Star Wars Colortiming & Cinematography (was What changes was done to STAR WARS in '93?) — Page 4

Hi there,

yes, it has already been proven. You're right, the DC/Faces/Gout master of SW is closer than the earlier video transfers in the scene with R2-D2 in the canyon, it should be twilight as you can see on the in-theater-reference pictures back in this thread and that is also the case on the '81 re-release prints as they only spliced in a new crawl on those, I'm not sure but there was probably new prints made for the re-releases as well, but that a new supervised colortiming was made on those isn't likely.

You could see the same thing on many early video releases from the 80's where scenes shot day for night wasn't accurately done for home video, in JAWS, I remember that the opening shark attack was often in broad daylight for example. However, the Gout master is heavily red tinted in those scenes, more so than in the rest of the film.

As a followup to my last post I recently noticed that the 1982 Laserdisc transfer actually have the canyon dark in the first shot but goes to the brighter light it was shot in after that.

I just wanted to put this somewhere, I love the colors of this shot, I bet it's from the original film/negative/whatever.

Nice colours, but it's a bit too bright IMO.

Harmy said:

Nice colours, but it's a bit too bright IMO.

Yeah, it's a shot for printing, I'm sure it has been tweaked but I don't think you can get this kind of result from the DVD source... Could be wrong though.

Nice vivid colors on that one, looking very film-like in quality. :)

Hey, guys. Did anyone ever come up with an answer to what the sunset should look like then? I'm working on the colour correction now and I'm not quite sure what to do about it.

I'm pretty sure the 1993 THX was the first to do extensive color correction as the films must have been very faded at that time. It seemed like an attempt to bring the movies back to how they originally looked.

The special collection is probably the best transfer without any tweaking but without that, it is from a faded print without the full contrast.

http://youtu.be/7tvXaErqaUQ

I had never seen this promo about the widescreen video before. In this upload though, notice near the end that Obi Wan's light saber is green.

Just thought I'd mention another example of color inconsistency. It's really hard to find out what the true look of these movies is because the colors seem to have faded or changed so many times LFL just tried to do whatever quick fix was available at the time. Which might have changed other stuff.

Another upload on youtube of the same video is brighter and less saturated but the saber still has a green tint.

Nice promo, never seen that before. :) Obi-Wan's saber doesn't look exactly green to my eyes, his and Luke's saber in Star Wars never had the same kind of color it had in Empire anyway, the same goes for Vader's, it was always more light-blue with perhaps a shade of green in some shots. I know what you mean but green saber to me is Jedi or the glitch in the 2004 DVD fiasco. One thing's for sure the vibrant blue saber Ben wields in the 2004 DVD is completely inauthentic. (Edit:) ...to how it looked in '77. ;)

I'd forgotten about sending that to JD years ago (I suddenly recognised the VHS "crapping out" bit near the start of the YouTube video).

I've also noticed Obi-Wan's sabre has a greenish tint on the US SWE LD.

Doesn't the SWE LD of SW have a bit of an overall greenish-yellow tint to it?

how odd

A sequence in Empire which doesn't look quite the same since the '93 THX transfer is the interiors of Cloud City when Han & company arrives, where the color pallette originally was warm with lots of orange. The bootleg source of Fritz is pretty rough and can often not be used for color reference but the colors in this particular part of the film is suprisingly stable and gives you an general idea of how it looked.

Bootleg

JSC/SWE LD's

DC/Faces/GOUT

Bootleg

JSC/SWE LD's

DC/Faces/GOUT

Wow. That's a big difference.

I think the orange in some of these scenes in cloud city is apparent on the 16mm PSB that I'm working on.

LexX said:

msycamore said:

The -83 rental tape! that is an old one:) Thanks for the trouble. It actually comes very close to the bootleg telecine in color from what I can see, it is pretty much the same on the vintage doc The Making of STAR WARS also. Then I strongly believe what zombie84 already said, that it's probably more accurate or closer in color pallette of the original -77 print in just that scene than the THX/GOUT version is.

Yeah, but still the tape is waaay too light during the whole movie, here's a couple of more examples just for shits and giggles:

 

here's our bluish version from the print:

later

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msycamore said:

Puggo's 16mm restoration

 

this matches this frame better:

------------

here is our version of it from the print, sorry not the exact

frame:

this is with uncorrected color.

here's a larger view of the frame:

later

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msycamore said:

A sequence in Empire which doesn't look quite the same since the '93 THX transfer is the interiors of Cloud City when Han & company arrives, where the color pallette originally was warm with lots of orange. The bootleg source of Fritz is pretty rough and can often not be used for color reference but the colors in this particular part of the film is suprisingly stable and gives you an general idea of how it looked.

Bootleg

JSC/SWE LD's

DC/Faces/GOUT

Bootleg

JSC/SWE LD's

DC/Faces/GOUT

here are the same 2 shots from our print, color corrected:

later

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