicate stock, its a photograph of a photograph, so you have the grain from the actual photograph and then the grain from the photograph of the photograph overtop of that (and in the case of optical composite shots this process is doubled).

So yeah, the GOUT looks rough--but you guys ever seen Taxi Driver? It looks like shit. Its made from the same filmstock that Star Wars was shot on. Seen the new Taxi Driver DVD from a month or two ago? They went back to the O-neg for the first time; the movie suddenly looks clean and nice. In fact most people consider this robbing the film of its identity, since the gritty, shitty, grainy look was a part of the texture and style of the film.

I think its purely a matter of the GOUT being from a less-than-perfect source. It just looks like a release print of a film from the 1970's without any modern mastering technology applied to it, and thats exactly what it is.