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Why is the GOUT not anamorphic?

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I never really understood that. A few hours with VirtualDub and I could make them anamorphic. Is it complicated to cut off some black space from the picture or something? I can understand just transferring it from the LD, because an SE-level cleanup would be expensive, but why would they not take the five minutes to fix this?
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If the GOUT was anamorphic, then it would sell out overnight; but the caveat for Lucasfilm is that if the OOT sold like hotcakes, then the "official" vesrion of the saga would suffer and go against their plans to eradicate the OOT from the collective consciousness of the general public. It is their gaol that 50 years from now, no one will remember the OOT and everyone will unconditionally accept the SE and PT.
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Johnboy3434 said:

I never really understood that. A few hours with VirtualDub...


Ding ding ding!

Why spend a few hours in virtual dub when you could just throw them on as-is?
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 (Edited)
generalfrevious said:

If the GOUT was anamorphic, then it would sell out overnight; but the caveat for Lucasfilm is that if the OOT sold like hotcakes, then the "official" vesrion of the saga would suffer and go against their plans to eradicate the OOT from the collective consciousness of the general public. It is their gaol that 50 years from now, no one will remember the OOT and everyone will unconditionally accept the SE and PT.


Oh, please. I can understand the goal of the purists, but this is nothing short of delusional. The SE has all the fancy newfangled CGI that kids love, nowadays. They'd sell no matter what the OOT looked like. Let's face it, most people don't give a damn who shot first. To the vast majority of buyers, it's the same movie. And really it is, whether we want to believe it or not. A few bells and whistles does not a new machine make. The purists' share of the market is almost negligible. There is no conspiracy to make people forget the original movies. That's ridiculous. If it was, they wouldn't ADVERTISE THE CHANGES when it hit theaters in '97.

Companies have been known to put out garbage DVDs, but I just found the fact that they didn't trim 12.5% off the top and bottom of the picture an act of unusual laziness, and wondered if they've even acknowledged questions about this.
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Well, if they advertised the changes to the SE in 97, why wasn't it mentioned that you'd never see the OOT again unless it was in a very bad form? Many people saw the SE as a gimmick, not as replacement for the movies already established. This also confirms my point that Lucas made a lazy transfer of the OOT so that we would be convinced NOT to buy it, making it the Catch-22 of preserving the OOT.
BTW, how were you able to refit the GOUT into anamorphic with copy-protected media? Just asking.
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Err... I just followed ADM's guide for converting 4:3 to 16:9. I didn't do anything special.
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In answer to the copy question, I remember one of the reviews stated that the discs are not copy-protected. Hence Johnboy didn't have to do anything special.

In answer to the original question, it would've saved us the trouble of zooming in but that's about it. Probably the biggest "fuck you" was reading that the fucking menus are anamorphic. It's all beside the point really. LFL needn't bother turning 4:3 into 16:9 when it's all just "bonus material" anyway.
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Johnboy3434 said:

Companies have been known to put out garbage DVDs, but I just found the fact that they didn't trim 12.5% off the top and bottom of the picture an act of unusual laziness, and wondered if they've even acknowledged questions about this.


Here are 2 possibilities:

1) In 2006, they're about to convert the laserdisc master to DVD. Some tech notices that the laserdisc master won't support anamorphic without upscaling, and mentions it to his superior, since ANAMORPHIC IS THE STANDARD. Word comes down from on high that the GOUT will be non-anamorphic. End of discussion.

2) Here's another possibility. Maybe the GOUT was made years ago, in the late 90s, when non-anamorphic was still common. For some reason, GL sat on this for years. (We all know George has a tendency to finish things and then sit on them, like the cgi yoda in TPM). This probably cost something back when it was done, so GL decides in 2006 to just use it as an "extra", and make some money off of what was otherwise a bad investment. Again, some tech probably mentions that ANAMORPHIC IS THE STANDARD. Word comes down from on high that the GOUT will be non-anamorphic. End of discussion.

Either way, someone has to make the decision that they're going ahead with the non-anamorphic version. I suppose that's a form of laziness.

I believe Steve Sansweet discussed the issue at a fan conference in 2006 (possibly ComicCon?). There used to be a video of it online somewhere. He basically tried to discredit the criticisms, saying that the transfer on the GOUT was very good, and that only a very small number of people were making a big deal out of really tiny black lines that you could only see if you look real close. This made no sense to me, since it sounded like a description of interlacing. I lost a lot of respect for Steve that day.

