4K restoration on Star Wars — Page 51

moviefreakedmind said:

If he didn't want anyone to see the OOT again then he wouldn't have released them in 2006, the GOUT showed that he has no desire to erase them from history anymore like he did when he created the Special Edition. Regardless of how horrendous the quality was, he still gave people an opportunity to see the unaltered versions; as long as they don't replace the Special Editions then he won't care.

There's a reason Laserman suggested that we should call the release "GOUT" around here. Had they been released from newly scanned elements, I would have agreed with your optimistic view of George Lucas.

Like Baronlando said, it was essentially the same laserdisc we had for 13 years up to that point. No original 1977 audio, the only thing nice about it was the '77 opening crawl/flyover shot but which only managed to pour more salt in the wounds due to being taken from a better source. Lucas quote around the time of release in 2006 says it all:

"It's just the original versions, as they were. We didn't do anything to it at all. But we're not sure how many people want that... Now we'll find out whether they really wanted the original or whether they wanted the improved versions. It'll all come out in the end."

At the same time Lucasfilm was giving a PR response - the short version is in my signature.

The only thing that 2006 release showed us was that he didn't give a fuck about what customers wanted. It was a very calculated release on multiple levels. Technically they weren't even given a release, they were Bonus Features attached to a repackaging of the DVD versions of the films. Right there they basically making themselves immune to whatever critique may come up over the quality. I'm also quite certain that it was other people within the company who where fighting to include them in the first place. The very poor end result though was entirely due to him.

So, no I don't agree with your view at all. It's very possible Lucasfilms stance on this have changed now when the elephant has left the building and the company is owned by Disney. But, it still remains to be seen. (If they have the balls to do what is right or if they will wait until that stubborn billionaire is no longer with us...)

MaximRecoil, If not the horrible DVNR smear and aliasing on that master made the GOUT bad enough, it was in fact so poorly produced it even managed to have worse vertical detail than the 1993 Definitive Collection and 1995 Faces LD releases. That's quite an amazing accomplishment, don't you think? I will not bother posting any examples because I and many others have done so on so many occasions on these forums through the years, it's redundant. Harmy's brilliant examples give you the idea. Anyway, the theory was that they applied a vertical blur in an attempt to mask the aliasing to be less noticeable. As a result, you have more vertical detail in some of the letterboxed VHS tapes compared to the GOUT. In addition the GOUT disc of ESB had an ugly chroma shift half of the movie not present on the LD's. And that's only the top of the iceberg of those poor discs.

The GOUT was and is a very subpar product, no matter where you try to put it on a scale, that's the only thing that matters. It was a big fuck you to the fans. No matter if you watch that fuck you on a CRT TV or on a modern display.

adywan said:

I'm pretty sure i said the UK. So what has you buying one at Walmart got anything to do with what i was saying? Just because they were still on sale in the US does not mean that they were available everywhere else in the world. I guess the UK just progressed a little quicker than the US ;) j/k

I know that for some reason European countries did adopt the 16:9 format long before North America did so it's entirely possible it was a similar scenario with CRT TV's around that time as well. I live in Sweden and I recall looking for a new CRT TV for old school gaming back then (2004 or 2005) but they weren't sold any longer so I had to look for a used one.

Originaltrilogy.com without TV's Frink would be a very boring place. :)

msycamore said:

moviefreakedmind said:

If he didn't want anyone to see the OOT again then he wouldn't have released them in 2006, the GOUT showed that he has no desire to erase them from history anymore like he did when he created the Special Edition. Regardless of how horrendous the quality was, he still gave people an opportunity to see the unaltered versions; as long as they don't replace the Special Editions then he won't care.

There's a reason Laserman suggested that we should call the release "GOUT" around here. Had they been released from newly scanned elements, I would have agreed with your optimistic view of George Lucas.

