CatBus said:
Father Skywalker said:
What's is the main problme/issue here, exactly???
For 20 years, the original films were available for average people to see in better than Blu-ray quality. All you had to do was go to a theatre showing them, buy a ticket, and watch. Today, if a theatre is caught showing the original films, they are quickly confiscated.
Back in '97, most didn't immediately see the impact of this policy change. Like you said, the public still had VHS tapes and Laserdiscs, which, while certainly not as good as 35mm film, were good enough for most people's televisions at the time. And since going to the theatre was falling out of fashion even then, people might not have considered exactly how much better the films looked before they were reduced to VHS and Laserdisc.
Now, not only are those obsolete formats becoming increasingly difficult to play, but two new formats (DVD and Blu-ray) have come along to remind audiences about that quality gap between 35mm film and VHS tape.
The GOUT release (the out-of-print bonus disc DVD release) was a Laserdisc-quality release on the DVD format (not to mention that Star Wars got the wrong soundtrack in this release), so it didn't really do much for fans other than provide a really distorted view of what the originals looked like to the uninitiated. Even today, you'll hear people say that the originals looked all low-res and dirty like the GOUT, that the Special Editions fixed all of that, and that the originals simply aren't worth an HD release!
In summary, the purists remember the period from 1977-1997 when it was possible to watch the OT in super-high-definition, compare it against today when your best officially sanctioned option is a crappy Laserdisc transfer from the early nineties with the wrong soundtrack, and we feel shafted. Especially those of us with children.
Or, to put it even more succinctly, when Beverly Hills Chihuahua 3 beats the hell out of Star Wars in the visuals department, there's a problem.
Got to strongly disagree with you here.
35mm 4th generation positive release prints shown in theaters(as Star Wars would have been from 1977-1991) resolved the equivalent of 1K or even less of "screen information"----- i.e less than Blu ray or Digital Cinema 2K.(but probably a little higher than standard def DVD and obviously better than the GOUT)
Peer reviewed International studies conducted in theaters across the globe concluded that the average release print has roughly 500-800 lines per picture height.
People keep conflating information captured on the camera negative with positive release prints(shown in theaters).
It is the same as confusing the 5k of information captured on the digital panavision/genesis camera(used for superman returns)----this 5k is then down converted to 1080p/2k for release
The camera negative of film has the capacity to store upto 2400 lpph of info(or 3-4K).But you don't watch the camera negative in a theater!
But Star Wars's "original negative-o-neg" was compromised by the fact that large portions of it were composed of opticals and dupes(for wipes/dissolves ect ect)----In a sense parts of the o-neg were not really original!
Sure----the model work was captured on Vista Vision cameras ----but even that is subject to degradation through the photochemical process of duplication.
They even did comparisons in 1999 with the release of the Phantom menace using a pristine 35mm print and projecting it side by side with a 1st generation digital projector with the digital version coming out on top.
I am up for seeing a release of the 1977 edit on blu ray as the next man but I dont subcribe to the misinformation/disinformation that 35mm release prints in the 70's and 80's were "ultra-high def" (which by the way equates to 4K)
If you were to strike a 4th generation release print from the 1977 oneg of star wars in 2012 you maybe surprised to see how grainy some of those original optical composites were/are.
That is why Lucas decided to replace them.
The irony is that the duplication process used in the fotochemical workflow tended to "even out" the discrepancy between the parts of the o-neg that were 1st generation and the other parts that were optical duplicates.
So by the time you got to that 4th generation release print the film looked relatively seemless.
But if you strike a positive digital "print" from a 4K scan the difference in granularity between all the constituent parts that make up Star wars will be jarring.