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Star Wars Trilogy - Original Theatrical Versions: 2006 DVD Flaw List

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 (Edited)

Well the 2006 DVD release has been out over a month now. As is the custom whenever Star Wars gets a release, someone has to make a list of what's wrong with it!
(List collected from various posts on the forum. Please correct any errors I've made. I'm planning on adding screenshots of the flaws at a later stage).

Since this DVD comes from the old definitive collection laserdisc master, many of the flaws mentioned here are equally as relevant.

  1. The DVNR or dirt concealment process that was used in mastering the THX laserdiscs caused a plethora of motion artefacts - trails, detail smearing and ghosting of bright images onto succeeding shots. Since the same master was used for these DVDs, the same effects are visible.

  2. Since the transfer is non-anamorphic, widescreen TV owners will need to select the "zoom" display mode to view in the correct aspect ratio (sometimes also called "cinema" mode). This results in Greedo's subtitles being lost off the bottom of the screen. Although some TVs have a "subtitle zoom" display mode that will fix this, this causes the "letterboxed" portion of the screen to be postioned higher up. Having unsymettrical black bars is aesthetically displeasing.

  3. Greedo's subtitle for the line "it's too late" is missing from the PAL region 2/4 discs.

  4. A distracting left/right wobble - known as "gate weave" - is present on this transfer. This is caused by enlargement of the film sprocket holes over time. For Star Wars, the shot of the original theatrical opening crawl and Star Destroyer flyby is a new transfer (the laserdisc featured the "Episode IV: A New Hope" crawl). It has been reported, by someone who is an authority on visual effects, that a "fake" gate weave has been added to this first element. Perhaps this was in order to match the look of the new element to the natural weave present in the rest of the transfer.

  5. A problem with horizontal field movement during the telecine process caused 'jaggies' in the Definitive Collection transfer. Instead of fixing this properly, i.e. making a sub-pixel horizontal adjustment between the fields, the DVD has been mastered with a vertical blur to mask the jaggie effect.

  6. IVTC errors - the master video will have had 3:2 pulldown applied to produce the NTSC framerate of 29.97fps. For the DVD, the video was inverse telecined (IVTCed) to convert to 23.976fps. Unfortunately there were some cadence errors in the master, resulting in some flickering artefacts on R2D2 in the scene with Ben and Luke after the Sandpeople attack. These artefacts are visible when viewing on a computer or a progressive display.

  7. The image on the DVD is extremely grainy. Opinions vary on this - take your pick:
    - artificial "grain" has been deliberately added to the image
    - it's a by-product of sharpening applied to the laserdisc masters
    - the films have always been grainy, it just looks worse on DVD because this format reproduces more detail

  8. The PAL (region 2/4) DVDs are upscaled from the NTSC masters. Not necessarily a flaw, however this is a very lazy practice in DVD mastering. An equivalent PAL master was used for the 1995 laserdisc releases in France and Germany; this master could have been used for the PAL DVDs.

  9. The German audio track was faulty on some discs. In chapter 13 of ANH when Luke, Han & Chewie wait for the elevator to the detention area, the announcements in the background are missing - as well as the lines "Ich kann in diesem Helm überhaupt nichts sehen (I can't see a thing in this helmet)", "Das wird nicht funktionieren (This is not gonna work)", "Warum hast du das nicht gleich gesagt? (Why didn't you say so before?)" and "Ich habe es gesagt (I did say so before)". A replacement disc with fixed German audio is available from 20th Century Fox Home Entertainmemt by emailing info@tcfhe.de.

 

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What about the missing frames detailed in this topic?
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On the grain issue, I just figured the grain was part of the film, but for the LD releases, they may have added a blur to the image so that the grain was less apparent. The DVDs would have been sourced from a master prior to the addition of this blur. Of course, I'm just theorizing. I have no evidence or anything. Just kinda looks that way from my experiences with adding a gaussian blur to scans and images in Photoshop.
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Originally posted by: Spock
What about the missing frames detailed in this topic?


Damn. Those were my favourite frames too.
VADER: Let me look on you with my own eyes...

LUKE: Dad, where are your eyebrows?

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=WO_S6UgkQk0
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I think the noisy/grainy GOUT picture is mainly caused by the quite high horizontal resolution. The Laserdiscs that used the same mastertapes would not be able to reproduce much more than 500 pixels, whereas the GOUT really seem to have the full 720 pixels resolution of DVD (at least for the niose and the grain ). Also the GOUT picture seem to been sharpened without first doing a proper noisefiltering and this would emphasise the noise even more.

One other flaw that's been mentioned from time to time is the high-contrast over-bright 'video look' picture of the GOUT (this also applies to the NTSC and PAL THX LD releases).

