They did as well for the individual PT and R1. They are releasing daily reviews.
Nice!
Unfortunately I just tried to see the differences between their two Phantom Menace caps but none of them really match up from 2011 to 2020.
Looks like they’re definitely from the included blu-ray, and not the 4K UHD, according to this italicized note in the review proper.
The included screenshots are sourced from the included 1080p Blu-ray disc, which has itself received a fairly drastic makeover compared to the 2011 20th Century Fox release.
So if I’m reading that right, EVERY screencap on that site for that review of Star Wars: A New Hope is taken from the '19 transfer that’s on the blu-ray, and not the UHD.
Hopefully they do that for the rest of the OT and PT, too!
here’s a quick side-by-side using their own screencaps
http://www.framecompare.com/image-compare/screenshotcomparison/9JBBCNNU
Looks like the buy 2 get 1 free deals on the 4K discs started… this weekend. At Target.
I have my moments.
not many of them
Y-Wing.
I’m a Cadillac man.
Writers rooms aren’t committees, arguably movies could stand to implement the practice as well.
Leia Organa isn’t a committee
A writers room can be called a committee to some degree, although I don’t think a “committee” is even necessarily a bad thing. What’s important is who you put on it
To that end, I don’t know that this guy is a good guy to put on it, much less at the head of it, but then again a lot of people probably would have side-eyed the appointing of “The Eyes of Laura Mars” director to the Star Wars sequel back in 1978, too. The Jurassic World guy was seen as a bad pick to head up the 9th Star Wars movie and then it turned out he had a better feel for what it could have been than the guy who made the 7th installment. Committes aren’t inherently bad, but staffing them poorly is.
I do think the last 20 years of television includes some of the best filmmaking period in that that time, and some of the biggest and most substantial achievements in filmed storytelling have happened in that medium, so I agree with Dom that the film industry (in whatever form it eventually assumes once we get through this upcoming recession/depression) could stand to crib heavily from how TV is doing things. It’s hard to argue with results on both a cultural and a storytelling scale like we’ve seen in the past 2 decades.
I don’t want Lucas involved primarily because Lucas’ creative spark essentially died decades ago.
Committee process works just fine for like 90% of TV created in the last 20 years.
I honestly don’t think there’s anything Lucas could add to this story that a bunch of other people couldn’t also. Star Wars isn’t that unique.
That all said: This new hire isn’t sparking any confidence at all. But I’m also not sure this current pandemic isn’t going to radically change a lot of what Disney’s studios have planned for the next couple of years anyway. When this is all over it’s not like anything is going to be the way it was before, economically OR societally.
Your comparison says it’s of the '19 4k UHD disc and the '11 blu-ray, not the '19 blu-ray disc and the '11 blu-ray.
I went through a couple threads at blu-ray.com and there’s more than a few people asking for direct comparisons between the '19 blu-rays to the '11 blu-rays, but the actual comparisons don’t seem to have been posted anywhere as of yet. That’s what I’m looking for.
https://forum.blu-ray.com/showpost.php?p=17497680&postcount=7181
Do you mean this one?
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/1332909/action/topic#1332909
I saw that, but it’s not comparing the '19 blu-rays and the '11 blu-rays, which is what I’m specifically looking for. I know they’re not the same transfers, so I’m curious to see what (if any) improvements in PQ there are on that format from release-to-release.
Are there any comparisons out there (been looking, can’t find any) that side-by-side these '19 blu-ray tranfers with the '11 transfers. I know most people are primarily interested in dissecting the 4K presentation, but these new 4K discs/set do appear to be the only way to get the new transfers on blu, and I’m very curious to see how these new transfers look on that format, especially compared to 2011’s entry.
Based on those screenshots the prequels look absolutely normal to me. Maybe TPM’s a little waxy but that’s nothing new. Hate me all you want but the OT looks like dirt.
I’m extra curious as to how the blu-ray transfers of the '19 versions looks now, since that’s probably going to be a lot more consistent (and probably a lot more accurate) to how the colors and contrast are supposed to look per-film.
That’s why I’d say an establishing shot of some sort might help.
I agree! I just don’t think there is one available. You’d have to make one up, and that’s a ton of work.
Unless the shot being added to the sequence is an establishing shot, the sequence will never not be broken. The thing that would fix it is an establishing shot, and there isn’t one you can just pull and drop in from somewhere else because of how they edited the final product. You’d have to kitbash one together.
That still looks pretty sunburnt to me.
I think there’s probably a middle ground between that and what the film gave us, where you’re still dropping into the battle with some build up (but not making it a whole sequence).
I don’t know, the primary problem with the Mustafar sequence isn’t so much how frenetic it is, it’s the geography. There’s no shot that shows where you are and where he’s going. Whether that shot comes after he’s bodyslammed someone, or before he starts his rampage - the biggest problem with the sequence is that missing shot showing you where he is and what direction he’s trying to go. Abrams & Co. just cut into the bone trying to save this sequence and I think they fundamentally broke it in the process.
