Disney doesn't believe in restoration. Look at the Fantasia blu ray. They'd rather replace things than fool with working with what they have. Disney does the bare minimum to sell their products. What is so interesting is how they will talk about how great their restoration work is, and they'll show a before and after wipe with boosted color. That shit was impressive 30 years ago, but every kid with a freeware video editing program can boost colors.
It would be so awesome to have Criterion releases of Disney films, but that's unlikely.
"The other versions will disappear. Even the 35 million tapes of Star Wars out there won’t last more than 30 or 40 years. A hundred years from now, the only version of the movie that anyone will remember will be the DVD version [of the Special Edition], and you’ll be able to project it on a 20’ by 40’ screen with perfect quality. I think it’s the director’s prerogative, not the studio’s to go back and reinvent a movie." - George Lucas
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Hey, I was just listening to an old episode of the Kaijucast (a podcast dedicated to Godzilla and all of his rubber suited foes) and after playing a wonderful piece of music I'd never heard, host Kyle informs "that was the main title to the new Ultraman film, by MIKE VERTA!"
Very cool!
Ha.. yep. Ultra Galaxy Legends. My first exposure to Ultraman and my first trip to Tokyo. It was fun!
_Mike
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I thought I saw your name on something the other day, but I didn't think you did music, figured it was someone else with the same name.
...but if it was you, I don't see it listed on your IMDB page (can't remember what it was).
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4th one down, Ultra Galaxy Legends. But whatever. Yes, I've been writing music professionally since I was 16 - became a composer because of... Star Wars. :) I do this sort of thing, generally:
(Gets going at 1'26"...)
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Well here's hoping someone drops your name in the hat to compose for one of the spin-offs! Based on what I've heard, I think you'd do an excellent job.
I really like your music, thanks for sharing it. ;)
By the way, when recording an orchestra with that many microphones and no acoustic barriers between them, how do you take phase issues into account? From a casual glance it seems like it would be an out of phase nightmare with all the bleed . . .
EyeShotFirst said:
Disney doesn't believe in restoration. Look at the Fantasia blu ray. They'd rather replace things than fool with working with what they have. Disney does the bare minimum to sell their products. What is so interesting is how they will talk about how great their restoration work is, and they'll show a before and after wipe with boosted color. That shit was impressive 30 years ago, but every kid with a freeware video editing program can boost colors.
It would be so awesome to have Criterion releases of Disney films, but that's unlikely.
It would be even more awesome to have Criterion releases of the OT.
:)
A Criterion or 'historical cinema' type release would signal to the fans that there may very well be disagreement within Lucasfilm and Disney that the original trilogy is either three films with agreed upon and locked-in versions (the Disney 201x 4K restoration) or multiple versions of three films in terms of restoration method and choice of visual, audio and supplementary elements (Reliance 4K restoration, Criterion restoration, Mverta restoration and so on).
It's another reason why I don't have a great amount of faith in Disney ensuring the theatrical releases appear on blu-ray as possibly close as they were on the opening nights more than thirty years ago. I think they'll get them to maybe 85% which is not bad at all for any release but they know how many versions of each of these three movies are not just publicly available on analogue and digital formats but now in the hands of fans at a level of resolution and clarity unseen before. So it's my belief that they'll strip back past the pre-1997 Special Edition but tinker with composites, scrub major visual and audio goofs and try to provide a less 'this is how it was back then' version and a more 'workmanlike' version which will look undoubtedly beautiful as a scan but ultimately another revision, another version, rather than a chance to let both fans and cinema historians see exactly what this meant and was in 1977, 80 and 83 in terms of intent and capability.
It's why I feel we're approaching the beginning of the end in a good way when it comes to fan restoration of the theatrical releases. We've now got scans and we have the ability to take publicly released material and utilise it in such a way that we can build beautiful restorations that are so exact at a frame by frame level that even the next official release won't get near them when it comes to accuracy of colour, audio and overall presentation.
We will just have to wait and see. However I can tell you that at least a couple of the shots on the Reliance showreel - if they are final - are inferior to even the current state on Blu ray. A couple of them have flat compressed highlights and saturation issues like the shot of C3PO and R2 in the Death Star alcove. It's a mess. so whether one's intent is restoration or preservation or whatever, they're still having basic image quality issues.
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Although the black levels of the Reliance stuff is greatly improved over the Blu-ray, I noticed that the shot of the stormtroopers running down the corridor in the Reliance reel looked very strange. It seems to be much more degraded than the blu-ray, like the film itself is starting to dissolve.
You probably don’t recognize me because of the red arm.