Here's some examples compared to the THX WOW DVD:

GOUT (clipped white levels and missing stars, also poor vertical resolution)
http://img60.imageshack.us/img60/1614/gout1fd0.jpg

THX WOW (hmm, nice anamorphic picture)
http://img332.imageshack.us/img332/9732/wow1zx6.jpg


GOUT (clipped white levels and missing stars)
http://img347.imageshack.us/img347/16/gout2lh5.jpg

THX WOW (hmm, nice anamorphic picture)
http://img54.imageshack.us/img54/3720/wow2hm7.jpg


GOUT (clipped white levels, and hmm very good horizontal resolution)
http://img327.imageshack.us/img327/5342/gout3ni1.jpg

THX WOW (hmm, nice anamorphic picture, horizontal res. could be better though)
http://img339.imageshack.us/img339/4063/wow3er7.jpg

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Hi everyone.

Something I noticed early on while watching the NTSC GOUT on an Infocus projector (74" screen in this case) is an ugly smear and/or ghosting to the right of the Tantive IV's engine glows which I haven't heard anyone mention yet. I'd read that this little segment was of higher quality then the rest of the laserdisc master, but that smear is pretty ugly and looks like a 3rd of 4th gen video copy!

Anyone else notice this? Other than that it didn't hold up toooo badly on the projector, though the film wobble was VERY noticeable especially on the death star walls.

For the time being though I still consider my treasured 1989 laserdisc (even - alas - with the shrinking ratio error) as my definitive version of Star Wars, both for sound and overall closeness to the version I remember seeing in the theatre back in 1980. Just wish I could get access to a Pioneer X0 and get a definitive recording of this LD...

- John
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If you google "THX WOW DISC" you will find this.

It contains an huge amount of information on THX audio and video systems, as well as an extensive set of calibration and alignment test signals.

This DVD contains ALL of the official THX trailers in both DOLBY DIGITAL & DTS. It has the WOW Segment (from the THX Laserdisc Demo) and the Jungle Sounds demo (from the THX Surround EX Demo).

-----------------------------------------------------------

Loaded with info on THX audio and video systems

Discussions with George Lucas

Extensive alignment tests

Numerous incredible THX trailers as seen/heard in theaters

Presented in anamorphic (16:9) widescreen

Recorded in Dolby Digital and DTS Digital Surround

Includes the legendary "WOW!" demo montage, totally remastered in 16:9 and new multi-channel discrete surround sound.

An absolute must-have for any audio/videophile

-----------------------------------------------------------

Sound: Dolby Digital EX (rate 448 kbps) and DTS ES (rate 754 kbps)
Picture: 16:9 Widescreen

Time:105 minutes

-----------------------------------------------------------

It is all here together for the first time!

If you have a sweet home theater system you owe it to yourself to own this DVD. It is the best demo DVD available!


This codefree DVD contains the following:

• George Lucas: The Power of Movies
• Podrace Sequence - Star Wars Episode 1
• Gary Rydstrom: The Power of Surround
• THX Surround EX Audio Demonstration
• THX Ultra 2 Featurette
• Gary Lux: The Power of Music
• Music Selections in 5.1
• The THX Story
• WOW! (first time in Dolby Digital 5.1!)
• Soundtrack! Featurette
• THX Trailers: Wings • Broadway • Cimarron • Grand • The Simpsons • Tex • Tex 2 • Broadway 2000 • Cavalcade


You can also look up any DVD or laserdisc release in the imdb or lddb
.
e.g. http://imdb.com/title/tt0100957/laserdisc
http://www.lddb.com/laserdisc.php?id=19090
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Is this set (or at least the first movie) partially interlaced? There are a few frames during the scene with the landspeeder buzzing into Mos Eisley that appear interlaced. However, they don't appear regularly.
http://img143.imageshack.us/img143/1113/userbar381851ln2.gif
http://img137.imageshack.us/img137/8653/userbar381853dp6.gif
Super Mario Bros. - The Wicked Star Story
"Ah, the proverbial sad sack with a wasted wish."
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Yes - see #6.

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If this is from the same master as the 1993 DC laserdisc surely it's at least as good as that, so what's the problem?
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LFL did a poor job IVTC'ing the interlaced LD master for their DVD release.

However, in practice you must take into account the “fuckwit factor”. Just talk to Darth Mallwalker…
-Moth3r

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The grain issue is not an inherant part of the Star Wars neg per se. It may be that the print used in the DC indeed is pretty grainey, and that this was softened and muddied in the LD but then sharpened and made explicit for the GOUT. Whatever the case, however, one can see that many other releases with a much sharper image than the DC (ie no DVNR) do not exhibit nearly as much grain, nor was such a high level ever seen in any theaters--its purely a print thing. I can't fathom that Lucasfilm would actually add grain to the image, if only because that would require effort on their part, which goes against the entire philosophy of the GOUT.

