skyjedi2005 said:
Again before the advent of better hi def audio aka in HD-DVD and Blu Ray which can contain uncompressed PCM. dvd could only one up laserdisc in terms of picture quality while laserdisc always had a more robust audio performance.
The one time dvd tried to come close was in the superbit dvd era when they were releasing dts tracks in full bitrate.
The very early preference of laserdisc over dvd was in dvd's early days when mpeg2 artifacting was very bad on a lot of improperly mastered releases. Indeed most of the releases were simply the same d1 or d2 masters used for laserdisc mastering and were single layer.
It gets even stranger when you consider that some Laserdiscs have the proper screen ratio for the movies they have while the dvd's do not, and some Laserdiscs have incorrect ratios and the dvd releases corrected that.
I know of certain cases in the release of James Bond vs DVD for instance where this occured.
Sometimes even letterboxing titles cropped the image on certain titles on laserdisc loosing parts of the top or bottom or even side frames.
As for what Hi Vision was i believe it was a japan mastering system considered to be an early form of HD, it was a widescreen tv set i believe as well.
Its ironic that there is an ad on youtube where george lucas advertises it for the japanese.
I not sure but i guess some who owned the muse players in japan like the X-0 or X-9 must have also owned a hi vision set at one point.
The biggest difference between the 1997 and 2004 special edition restorations is that the 1997 was mostly done by hand and mechanical processes as well as photo chemical not done all on a computer like Lowry.
YCM laboratories did the image restoration, YCM of course being a reference to the yellow, cyan, and magenta seperation masters used in film.
As to why their restorations turned vaders saber pink is beyond my limited understanding.
Lowry Just Scanned the supplied altered film nagative into their computers at 4k resolution, they did not do any of the new color correction or timing that was done by ILM and supervised by LUCAS.
How the picture looked before it was tampered with to make the colors try to match the digital coloring of the prequels we will probably never know.
Again before the advent of better hi def audio aka in HD-DVD and Blu Ray which can contain uncompressed PCM. dvd could only one up laserdisc in terms of picture quality while laserdisc always had a more robust audio performance.
The one time dvd tried to come close was in the superbit dvd era when they were releasing dts tracks in full bitrate.
The very early preference of laserdisc over dvd was in dvd's early days when mpeg2 artifacting was very bad on a lot of improperly mastered releases. Indeed most of the releases were simply the same d1 or d2 masters used for laserdisc mastering and were single layer.
It gets even stranger when you consider that some Laserdiscs have the proper screen ratio for the movies they have while the dvd's do not, and some Laserdiscs have incorrect ratios and the dvd releases corrected that.
I know of certain cases in the release of James Bond vs DVD for instance where this occured.
Sometimes even letterboxing titles cropped the image on certain titles on laserdisc loosing parts of the top or bottom or even side frames.
As for what Hi Vision was i believe it was a japan mastering system considered to be an early form of HD, it was a widescreen tv set i believe as well.
Its ironic that there is an ad on youtube where george lucas advertises it for the japanese.
I not sure but i guess some who owned the muse players in japan like the X-0 or X-9 must have also owned a hi vision set at one point.
The biggest difference between the 1997 and 2004 special edition restorations is that the 1997 was mostly done by hand and mechanical processes as well as photo chemical not done all on a computer like Lowry.
YCM laboratories did the image restoration, YCM of course being a reference to the yellow, cyan, and magenta seperation masters used in film.
As to why their restorations turned vaders saber pink is beyond my limited understanding.
Lowry Just Scanned the supplied altered film nagative into their computers at 4k resolution, they did not do any of the new color correction or timing that was done by ILM and supervised by LUCAS.
How the picture looked before it was tampered with to make the colors try to match the digital coloring of the prequels we will probably never know.
After my first post here, I got to see some X0 screencaps (I think) from the special collection when I found a post of Zion that linked to his imageshack. Even with the X0, the special collection looks fuzzy and washed out. The film to video master transfer technology probably wasn't as sharp in 1986.
What was a D1 master anyway? What is different than the HD masters used today? The D1 master for the Definitive Collection still seems pretty detailed other than the smearing and letterbox format. I cannot stop thinking about how much of a bad idea the DVNR was. Considering how washed out and bad of shape the prints were, the THX color correction was pretty good. Was the smearing mentioned or noticed when the laserdiscs first came out? I had heard reviews about the set were very good. We would be in such better shape without the DVNR because modern computers could erase scratches so much better. Would the X0 team even need the special collection were it not for the smearing? I'm sure a lack of DVNR would have made any video restoration like the X0 and others much easier.
And it's again a classic example of dumbing down a video release for the average ignorant customer. Just because more people would notice scratches than an interpolated picture at normal speed doesn't mean it's a good idea to throw away detail. I guess the people making the transfer didn't think it would be noticed the majority of the time on the average laserdisc player. I had heard about it but never really noticed it on my bootleg dvd's. Though I did wonder why some scenes looked less sharp and had bad compression. The clarity of the unaltered dvd's made the DVNR so much more obvious.
As for overcompressed dvd's that didn't look as good as laserdisc, did any Buffy the Vampire Slayer episodes get released on laserdisc? I have the first four seasons. 1 & 2 look bad. 3 looks much better but I see the same DVNR ghosting and smearing. 4 looks pretty good but there are still some times when I could spot DVNR at nomal speed.
Why didn't dvd's ever use PCM stereo? I mean, the bootleg dvd's do. But sorry, once digital compression improved enough, laserdisc (other than with an X0) could never be as sharp as dvd. The Gout is a good example because it uses the same master but the latest dvd mastering.
When you mention proper screen ratios, are you talking about matted films like The Shining? Or is this something else? The new Bond dvd's did feature some screwups but remember, those were also done by Lowry. Lowry has also screwed up some classic Disney. Lady and the Tramp is too shiny digital. The bonus showed a clip from the unrestored full screen version and I was like whoa, film grain and texture! I was really dissapointed with the newest Peter Pan platinum dvd. The picture looked so washed out and murky. I've seen screencaps of the first laserdisc and that looks most accurate in terms of color. Lowry's had a lot of screwups so I don't know how they don't have any responsibility for the Star Wars debacle. Surely they could have fixed some of the blatent color errors like the sabers if anyone was awake.
One of the reasons Empire of Dreams is so good is because most of the clips are from a '97 print anamorphic. The crossing sabers in front of the Emperor is shown early on and they actually have white cores.