Episode 9 Rewrite, The Starlight Project (Released!) and ANH Technicolor Project (Released!)
I'll pull the Legacy version of that shot soon so we can at least see what was in theaters originally.
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Would the print they're working from be breaking down at a substantial level at this point in time? What negative would Reliance be working from?
Don't Lucasfilm hold a set of Technicolor separation prints that would be essentially as sharp and vivid as the day they were created? I know that the most recent 8K scan of The Wizard Of Oz came from a seperation print which held up beautifully after seventy years.
Nobody's 100% sure what they have, but we can deduce from a thousand clues they do NOT have pristine, intact anything.
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It's very surreal to think about. It reminds me of a few years back when fans were transferring unplayed vinyl boxsets of Beatles albums and very, very carefully restoring them so that they reproduced the warmth, EQ and general ambience of the vinyl editions in a digital format.
The Beatles remasters were released in 2009 but boy, there was heated arguments about how invasive the noise reduction was, how harsh the compression was and whether or not background errors like chairs and sniffs should've been edited out or left in. In a way, we got revisions, rather than a restoration much like the trilogy. I mean, for pities sake, they took away the crackle on John's wail during 'She's So Heavy', a crackle that was proven to be part of the original vocal take and not an error during the final mix as it can be heard in the isolated vocals of the multi-tracks.
So, yeah, it seems the fans have created the best quality versions of Star Wars available and may well be able to hold that title forever.
Mike, it's up to you to make them see sense...
The story I've heard about the separations is that they were incorrectly made back in 1977 and one of the three channels was duplicated in place of the third channel, or that one of the three was found to be missing when they were pulled for the SE restoration.
(And this isn't the only time I have heard of this happening; when Disney restored Pollyanna in the late 90s/early 00s, they were working from a faded original negative, and when they pulled the B&W separations out of the archive they found that they had only two of them, with the third being a duplicate of one of the other two.)
Say the blue channel was missing from the separation prints, would it be possible to pull the blue channel from the next best negative and use it in place after a lot of fit and finish or is it completely incompatible? In my eternal struggle to create a surround mix of Pink Floyd's 'The Wall', I've certainly used parts of a deconstructed stereo mix with discrete left, right and centre channels where the movie surround soundtrack couldn't offer me the elements I needed at a given point in a song.
Mixing and matching of channels and elements is possible - Legacy does it all the time - but it did require me to have very robust custom registration and analysis tools developed to do it.
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Well in a way it's good that technology has advanced as older films have degraded further and further.
[ Scanning stuff since 2015 ]
Meanwhile:
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mverta said:
Meanwhile:
I can see why they might want to re-composite it (the laser going behind the wings shows off thick matte lines), but the SE version looks identical if you aren't looking too hard. Sure, they come a little closer to the turret, but if you watched the two version back to back, you wouldn't notice. Besides, some of the stuff they keep looks nothing like the CG stuff they did- that makes both the CG and the model work stand out in weird ways. Anyway, great work as usual, Mike.
Regarding some of these Reliance clips.. I made this video for you guys:
The password is: reliance
If somebody wants to share it to that RPF thread, feel free. It was some of their "at least somebody did it right" nonsense that inspired this video.
If you would like to download a raw sample of this clip here it is: Raw Sample Clip
_Mike
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You can actually see the seam for their color grading of the left wall on the first few frames of the shot:
What a fucking mess. The 2004 master never ceases to amaze me. :)
Btw, isn't the samples in the Reliance showreel just the old Lowry work before the colorists turned it into a candy colored mess?
We want you to be aware that we have no plans—now or in the future—to restore the earlier versions.
Sincerely, Lynne Hale publicity@lucasfilm.com
mverta said:
4th one down, Ultra Galaxy Legends.
No, I mean I'm not sure which movie I saw your name in...I've seen several movies in the past few weeks, and none of them are on your page.
I think the newest film we saw was The Imitation Game, but I want to say it was something we saw on the small screen... *shrugs*
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Watching the Reliance comparison video makes me admit defeat in regards to any hope for an appreciable restoration from Lucasfilm or for any well-loved film in the future. The moment Mike switches to his restoration after showing the blu-ray and Reliance showreel efforts, it's like being able to see for the first time. The stormtroopers just pop back to life and stop fighting for attention with the background not just in terms of colour but clarity. The colour of the background itself seems to instantly invoke Star Wars, as if that particular shade of 'gun-metal blue grey' was invented just for the film and I recall it from various making-of books and photographs. It's shocking that they would overlook such basics like that and I can't imagine it's an editorial decision at that point, more a team just wanting to push these shots out and get them finished.