If GL changed his mind about releasing OUT, but with a few tweaks..... — Page 2

If I owned a Blu Ray player, and had no other choice, then yes.

DuracellEnergizer said:

If I owned a Blu Ray player, and had no other choice, then yes.

I'd still refuse.

No tweaks to OOT. Leave the OOT as they are for Blu-Ray (if there is one).

As I said earlier I don't mind seeing films made in the past, warts and all but the intention of a piece of story telling is telling a story.

Matte lines and the like aren't part of the story so if I was offered Star Wars (1977) only without matte lines I wouldn't foam at the mouth.

But I wouldn't mind if they were there either.

What makes the SEs Special Editions (for me) is that the actual scene changes effect the presentation of the story (sometimes in positive interesting ways but often in sphincter clenching awful ways).

Having the original scenes, models, matte paintings etc but composed in a manner without the sort of glitches in them that the artists at the time would have removed if they could is essentially the same film to me.

Adding new models, actors, scenes and effects makes it a remix of the original film and that sort of thing should only exist along side the original.

If such a version was given to us in 2004 and this year (and available for theatrical release) I doubt if a site like this would be sustainable.

No, I wouldn't buy it.

Why would it be so complicated to just give us the 100% original version "as is" anyway?????

In my opinion, since Lucas has taken the "restoration" of the OT so far in one direction, I say that makes it all the more important to go an equal distance in the opposite direction. That means a restoration of the original version without a single change.

I don't want another non-OUT edition out there because it will see the consequence that the OUT won't get released!

Once a harmful SE gets out, there won't be any public pressure to release the OUT.

If anybody wants an edition with updated effects he can watch the SE all the time, avaiable in bluray. 

Lucasfilm would satisfy/reach more people with simple high quality releases of the OUT. If you wanna watch the original, you wanna watch the original right?

I would ask for all theatrical soundmixes as hairy_hen, selectable in main menu: 70mm edition, 35mm edition,...  I see no problem at all with seamless branching. They may not forget about foreign countries who had 70mm mixes as well like germany! I never heard it but read it sounds breathtaking.

The real reason behind this thread is, that most of us share the opinion that the SE as it is now, is unwatchable. Well, all you can do about it, don't buy the blu rays or go to the 3D cinema viewings of them. If you wanna do more, you can always start public relations (doing a homepage, blog, writing articles, letters, telling friends,...).

This is the only way to get the point to GL and the legal successors of the films.

I am still full of questions about the dvd/bluray colors, why did we get an almost new color palette in 2004 for the SE?

• GL thinks the colors are like in 77/80/83
• GL thinks the colors should have looked like this in 77/80/83
• it is due to the rush process in 2004 and GL didn't want to invest any money for fixing colors in the blu rays.
• it is due to the rush process in 2004 and GL now began to like them - will even use them as reference for future releases

Simple explanation for the 2004 colors being messed up: they went back to the negative, which doesn't contain any of the color-timing information.

That would be a nice Special Edition, but its not the OOT. I'd buy it, because it's very close, but I'd still be on Lucas' ass for the original, and I'd still be running savestarwars.com. Those matte lines and "defects" are important, thats the film. For me, the matte lines are as important as the rest of the effect--actually, the matte lines were the effect, the effect is the composite not the model on a blue screen; as soon as you take that away you have destroyed all historical integrity that special effect had. Same with wires, if you want to appreciate the film in its context and with its history, well they did things with wires and sometimes the wires showed a bit and they couldn't paint them out because they didn't have computers. Same with crew reflections, or a bad dub. Same with anything. Star Wars should just be Star Wars, a film that opened in May 1977, if you aren't seeing that, you aren't seeing Star Wars, you're seeing something else.

So yeah--Tasteful Special Edition. Cool! But it's not the film we are looking for.

@ R2-D2: It's a deliberately new colour timing, and reflects a number of things. Some of it is faithful to how the films originally looked. Some of it may even be faithful to how Lucas wishes they did. And a lot of it is how Lucas thinks the films should look today (eg., not exactly the same as before).

The 1997 Special Edition was actually pretty faithful to the original versions in terms of colour, with few exceptions, and was matched by YCM Labs to a 1977 Technicolor print of Star Wars (not sure about the other films). This was on the IP duplicate prints, unfortunately, so when they went back to the original camera negative for the 2004 release none of this was carried over. That's probably one reason why George decided "fuck it, we'll just give the films a whole new kind of look." They better match the cleaner, high-contrast, more colourful look of the prequels, so I am guessing that was one motivation for Lucas to screw around with the colours. He guided the colour correction himself, after all.

Puggo - Jar Jar's Yoda said:

People who say to do zero tweaks, just slap the original to digital, are discounting that the process of transfering film to digital simply does NOT result in a viewing experience that is the same as seeing the original film projection. A really proper "restoration" to digital also requires a certain amount of additional work to make the playback of the digital look as close to competitive as possible with how good the original projection looked. There are always some tweaks.

Of course, the SEs go WAY beyond teaks.  But the types of tweaks described in the first post are pretty common and as far as I'm concerned would be totally acceptable in terms of making a digital version of the original trilogy that is faithful to the original viewing experience... if they included faithful reproductions of the original sound mixes that aren't over-compressed.

Right, but this isn't the same as re-compositing things. When the transferred 1982 Blade Runner they no doubt had to futz around with the colour controls so the contrast and colours look right, but every film goes through this. I don't think anyone is saying just let the telecine run unsupervised, but don't deliberately alter anything or "fix" anything, just make sure it looks as the same as the print you transferred it from.

Doesn't this kind of exist already as Harmy's restorations? Honestly, those are good enough for me. If I never get an official release from Lucas at least I have those. I think that's why I have less bile for Lucas than most people do. I'm cool with what I got.

that's like asking why do we want the OUT when there's fan edits.

They might have just got rid of some of the grain, or maybe they just went back to the negatives. The film isn't very old and had CG in it, don't forget, it shouldn't really look dated.

But yeah, I agree with your point: films are what they are. A film from 1977 should look like it was from 1977. Now, this doesn't mean that it should be super grainy and all contrasty, when you go back to the negatives they are surprisingly crisp compared to how we expect them to be.

bigmonkey2382 said:

that's like asking why do we want the OUT when there's fan edits.

 I see what you mean, but we aren't going to get it. Why not enjoy the next best thing?