If I had any other film to compare it to, I’d say it’s sort of like how the open of Alien 3 became a disconnected montage that also fundamentally breaks itself as it goes. This is probably worse than that, in that almost none of the Mustafar information being imparted is as necessary as Alien 3’s opening is to its movie.
Yeah, looking at what I wrote, if there’s anything usable it’s less the words (I think yours were better, and you’re right, that Spark of Hope bit needs to stay in there) and more a sense of urgency? Mine’s utility is in that there’s basically a ticking clock that gets started on Leia’s life, the resistance getting enough fighters, and Kylo ending the war on his terms. Functionally, it’s this:
Leia’s doing THIS because of THIS, The trio is doing THIS to stop THIS, and Kylo’s doing THIS to stop THEM.
I think the reason I was advocating just tilting down straight to the TIE jumping into frame from the nebula and cutting EVERYTHING Mustafar earlier in the thread, was because of the key problem any Mustafar edit will have, that you just crystallized for me in your post: Your urge is 100 percent correct that there needs to be some lead into the Mustafar scene. But the problem is there’s simply no footage that puts us on that planet as Kylo arrives.
I read a post at the JWFan boards awhile back (they’ve been piecing together score sheets and doing their own sleuthing as to what the film looked like at various points based on what music Williams wrote and scored) that suggested there WAS a cut of the opening reel at one point that just got rid of EVERYTHING Mustafar, and one of the cues actually lines up PERFECTLY with there being a tilt down to Kylo’s ship jumping into frame. At some point they decided against that cut for some reason, and decided instead to speedrun the Mustafar business as much as possible before sending him to Exogol. And unfortunately, that meant “Cut the landing, cut the establishing shot, cut the oracle, cut the castle, etc.”
Without that, I don’t think there’s any way around the sort of incongruous and weirdly dislocated feeling the opening has. No matter how many times you go at it, the shot you need (Kylo descending to the planet, establishing where he is and where he needs to go) will never exist, and so you can’t cut it together properly. The version in the film is as good as you can get without that shot, I think.
The only real solution to smoothing out the Mustafar sequence is somehow creating, out of footage from TLJ and TFA, and probably completely new VFX shots Adywan style, a shot of Kylo’s ship descending from the star destroyer and going down to the planet. As a pie-in-the-sky example:
TILT DOWN, TIE fighters swoop in. Camera trails fighters, then leaves off and pushes in on Star Destroyer. Kylo’s ship launches from star destroyer, camera - not stopping - picks THAT up and tracks with IT as it heads to the surface. (this is kind of a riff on TLJ’s opening mechanics, really, as well as ESB’s open)
CUT TO: INT of ship, Kylo piloting, sweaty and determined and pouty and greasy and hairy and hot, etc etc.
CUT TO: planet surface, looking up, seeing Kylo’s ship, now joined by two troop carriers, entering the atmosphere.
CUT TO: reverse angle, in the air looking down at the back of the ships landing, ruined castle in the distance, burnt out forest between the two points.
And then at that point you’d just use a wipe to pick up with the movie where it starts on Mustafar with Kylo mid-whoop-ass.
That’s basically the sequence you need to get to Mustafar and make everything else that blips by make sense. But it has to be made out of already used footage and completely new VFX, because Abrams & Co. didn’t give it to us anywhere else.
It feels odd to go from Kylo on the destroyer to down on the planet with no establishing shots in between.
I agree. The technical work is good, but from a storytelling pov this basically just adds another location to the already fairly large list of locations (EXT: Space, INT: Star Destroyer, EXT: Forest, EXT: Ruins, INT: Ship, EXT: Space) being blipped through in about 3 min before Kylo is actually on his way to do what the crawl says he’s doing.
However, the crawl is a big improvement. The only thing that feels very strange to me is to mention that Leia is ‘ailing’ right before playing up the strength of the Resistance.
How about something like this?
The Galaxy is divided. All across the stars,
good people stand for their freedom, and are
cruelly struck down by the tyrannical FIRST ORDER.
GENERAL LEIA ORGANA, her health failing,
sends heroes of THE RESISTANCE
in her stead, recruiting thousands of new
rebels for the ultimate fight.
Meanwhile, SUPREME LEADER KYLO REN searches
for the source of his former master’s dark
power, to win this final war once and for all…
I don’t think that’s THE solution, but maybe there’s an idea or a direction in there that might be useful? Use (or ignore) as needed 😃
Pretty sure that video was subsequently derided for being mostly inaccurate?
The whole “4K Era” is riddled with these sorts of problems. The tech was sorta rushed into place, and gimmicked to hell and back as it got introduced, and as such you have a ton of people who don’t really know what it is, what it can do, and how it does it.
