Now that's a nice lookin' transfer!
Ok adywan I give you've convinced me I agree the colors won't be fixed. Now are we in agreement? Now will the HD versions of the OT be better on blu-ray as far as detail (not color changes) goes than on the dvd's and the HD Broadcasts on SpikeTV?
Most likely. They'll be a higher bitrate, so you'll have substantially less digital artifacts, and it'll probably be sharper.
But you'll still have issues like loss of detail in very dark areas caused by the crushing of the blacks in the color grading.
Good point ChainsawAsh and I agree.
Looks like for TPM they have softened the picture slightly, maybe to look similar to the soft digital look of EP2 and 3?
Still, colour wise, it looks definitely improved. Question is, did they fix the colours in the lightsaber fight with Darth Maul at the end too? The DVD colours always bothered me there.
I can't believe people are judging a future (a year off still?!) bluray release on some screen caps from a documentary! There's every chance they - the makers of the documentary - grabbed what was available AT THE TIME when making it. Wouldn't surprise me if Lucasfilm are going through the films in order, or at least prequals first as they'd need less work than the originals in terms of bringing them to bluray. They're probably working on the originals now which is why they had to use the current transfers in that documentary.
It's not over till it's over, and a lot can happen in a year.......!
To pronounce you know what the new bluray transfers will look like from watching a documentary is pretty far-fetched IMHO and more than a little reactionary!
Nerfherder said:
I can't believe people are judging a future (a year off still?!) bluray release on some screen caps from a documentary! There's every chance they - the makers of the documentary - grabbed what was available AT THE TIME when making it. Wouldn't surprise me if Lucasfilm are going through the films in order, or at least prequals first as they'd need less work than the originals in terms of bringing them to bluray. They're probably working on the originals now which is why they had to use the current transfers in that documentary.
It's not over till it's over, and a lot can happen in a year.......!
To pronounce you know what the new bluray transfers will look like from watching a documentary is pretty far-fetched IMHO and more than a little reactionary!
Awww...how idealistic of you.
If you don't think the films from this set are done at this point, you're kidding yourself.
Also, been looking at that clip of the new ROTJ footage, where Luke is in cave with the lightsaber and Vader is on the ship, and it seems there is quite an obvious green cast in parts. It seems either this could be due to the way it was filmed with the video camera, or ROTJ could be following a new green colour scheme, much like how ESB was nearly all blue...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=18O-Rj2MP9Q
I dunno, maybe I am looking far too much into it lol.
Tobar said:
Now that's a nice lookin' transfer!
But you still can't polish that turd.
Nerfherder said:
I can't believe people are judging a future (a year off still?!) bluray release on some screen caps from a documentary! There's every chance they - the makers of the documentary - grabbed what was available AT THE TIME when making it. Wouldn't surprise me if Lucasfilm are going through the films in order, or at least prequals first as they'd need less work than the originals in terms of bringing them to bluray. They're probably working on the originals now which is why they had to use the current transfers in that documentary.
It's not over till it's over, and a lot can happen in a year.......!
To pronounce you know what the new bluray transfers will look like from watching a documentary is pretty far-fetched IMHO and more than a little reactionary!
Lucasfilm have already stated over a year ago that the OT was already finished and ready for a Blu-Ray release. GL has also stated that we won't get the OUT restored because it would be too expensive. It's all about money. He was happy with the way the 2004 set turned out and there is no way he would spend any more money going back to the beginning and making a new HD transfer, with fixed colours especially when he see's nothing wrong with it. He has only spent money on restoring TPM because he wanted to add digital Yoda and because the old TPM transfer looked so bad.
Why do they even need to make a new transfer of TPM? Shouldn't there be a complete 2K DI ready for them to just encode from? And that should most definitely have the right colours (i.e. the colours seen in cinemas) as it was used for making theatrical prints.
But the scan would have the puppet Yoda, right? I guess ANY scan would have the puppet Yoda, that they would have to erase get rid of...Harmy said:
Why do they even need to make a new transfer of TPM? Shouldn't there be a complete 2K DI ready for them to just encode from? And that should most definitely have the right colours (i.e. the colours seen in cinemas) as it was used for making theatrical prints.
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Ady: For sure, the red shift of the previous transfer was gross. But you are right, it's the gamma that's making it look flat and unattractive, your correction there looks a lot better. I hope for the film's sake that the BD transfer looks more like that.
