Complete Comparison of Special Edition Visual Changes — Page 5

What the hell is that? Is that a random frame of a starfield in between the Cloud City SE cuts?

Also, I'm still not over that scanline thing. Like, what does that mean? Was there two different versions of the shot, one with scanlines and one without? If so its weird that the earlier video had it, as it seems that they were adding things to the picture as the releases went, rather than subtracting. I don't see why they would deliberately alter that one detail though. Hmm. I wonder now what that 16mm print Puggo was trying to get ahold of looks like.

doubleofive said:

Apparently I hadn't tortured myself enough:

http://picasaweb.google.com/doubleofive/EmpireSpecialEditionChangesHD

005, could you add this link to your first post?

And I've got a question about this shot?

The caption says the speeder behind the walker was darkened to be in the shadow.  What shadow?  The walkers?

Natch.  Thanks!

Ok, I must be seeing things.  I read that differently than what you actually have.  Mea culpa.

So, I was fiddling around with that scanline shot in the GOUT. It kinda looked like there was artifacts of scanlines that had been smeared away, watching it on an endless loop there definitely looks like some kind of layer there. But it also really just looked like noise or grain. So, I took the fullscreen pic with the scanlines and played around in photoshop. The first thing you notice is that the exposure and brightness is way different, possibly because the scanlines darken it. But anyway my theory was this: if the GOUT is just that image but filtered and brightened, it should be possible to re-create it using this supposedly original image.

No such luck. I got the brightness/exposure levels to sort of come close, but it still looked very different, and it was really obvious that the scanlines were still there. So, I thought maybe if I soft filtered it, they would go away. Eventually they actually did start becoming less visible, but the image was a soft mess. The GOUT image has pretty good fidelity on the power generators, and the dead giveaway is that the writing and other electronic markings on the side are as pin-sharp as the GOUT gets. I also tried to see if I could make the colours of the electronics change--no such luck. It's simply not possible. You end up with a red power generator.

Conclusion: the GOUT is a totally different image than the 89/92/whatever the fullscreen sample is. The electonic viewer markings are coloured differently, and there's no scanlines overlayed. The scanlines are artificially composited, not "burned in"--for instance, the shot of "We've spotted imperial walkers"; like most scanlines instances, its created by playing the footage back on a television monitor and re-photographing it. Such is not the case with this one from what I can. So the GOUT is an earlier version, or possible the "original" clean version.

How it got there, I don't know. I also can't say if the scanline version is "original", maybe they added this to a later re-release, or had it done in 1980 but it was never ready for any theatrical version but then was able to be seen for the video releases done later. But yeah. I'm calling the GOUT a totally different version of that shot.

Wow. All I really can say is WOW :-)

In 2006 I have created my own version of the original trilogy using the 2004 versions and GOUT and now I think I can throw them away, since I haven't found most of the SE changes :-)

Now that's very interesting. I would say either possibility is equally likely.

The compositing was so good in ROTJ that there were only a handful of shots that needed to be re-comped, I suppose. I think Lucasfilm also was feeling the strains of both time and money--ROTJ was in fact delayed a week and had the least amount of money put into it, but there are other factors at play there (it's usually claimed that its delay was because ANH and ESB were still doing strong business).

I wonder how "clean" the film actually looked with all the dozens of layers of composites, and the possibly-not-re-printed-wipes. The 2004 version got rid of all the grain and smoothed out the density fluxuations, and all the home video versions of the 1997 version are too soft to see that sort of detail. I only saw it once in 1997 so I don't remember how well it compared to the previous films in terms of that kind of picture detail.

Also, it was asked why the random re-comping? i.e. a sequence will start off original, then in the middle there is one or two re-comps, then back to original.

The answer is because they never really intended to do so much re-comping in the first place. But then ILMers would point out the odd shot that was noticeable worse than the rest around it, or that needed something smoothed out or moved. But the project was never supposed to be so in-depth or expensive, so they couldn't re-do every shot, nor did they want to, so they just picked and chose the ones they thought were the worst off. One side effect of this was that when the re-comped one shot and fixed it, suddenly it made another shot that didn't look bad before seem worse because everything around it was perfect, so they usually ended up re-doing two or three other shots in a sequence. In fact, ESB and ROTJ were never supposed to get the SE treatment, and the decision wasn't made until sometime in late 1995 or early 1996. This shows why so little work was done to those films, the 35mm negatives were in relatively good shape and the effects still held up pretty well and weren't in dire need of restoring and enhancing.

Yikes if that's the case.