Broom Kid

I’m confused by the HDR thing fairly frequently - I don’t have any 4K displays in my house, although I do have an HDR-capable TV, but only a few apps/games have tried to kick the HDR on (Fleabag on Amazon automatically shifted over to HDR for season 2, and I found it didn’t look as good, honestly. It might have just been that title wasn’t converted/applied well). I understand that there are separate tags/flags that are sent along with the picture info that tell the tv what color range and values to apply to the image, so my understanding (and this is the part where I want someone to please pick this apart and explain it to me, haha) is that when the stream is fast enough to make 4K HDR viable, it switches over from the SDR file to this 4K file. This 4K file is now basically as flat as possible because the HDR tags/flags need to be applied to it, and those tags will change on a scene to scene basis.

but the 1080p file that I’m getting when I watch any of the Star Wars movies - those files are sourced from the same 4K master. Is the primary difference that their color grading isn’t sent along as additional picture information, but baked into the file/stream itself?

And while HDR colors/contrast should have more pop, depth, and vibrancy, there should be a general similarity between what it was graded to look like at 2K/1080p, and what it looks like in 4K, right? Like you shouldn’t go from one to the other and have the other look markedly different in terms of color temperature and contrast levels beyond the basic advantages that the expanded range will provide?

When I bring up Attack of the Clones in 1080p, it doesn’t look the same as my blu-ray. When I bring up Star Wars, it DEFINITELY doesn’t look the same as my blu-ray. That’s how it’s supposed to be even at standard def, correct?

Hah. I was thinking the same thing when I saw that, but then again, IF he read these boards he wouldn’t have written that the Fox logo being used was the “new” one - it’s old now, and it’s been specifically modified on top of that.

Those are false rumors. It doesn’t have several endings, and 3/4ths of the film wasn’t reshot. I don’t know where you heard that, but they’re providing bunk information and are unreliable.

dgraham414 said:

My dislike of one and apathy towards the other comes from the films internal consistency.
If you’re a first time viewer of ROTJ and it’s the first Star Wars movie you’ve seen ever then it’ll be really odd to see a brand new, never before seen, actor portraying… well you can’t even be sure if you have no prior knowledge to bass it off of. That is why the replacement of Sebastian Shaw is so much more reviled then the replacement of the Emperor.

This is another really good point - the change seems to depend on the idea that everyone who watches/rewatches the movies is going to watch them in episode order. But that’s not only very presumptious, but it doesn’t make sense for that to be the assumed default. Watching them in episode order basically breaks the whole saga and makes it duller and more confusing in general, because so much of what the PT even IS, is reverse-engineered from the OT. It’s constantly referencing stuff it assumes you know from having watched the OT already.

It’s a change made solely for the purpose of benefitting people who are watching it in a manner disadvantageous to getting the most out of the series. It ONLY works on rewatches, if it works at all - and it doesn’t.

The years it is not, honey. The mileage, it is.

Mocata said:

It looks like a bootleg typeface you get free online.

Which is funny because I believe that’s EXACTLY what they did for the Clone Wars Season 7 trailer.

Harmy said:

Mandalorian is “out there” in 4K HDR, so the drm has clearly been broken on day one, so I think for those of us who won’t get D+ until 2021 (and believe me, if I could get it now, I’d be the first in line), someone will put the new masters out as well.

I am honestly very surprised the entire 4K saga hasn’t been circulated yet. I’m wondering if the pirates in question simply don’t know there’s a difference and haven’t bothered (i.e. “we already did all this back in 2011 what’s the point”) or what.

edit: missed Ash’s post from upthread that explains exactly why, haha. Sorry Ash!

So far Lucasfilm is 0 for 2 at coming up with something “new” for the pre-titles. First it was that botched fanfare edit for the Lucasfilm logo, and now it’s… this very unnecessary thing.

I believe it’s new, yeah.

I also don’t know that I like it. Not the redesign, I guess I’m fine with that. I guess I just don’t see the need for the logo at all. I prefer just the Lucasfilm logo fading in and out.

pleasehello said:

It really sucks that most people either don’t see or don’t care about the difference between blu ray video quality and a lower bitrate stream. When I stream movies and I see blocking, it takes me right out.

Fewer physical releases also means we are at the mercy of the streaming services, only able to watch what they deem “popular enough” to carry.

