**RUMOR** Original theatrical cut of the OT to be released on blu ray!! — Page 15

I typed brachiosaurus and my spell-check uderlined it and offered brontosaurus as an alternative - true story.

@moviefreakedmind: I don't know - I didn't like the Tim Burton remake but I thought the apes (played by people in masks) looked frickin' awesome.

Harmy said:

I typed brachiosaurus and my spell-check uderlined it and offered brontosaurus as an alternative - true story.

@moviefreakedmind: I don't know - I didn't like the Tim Burton remake but I thought the apes (played by people in masks) looked frickin' awesome.

 I agree that the makeup and costumes were well done. I was just trying to say that as of now it's very difficult to get real looking apes, so it's more a matter of personal preference. I thought the new apes looked great when they were on there own, it was just when they were alongside people that they looked phony. I was so into what was happening in the movie that I forgave some of the questionable CGI though. I'm pretty forgiving with such things, unless they're just lazy or needlessly cheap.

Yeah, it was a good movie - I was just trying to say, that I wouldn't really call the apes there state-of-the-art.

Agreed.

pittrek said:

Wasn't this thread about the rumoured Bluray release of the OT?

 It was :-) but between this and the 4K thread we've almost discussed it as much as possible. At this point we just have to wait for more info. I guess my question still stands though, is comicbook.com reliable? I'd never heard of it but apparently it's pretty well known. Basically, does anyone here trust that site in a way that if they say they have reliable sources, you believe them? Just wondering since comicbook.com doesn't even say it's a rumor, they state so clearly that the OUT is being released that there's no way it's a misunderstanding. They either made it up completely, or they have real information.

DuracellEnergizer said:

The brontosaurus lives on Pluto, now, watching the OOT on Betamax.

Well, if this rumor is true, then we won't have to rely on dead and outdated technology to watch the OOT. 

Short Round said:

Hey guys, several weeks ago I sent an email to Walt Disney Studios asking about Star Wars (not sure why, I didn't really expect an answer, but was curious what they'd say), and just today they responded to it. It took me a while to remember because I'd forgotten I'd even emailed them. Anyway, I don't have my original email anymore since it's been so long, but it was basically just asking if there was going to be a re-release for the OUT. They sent back a really strange email that said that Star Wars was not a Walt Disney Home Entertainment production and gave me a huge, and bizarre, list of other places to contact including Dreamworks, Paramount, New Line Cinema, and Fox. I know that the Star Wars Trilogy in fact isn't a Home Entertainment product of Disney's, but I remember someone else on the forum (probably in the 4K thread) posted their response and it said that Disney hadn't set a re-release date, and that the OUT was unavailable currently. Anyway, I just thought that was strange so I supposed I'd post it here. 

 First, I have no idea why they changed their message from, "it's currently unavailable" to the new one they sent you, but I wouldn't worry about this. I'm 99% sure you probably sent some kind of title request to Disney Home Entertainment (since they responded about it), but they have no control over what is going on with Star Wars. They're purpose is to package, sell, and advertise DVD's and Blu Rays, as well as probably digital home entertainment, and they won't be doing that with Star Wars unless Disney buys the distribution rights, but I think they're much more likely to just continue with the Fox distribution deal for now, at least until 2020. Second, this does not mean that Disney isn't going to be involved in a Lucasfilm restoration of the OT because they'd likely be funding it since they own and receive profits from Lucasfilm, but Disney Home Entertainment won't be involved since they won't be the ones distributing the discs. The better people to contact would be Lucasfilm or maybe another branch of Disney, but not their Home Entertainment section. 

WedgeCyan said:

imperialscum said:

WedgeCyan said:

imperialscum said:

 But for example AT-AT motion and interaction with environment looks quite fake to me because the dynamics of the model is completely different from the dynamics of the thing that it tries to model.

You're right. Stop-motion AT-ATs are so unrealistic compared to all those real-life 20-story mechanical walking tanks.

What a childish reply. I was simply stating the physics... If you make a model of something that does not exist in real life and your model does not perform/match in terms of physics, then you can't use an excuse as lame as "the thing I modelled does not exist in real life" to justify its bad performance.

 Are we really criticizing physics in a discussion of Star Wars? Ships banking in space is certifiably bunk, but it doesn't bother me in the slightest.

In addition, I think AT-ATs are a little more realistic in their movement than, say, a tauntaun, simply due to them being mechanical in nature. They are mechanical, and look so as well.

And now we get back to the original argument. While practical models may visually look more real, but CGI has a huge advantage over miniature models when it comes to motion. You can simply apply a complex dynamics simulator behind the CGI model.