Like Baronlando said, it was essentially the same laserdisc we had for 13 years up to that point. No original 1977 audio, the only thing nice about it was the '77 opening crawl/flyover shot but which only managed to pour more salt in the wounds due to being taken from a better source. Lucas quote around the time of release in 2006 says it all:

"It's just the original versions, as they were. We didn't do anything to it at all. But we're not sure how many people want that... Now we'll find out whether they really wanted the original or whether they wanted the improved versions. It'll all come out in the end."

At the same time Lucasfilm was giving a PR response - the short version is in my signature.

The only thing that 2006 release showed us was that he didn't give a fuck about what customers wanted. It was a very calculated release on multiple levels. Technically they weren't even given a release, they were Bonus Features attached to a repackaging of the DVD versions of the films. Right there they basically making themselves immune to whatever critique may come up over the quality. I'm also quite certain that it was other people within the company who where fighting to include them in the first place. The very poor end result though was entirely due to him.

So, no I don't agree with your view at all. It's very possible Lucasfilms stance on this have changed now when the elephant has left the building and the company is owned by Disney. But, it still remains to be seen. (If they have the balls to do what is right or if they will wait until that stubborn billionaire is no longer with us...)

Sure, I agree that at that time Lucas was still hung up on his "true vision" and that's why the GOUT was so poor. He wanted it to be released in a subpar quality so that his versions would be the watchable ones, and it was very petty because he wanted everyone to think that if you prefer the OOT, you have to watch it in 1993 laserdisc quality. Remember though, this was in 2006, and by the time we got to the blu rays he didn't even mention his "vision" he just mentioned it being expensive and time consuming. He didn't even say it'd never happen, probably because he was already working on the Disney sale. I've always noticed George softening on his whole, "one version only" idea. In 1997 he wanted to let all copies of the trilogy deteriorate, and in 2006 he released the laserdisc on DVD which effectively "preserves" the films digitally (I know it sucked, but he did release), and then by 2011 he's just saying that he isn't interested. Not opposed to releasing them, just not interested, and he completely admitted that he was perfectly capable of doing so, while in '06 he was claiming that it was impossible to restore them. 

moviefreakedmind said:

Sure, I agree that at that time Lucas was still hung up on his "true vision" and that's why the GOUT was so poor. He wanted it to be released in a subpar quality so that his , and it was very petty. Remember though, this was in 2006, and by the time we got to the blu rays he didn't even mention his "vision" he just mentioned it being expensive and time consuming. He didn't even say it'd never happen, probably because he was already working on the Disney sale. I've always noticed George softening on his whole, "one version only" idea. In 1997 he wanted to let all copies of the trilogy deteriorate, and in 2006 he released the laserdisc on DVD which effectively "preserves" the films digitally (I know it sucked, but he did release), and then by 2011 he's just saying that he isn't interested. Not opposed to releasing them, just not interested, and he completely admitted that he was perfectly capable of doing so, while in '06 he was claiming that it was impossible to restore them. 

That "softening" some speak of, did we ever see anything being materialized...?

I can assure you he never changed his mind on this, I put together a greatest hits of his comments to the media regarding this last year: http://originaltrilogy.com/forum/topic.cfm/Lets-all-say-something-nice-about-George-Lucas-No-insults-allowed/post/617831/#TopicPost617831

I only see a hypocritical man burping the same shit over and over again, when he spoke to the media, he couldn't behave himself either due to being too personally invested in the things being criticized or he acted like a politician.

The only thing he gave the old fans who made him during his last twenty years at the helm of Lucasfilm was a 15 year old LD master as a bonus feature and in the process destroyed a bit of American Cinema history. Btw, where is his THX 1138 he was so proud of back in the day? Oh, right you can watch it on laserdisc, I forgot... The irony, the true cut of his film Coppola and him fought so passionately to save from the studio back in the day is just another series of patches in his software program.

I still don't think that he cares anymore. I think he went from being legitimately opposed to people seeing the OOT, to someone who just did not care at all about it. 

