TServo2049 said:
How many preservations are there of the fullscreen PAL versions? And not just of the original film, but of Empire and Jedi as well? The 1995 PAL VHS versions would be interesting, they're probably the highest-quality cropped transfers. (And here's a question - is the DVNR different on the P&S versions? Since this is before HD, I'm guessing they had to transfer it two times, because they couldn't derive the P&S version from a higher-resolution source.)
I believe that the answer is zero. In fact VHS/Beta has rarely been preserved and I am only aware of the 82 ANH by Starkiller and the Faces and SE by Dark Jedi. There was the 1994 Widescreen ANH VHS on the newsgroups about a year ago but I have never seen that release or heard anything about it.
I did a total "hack-job" of my VHS collection just to get them into a digital format so that I could do comparisons such as this thread. Trust me, the quality sucks!!
Read about that here http://originaltrilogy.com/forum/topic.cfm/PAL-VHS-Archive-Collection/topic/3829/
and here (another "hack-job") http://homepage.ntlworld.com/russdawson/laservhsvcd/vhs/palvhs.html
The biggest things I found out at that time was as follows
Firstly, it is well known that the PAL movies are shorter than the NTSC movies by 4% due to the different framerate.
For some bizarre reason, the 1991 Trilogy Special Widescreen Edition films are approx 4% longer than the other releases I have.
Star Wars 118 mins and 122 mins
Empire 119 mins and 125 mins
Jedi 126 mins and 132 mins
It is almost as if there is some type of framerate compensation to make the films play for the same length of time as the same as the theatrical and NTSC versions.
Has anyone got any ideas on this one??
Secondly, on the 1995 Trilogy - One Last Time - Fullscreen and Widescreen release, Empire and Jedi only, there is no Fox logo and fanfare. Instead there is the crappy blue CBS FOX logo. This is very wrong!!!
Another reminder NOT to take anything for granted when dealing with all things Star Wars......
We now have proof that the "squeezed" macrobinocular shot was in fact used on the early HBO broadcasts as well as on the 1982 NTSC LaserDisc. That same shot also appears on the UK PAL 1982 to 1989 Fullscreen releases. Therefore, you would assume (I did) that the 1982 NTSC LaserDisc and the UK PAL 1982 to 1989 Fullscreen releases are exactly the same. You would in fact be wrong as the two crawl shots from my original post show!!!
1982 LaserDisc crawl
1982 UK VHS crawl
