Oldfan said:
I was just looking at the comparison shots posted between v1 and v2. Many of the shots actually look like the black levels are totally crushed - like take a look at the shots of the Millennium Falcon docked on the Death Star (shots 72 & 73, 80 & 81) - tons of detail is just gone, lost in shadow, and in shots 80 & 81 the door on the left in the background is almost impossible to see. And in the shot of Obi-Wan early on (shots 22 and 23), the v1 looks nice but v2 is totally blown out, with all detail in the background completely lost in a sea of white, and the colors look terrible compared to v1.
Is this just unavoidable due to the different sources used for v2? I don't mean this to sound like a criticism, I'm just curious why such a difference in quality- to my eyes many of the v1 shots have more background visible, even though the v2 are clearly sharper. In those shots, is this just how it looked originally, and we're just used to seeing tweaked versions over the years, or are those shots just due to limited available sources? It seems in the shots I mentioned above, v1 looks far better overall.
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*Fourth, verse, same as the first!*
Harmy painstakingly did a shot for shot retiming of the whole film to match the color of a non-fade 1977 technicolor print.
Basically, if the film looks "weird" or "different" to what you're used to, it's not because Harmy overlooked it...it's because that's the way it was on the print. The goal behind this project was to make this as faithful as possible to the film as it was released in 1977.
Now, perhaps we can criticize the film timer back in 1977 for making crappy decisions, but not Harmy.