adywan said:
danny_boy said:
I actually have the Sony vw1000es 4K home cinema projector.
The Star War's blu's(both prequel and original) look absolutely phenomenal on it.
But.....
Due to the increased resolution offered by the projector....(all be it upscaled) the limitations of the analogue techniques used in making the OUT are far more pronounced.
In particular , scenes and shots which where optically composited exhibit noticibly softer looking images than 1st generation material.
4K(and to a lesser extent 2K) is ruthless in exposing these discrepencies.
By their nature large portions of the original films featured such material.
A 4K master and a 4K Digital Cinema Package(DCP) may be too "harsh" on the OUT .
One of the reasons why Lucas opted for a 2K master.
Can't disagree with you more on this. They look terrible projected at 4k. TPM is actually worse than any of the OT, but AOTC & ROTS do look good. The problem you are seeing has nothing to do with the techniques used at the time of filming, but the way the transfer was mastered. The worse shots are the ones that weren't recomposited. Instead they just DVNR'd these shots to death. You can even see that they did this to some elements that they did recomposite. Plus, the scanning done in the 90's for these elements produced a lot softer results than a scan done today and, with the special edition, we're pretty much stuck with that. That's you problem right there as to why they look so soft. Add Lowry's so called clean up into the process and this is what you get.
Now, the person who invited me to the 4k viewing , also had something that came as a little surprise. He had a 4k scan of a 70mm reel from ESB (which is why he invited me really it turns out). It was unfaded, which came as a bit of a surprise. Now we compared this to the blu-ray and the 4k scan looked so much better, even if it was dirtier. Now this shouldn't have been the case, right? we did some side by side comparisons with some screenshots and there are effects shots that are smeared to hell on the blu-rays and have some very bad artefacts caused by this. I just wish that he had more than one reel so i could have done some more comparisons (and that he would have given me a copy of the scan). He also had a full scan of a tecnicolor ANH, which we only had time to watch bits. That looked amazing but it was noticeable which shots George deliberately downgraded.
So, redo all the compositing using todays tech and don't scrub the hell out of the elements and you will see a hell of a lot of difference.
Why did George only scan the OT in 2k? Because of the 2 PT films being shot in 1080p? Does he really want his older films looking better than he new ones with the tech that he was pushing so hard for? Probably not
But the blu-rays of the OT were such a piss poor job i can't see how anyone can say they look amazing, because they don't, especially when projected @4k.
Those films could look hell of a lot better than they do now if only someone who gives more of a crap about the quality than just getting the job done and maximize the profits.
That's why I can't help but wonder if the Lowry master will still be used for the inevitable 3D theatrical re-release. When Lucas randomly changed some shots for the blu-ray (the rock in front of artoo, the door to jabba's palace, etc), a lot of people assumed he was doing it for the eventual 3D version. Seemed a little weird (to me, anyways) for those changes to have made their way into the movies so early when the release dates for the 3D versions were still years away.
I can't really fathom a 1920x1080 master of the OT, a master which was only really ever meant to hold up to scrutiny on HD video, being used for a 3D conversion. Jim Ward called it a "digital negative," but this was back in 2004, an eternity ago in terms of tech. Wizard of Oz, Titanic and Jurassic Park all got new 4K masters before they were dimensionalized. Maybe it's a different situation with the OT-SE, since there are now many cgi shots and those may or may not still be sitting on the servers at ILM somewhere (I kinda doubt it). So, the filmed-out negative would be the only source for those shots, or they could redo them from scratch with modern cgi.
The irony is that the opticals could still look better thanks to better scanning technology, the benefit of being completely photochemical in nature. It occurred to me just now, as I was writing this, that fresh new scans of the vistavision negatives would benefit a 3D conversion immensely since you already have the individual components of those shots separated out.
You could have a point, though. Maybe Lucas honestly doesn't want the old movies looking better than the new ones. It's a little crazy, though, that we've gotten not one, but two new scans of Raiders since 2003* and Star Wars is yet to be revisited. The SE itself still has a bunch of problems that weren't fixed in '04, like transparencies and movement errors (I say that having never watched the blu-rays, but from what adywan is saying they weren't fixed).
A truly updated version of the SE coupled with a 3D conversion could be mind-blowing for today's audiences, not that I'd ever pay money to go see it. The question, ultimately, is whether GL would be interested, since he'd surely have a say in such things.
*I wonder if this was more at the behest of Paramount and Spielberg than Lucasfilm, though. All three Indy movies got new 4K scans / 2K finishes circa 2008, and I even heard there were new 35mm prints made from these masters. Raiders got scanned yet again last year (6K scan, 4K finish, or something crazy like that) and got a short run in liemax. It's this newest 4K master that was used for the blu-ray of Raiders, while the 2008 2K masters of Temple and Crusade were used for their blu-ray transfers.