With regards to TPM's 2K DI...you know, I'm not even sure if it was a proper DI. Someone might have to go look up the American Cinematographer article on it. I know that the film was all scanned, but a DI involves more than scanning the film, it also involves the colour correction process and all that post processing work, and since DIs were extremely rare and experimental back then I would think that the actual release was a photochemical intermediate. They did have it all sitting on a computer, but I'm not sure if they would have re-scanned the final negative or answer print, or if they even kept all the scans from back then. So, the new transfer is probably a brand new DI based off the original shot scans/composites if they did hold on to all that, or it's a new DI based off the original film-out answer print or negatives from 1999. But I could be wrong, it could be a new transfer from a 1999 DI.
EDIT
Yeah, I just browsed through all the AC articles (4 seperate ones), I couldn't find any mention about a digital intermediate. There was mention of a special digital intermediate made for the experimental digital projection screenings, but this was a special side project created for specific events. Maybe they kept that, but it would have been a 1920x1080 downconvert anyway, so I'm not sure if this would have been kept and/or used for future releases (although I guess it would be okay for a BD). Likely they are using one of two methods I mentioned above though. I know they kept all the digital finals starting with AOTC, but I'm really curious if any of those TPM files were held on to for long term access.
Wasn't O Brother, where art thou the first DI? that was a year or so later
It was the first film that was entirely color graded in a computer, so it seems very likely that it was the first complete DI.
Even The Fellowship of the Ring wasn't a complete DI - that's why they had to make a new transfer of it for Blu-Ray. The other two LOTR films were complete DIs, though, if I recall correctly.
Yeah, so this is probably a new scan of the film-out negatives from 1999.
So would that mean they've scanned the film for Blu-Ray from a 3rd generation copy? Because like 90% of the film has a digital effect in it, so basically the completed shots first existed inside of a computer in 2K and then were printed onto film to create the "o-neg" (the actual camera o-neg has a lot of green screens in it so it can't of course be used for anything).
Yeah, the negative would be a 35mm printout of the computer composites of the 2K scans of the original elements. Every shot except one had a digital effect in it, according to Rick McCallum.
So its:
original 35mm elements>2K scan into compositing software>35mm negative printout.
And they didn't keep the files they printed it out from? That's stupid!!! But then, we're talking about post 1997 Lucasfilm here, so stupid is possible :-(
It's possible they kept them, we really don't know. It's hard to say what kind of long term digital storage they were looking at back then. By 2005 it was standard practice to save all these digital masters of films, but in 1997-1999 there was no such thing as digital masters because it hadn't been done. Especially when you consider the state of HDD storage back then. I wouldn't be surprise if there was no actual "digital master", probably what happened is that the individual shots were printed onto individual negative segments and then edited together by a neg cutter just like a regular film. So, in the somewhat unlikely event that the digital files weren't wiped out after the film came out, they are probably in piecemeal individual states and not conformed to an edit, because the negative was cut together and then colour timed in the physical realm, not the digital realm.
Well, yeah, I guess it makes sense. I just finished reading your article "From Interpositives to Separation Masters:How Film Preservation Works", Zombie and it is awesome. I really enjoyed reading it even though only about 10% of it was new information to me. And the end of the article explains exactly this issue. It was probably kind of unthinkable to store tens of terabytes of data in 1999.
How practical/doable is it for them to re-use the 2004 source, but correct something like the lightsabers? And by "practical" I mean on the LFL scale of effort and quality control, not the normal scale everyone else has to go by.
(Also, on the subject of using TV broadcasts to predict possible future blu-rays, Raiders is on USA this week, if anyone is curious to see if that new CGI cliff is still in there.)
Good points Zombie84 very good points on HDD storage and what it has to do with film and digital.
Baronlando said:
(Also, on the subject of using TV broadcasts to predict possible future blu-rays, Raiders is on USA this week, if anyone is curious to see if that new CGI cliff is still in there.)
I've seen Raiders twice now on TV recently, and both times I'd swear that cliff scene looks different (and I liked the original vfx). I don't recall it ever being mentioned as a change in the film, other than the boulder poles, snake reflection, truck pole that were digitally removed. Damn. More LFL meddling...
Baronlando said:
How practical/doable is it for them to re-use the 2004 source, but correct something like the lightsabers? And by "practical" I mean on the LFL scale of effort and quality control, not the normal scale everyone else has to go by.
You mean how easy would it be? Well, look at SW Revisited. I mean, if a single guy in England can do all that in his spare time using his home PC and commercial software...come on. Basically, fixing the lightsabers involves bringing the shots into something like dinky Aftereffects and rotoscoping a mask to change the hue and brightness. I mean, 12 year olds do lightsaber effects for their fan films right? It's never been a question of doability, really, it's a very simply fix.