I think that the AT-AT's looked great in stop-motion because they needed to have that mechanical look to their movement, and the only time I thought they looked a bit fake was when it turned to shoot the snow-speeder.

Well, I always said that the Fox argument was hogwash, so this is no surprise to me. Plus there has been talk of a digital release of the Star Wars films for quite a while now.

I think it means that they're going to re-release the films in some form.

MaximRecoil said:

Harmy said:

@darklordoftech: Yes, exactly.

@MaximRecoil: I simply disagree with this - people weren't used to seing CGI dinosaurs, so they seemed much more real back then, than the seem now - I know this, because I experienced it and my dad said this as well, last time we watched Jurassic Park. I just watched the 1st Harry Potter movie yesterday and I could spot things being obviously CGI, where I never spotted them before. And the LOTR example is a very good one as well - when I first saw those movies, they seemed flawless (visually anyway) and now, I can see all kinds of things looking fake and CGIed, though I can still see less CGI fakeness there than in the Hobbit movies, because there is simply less CGI - like Neverar says, people just learned to recognize the signs of something being CGI but in the early days, most people thought it was photo-realistic. You may be the exception to that but not the rule.

Sure, some CGI always looked bad (CGI Jabba is a great example) but most CGI definitely seems much more fake now, than it did when it was created.

 Anecdotes can't establish anything one way or another. "Confirmation bias" is the biggest potential problem with anecdotes of this nature. A controlled study of some sort could give meaningful results. This would have to involve people who have never seen the CGI in e.g., Jurassic Park and therefore have no preconceived notions about it.

As for "learning to recognize the signs of something being CGI": logically, there should be no learning process required. Those signs are simply differences from reality, and reality is something that pretty much everyone is extremely familiar with.

As for my own anecdotes, I have none where I once thought a certain case of CGI looked real or good but now I think it looks fake or bad. I'm too old to have seen any photorealistic attempts at CGI as a kid, though that could change things (i.e., a child's brain isn't even close to being fully developed yet, and they are inherently more credulous than adults as a general rule). Another thing that can change things is the quality and resolution of the picture and the display, i.e., CGI that looks good on a VHS tape or even a DVD displayed on a 15 kHz CRT isn't necessarily going to look good at far more revealing levels of resolution/quality.

 Okay then, to leave anecdotes aside, and to remove the spectre of confirmation bias, one of my jobs at Animal logic in the 90s was to take the animators to each new effects film and get them to rate the effects and their realism level on a scale, and to research what we were up against with the competition. We would also take non animator friends with us and put them through the same grilling to ascertain what effects the general public found believable and what they found poorly executed to use as a yardstick for our own work.

Going back through my notes has been an interesting and somewhat hilarious and humbling exercise. Reading my notes I was a bit of a tool back then, moreso even than now, and it is pretty clear I thought I was funny and/or clever.

Apart from all that, my notes for Jurassic Park reveal that out of the 14 animators, 12 thought the opening scenes with the first reveal were 'completely real' on our scale. i.e. that the effect was good enough, that time and advances would probably not improve on it. The 'general public members' best comment was 'How the F**k did they do that' and all of them found the effect entirely convincing.

I also noted that only 3 of the animators and none of the 'general public' realised that the jeep was CGI in the T-Rex scene in the rain.

I flicked across to Dragonheart, everyone rated the shot of the Dragon in the rain as 'perfectly executed', again basically stating it was effectively real and couldn't be made better.

Now keep in mind that this was after a single viewing at a cinema, and the effects look better on film than on BD.

I could only find two of the guys now that made the comments about JP, and both of them said the initial reveal looks flat and dated now.

Going through some other notes it is interesting what people thought of as entirely convincing, and what they didn't, and the stuff that they didn't even realise was CGI that now I am surprised no one picked it at the time.

We do get better over time and more discerning, when the best thing that had *ever* been seen before was stop motion plastiscene or latex models, the CGI dinos just looked so shockingly real, that our more cynical detail oriented brain possibly got switched off for a while.

Also, after countless CGI films, and better effects, we are now more educated what to look for, quite simply more discerning. Like the first time you have wine, you have trouble discerning much about it, but after drinking many varieties, and quality levels, you learn to become more differentiating.

Having said that, the CGI in the 1997 release of ANH looked off at the time to all of us according to my notes, we had trouble believing that ILM, who existed because of Star Wars, did such a shoddy job on itcompared to the other films they worked on that same year.

Now that is cool, thanks for sharing poita!

I think my ability to suspend disbelief (in myself) must be high, because I still think that the effects throughout Jurassic Park are fantastic.