As for the gate weave being digitally added to the "original crawl" i must strongly disagree with this, for the same reasons that the "fake grain" issue seems dumb. If the original crawl is actually the original crawl then it would suffer from all the age artifacts that produced gate weave in the telecine of the rest of the film (ie enlarged sprockets, swelling, shrinking, dirt and knicks). The original crawl would actually be much older, since the GOUT print for the rest of the movie is some kind of nth-generation print (which would explain the high grain) and not a first or second generation print as the original crawl would probably be from.
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Don't know if you want to update this old flaw list or not, but you also have a few weird optical color glitches in these '93 masters.

This one is a weird one that is only present on the NTSC-telecine as far as I know, therefore the flaw is also on the PAL GOUT as well. C-3PO's oil bath in SW, for the first few frames of the scene everything looks as it should...

...but in the next frame the lights behind Threepio suddenly switch color...

...this continue on for quite a while, where the lights goes back to green to blue and to finally turn to purple in the scene where he presents himself as C-3PO.

Another glitch where the green colored markings turned pink, I'm not 100% sure of this one though, but 99.9%. ;)

When the Falcon dives to outmaneuvering the Imperial fleet, the TIE lasers turned yellow which totally destroys my enjoyment of one of my all time favorite ILM-shots. :(

In Empire, you also have this weird glitch: http://originaltrilogy.com/forum/topic.cfm/Whats-missing-from-GOUT/post/458996/#TopicPost458996

In Jedi, the Falcon's red laser turned to a dull green color in this sequence.

Similar glitches on the TIE lasers in this shot.

This Stardestroyer's green lasers doesn't look so green anymore.

Return of the yellow lasers.

We want you to be aware that we have no plans—now or in the future—to restore the earlier versions. 

Sincerely, Lynne Hale publicity@lucasfilm.com

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George & Co must have learned their lesson by now.

They are certain to fix this when the original versions are included in the Blu-ray set........... What?

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inconsistent cropping

GOUT - US, Europe:

GOUT Japan, Hong Kong:

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 (Edited)

^ interesting, any differences in frame counts, IVTC? Maybe you have the screenshots mislabeled, because my US copy match your Jap, Hong Kong screenshot in cropping.

We want you to be aware that we have no plans—now or in the future—to restore the earlier versions. 

Sincerely, Lynne Hale publicity@lucasfilm.com

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 (Edited)

Yes i've been getting different frame counts, but i'm uncertain if it's my playback choices.  Originally wanted to work with the files so had ripped them, but those gave a different frame count then the original vobs.  So took a step back and using avidemux on the mac and PC to confirm frame numbers.  http://fixounet.free.fr/avidemux/  Looking for a second application to confirm the numbers.  What is the date of the vob's in your version?

If you have d_j's Version 3, could you look at the cropping of the first frame there.  My version of that looks similar to the US/Europe posted above.  Can the black bars be displayed differently between programs?

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none said:

What is the date of the vob's in your version?

 How do I check that, what software do I use?

none said:

If you have d_j's Version 3, could you look at the cropping of the first frame there. My version of that looks similar to the US/Europe posted above. Can the black bars be displayed differently between programs?

d_j's Version 3 is resized and utilized the stabilization script of g-force so there's additional cropping on it.

We want you to be aware that we have no plans—now or in the future—to restore the earlier versions. 

Sincerely, Lynne Hale publicity@lucasfilm.com

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^ The date of the vobs are just like any file, your operating system will have a creation date.

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The date is: 2006-06-28

We want you to be aware that we have no plans—now or in the future—to restore the earlier versions. 

Sincerely, Lynne Hale publicity@lucasfilm.com

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US GOUT : 2006.06.28
Ge GOUT : 2006.06.30 (please confirm)
HK GOUT : 2006.09.28 (please confirm)
but they all share the same AUTORUN.INF (2006.05.08) & MENU.EXE (2006.06.23).  Going by this data was wondering if they possibly fixed/modified something in the HK GOUT.

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none said:

US GOUT : 2006.06.28
Ge GOUT : 2006.06.30 (please confirm)
HK GOUT : 2006.09.28 (please confirm)
but they all share the same AUTORUN.INF (2006.05.08) & MENU.EXE (2006.06.23).  Going by this data was wondering if they possibly fixed/modified something in the HK GOUT.

Any new information on this?

Is the Hong Kong GOUT better than the US GOUT in any way?

A picture is worth a thousand words. Post 102 is worth more.

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