You know of the rebellion against the Empire?

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Fang Zei said:

Probably the biggest "fuck you" was reading that the fucking menus are anamorphic. It's all beside the point really. LFL needn't bother turning 4:3 into 16:9 when it's all just "bonus material" anyway.


+1
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The ironic thing about the GOUT is it is the worst non-anamorphic DVD in my collection. I have early non-anamorphic movies like The Abyss and Titanic, and they aren't pristine, but they are pretty good transfers for non-anamorphic, and if the OOT were of that quality, I actually could live with it. They did ZERO work on the laserdisk masters, as there is so much dust and scratches on many of these scenes, especially the whole Hoth part which looks like utter shit on a 16 x 9 TV.
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upscaling a non anamorphic video master will not give you more resolution, as a new scan of the negatives anamorphically enhanced would.

i mean its a stupid question right it would display better on a 16:9 TV possibly. but you are not going to recover the 30% loss of quality evident in older 4:3 letterbox releases
which would have been ok in 1997, but not 2006.

Gout of Star Wars 1977 is pretty much unwatchable.

it is pretty sweet to be a fan of blade runner or godfather as they got and are getting pristine restorations. star wars is forgotten by lucas except when he needs money.

“Always loved Vader’s wordless self sacrifice. Another shitty, clueless, revision like Greedo and young Anakin’s ghost. What a fucking shame.” -Simon Pegg.

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Which is very depressing; let's honestly hope that ten years down the road, the BD will show the OOT in LD quality. Anyways, the purists are now considered crackpots because the PTSE has become so entrenched in to the public's association with SW. But that's just my rant about things.
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An anamorphic transfer would yield better results than most player-based zooming/upscaling, but its really besides the point that the transfer itself sucks because its from 1993. I have lots of non-anamorphic DVDs but they look fine because the transfers themselves are good, they yield considerable detail (and since I don't have a widescreen TV anamorphism is an irrelevant issue). The only version of the Abyss that you can get on DVD is non-anamorphic but it looks really good in spite of that.

The issue really just comes down to: the GOUT was an extra that was thrown on "as-is." The 1993 transfer is non-anamorphic so the GOUT is non-anamorphic. End of story. No work is to be done, the main point of the release is that the films are available individually, this is just an extra being tossed on to get people to buy, along with a demo for the latest video game of the time. Lots of extras are non-anamorphic, perhaps even most extras, at least back then.

Why are the menus anamorphic? Because DVD authoring software is anamorphic by defeault. Making anamorphic menus takes no additional labor, you just tick the box that it is 16:9 and this is the default that you start with.
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The GOUT is non-anamorphic because they didn't care about the quality. If anything at all they wanted it to suck. And it's not that they didn't test how it looked because they blurred it like a motherfucker to mask those terrible jaggies.

The star wars trilogy bonus disc from 2004 is completely anamorphic. Even the old Star Wars trailers that are 4:3 P&S on the DC are anamorphic.
Fez: I am so excited about Star Whores.
Hyde: Fezzy, man, it's Star Wars.
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Arnie.d said:

If anything at all they wanted it to suck.


There's a difference between not caring if it sucks and actually wanting it to suck, you know? I don't think anyone goes into a business venture wanting their product to suck.
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I have many theories, with this being one:
Erikstormtrooper said:


2) Here's another possibility. Maybe the GOUT was made years ago, in the late 90s, when non-anamorphic was still common. For some reason, GL sat on this for years. (We all know George has a tendency to finish things and then sit on them, like the cgi yoda in TPM). This probably cost something back when it was done, so GL decides in 2006 to just use it as an "extra", and make some money off of what was otherwise a bad investment. Again, some tech probably mentions that ANAMORPHIC IS THE STANDARD. Word comes down from on high that the GOUT will be non-anamorphic. End of discussion.


IMO this was all done to bleed even more money out of the fans and the new "converts" who saw the OOT for the first time via the bonus disc. It was a win/win for George: he didn't really spend any money on the transfer, he got to unload tons of SE discs that didn't sell that well two years prior, you had to buy the movies individually... When a new SW OOT product pops out someday (which I believe it will), it will be anamorphic, and many people who bought the '06 discs will buy again.

