Theater Performance Preservations — Page 2

Also of interest to this project might be the 1977/8 in-theater audio recordings of star wars by brianm and morgands1.

doubleofive said:

We really really really need to find an ESB theatrical bootleg.

This guy seems to have it: http://home.online.no/~frinilse/starwarsonvideo/ Check out Betamax, others... He seems to know about OT.com, too, maybe somenone should try to contact him?

none said:

Wow!  Added.  How did you come across the site? (search process notes)

He's a member on Rebelscum. I'll ask if he can join here, too.

Sorry, I misunderstood this thread, I thought we were looking for best theatrical versions, should've read more carefully. Still, isn't that the first bootleg of an original TESB? I'm not sure if there's a right thread for this, so sorry for a little OT. :P

It would be worth checking out on the off chance that it might be from the 70mm. Plus, even if it's only 35mm, wouldn't that still be a verifiable source for the original 35mm soundtrack?

That was a mighty impressive collection! thanks for the link, LexX. That rare Empire bootleg could possibly be a great source for reference, I hope he have digitized it.

Hi all. (My first post on the OT forums!)

After being contacted by members of this board regarding my ESB bootleg I decided it was time to join. I've been a lurker for a few years anyway. Time to contribute :-)

I have both ESB and Jedi on bootlegs from 1982/1983, and understand they may be of interest to you guys.

First, I've already made arrangements with None to give him DVDs of these bootlegs. I'm sure this will benefit all members of this forum, if you catch my drift ;-)

Empire Strikes Back: This is a telecine of a UK print, not a CAM. It IS from circa 1982, but I have no idea how such a copy came to be.

I'm enclosing a few grabs. As you can see the print is dark and oversaturated, and partly cropped albeit squeezed by some 90% both horizontally and vertically. I've enclosed a frame from Luke under Bespin to show the Falcon dish is present (ergo: No 70mm source here, sorry).

I'll fix the ratio when I master the DVD. There are some frames missing here and there where the tape is ruined. BTW: This is a PAL copy, and the DVD I make will remain so.

Also, there is a lot of telecine wobble in this, but I'll leave that to the Avisynth gurus to stabilize somewhere down the line. There are lots of small tracking errors as well, but what do you expect from a 30 year old tape and a 25 year old Sony Betamax player?

As you can see, the telecine operator has a hard time aligning the frame for the first several seconds. This happens at several reel changes. Just adds to the charm, I think.

It's kinda dark, but the dish is clearly present.

In my next post I'll cover my Jedi bootleg. Brace yourselves :-)

Now, to shamelessly plug my Star Wars Video Collection site:

http://home.online.no/~frinilse/starwarsonvideo/

My Jedi bootleg is a CAM of the old-fashioned sort. It made the rounds in 1983, so it is a testament to how the film appeared at the time.

Washed out colour. Cropped. No crowd noise, so must be from some sort of private screening. Sourced from the UK. (PAL)

At least we can determine the original subtitle placement and size. (I'm assuming this would be identical in the states and the UK).

The grabs say it all:

As you can tell, this is in horrible condition, but for anyone who deems it of value...

Welcome to the board, Video Collector and thanks for the willingness to sharing these rare gems of yours. :) Even though the quality is crude, as you said the Jedi bootleg will be of a great reference to the subs, some will maybe find the locations of the reel-changes to be interesting etc. you never know what to find. This is great! :)

Thanks for joining, cool stuff! :)

To echo everyone's sentiments so far: welcome! Thanks for sharing what you have in your collection. These are always great curiosities.

Welcome to the forum Video Collector.

How did you make those screen grabs out of interest? The reason I ask is that they appear to be half-height grabs scaled up using a simple point resize (which is why there is heavy aliasing on diagonal lines). I suspect that one of the fields - half the resolution - got discarded somehow when you made your screen grabs. This would mean that the actual tapes contain twice the vertical resolution of your screenshots!

Very much looking forward to seeing these.

VideoCollector, thanks for joining and sharing your goodies. These will be a great resource!

Moth3r said:

Welcome to the forum Video Collector.

How did you make those screen grabs out of interest? The reason I ask is that they appear to be half-height grabs scaled up using a simple point resize (which is why there is heavy aliasing on diagonal lines). I suspect that one of the fields - half the resolution - got discarded somehow when you made your screen grabs. This would mean that the actual tapes contain twice the vertical resolution of your screenshots!

Very much looking forward to seeing these.

The screengrabs were made from VideoReDo (just because I'm using that program for basic trimming of the "raw" captures ).

I'm using a consumer DVD/Harddisc recorder that captures realtime MPEG2 to harddisk. Not an ideal solution, granted (even at the highest quality setting there is some compression-related blocking).

The captures are at their native PAL DVD resolution 768x576. Dumped to memory, pasted into Photoshop at 72dpi and saved as jpegs. That being said, I have no idea how the framedump function in VideoReDo handles the interlacing. The aliasing may be an artefact of the harddisk capture/encoding, and maybe WYSIWYG.

All the same, these grabs should give a general idea of the image characteristics of the tapes. I don't want  anyone to get their hopes up too high.

Oh, and everyone, call me Fritz, okay?

Sure Fritz. :)

Could you perhaps trim and upload a conveniently small MPEG2 sample from the raw capture? I'm curious as to whether the aliasing really is introduced by your recorder.