Complete Comparison of Special Edition Visual Changes — Page 21

Just to confirm what you already wrote, it was recomposited for the '97SE: http://originaltrilogy.com/forum/topic.cfm/Complete-Comparison-of-Special-Edition-Visual-Changes/post/463505/#TopicPost463505 It's on that list I posted.

msycamore said:

Just to confirm what you already wrote, it was recomposited for the '97SE: <a href="http://originaltrilogy.com/forum/topic.cfm/Complete-Comparison-of-Special-Edition-Visual-Changes/post/463505/#TopicPost463505</a>" title="originaltrilogy.com/forum/topic.cfm/Complete-Comparison-of-Special-Edition-Visual-Changes/post/463505/#TopicPost463505">http://originaltrilogy.com/forum/topic.cfm/Complete-Comparison-of-Special-Edition-Visual-Changes/post/463505/#TopicPost463505</a>" target="_blank">http://originaltrilogy.com/forum/topic.cfm/Complete-Comparison-of-Special-Edition-Visual-Changes/post/463505/#TopicPost463505">http://originaltrilogy.com/forum/topic.cfm/Complete-Comparison-of-Special-Edition-Visual-Changes/post/463505/#TopicPost463505</a> It's on that list I posted.

That's a good question, doesn't necessarily have to be a digital alteration, maybe just cropped/framed differently, happens often, but there seems to be a little too much information on the left for that to be the case, I can check other transfers and see how it looks.

msycamore said:

That's a good question, doesn't necessarily have to be a digital alteration, maybe just cropped/framed differently, happens often, but there seems to be a little too much information on the left for that to be the case, I can check other transfers and see how it looks.

Back to the shot of the TIEs, I found this quote in American Cinematographer:

"For example, in the shot of Darth Vader's ship flanked by two TIE fighters flying through a Death Star trench, George wanted us to make the villain's vessels larger and more dominant. We found the TIE fighter elements and Darth Vader's ship, but even after I found all of the other Death Star trench backgrounds for the space battle, I couldn't find that particular trench plate. Then I realized that on certain shots they had used the same take over and over again—but in different segments, to make viewers think it was a different background. Since the backgrounds were blurred, it sometimes drove us nuts, because we'd find ourselves saying, late at night 'There's a triangle going by, there's a square. Okay, if a circle follows that, then that's the right one!' A lot of times things worked in reverse, which just made things that much harder to piece together."



This shot was re-composited using the original elements? That's pretty impressive. So much was done to this movie besides the CGI, but that's most behind the scenes things focus on. These AC articles talk about matching starfields and finding elements that suggest that there's even more done to this movie than we know. If this "zoomed in" shot can be lined up perfectly, I'm wondering how much was recreated flawlessly?

doubleofive said:

 

Maybe the GOUT is mis-cropped?

Here it is from Puggo Grande:

and here from 97SE:

I think it's quite clearly an SE change and not a transfer mistake:

I assume you're fixing this, Harmy?

:-)

Yep :-) It's already done in the workprint.

Harmy said: 

Here it is from Puggo Grande:

and here from 97SE:

I think it's quite clearly an SE change and not a transfer mistake:

Yeah, it looks like it alright, a similar reframing was done here:

GOUT

2004

I don't know, I'd say in this case it does seem to just be cropped differently.

Cropped differently= reframed

But I agree, there's a lot of info on the left of that cockpit-shot. So what are you suggesting, completely manipulated in the computer?

msycamore said:

Cropped differently= reframed

But I agree, there's a lot of info on the left of that cockpit-shot. So what are you suggesting, completely manipulated in the computer?

Well, let me show you what I mean:

Here are the frames layered over each other. The first one is definitely shifted to one side, the other one seems to be simply cropped pretty much equally on all sides by about the amount the whole GOUT is cropped compared to the SE. What this proves though is, that the holograms were definitely recomposited, as in the original they are a bit smaller in the frame than in the SE.

I'm reading everything I can regarding the SE, I'm hoping it might shed some light on this kind of thing.

Beautifully demonstrated, Harmy. When you're sitting on such info spell it out immediately instead. ;) Definitely manipulated.

005: no, I'm not arguing with you, my last post was actually intended towards Harmy's post, but now I can clearly see the difference.

Haven't watched that footage myself, does it look fake somehow?

No it doesn't, that's the thing about it. But it doesn't necessarily mean it's CGI, they could have just used elements from other shots. The reason for this change is what baffles me.

Harmy said:

No it doesn't, that's the thing about it. But it doesn't necessarily mean it's CGI, they could have just used elements from other shots. The reason for this change is what baffles me.

Actually, I just noticed there's some weird movement on the right side of the frame in the original, could that be the reason? 

So, could they do this with all scenes? Is there actually a lot of cropped image?

I'm not sure what exactly you mean now. The GOUT is definitely more cropped on all sides compared to the 04SE.

I don't know, it just seems to be Lucas' desire to have every shot perfectly lined up, not the gritty documentary-style Lucas' of the seventies. That one we may not figure out.

Harmy said:

I'm not sure what exactly you mean now. The GOUT is definitely more cropped on all sides compared to the 04SE.

I meant that is the whole movie actually cropped from a bigger image or was it only that shot or what's going on. So could you go back to original negatives and see a lot more than what has been released? Like 005 said: I'm just wondering what ratio the original film was in to allow for so much cropping.

I don't think so. Almost every home video transfer of every film is cropped to a point but it's usually just a little, I don't think the releases of STAR WARS are majorly cropped compared to the original negatives. The 04SE is the least cropped release so far but you can still see a little bit of more of the frame in the 70mm scans.

I found this quote in American Cinematographer, which is interesting:

The Sarlac animation was just a warmup compared to the chore of displaying the entire landscape of Tattoine's lumbering desert wasteland with Jabba's barge in the background, sand skiffs in the midground and the Sarlac in the foreground. "There are shots where we spent 80 percent of our time re-creating the original composites and 20 percent just putting the tentacles and beak in," reports CG supervisor Hutchinson. "The original shots contained various elements: two sand skiffs shot against bluescreen, several matte paintings, and the original plate shot on location [in Arizona]. All the roto work for the laserbolts and Luke's lightsaber had been farmed out to another company, so it's been very difficult to find very much of those original elements. We've had to re-create the green lightsaber and the red laserbolt animation, and blend it into the location shots with all of those matte-painting and blue-screen elements, exactly as if it had been done optically."

LexX said:

I meant that is the whole movie actually cropped from a bigger image or was it only that shot or what's going on. So could you go back to original negatives and see a lot more than what has been released? Like 005 said: I'm just wondering what ratio the original film was in to allow for so much cropping.

This doesn't seem to be a regular difference in cropping, that was what I first thought when I saw that screenshot, but as you can see it's largely shifted to the left, so it must be a deliberate change. (Lucasfilm really made that word infamous ;).

As Harmy said, most films are cropped more or less when they make a video transfer, but then it's in the range of what was displayed on the Empire-pic he posted, the Japanese Special Collection transfer for example displays too much vertically in some scenes but it's always a marginal. 

They must've approached this scene in the same way they altered the composition of the Falcon-cockpit in Empire.