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ORIGINAL STAR WARS TRILOGY OUT 09/2006 BY LUCASFILM — Page 16

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Originally posted by: trip42
From http://www.thedigitalbits.com/#mytwocents:

"And here's a little something that's very interesting: Our friend Arnaud Calistri, who runs the DVDRama.com website in France, e-mailed me yesterday to say that Fox France has confirmed with him that the original versions of the Star Wars films to be released on DVD there will be in anamorphic widescreen (enhanced for widescreen 16x9 TVs). As many of you know, they were announced for release here in the States and elsewhere in non-anamorphic (letterboxed) widescreen only, causing a furor among fans (and rightly so). This news, if true, means one of two things: Either Lucasfilm quickly got their act together when fans complained and created new anamorphic masters for the DVD release everywhere (and it just hasn't been announced here in the States yet), or France is getting better DVDs that the rest of the world. If they DID get their act together, expect Lucasfilm's fan relations guru, Steve Sansweet, to make a massive deal about it the company's Star Wars panel at Comic-Con next week. If they DIDN'T get their act together, and France IS getting better discs, expect fans to make a massive deal about it. We'll ask all the right people to see if we can find out the truth of the matter. Of course, we'll let you know."


Cripes!

That would be cool if it is true that they have changed their minds!

However, Europe has been into widescreen TV's longer than Americans - maybe they are cow-towing to the European audience

Hopefully they won't issue the Euro DVD's with those nasty 80's airbrush covers with the giant heads, though.

Or, maybe they should, if Europe will be the only region getting anamorphic. With Lucas post-1996 there is always some drawback, right?
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Originally posted by: trip42
From http://www.thedigitalbits.com/#mytwocents:

"And here's a little something that's very interesting: Our friend Arnaud Calistri, who runs the DVDRama.com website in France, e-mailed me yesterday to say that Fox France has confirmed with him that the original versions of the Star Wars films to be released on DVD there will be in anamorphic widescreen (enhanced for widescreen 16x9 TVs). As many of you know, they were announced for release here in the States and elsewhere in non-anamorphic (letterboxed) widescreen only, causing a furor among fans (and rightly so). This news, if true, means one of two things: Either Lucasfilm quickly got their act together when fans complained and created new anamorphic masters for the DVD release everywhere (and it just hasn't been announced here in the States yet), or France is getting better DVDs that the rest of the world. If they DID get their act together, expect Lucasfilm's fan relations guru, Steve Sansweet, to make a massive deal about it the company's Star Wars panel at Comic-Con next week. If they DIDN'T get their act together, and France IS getting better discs, expect fans to make a massive deal about it. We'll ask all the right people to see if we can find out the truth of the matter. Of course, we'll let you know."


If that's true, it will probably mean that Begium and Holland will also get the anamorphic version. Because these countries share their dvd version. (At least with the previous Lucasfilm dvd releases).

A new release of Star Wars is like a box of chocolates, you never know what you're gonna get.

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If France is the only one getting the anamorphic versions, we could always convert it to NTSC (whichever method Darth Editous converted his ANH edit with looks outstanding) and sync it with multiple versions of the soundtrack and burn it to a DL disc.

If push comes to shove, that is.

I know I’ve made some very poor decisions recently.

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Which idea is awesome, although it is hardly a fan preservation edit and rather illegal.
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It's no more illegal than any fan edit that uses material from commercially available DVDs. As long as it's traded among owners of the official DVDs in question, I believe most people on this forum would consider it ethical. Whether it's LEGAL is up to the beaurocrats and lawyers to decide.
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If no one else who is more skilled does, I certainly will be compiling my own edit on DL DVD with multiple soundtracks to select.

I know I’ve made some very poor decisions recently.

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Originally posted by: andy_k_250
Cripes!

That would be cool if it is true that they have changed their minds!

However, Europe has been into widescreen TV's longer than Americans - maybe they are cow-towing to the European audience
Like us, France has parallel importing. One explanation is that they're deliberately making France's domestic release an improvement over possible imported versions. With that said it's excellent news, because it means I can get them imported at my local store and the French DVD's are PAL - so they'll be excellent quality!

With that said, if that is the case, by the same logic they could give us an anamorphic one to out-do the imports, and shaft Australia with a non-anamorphic release! Oh PLEASE let this happen!
Some were not blessed with brains.
<blockquote>Originally posted by: BadAssKeith

You are passing up on a great opportunity to makes lots of money,
make Lucas lose a lot of his money
and make him look bad to the entire world
and you could be well known and liked

None of us here like Lucas or Lucasfilm.
I have death wishes on Lucas and Macullum.
we could all probably get 10s of thousands of dollars!
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Ok, I'll repost it... RtW version 2.
PAL video, NTSC audio... maybe in an HD format to preserve as many lines as possible?

