CatBus

You’re very welcome!

GlastoEls said:

Well that got awkward!

No, now it’s awkward!

CatBus said:

The tractor beam line, for example, sounds like he’s off saying it in a broom closet instead of on the same set he says all his other lines. The line itself it fine, it just… doesn’t blend for me, even on the mono mix. Probably in the minority on that one, but this stuff is pretty subjective at some point.

I guess it wasn’t my imagination. According to the info at the link Moth3r provided, “according to Anthony Daniels, C3PO’s tractor beam line was recorded long after filming had finished, on his own in a broom cupboard in London”.

PM’s sent.

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Well, I think the point is that Harmy’s not shooting for any aesthetic other than “what it looked like in 1977”. So if it looked like a Technicolor trainwreck with inconsistent skin tones back then, success means that’s what it’ll look like here. If Han’s shirt was yellow in one scene and white in another in 1977 (which would be pretty normal due to interior lighting differences), correcting that would be revisionist.

I am assuming Harmy’s likely to use his professional scan of a low-fade theatrical print as a reference, like he dd with 2.5, but with a little more leeway around correction, since that reference wasn’t fully corrected, and with better tools for making all the various sources match that color timing, instead of eyeballing it and settling for close enough in many cases. If that’s the case, 3.x will look a lot closer to 2.5 than any home video presentation, simply because 2.5 got closer to theatrical colors than any home video presentation. But there’s always room for improvement.

GroovyLord said:

Also, just curious what people’s thoughts on the laserdisc color is?

There are lots of Laserdiscs. There’s certainly some proponents of the color on the Japanese Special Collection laserdiscs, and that seems to be the only Star Wars Laserdisc with reasonably accurate color – the rest are generally poor to awful. Nevertheless, using home video releases as a color reference is a bad move, when better references exist – and thankfully they do.

Let me know if you’re interested taking a look at the full Japanese SRT file for ROTJ for early testing and feedback. At the moment, the timing of the alien subtitles won’t exactly match any existing version of the Despecialized Editions – this file uses the new timing which will be used in the final ROTJ 2.0, so things will seem a little off in that respect until then.

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PM’s sent. For the most part, all Despecialized versions are synced to the same reference, the the subtitles work on either version.

Yeah, it’s multiple things. I probably dislike the shattering glass mostly because when you’re seen a movie around one gazillion times, and there’s never been shattering glass on any of the mixes, then suddenly one day there is, there’s pretty much no way to keep your brain from saying this is wrong, they screwed something up, stop watching this movie and put in the one with the right soundtrack. Plus, you know, there’s the complete unnecessariness of adding the shattering glass sound that I can’t ignore either. As for the inclusion of the mono mix lines, I also favor the original multichannel mixes because they don’t have them. The tractor beam line, for example, sounds like he’s off saying it in a broom closet instead of on the same set he says all his other lines. The line itself it fine, it just… doesn’t blend for me, even on the mono mix. Probably in the minority on that one, but this stuff is pretty subjective at some point.

No, we (meaning, people at OT.com) have lossless versions (DTS-MA, FLAC, whatever) of those tracks, but I guess either Harmy opted not to use them for space reasons or he didn’t have easy access to the lossless versions at the time he finalized 2.5. There’s always new audio captures being made – yes, off 30-plus-year old Japanese media we buy on eBay. AC3 and DTS are both lossy, unless you’re talking DTS-MA.

GeneKaufman said:

Also I wanted to apologize to whomever it concerns (probably TV’s Frink)

Don’t apologize to Frink, you’ll just encourage him 😉

Check this thread for dialogue differences:
http://originaltrilogy.com/topic/The-Definitive-tractor-beam-Close-the-blast-doors-Blast-it-Biggs-Wedge-you-dont-taste-very-good-Noooooo-Preservation-Guide/id/13428

I’m not sure it includes the ESB mono mix because that was a somewhat recent discovery.

77 has a decent amount of dynamic range, 85 has very little, it’s your standard “near field” home video remix of the time. And actually IIRC the 85 has a wider sound stage than any other mix, I’m not sure why.

There’s been speculation about an 85 mix for ESB and ROTJ, but the consensus among the experts (not me, hairy_hen and folks) are that there wasn’t one. The slight variations in sound quality from release to release more than account for the differences on 85 soundtracks for ESB and ROTJ without anyone having had to make a new mix. So, all ESB soundtracks prior to 93 are the 80 mix, and all ROTJ soundtracks prior to 93 are the 83 mix.

PM’s sent. No, no prequel or SE subtitles here, just the OOT.

If a drive-in counts as a theatre, then I did indeed see it in the theatre in 1977 (and yes, two standby’s). The “misunderstanding” I’m referring to is that you seem to think you need to be old like me to have seen/heard a theatrical print, or that the Despecialized Editions are somehow limited to home video releases and don’t use theatrical prints. Theatrical prints are still with us (often in bad shape, sure, but they exist), and in many private collections around here. They are used in the Despecialized Editions. You don’t need someone who was even alive in 77 to tell you what was on those prints, you just need someone to walk over to those prints, check it out, and report back*. As I said, it’s settled. There were only two standby’s. Checking with other peoples’ equally faulty 40-year-old memories is not much value to anyone, especially when we are swimming in so much hard evidence that’s so easy to consult.