AntcuFaalb said:

Puggo - Jar Jar's Yoda said:

While I understand (now) that the LD master was letterboxed, presumably that master was made from some earlier scan.  I'd also imagine that that scan was better resolution than letterboxed 4:3.

I'm pretty sure a fairly direct film->...->D-1 pipeline was used. The storage costs for a digital scan of a film at >NTSC resolution would have been massive in '92/93 and it still would have been on tape.

So if I understand you correctly, the letterboxed LD master was likely the highest resolution entity they had, other than the original film?

Puggo - Jar Jar's Yoda said:

AntcuFaalb said:

Puggo - Jar Jar's Yoda said:

While I understand (now) that the LD master was letterboxed, presumably that master was made from some earlier scan.  I'd also imagine that that scan was better resolution than letterboxed 4:3.

I'm pretty sure a fairly direct film->...->D-1 pipeline was used. The storage costs for a digital scan of a film at >NTSC resolution would have been massive in '92/93 and it still would have been on tape.

So if I understand you correctly, the letterboxed LD master was likely the highest resolution entity they had, other than the original film?

 You'd think they could've just scanned the '93 print and cleaned it up to make it look acceptable and released that in '06. That would've satisfied most people I think

Puggo - Jar Jar's Yoda said:

AntcuFaalb said:

Puggo - Jar Jar's Yoda said:

While I understand (now) that the LD master was letterboxed, presumably that master was made from some earlier scan.  I'd also imagine that that scan was better resolution than letterboxed 4:3.

I'm pretty sure a fairly direct film->...->D-1 pipeline was used. The storage costs for a digital scan of a film at >NTSC resolution would have been massive in '92/93 and it still would have been on tape.

So if I understand you correctly, the letterboxed LD master was likely the highest resolution entity they had, other than the original film?

I guess the reason that I ask, is because the letterboxed format wasn't the only format that the OUT was available on.  There was also pan and scan, and PAL.  Presumably the pan and scan was at a higher resolution (albeit with cropped sides).  So would those different format masters have been all generated from completely different scans?  Might instead there have been one master scan from which these various other masters have been made from?  And if so, why not just generate a new anamorphic master from that scan?  Or, back to my original question, is it more likely that they saved the various masters but not the scan from which they were made?

I'm pretty sure that movies weren't "scanned" as we know it today. They were telecined. I could be remembering this wrong (I've only had very limited experience with telecines and they were mostly through correspondence) but these telecine machine were programmable. So you'd go through the film and punch in timecode in the computer and tell it to up the contrast to so much percent or change the color - whatever. Once you've gone through the whole film and your data is set, you'd hit record and do a realtime transfer to video tape.

I would think the same thing would apply to Pan and Scan. You program the machine to pan and scan where and when you'd want it to. 

Well, there were pan and scan releases before the GOUT.

The telecines used for LD would go straight to what format tape?  UMatic?  1-inch? And already letterboxed?

Puggo - Jar Jar's Yoda said:

Well, there were pan and scan releases before the GOUT.

The telecines used for LD would go straight to what format tape?  UMatic?  1-inch? And already letterboxed?

I'm not an expert but I think it was 1-inch before the arrival of D1/2. If you watch the special features for the Star Trek TNG bluray restoration, you see them handling 1-inch reels of video tape from the first couple of seasons which were the original film to tape transfers. 

But I'm pretty sure transfers switched to D1 or D2 once those became viable options. 

As far as letterboxing, I would say yes. I would think they just had different telecine masters for the LB version and the P&S version. But again, I'm no expert. 

Yeah I have no idea who that is

So there may possibly be an update here:

http://www.slashfilm.com/new-disney-ad-fuels-rumors-full-star-wars-digital-re-release/

Insert obligatory speculation that it may be the 4K scans:

http://screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/94908

The ad is very low quality, so the only differences worth mentioning other than the extra cropping is the substantial bump in brightness.

Jeez, that article is still hung up on that whole, "Fox refusing to ever sell these movies again" thing