Cantina Scene said:

adywan said:

Yes, i had a 1080p scan from a 35mm source. It was a pretty beat up print and badly faded, but did the trick in the end. I have been able to do all of the cropped shots. All i have heard about the cropping is that George preferred the tight framing done in ANH for the cockpits. How true that rumour is, is anyone's guess.

Yeah I read in The Secret History of Star Wars (I think) that Lucas was annoyed that they made the cockpit bigger for ESB ;something to do with preferring a cramped WWII vibe, I think; can't recall exactly.

Interesting, that's something that had never occured to me but GL is right IMHO. Based on Luke's initial reaction to seeing the millenium falcon in Star Wars, calling it a "piece of junk" the ship cockpit works better feelling cramped, not spacious like the uncropped shot makes it feel. This is of course seperate from the fact that the uncropped shot looks like the camera is shooting through a window into a set while the cropped shot looks like the camera is in there in the cockpit with the characters and not shooting from the outside into a set.

I don't want to offend anybody here but I think that some of you should try to be a bit more objective about the changes that GL made to the Star Wars Original Trilogy, yes he made a lot of bad calls by making Greedo shoot first, adding Jabba to the first film, adding Jedi Rocks and Christensen to ROTJ etc. but that doesn't mean that ALL the changes he made, like cropping this cockpit shot, are automatically bad, give him a bit of credit. Some of the changes he made, especially to effects shots, were improvements IMHO. Remember that Star Wars would not exist without GL, he deserves our respect for that alone, even if he went off the deep end later on with some of the Special Edition changes.