But they all seem to have various ideas on how it gets done WRONG, haha. If anything, the primary lesson most people seem to have learned from the 4K era is that most everything isn’t even MADE in 4K. It’s gotta be sort of disillusioning to spend all that money on all those “Ks” only to find out you weren’t able to really tell the difference between 2 and 4k the whole time - and still can’t.
Across various 4K bluray rips I saw, they don’t look anyhow better. It’s what it is.
I honestly think a lot of that has to do with how confused and weird the whole UHD thing is on a tech level. There’s no standardized “HDR” format, and the need for an “HDR” format doesn’t even honestly make that much sense, especially not when you see how it’s been applied.
Most consumers didn’t even really understand the benefits of what 1080p were offering, or how to appreciate them correctly, before the industry started running 4K at them. For a lot of people, 1080p = “motion smoothing on, icy blue colors and 16x9 at all costs” and that’s what “HD” was.
And then for 4k they added something like 3 different “HDR” formats, none of which seem to have anything to do with making stuff look better, just louder. And accuracy to what it looked like when it was shot is completely out the window, and nobody has a standardized way to get the picture info back to what it was supposed to look like before these artificially pumped-up grades were applied, so everything becomes a guessing game of “is this what it’s supposed to look like” on a player-to-player basis.
4K didn’t need to be the unnecessary mess that it currently is, and I think a huge part of why the format won’t ever take off is due to that mess. You can’t reliably put a disc into a player and have it look the way the directors and cinematographers intended it to look when they made it, and that sucks.
Maybe when this coronavirus basically relegates movie theaters to nothing more than blockbuster theme park rides (Disney will probably own all exhibition in five years and LITERALLY make them theme parks for Marvel, Star Wars, Disney, and Pixar releases) someone will figure out how to make the cheap 4K smart TVs we’re all buying (because they’re the only option available anymore) reliably display a standardized image that looks great and takes advantage of the resolution AND the color gamut without dealing with competing and incompatible formats.
That’s the first I’ve seen of it. I’m pretty sure it isn’t happening, and that’s probably a mistaken product placeholder that won’t ever get filled?
Home 3D’s been dead for years now, speaking of niches within niches. I can’t believe there are 3D conversions of all the movies done or pressed up on a commercially available disc there.
I was asking about the blu-ray only Skywalker Saga sets, not the 4K ones.
We know the 4K UHDs included in the 4K set are the '19 transfers
We know the blu-rays included in the 4K set are the '19 transfers
We know the single-film blu-ray discs are the '11 transfers (old stock released months ago)
What we don’t know is if the blu-ray only version of the 9-film Skywalker Saga set contains the '19 transfers or not.
It was assumed they would be those '19 transfers, right up until yesterday’s confusing tweets and “confirmations” that haven’t been followed up on, so far as I can find.
No one’s arguing that Disney’s decisions are somehow more appealing, just that everyone should be pretty used to this by now, especially here.
No one’s saying “why are you frustrated” because everyone’s frustrated. We all know why.
Anyway, has anyone heard whether or not that blu-ray only Skywalker Saga set DEFINITELY has the 19 transfers, and not the 11?
I’m still not getting it, but it’d be nice to have the weird question from yesterday cleared up. It seems to me like people are confusing the single-disc blu-only release from months ago (which was a 2011-stock-clearing-exercise) as being part of the big push coming on Tuesday (which is newly produced product).
According to thedigitalbits TPM is a new scan which was also used for the 3D re-release (there’s still a lot of DNR in an attempt to blend the film elements and digital scenes) and AOTC and ROTS are based on the old 2K masters (they were shot in 1080p but mastered in 2K) but with additional upscaling and “film look” processing to bring them to 4K. The grades are also slightly different.
The Blu-Rays included in the new set are downscales of the new 4K master, not the same as the old blu-rays.
Thanks for the clarification!
Now the only question is whether or not buying the blu-ray only Skywalker Saga set means you get these 2019 transfers, or (presumably?) new artwork placed on the top of the 2011 Fox discs (?)
I wonder if the confusion is coming from people buying blu-ray only single disc versions, which ARE the 2011 discs just re-packaged, and have been on shelves for awhile now. From what I understand, the artwork for the new 4K single-disc releases is the exact same as the blu-ray only single-disc releases that preceded them, so maybe THAT’S where the confusion is coming in?
I think Dom and I were specifically referencing the PT, not the OT.
I think it was a bad idea.
It’s funny going back and watching trailer reactions now. Honestly, it was funny then: People were excited and psyched and all that. And then Palpatine starts laughing and you can almost literally SEE question marks popping out all over everyone’s face. And not in a “oh wow, what, that’s awesome” way, but a “what the… what? WHY” sort of way.
And then the bland-as-hell, blockbuster-basic “The Rise of BLANK” title scheme comes up with the word “Skywalker” filled in and really… that was probably the first sign this wasn’t going to go the way we thought.
Really! I thought I’d heard there were noticeable color grading differences at the least?