adywan said:
Has anyone noticed that they seem to have changed Nien Numb's voice slightly in the death star footage? Or is it just my sound system crapping out?
http://youtu.be/4fq4CH3I7SU
It sounds like it's through a voicebox with effects or something. The whole sound mix feels/sounds so wrong! The levels are totally different, and everything has been both scrubbed of detail/range and just shoved back into the timeline at an approximate guess!
And great, still mattes all over the TIE through cockpit shot.
zombie84 said:
Also--Fox spent $20 million restoring and updating the films from 1993-1997. The films were very meticulously restored, by hand and also digitally. The only bit to do would be to wash the negative again (it's been handled since then) and do a 4K scan, and then retrieve the missing pieces from storage (or other print sources if they are damaged), clean them and splice them in. This accounts for, what, maybe eight minutes of material for ANH and five minutes for each of the following two films. How long do you think that would take? Just over a week maybe, plus all the release/home video prepwork. Cost maybe, I dunno, 300 grand or so per film?
They underwent the restoration at YCM labs and have the different color timing. The thing that gets me is the complaints people had of the softness in the image and how it didn't resemble the original films.
It should be simple to work from the restored films-as in those finished so that they could even do the added bits. If it came to it, they should simply scan those personal prints of George's. It would cost less, involve less people and time, and they could also sync the alternate mixes (70mm, mono) that they now have scanned digitally into their HDs.
Can't be that much more, the scanners are in-house at ILM and so is everything else, since 110/120 minutes of each film is already restored your main cost is the labour of the people actually putting those bits together. You'd have to pay a film librarian a day's wage to identify and retrieve the missing pieces (day 1), pay a supervisor to approve or select another source (day two), find and approve any alternate sources (day three), pay a lab technician to clean, scan, digitize and back up the negs and new pieces (day four), pay an editor and assistant editor to log it all and then edit together a new D.I. (day five), pay a colour correctionist to grade the D.I. under the supervisors approval along with select areas of digital repair while a sound mixer scans and masters the soundtracks (day six, seven, eight and nine maybe?) and bam, done. You overlap the film work so that you are constantly moving the work forward (i.e while ANH pieces are being scanned the film librarians are searching for ESB, so they can be scanned while ANH is in the D.I.) and within two weeks, you have a 4K restoration of the entire trilogy, probably not costing more than a few hundred thousand dollars. They could add a $2 tax to the tickets for the next Celebration and the fans themselves would have footed the bill.
It's just that no one wants to take the time to do it. It doesn't take much time or money at all. Even if they just scanned and released the 97s this release would be better all around. The materials exist to preserve the films. The restoration was already done (quality is somewhat questionable) and if further work is needed on those, it should not be very difficult.
It's just that the OT is viewed as the past, and only desired by a niche market. The dollar signs are not large enough. It doesn't matter that people would do the work for next to nothing. Most of us on here know more about the presentation of the films than anyone on the Blu production staff. (We should just petition them to let us freelance the work.) Ever since Robert Harris mentioned that he knew the OT existed in decent to good condition materials and could certainly be presented well instead of the LFL claimed "they don't exist/deteriorated/destroyed" there's been no validity to their argument. Now they hide behind the supposed cost instead of the personal vision.