Come on George, do right by us (so I don't have to), and we will reward you handsomely.

Dr. M

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Originally posted by: boris
With that said, if that is the case, by the same logic they could give us an anamorphic one to out-do the imports, and shaft Australia with a non-anamorphic release! Oh PLEASE let this happen!


I'll be mighty pleased if Australia gets anamorphic. If not, then I probably won't buy the set as I have the first set from 2004 (the one with the Bonus disc). I suppose if the France thing is true then I could always import that set.

To contact me outside the forum, for trades and such my email address is my OT.com username @gmail.com

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The german DVD's of the original Original Trilogy won't be anamorphic.

Has anybody an idea or a guide to make an own anamorphic transfer? Sure, this would be more a "fanamorphic" than an anamorphic transfer. But the qualitiy would be probably better than the original letterbox-film (what do you think)???

The Moth3r-transfer is a really good "fanamorphic" transfer from the laserdisc, so why shouldn't it be possible to make a "fanamorphic" transfer of the DVD???

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Sure, you could make a "fanamorphic" (hah, I love that word!) version of the letterboxed video simply by cropping and resizing it in AviSynth, but that's exactly what it's going to look like -- a cropped and resized version of the letterboxed video. I'm guessing that using AviSynth's Lanczos4 filter to resize the video will yield better quality than using the "Zoom" function of a DVD player on a widescreen TV, though.

I must admit I know nothing about laser discs. Is it a digital format?
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Originally posted by: wmgan
I must admit I know nothing about laser discs. Is it a digital format?


This isn't the thread to discuss LD, I'm afraid. There are lots of threads that do, both here and at places like Doom9.org. But no, LD video isn't digital (although the audio can be).

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Well, I wasn't trying to start a discussion about LD per se, I was just going to bring up the fact that, if LD video is analog, then an anamorphic transfer of LD video to DVD would look better than converting letterboxed digital video into anamorphic digital video, right? I may be completely off the mark here, but I'm thinking that resizing analog video would not introduce ugly artefacts like resizing digital video would, since the resolution of analog video should be practically infinite (I'm thinking of a photograph taken with an analog camera, which can be blown up to any dimensions without artefacting -- versus a picture taken with a digital camera, which has a fixed resolution).
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I just got off the phone with Lucasfilm. The lady that I spoke to there told me that they had had other calls regarding the rumor that the French release would be anamorphic.

"It is 100 percent, completely not true" was her response.
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...as we suspected.
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Too bad. Here I had hoped that they had figured out that the non-anamorphic transfer was stupid. Or at least one could import the French DVDs to get anamorphic video. I guess that Lucas would rather show his distain for the O-OT rather than give a quality release. S
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Originally posted by: wmgan
I may be completely off the mark here, but I'm thinking that resizing analog video would not introduce ugly artefacts like resizing digital video would, since the resolution of analog video should be practically infinite


Analogue video doesn't have a (horizontal) resolution like 720 pixels per line, but it still only has a finite amount of information, as does a photograph on film. You might not see digital artefacts like blocking when you zoom up an LD, but you will see dot crawl and colour bleeding and lower resolution (in the sense of having enough information to resolve objects, lines, etc).

DE
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thedigitalbits confirmed it as well

from http://www.thedigitalbits.com/#mytwocents again:

"We've got some more interesting standard DVD news to report today, starting with a follow-up on that French Star Wars DVD controversy we mentioned the other day. We've gotten a follow-up e-mail from our friend Arnaud at DVDRama in France. He's actually had the chance to see, with his own two eyes, the new Star Wars DVDs being released there, and it turns out Fox France was wrong. Someone in marketing over there apparently still doesn't know what anamorphic means. The special edition versions of the films on Disc One of each set are anamorphic, but the original theatrical editions on Disc Two of each are definitely NOT anamorphic. They're just letterboxed widescreen as we expected. Fox France has apparently apologized for the confusion, and we definitely appreciate Arnaud's efforts in confirming the truth of the situation. So to sum up, France is getting the same sub-par Star Wars DVDs as the rest of us. 'Nuff said."

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But won't the PAL versions still be better due to the higher resolution? Does anyone know at what resolution the LD master was made?

That's no moon. It's a LaserDisc.