The thing that gets me is the banding. UGH I hate banding so much. People must not see it, or think it’s a creative choice? I don’t get it. But sunrises shouldn’t come up on screen looking like an area rug, right?

For a second I thought maybe people would start to lobby hard for some real changes in compression and picture quality after it felt like the entire world got all pissed off at HBO for their terrible compression ruining that one dark episode of Game of Thrones. But that was dumb of me, haha.

You can look at that track record for yourself, really. The two don’t blend particularly well. Or at least they didn’t in his case. But he definitely made sure to implement technological changes in the making of movies that other creatives definitely put to good use, and that’s a very good thing.

I don’t know how you can give Lucas all the credit while also giving his collaborators all the credit, unless you’re going to suggest that all his collaborators credit actually belongs to him because he’s the one who chose to collaborate with them?

Historically, you can see Lucas’ abilities as a creator start to fade pretty fast around 1982, when his life started entering into serious upheaval, and his focus turned more to being a CEO than to a creative. It’s why Jedi (and Temple of Doom) seem as compromised as they are, and why the other films with his name attached to them (save for Willow - which didn’t really work) at that point had minimal (if any) involvement from him (Last Crusade, Labyrinth, Howard the Duck, Tucker, etc.)

Part of the reason the Prequels didn’t go the way he wanted them to is because he didn’t really want to write or direct them, and his headspace was completely shifted. He was trying to reverse-engineer a story from a set point, and tried aiming it at children/families without having spent too much time in that world, if any, in the intervening 15 years. Which is probably why we wound up watching a kids movie about bureaucratic malfeasance in 1999. It’s the perfect example of his two halves just smashing together and not really mixing.

THX 1138 was (and still is) a misunderstood satire of capitalism
American Graffiti was autobiography
Star Wars was nostalgia pastiche.

Those are his three. He executed those three ideas brilliantly, and the uniqueness of his voice rang out as strong as it could, and that voice has been echoing ever since. But he had one hell of a backing band behind him, too, and not everybody gets to be a belter for all their life. Or even most of it. Sometimes you shine as bright as you can for a short period of time, and no matter how talented or gifted you are, that’s all you get on your own, and you’d better learn to work with, rely on, and fit in with others if you hope to carry on that path. There’s nothing wrong with that, or with acknowledging that, either. I think it’s fair to say he did that.

I disagree in that “big picture” isn’t really a necessary ingredient. the OT didn’t really have one, either - part of the reason Lucas could blow up Empire the way he did is because he didn’t have any real big picture. He just made something up and stuck it at the end of his script and then had to try and figure out how that was going to work in Jedi. And then how he ended up having it work was ALSO something that didn’t have any big picture planning behind it. Same with the Prequels: The only real “big picture” was the status quo at the beginning of Star Wars. But the way he got to that status quo had no solid throughline at all, and that’s because he just made each story up as he went. Even the parts that he’d been telling us about for decades by that point weren’t the same when he finally got around to writing them.

Of course, those are semi-negative examples that sort of prove that a “big picture” might actually be necessary, but there are countless other examples of movies, film series, tv shows, books, etc. whose greatness is unquestioned, but whose creative paths were absolutely not mapped, or pre-ordained when they began. In fact MOST great stuff we all like and have copies of on our shelves wasn’t created that way. The idea of the “Big Picture” being a necessary element is mostly a myth, and it’s mostly a new one, created in response to TV fans reacting poorly to LOST and Battlestar Galactica. It’s less an actual recipe for making great art, and more like a security blanket for consumers so they can feel good about investing all their time and energy into following along with a story and feeling like they won’t be disappointed at the end. Since almost everything that causes someone to BECOME a fan was created without any serious “big picture” in place before it was started, the idea that the “big picture” is a thing that’s desperately needed doesn’t make any sense, unless you’re solely looking at it as an insurance policy.

Biggest problem with both changes (which I don’t think everyone consensus likes OR dislikes - but trying to find a consensus in Star Wars fandom is like trying to find a rose growing at the bottom of a sewage treatment plant)

McDiarmid replacing Revill: The makeup on McDiarmid isn’t very goooooood, and the dialog changes are just extraneous additions. Styrofoam peanuts.

Christensen replacing Shaw: It’s literally a headswap from a costume test. That’s bush league. Hayden isn’t even ACTING in the scene.

