Ronster said:
Okay But I think there is more of the frame visible in the SE also. unless it is my scaling is way out. I trust your judgement though. I thought it was worth flagging up. Not exactly the same frame either the images.
Check that pipe on the left....
Zoomed out?
The cropping just happens to be poor in the GOUT on that particular reel, cropped way too much. There are of course a lot of reframed shots in the Special Editions but this is not one of them. That LD-master cannot really be used if you're going to measure the "correct" framing in ESB as it have its own variable cropping.
There are a lot of instances of not so obvious reframings in the Special Editions that often happened when they went back to the original negative - Ben and Luke watching Mos Eisley in the distance recieved a tighter framing. Other such examples are where the detention block corridor was altered, the framing was once again made a little tighter, and in other instances it was opened up a bit - Docking Bay 94 shootout. But most differences in framings are so subtle that you can only really spot the differences if you compare with original prints.
When reading Rinzler's Making of ESB again I'm once again reminded of that 99% of the final frames in that book was taken from the 2004/11 video master when it only happened occasionally in his first Making of. :( The alterations are of a more subtle nature in ESB which might explain it but still a disturbing consequence of Lucas tinkering which not even the making of the films can escape. Anyway, this little segment caught my attention regarding the reframed cockpit shots in 1997 and 2004:
While Cokliss did what he could in the hangar, the actors’ back-to-back scenes in the cockpit, over several days, slowly but surely wore them down. “It is detailed, effects-related, and time-consuming work in cramped conditions and, to the observer, is unspectacular,” Arnold writes. This was true despite the fact that Kurtz had asked the art and construction departments to build the cockpit larger than the one used in Star Wars (when Lucas found out, he was less than thrilled—the cramped set of the first film had been designed to simulate the reality of jet fighter and rocketship cockpits, which are just barely big enough for their pilots).
“That cockpit was probably the single worst set we had as far as the actors were concerned,” Kurtz says. “It was very close quarters to start with and a lot had to go on in there. And some of the action as written was very difficult to actually perform in the confines of the cockpit. It’s also very difficult for the actors to work in a situation where they can’t see what’s going on. You have 25 people out there looking at them, but they’re supposed to be looking at asteroids or ships. On the bluescreen stage, I think all the actors felt more like robots.”
When compared, I personally find the cockpit reframings in ESB aesthetically pleasing for the most part and I can see why Lucas did it but it's not the way Kershner and Suschitzky composed the shots. Anyway, let's take a look at this shot in ESB which appear just after Vader have cut Luke's hand:
Original (GOUT)
2004 DVD
One of the small differences is that the light in the left corner of the shot is lit right from the first frame of the shot in the DVD version whereas it doesn't get lit up until the fifth frame (I think) in the original film. Don't ask me how that happened and how I found out, but it's a testament to how fundamentally screwed up the photography is in those abominations. Check it out for yourself.
Was recently performing IVTC on the ROTJ JSC LD for a friend and stumbled upon this:
I'm posting the adjacent frame so you guys can see it's not anything unusual with how the LD-transfer is framed. The GOUT print is quite severely cropped here and the SE seems to be specifically reframed because of this issue. I'm not so familiar with Jedi as with the other two films so I guess those with release prints and in the know how when it comes to this movie needs to verify.
A similar case appear in this shot...
