This thread is for the discussion of my 97 Special Edition preservation following on from the discussion that started in this thread. (mainly pages 6 - 8)
My intention is to use the best available materials to put together a best possible version of the 97 SE. The main reason for doing this is that to me this is now the version of these films that is least likely to ever get a proper release, and in my opinion they aren’t as bad as the dvd versions.
For various reasons I am starting by doing ESB using the video from the TB and GKAR sets as a source (both are PAL), to my knowledge these are the only two anamorphic sources available, and conveniently they are based of the same master so are very easy to cut between. The audio will be both 2.0 and 5.1(from the laserdiscs) and there will be both NTSC and PAL DVD-5 versions.
Some examples of the relative quality of the two sources:
As you can see the TB version is much better but unfortunately it has a few missing frames and encoding errors so these are being filled in with the GKAR footage. So far the video file comprises of only 18 frames from the GKAR (not including the credits) which fill in missing/damaged frames and only one of those frames is noticeable when you watch it and will require some colour correcting.
The only other video problem I have so far noticed is the starfield in the opening shot of the TB just disappears as the camera pans down so I will need to fix this shot:
The GKAR set doesn’t suffer from this problem but obviously I can’t use the whole shot from the GKAR as the crawl is in German, also this is the only shot of the film that isn’t framed the same in the two versions so I can’t simply cut from one to the other, it shouldn’t be to difficult to fix I just haven’t got around to it yet. All in all the TB set is pretty weak for starfields, but the GKAR set has been excessively filtered so the stars blur on pans (except for this shot) so either way the stars wont look as good as we’d like, but I’ll do my best.
After ESB I will do ANH for which there should be a couple more anamorphic sources available (although I only have the TB and GKAR at present) and then ROTJ for which I currently only have the GKAR and some of the TB.
I think that basically covers it but it’s late here and I’m tired so I might not be making any sense so feel free to ask questions.