I am wondering if, much in the same way McDiarmid has replaced dialog in Rebels while working on TROS, they’re going to re-do Christensen’s appearance at the end of Jedi so that he’s actually ACTING in the scene? But I guess that’s really unlikely now that we’ve seen the 4K masters and that shot hasn’t been re-done at all.

Originality is vastly overrated as a key aspect of artistic strength. “Yeah, but it’s new” doesn’t carry a lot of weight when what’s new isn’t made well.

However - Lucas DID basically whip up Empire Strikes Back’s story/structure more or less all by himself once Brackett was gone. Kasdan contributed heavily, yes, but by the time he came on the bones of the thing were firmly in place. But on the other hand: The most famous twist of all time, probably, and the one that basically doomed Star Wars to forever be taken way more seriously than it ever really needed to, and trained its biggest fans to expect twists and turns and huge surprises in every chapter despite the fact it’s ALWAYS been a straightforward fairy-tale other than THAT ONE TIME… that twist was basically pulled out of his backside at the last second before shooting started. It wasn’t a deeply considered, thought-out idea. It was just a hand grenade tossed at the end of the story to create one hell of a cliffhanger for the next chapter.

It was also not really the newest of ideas, either. In fact it was, even by 1978, a pretty obvious staple of soap operas and pulp fiction.

I haven’t really gone through them myself. I think the DVD era more or less burnt me out on “extras” although I still find myself, out of habit, buying blu-rays based on how many bullet points are on the back.

But at some point it occurred to me that for all the weight I give “the extras” on any disc I ever bought, aside from a handful of very prominent examples, I almost never watched them more than once, and sometimes never watched them at all.

There’s a bunch of stuff on the 2011 blu-ray set for Star Wars I’ve never clicked on. That includes some of the deleted scenes.

Yeah, my list certainly doesn’t look like it did last year. And 5 years ago it probably would have looked a lot different, too.

Every year that goes by informs the way I appreciate movies, and that appreciation shifts and changes with the number of stories I consume. Lists like these are fun not only because you get a sense of what people like and what they value over other aspects, but because they DO change as experiences accumulate.

I swore up and down all through my teens and early 20s that Superman II was a better made, more interesting, more involving, more MOVIE movie than Superman: The Movie. Much older me understands why I thought that, but definitely disagrees. Same with Aliens and Alien.

I believe that some (but not all?) of the deleted scenes for included on the 2011 box set are available under each movie’s “extras” menu on Disney+

Again, not attempting to excuse or justify this hiliariously weird change by Lucas, but to attempt answering your question, I believe this is what he was intending:

Greedo at no point appears to believe Han is a threat, which is why he’s talking so big.
Han is content to let Greedo believe he’s unarmed, which is why he’s surreptitiously getting his gun ready.
Greedo keeps talking bigger and bigger
Han, with his weapon free, goads him to see what he’ll do.
Greedo now says “MacKlunkey!” which is apparently actually “Ma Klounkee” - Huttese for “This is the end of you.” or something like that.
Han shoots first.

So I think the intent (again, not saying he was successful at all) was to make it even clearer that Greedo was out to burn Han, and to have the scene play more like an actual showdown instead of a sneak attack. In this way, Greedo’s boldness and stupidity in needing to get the last word is what gets him shot.

Fourth time’s the charm, I guess? (It isn’t)

DominicCobb said:

Has anyone checked against the stills pulled from the Reliance reel that started this thread so many years ago? I know the obvious assumption is that it’s their work, but it might be worth confirming.

I believe Pablo confirmed this on twitter? There was only one 4K restoration being done when Lucas still owned Lucasfilm and it was by Reliance. The fact he was able to pinpoint it as “The 4K one” solely by hearing about MacLunkey basically eliminates any other option.

Mike Zeroh is always full of it. He’s one of the most notorious YouTube grifters there is. There is no benefit to giving him clicks and helping his monetization.

He came and he took without giving.

I think it’s just Solo and Mando (and Rebels)

Thank you Ash!

ChainsawAsh said:

JEDIT: Default forced subs suck. I tweaked them to look okay (200% size, depressed font edge, 0% background opacity), but they still alternate seemingly at random between the top and bottom of the screen, which is super annoying. And they are parly in, partly out of the letterboxing no matter what you do.

How did you manage to change them? I can’t even find a setting in the app to adjust… basically ANYTHING