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Originally posted by: trip42
thedigitalbits confirmed it as well

from http://www.thedigitalbits.com/#mytwocents again:

"We've got some more interesting standard DVD news to report today, starting with a follow-up on that French Star Wars DVD controversy we mentioned the other day. We've gotten a follow-up e-mail from our friend Arnaud at DVDRama in France. He's actually had the chance to see, with his own two eyes, the new Star Wars DVDs being released there, and it turns out Fox France was wrong. Someone in marketing over there apparently still doesn't know what anamorphic means. The special edition versions of the films on Disc One of each set are anamorphic, but the original theatrical editions on Disc Two of each are definitely NOT anamorphic. They're just letterboxed widescreen as we expected. Fox France has apparently apologized for the confusion, and we definitely appreciate Arnaud's efforts in confirming the truth of the situation. So to sum up, France is getting the same sub-par Star Wars DVDs as the rest of us. 'Nuff said."
To emphasize the positive aspects of this obviously disappointing (but not entirely surprising) news, let me say this: at least we have drawn some more attention to the core problem. The fact that there was this much stir over the possibility that an anamorphic version might be released in France just adds fuel to the fire of our cause, because both Fox and LFL have been forced to take notice and respond to it. The awareness continues to be increased. We should continue to voice our dissatisfaction until our request for a decent and worthy transfer of the original unaltered trilogy is finally taken more seriously.

--SKot

Projects:
Return Of The Ewok and Other Short Films (with OCPmovie) [COMPLETED]
Preserving the…cringe…Star Wars Holiday Special [COMPLETED]
The Star Wars TV Commercials Project [DORMANT]
Felix the Cat 1919-1930 early film shorts preservation [ONGOING]
Lights Out! (lost TV anthology shows) [ONGOING]
Iznogoud (1995 animated series) English audio preservation [ONGOING]

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Originally posted by: Grinder
But won't the PAL versions still be better due to the higher resolution? Does anyone know at what resolution the LD master was made?
Apparently it was made in "standard definition", which would imply NTSC resolution as the USA is an NTSC country. But keep in mind the same digital master was used to create the "pan and scan" releases (NTSC and PAL), which implies there was enough detail for that. The PAL LD's *do* have more detail in them, however it can be speculated that even though this is the case they were still resized from NTSC resolution. You could conclude that they must have used a source higher in resolution then SD NTSC for the Pan & Scan releases... but knowing how much they didn't care about creating decent PAL versions back then, it's more likely that the master is SD NTSC, sadly. The audio on the PAL versions (1993 and 1995) was however pitch-corrected, something they didn't pay too much attention to back then (you have to lower the pitch by about a semitone to make it sound perfect - however its generally accepted that the pitch difference isn't noticeable unless you're running between watching differently played versions of the film). So with that in mind it could lead you to conclude that they were paying the PAL release special care, and so perhaps the SD source is PAL resolution.

But if this is the case, then why scaled-down the source for the NTSC dvd? wouldn't it be better to up-scale it so that you're not loosing detail?

Everything points to the source being SD NTSC.
Some were not blessed with brains.
<blockquote>Originally posted by: BadAssKeith

You are passing up on a great opportunity to makes lots of money,
make Lucas lose a lot of his money
and make him look bad to the entire world
and you could be well known and liked

None of us here like Lucas or Lucasfilm.
I have death wishes on Lucas and Macullum.
we could all probably get 10s of thousands of dollars!
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Well, do Pal laserdiscs have a greater possible resolution than NTSC? The pan & scan THX version was only on vhs in '95. However, parts of the films were shown pan/scan on the Leonard Maltin interviews. The interviews were on laserdisc. Someone could use those for comparison. The Rowman bonus discs sourced them from vhs, by the way.

Haven't there been movies sourced from letterbox video masters that were made anamorphic anyways?
"Better off Dead"
"Blade Runner" is anamorphic. What was the current (crappy '97) dvd sourced from?

Take back the trilogy. Execute Order '77

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Originally posted by: boris
Apparently it was made in "standard definition", which would imply NTSC resolution as the USA is an NTSC country. But keep in mind the same digital master was used to create the "pan and scan" releases (NTSC and PAL), which implies there was enough detail for that.
Originally posted by: boris
You could conclude that they must have used a source higher in resolution then SD NTSC for the Pan & Scan releases...
Aren't these two statements contradictory?Originally posted by: boris
The PAL LD's *do* have more detail in them, however it can be speculated that even though this is the case they were still resized from NTSC resolution.
Please explain how this is possible.