I’ve linked to the print variation thread in a post above, and a google site search on grappling hook will get you to all kinds of threads about our most common false memories.

EDIT: Oh, in addition to the original film reels, we also have in-theatre audio recording from the time, too. They’re not good enough quality to make a good soundtrack out of them, but they can be used to verify details like this, and… well, you probably know what I’m going to say about them next. Two standby’s.

* Technically, they may not be willing to do it just for this. But seriously, we’ve got lots of different people people poring all over these things on lots of different prints all the time, and maybe you just have to be around here long enough to know that if someone, in all of that time, discovered an even slightly different soundtrack variant (and extra standby’s definitely qualifies), it would have been front page news around here long ago. Take a look at the print variations thread–does it really seem like people who notice that sort of thing and have access to this sort of material wouldn’t have already noticed this?

Wazzles said:

CatBus said:
there were some very minor print variations (differences in the credits layout, one composite effect for a planet)

This is the first I’ve heard of this. What’s the deal there?

http://originaltrilogy.com/topic/Print-variations-in-77-Star-Wars/id/14705

The deal is we are quite the collection of nerds here 😉

REPORT-ESB-v2.0
00:02:20
stars change brightness as image pans

00:40:15
stars change brightness(unsure?) as falcon makes loop

02:00:26
credits are a reconstruction, contain numerous typos

I’m an oldster and never heard more than two standby’s. But maybe you’re misunderstanding things. We have multiple people here with actual 35mm film reels, and some of those film reels have been scanned (audio captured too) and made it into parts of the Despecialized Editions. Yes, home video isn’t always the same as the films upon which they’re based, etc, etc, but this sort of thing is settled. We have pored over these things to a ridiculous degree, and we are swimming in so many actual theatrical projection prints that if there were a different version with more standby’s we’d have picked up on that too. There were only ever two standby’s. There are tons of false memory threads here: Luke’s first failed grappling hook throw attempt, Biggs showing up, the scene of Darth straightening out his TIE fighter not appearing the first time, etc. Some things are attributable to outside sources: comics, radio dramas, novelizations, some of it is just mistakes that your memory makes all the time.

Now, Star Wars is a source of more of that than normal, because there were three different soundtracks depending on where and when you saw it (but all of them had two standby’s), there were some very minor print variations (differences in the credits layout, one composite effect for a planet), and the first few minutes were chopped off and replaced by a whole new beginning in 1981 to rename the thing “A New Hope”. So people were always thinking “Heyyy, something’s a little different about this”, which created a lot of validation for the sort of simple errors that you’d normally dismiss, so false memory claims abound.

TL;DR: all of our memories are fallible, this memory you have is wrong but that doesn’t make you a bad person, and Harmy got it right.

It depends on your priorities. For Star Wars, the most “authentic” tracks are the 77 theatrical ones. 77 mono is probably what most people heard in theatres, but it’s the worst audio quality (recording of OTA broadcast, and academy mono wasn’t so hot to begin with). Stereo and 70mm are very slightly different content-wise (but not so most people would notice), and both sound great (lossless from Laserdisc, 70mm also uses some Blu-ray elements). For a stereo system, it’s safest to recommend a stereo track, as downmixing six channels can muddy things up a bit.

Then comes the 85 mix. A lot of people like this because it’s the home video mix most were used to in the VHS glory days – and because it’s a sort of mashup of the mono and surround mixes, it’s made up of all-authentic mixes, kind of a best of both worlds. It has great channel separation and no dynamics to speak of, but the audio quality is also great (lossless from Laserdisc).

The 93 mix is far from a crowd pleaser. While the audio quality is top-notch, authenticity goes out the window, as non-theatrical (and thoroughly unnecessary) elements have been added to the mix. It’s what (some) Star Wars fans hated before there were Special Editions. It’s also lossless from Laserdisc. I think it’s inevitable that any official OOT release would have this g****mn mix as the only audio option, which is why I made the comment you referred to earlier.

For Empire, the 1980 stereo mix and six-channel mixes on Despecialized are content-identical. There was a 70mm six-channel mix, but this isn’t it, and there aren’t any good recordings of it, and it went with a different video cut anyway. They both sound great (80 stereo and six-channel), lossless from Laserdisc, yadda yadda. The 1993 mix also sounds very good but is flawed, as it’s missing a sound effect during the snowspeeder crash. The 16mm mono mix is a recent discovery, sounds like crud, but is really interesting, and authentic.

For Jedi, all mixes are content-identical, and all sound very good. I think the 93 stereo might sound a little better than 80 stereo, but they are both lossless from Laserdisc, you know the drill.

Hopefully my repeated mentions of Laserdisc let joefavs know where the lossless sources come from–high-quality lossless audio for home video actually predates DVDs by quite a bit. Star Wars Laserdiscs released before 1985 have the 77 mix, between 1985 and 1993 have the 85 mix, and after 1993 have the 93 mix. Some Laserdisc audio was analogue, but we actually have digital captures of all of these (not sure which ones Despecialized uses, except 77 stereo is definitely a digital capture, because it was so hard to find digital audio on a pre-85 Laserdisc that we made a big deal about it when we found one).

For me? I always listen to the 6-channel mixes, and the downmixing doesn’t really make that much difference on stereo setups IMO, so I’d still listen to them there.

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