Save Star Wars Dot Com — Page 12

So, the mono screenings of ESB and ROTJ were just the same 35mm stereo print with the theatres sound equipment playing it back through a single channel? That seems a bit odd, at least for ESB. Mono was so common back then, you'd think they would want to make sure it had been mixed specially for that format to make sure the levels were better suited to a single channel.

I don't think there was that big a shift in technology between 1977 and 1980. Most people probably still saw ESB in mono. ROTJ is a bit more understandable.

I don't really know much about the specifics of Dolby Stereo optical in particular, but two-channel audio generally works reasonably well downmixed to mono.  It isn't optimal, of course, because the levels may not come out right, and most especially because the matrixed rear channel effects will phase cancel out and will not be heard at all.  So things like the blockade runner coming from the back before appearing on screen in the first film would be missing on a stereo mix played in mono, as would various other ship flybys, the chasm voice echo, and numerous background sounds.  There are quite a lot more rear effects than you might imagine without hearing them on a surround setup, though not as numerous or immersive as present day mixes tend to be.

When they say Dolby Stereo is designed to be mono-compatible, does that mean that it has a way of ensuring that the surround effects will still be heard?  I'm not sure how such a thing would work.  Based on that alone I can see why they wanted to make a separate mono mix, and also to take into account the Academy EQ curve for mono setups without noise reduction.  I guess by the time they made Empire and Jedi they assumed most theatres had upgraded to stereo and didn't bother making another separate version?

Speaking of Empire and Jedi, there's something I've been wondering. Were the original six-track versions 5.1, or were they 4.2 like Star Wars? There's a featurette on the Apocalypse Now complete dossier about how it was the first movie to be mixed/played in 5.1 when it opened in '79. Did every other six-track release from then on do the same thing?

That is my understanding as well.  Shortly after ESB was released in 80, the Episode IV tag and A New Hope were added to some published items, but weren't added to the film until the re-release.

The new crawl appeared in the script in The Art of Star Wars in 1979. But it wasn't in the film until 1981.

DoubleOO5: The wipes were also redone. This is maybe not "altering" the film, but like the re-comps it does constitute changing the original negative. For instance, in the wipe from the sandcrawler to the stormtroopers, there was a change in colour grading once the wipe began, because it was prepared before the final grading was done, so it never totally matched and you could see the colour jump if you looked closely. This has been corrected so that now the wipes have the same grading as the material around it.

Fang Zei said:

Speaking of Empire and Jedi, there's something I've been wondering. Were the original six-track versions 5.1, or were they 4.2 like Star Wars? There's a featurette on the Apocalypse Now complete dossier about how it was the first movie to be mixed/played in 5.1 when it opened in '79. Did every other six-track release from then on do the same thing?

According to the lists on in70mm, all the Star Wars films used the 4.2 format with twin LFE's and mono surround.  Apparently stereo surround channels were quite uncommon before 1989, and didn't always correspond with use of the dynamic increase provided by Dolby SR.

http://in70mm.com/library/process/dolby/index.htm

These newer 70mm magnetic mixes could be described as 5.2, because for the sake of backwards compatibility they still used twin LFE's as did the older variant.  The stereo surrounds were mixed into the LFE channels, relying on crossovers in the signal chain to separate the bass frequencies from the rear effects.  A mono rear channel was also included for theatres that didn't have stereo surround capability.

(Note that present day DTS cinema format also encodes the bass into the surround channels to eliminate the extra bandwidth a separate LFE would require, but the home video DTS codec does not do this.)

Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade is listed as using both Dolby SR dynamics and stereo surrounds.  I wonder if the 5.1 mix on the dvd is the same as the 70mm or if it was redone.  I'm pretty sure Raiders of the Lost Ark was remixed, due to occasional stereo surround use, but I couldn't say whether it was done from scratch or came from modifying the existing 70mm version.  Some have commented negatively on the dvd mix compared to the 35mm stereo, which might indicate its having been redone, but I'm not familiar enough with either to speak of it with any authority.

doubleofive said:

I quickly found and inserted all of the wipes and fades I could find, along with an additional SE change (another extended shot).

Very interesting, thanks for doing that.

About Raiders, I vaguely recall that the 90s laserdisc had a few redone sound effects that were then reverted back to the original for the dvd. (In particular, the sound when Indy drops the staff into the map room)

Those first three Indy movies are great entertainment whatever sound they have :)

(Another original trilogy almost sullied completely by Lucas's meddling and the fourth wretched installment.)

005: Excellent job on getting those wipes. I hadn't realized they basically just covered over the pre-existing wipes. On some it seems like they went back to the original pieces and did new ones, but the timing is never the same. Will you eventually be adding the other shots that Msycamore found?