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WOOKIE GROOMER PRESENTS
Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope
HIGH DEFINITION
BD50 BLURAY FORMAT
2009 Minor Adjustments Edition
Han Shoots First / Restored Original Darth Vader voice
PROPER RE-ISSUE WITH CORRECTED AUTO SYNC
AS TESTED BY MEMBERS OF WWW.ABHDTV.NET AND MYSELF
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General Information
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Release Date : July 2009 - Proper Re-Issue August 14, 2009
Source : 1080p Sky Broadcasting/1080p German Premier Caps Hybrid
Frame Rate : 23.976 fps
Video : 1920x1080p @ 35,000kbps H.264
Audio : English AC3 5.1EX
Audio : English DTS 5.1
Audio : Isolated Film Score DTS 5.1 @ 1509kbps
Audio : Isolated Film Score Uncompressed PCM Stereo
Audio : Audio Commentary -Untouched from Retail R1 DVD
Length : 124m
Like Empire Strikes Back and Return Of The Jedi, Lucas went back and made color adjustments to the Special Edition releases. With Empire he went blue and A New Hope he went Red. With A New Hope, the bland black and white universe dominated by the Empire had suddenly become more colorful. Some of the scenes were overly hot adding a reddish hue and laserblasts were now a hot pink?!. WTF... I tried to clean up some of those issues. I didn't want to get tied up in some sort or obsessed "restoration" because I am only a little crazy. I tried to "fix" the pink/magenta laser blasts with either red or white depending on what seemed closer to the frame on the original theatrical version. However, I didn't do a frame by frame adjustment through the entire movie so I know I missed a few. I wanted to take away the obviousness of them so watching the scenes with a lot of laser blasts you shouldn't really notice anything except the action on the screen- no pink pops. Again, this is NOT an extensive restoration and against popular belief these blurays are NOT "color corrections" I never said they were. They are simple adjustments here and there to my liking. In fact, I could probably spend months tweaking the colors and brightness and never truly be satisfied. No one knows for sure what "correct" even means and should never claim so. One other tweak worth mentioning is the Cantina scene, I had to lighten it up some. I thought it was way too dark in many scenes and had to give it some breathing room. Compared to the theatrical version it looks like it was shot completely in the dark when in fact it use to be well lit.
For this release I mainly dialed back on the overall red saturation trying to bring the color tone closer to what appeared natural to me like I did 3 years ago on the original release. I felt the majority of the feature looked pretty good and I did leave a lot of things "as is" because I liked the punch of color. Even though I had already visited the high def saga back in 2007 with several of these adjustments- this go around is my preferred versions because I went much deeper than before and never quit felt happy, not to mention Han does shoot Greedo first as I have always done. I never had access to H.264 encoding and my old obsolete version were compromised in almost every way. These things seem kind of trivial now since several have imitated this technique over the past couple years but up until now no one has actually threw the bits at it to fully enjoy it all on a real home theater system in a convenient "just hit play" format.
In the audio department I dug up an old laserdisc capture I had laying around and extracted the center channel dialog. I pulled out all of Darth Vaders dialog and plopped it into this release because I really liked how the old Vader sounded. I extracted the AC3 rf on an old capture card from a Pioneer DVL-909 Laserdisc/DVD combo player eons ago. I always hated the picture quality of the cap but the audio was bit perfect and sounded great. I also replaced the sound Obi-wan made when he first appeared on screen to scare away the Sandpeople with the original sound also from that cap. So basically, these blurays are still the new Special Editions with what should be minimal "transparent" tweaks. I debated on deleting the Jabba scene but Harrison Ford is in that scene and you can't delete Harrison Ford. Like the rest of this project I am the first to provide a full uncompressed isolated music score that sounds awesome and I will NEVER use mp3 files downloaded from the internet on my releases. For the record the isolated scores on all my releases are directly ripped bit perfect from the original outstanding Sony Classics remastered CD's of the trilogy and carefully edited to match the films score as close as what's reasonable. Even if you are a casual viewer you owe it to yourself to sit back and just listen to the fantastic scores that run through these films.
As a side note, you may notice an audio sync issue with the background sounds on the audio commentary. To re-edit the Han Shoots First scene several frames had to be removed. Since I plugged in the audio commentary as-is that edit will be apparent after the scene is over. I did not feel editing the audio commentary was warranted since it technically does not impact the feature itself. I also omitted all the foreign language tracks as they would have to be re-edited too in order to sync with the film and I did not need the extra headaches. New covers are provided will all these re-issues to accurately depict the actual contents of the disk.
Special thanks to the members at www.abhdtv.net for helping me and understanding the weight of this project.
wookiegroomer@hushmail.com