George is a money maker, and he will squeeze every dime out of the series that he can.
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Johnboy3434 said:

Arnie.d said:

If anything at all they wanted it to suck.


There's a difference between not caring if it sucks and actually wanting it to suck, you know? I don't think anyone goes into a business venture wanting their product to suck.

Have you watched it? :P
Seriously, there's is more detail in the DC laserdisc image so whatever they did to it made it worse.

ESHBG said:

I have many theories, with this being one:
Erikstormtrooper said:


2) Here's another possibility. Maybe the GOUT was made years ago, in the late 90s, when non-anamorphic was still common. For some reason, GL sat on this for years. (We all know George has a tendency to finish things and then sit on them, like the cgi yoda in TPM). This probably cost something back when it was done, so GL decides in 2006 to just use it as an "extra", and make some money off of what was otherwise a bad investment. Again, some tech probably mentions that ANAMORPHIC IS THE STANDARD. Word comes down from on high that the GOUT will be non-anamorphic. End of discussion.


IMO this was all done to bleed even more money out of the fans and the new "converts" who saw the OOT for the first time via the bonus disc. It was a win/win for George: he didn't really spend any money on the transfer, he got to unload tons of SE discs that didn't sell that well two years prior, you had to buy the movies individually... When a new SW OOT product pops out someday (which I believe it will), it will be anamorphic, and many people who bought the '06 discs will buy again.

George is a money maker, and he will squeeze every dime out of the series that he can.

I don't believe they used unsold 2004 release discs for the 2006 release. Mine certainly were different pressings.
Fez: I am so excited about Star Whores.
Hyde: Fezzy, man, it's Star Wars.
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Of course Lucasfilm intentionally made this product to fail in the market. They are completely free of logic at this point. "Because logic is for pussies."
Anyway, the LD version the GOUT was sourced from actually looks better than the GOUT itself? Wow; and I was even considering picking it up two days ago.
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Personally I believe the GOUT looks better than any (DC) LD to DVD transfer to date. The GOUT has more horizontal resolution/detail than the DC LD (which is a limitation of the LD not the mastertape). But the DC LD has more vertical resolution/detail than the GOUT (resolution that must be on the mastertape) so they screwed something up big time (they probably used a vertical blur to mask the jaggies according to Laserman).
Fez: I am so excited about Star Whores.
Hyde: Fezzy, man, it's Star Wars.
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skyjedi2005 said:

upscaling a non anamorphic video master will not give you more resolution

Gout of Star Wars 1977 is pretty much unwatchable.

I was going to make the same point about the resolution.

However, I personally don't find the GOUT unwatchable. It's not what it should be or what I want it to be, but I can watch it and enjoy it.

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Arnie.d said:

Seriously, there's is more detail in the DC laserdisc image so whatever they did to it made it worse.


I'm not arguing whether they made it worse or not. I'm arguing whether or not they did so intentionally. There's a difference between laziness and malice.
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It was neither, just cheapness. Like sub-porno cheapness. (they did a new transfer for Debbie does Dallas. Uh, so I heard.)
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Erikstormtrooper said:

I believe Steve Sansweet discussed the issue at a fan conference in 2006 (possibly ComicCon?). There used to be a video of it online somewhere. He basically tried to discredit the criticisms, saying that the transfer on the GOUT was very good, and that only a very small number of people were making a big deal out of really tiny black lines that you could only see if you look real close......



If someone could supply a link to this or point me in the right direction I'd appreciate it.

I've done the virtualdub re-author thing too. At the moment it's my version of choice. I prefer it very much over having to sit through the SE.

"Well here's a big bag of rock salt" - Patton Oswalt

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At least the GOUT was a dual-layer disc - unlike the non-anamorphic Region 2 DVD of Condorman, released the same year.

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Since they took the video off an old laserdisc master I'm 99% sure the master wasn't anamorphic, so making it anamorphic on the DVD would gain nothing. Actually, resampling by only 33% does damage to the fine details. And I wouldn't use VirtualDub for scaling anyway, since it operates in RGB instead of YUV.

Star Wars deserves a Blade Runner style restoration, but since it didn't get one, I'm glad they didn't mangle the video further by artificially making it anamorphic - I'll take the original master over a faux-anamorphic one any day. Your DVD player or widescreen TV has a button to control aspect ratio - use it.