msycamore said:
Mike O said:
I'm not saying this to be a smartass, but are you sure?
If we are to believe what has been said and written about it in several magazines, articles, documentaries etc, yes that is the way they approached the cleanup process.
http://www.theasc.com/magazine/starwars/articles/sped/ssws/pg1.htm
Fortunately, Fox's head of postproduction, Ted Gagliano, made the restoration of Star Wars a personal labor of love, working closely with YCM Labs, Pacific Title, Lucasfilm editorial, ILM and Skywalker Sound. Had the negative been constructed more conventionally, the first order of business would have been to wash it in a sulfur bath a 104F, then wipe it down by hand. But those four different film stocks couldn't be washed together; instead, they had to be separated and washed in batches. That meant dissecting the original Star Wars negative, washing it, and then reassembling it. "That made everybody suck in their breath, " Kennedy says, recalling the stressfull situation. "Thankfully, Robert Hart, the neg cutter on the second and third films, came in to put the negative back together. After doing various tests, we found out right away that nothing beats scanning original negative. Star Wars was an A-B neg cut, which meant that they could actually lift and slug original negative and send it back to ILM whenever we were enhancing a live-action shot. I think this is the first time someone has tried to bring a Seventies effects film back to the big screen."
Mike O said:
Do you think he was lying, misinformed, or just being an idiot?
No, I absolutely don't think he was lying, being misinformed nor do I think he's an idiot. David Tanaka were a visual effects editor at ILM who was directly involved with this "restoration." He was apparently responsible for finding the elements for the original optical effects so that they could be digitally recomposited.
I just find it frustrating hearing these vague stories on how things went down as there's been a lot of confusion and different thoughts on what actually was done to the original negative. It effectively muddies the water. Reading that quote from arstechnica again, my guess is that when he says original negative he's actually talking about those negative bits and pieces they had to track down for recreating and making their new visual effect shots and not the actual finished cut negative that was disassembled, washed and reassembled. But what he was saying may of course have been perfectly clear to you or everyone else besides me.
So, Mike O, what did you make of his story? Do you think I am misinformed, or just being an idiot? ;)
I didn't mean any disrespect, so I apologize if you took it that way. I merely meant that what you were suggesting was that what he was saying was incorrect (Or at least that's how I interpreted what you were saying.). It just sounded like you were saying that he had his facts wrong, and I was wondering why you believed that. I apologize if I came across as confrontational in any way, that was not my intention!
generalfrevious said:
You know what, I don't care about whether or not Cameron made his movies with the wrong color timing. I guess I could see the difference if I trained my eyes to spot them, and I could understand it bothering me.
But what Lucas is doing to the OT is unique. I know few believe this, but I think he wants to spite us and make one of the most significant films of all time disappear off the face of the Earth. He lured us, and is now beating us for no reason. What did we ever do to him to deserve this treatment? Nothing. It was his plan all along to piss on the fans, it just took him twenty years to do it so he could fool us into thinking he was the hero while purging everyone else that made the OT great like Stalin did 50 years earlier. He is a stupid and evil man, and the tragedy is that when he passes away, it will be without any remorse for what he has done.
Like I said, all Cameron has done is make everything teal and orange. That's splitting hairs compared to the SE.
What Lucas did to the OT is unique, I don't know if outside of Kubrick there's been any other filmmaker who's actively destroyed his own work in an attempt to revise history. This does, not, however, absolve Cameron of anything. He's engaging in exactly the same type of revisionism, and in a much more subtle way. While few members of the general public care about what happened to Star Wars, fewer still care about what happens as regard color timing since many HDTVs aren't even calibrated properly (I've been having trouble with mine). And neither scenario is one which the average viewer is likely to care enough about to boycott the releases, which is why it's allowed to continue.