CatBus

darklordoftech said:

What would Disney have to gain from making more changes?

A 4K version of Star Wars, for one.  For >2K, they absolutely must go back to film elements, which means pre-2004.  Another good reason would be maintaining contractual obligations (i.e. with Reliance Media) that were agreed to prior to the Lucasfilm purchase.  They may try to make the result look like the 2011SE, or the 2004SE, but if they do, it will inevitably be somewhat different and therefore "more changes".  Heck, if they decide to actually go the OOT route, they may decide to port over some of the more subtle recomps from the SE, and that too would be yet another special edition.  There are SO many ways this can go wrong without someone at the helm who actually loves the films deeply.

moviefreakedmind said:

I don't think for one second that Disney would allow more changes to the trilogy due to the backlash it gets every time it happens. I could see Disney sweeping it under the rug, continuing to release the 2011 SEs, and then never mentioning the OOT ever again, but adding even more changes I just can't see them doing.

And then there's the mysterious Reliance Media project, which seems to be exactly that.  The 04/11 SE's are limited to 2K, so going back to the 97SE's, doing a 4K scan, and re-specializing is the only way to keep the SE fork alive at all for higher-res releases (and, given that complicated history, it won't be an exact match to the 2011SE even if that's their intended goal).  Now, Disney probably bought this project already contracted out and partly-completed, so they didn't technically decide to do it, but AFAIK nobody's killed it yet.  Corporate inertia is a force to be reckoned with.

Hey, I want it released as much as anyone, but "it just doesn't make sense not to" has been a valid argument since the mid-nineties and nothing's come of it yet--except, you know, rumors from "credible sources" every five months for the past twenty years.

moviefreakedmind said:

I'd love to hear what Landis himself said verbatim, but it seems that Empire magazine interpreted his statement as being the original versions specifically.

Sure, but Landis is already not the first speaker in that game of telephone.  He heard it from Lucas.  Lucas may have said "the original trilogy--yes, John, THE original classic films that started the whole thing, back in 1977, with no changes at all to what I intended all those years ago".  A normal person could walk out of there thinking Star Wars was finally going to get a decent home video release and say that to the press without reservations, but in Lucas-speak, that just means a new 2016 Specialer Edition where Yoda is now CGI.

Most sources for the English audio were from Laserdisc, we have nice mixes now (not necessarily exactly the same as those used for the DeEd's) that use "best of breed" releases, with patched over dropouts, etc.  So it's lossless in the sense that it's from Laserdisc, mostly digital audio, but occasionally patched over with analogue audio, originally 44.1k 16 bit lossless, resampled to 48k.

"Lossless" is always a bit of a dodgy term, because much could have been altered for the Laserdisc release (dynamics, channel separation, etc), but that's pretty much exactly as good as Blu-ray lossless in that sense--moreso in that they didn't routinely tweak the audio so much back then.

The Star Wars mono mix is mostly from a capture of a European TV broadcast, expertly cleaned up and synced, and doesn't really sound much worse than partial captures we've gotten directly from 35mm--academy mono really wasn't all that great, so it seems that's just about as good as it sounded originally.  Empire 16mm mono mix is, surprise, from a 16mm film capture, and is pretty rough.

This thread is about one mix in particular, just the 6-channel 1977 70mm reconstruction, which is from multiple sources, all Laserdisc IIRC except that some of the LFE track is derived from the Blu-rays.

IIRC these 6-channel mixes for ESB and ROTJ are content-equivalent to "tasteful upmixes" of the original stereo mixes, not reconstructions of the original 6-channel mixes.  ESB's theatrical 6-channel mix was entirely different, matched an entirely different 70mm cut of the video, and our best source is a pretty dodgy-sounding 8mm capture that's missing some big chunks--and we don't have a complete re-creation of that.  ROTJ's theatrical 6-channel mix has no known differences from the stereo mix content-wise (but no reference either, so who knows), so a tasteful upmix of the stereo mix may very well be pretty close.  ESB got some LFE from the Blu-rays in the latest iteration, ROTJ will probably get the same treatment once ROTJ DeEd 2.x is closer.

bkev said:

source.  Anyone have any thoughts on this?  Likelihood of reality?

At this point, I'm guessing that keeping this rumor circulating is simply the most cost-effective way of keeping Star Wars relevant.  Just in time for a new film, what a coincidence!

EDIT: Either that, or it's just your standard everyday confusion over the term "original trilogy", where the original speaker means the special editions and everyone else hears what they want to hear, and passes along their misinterpretation.

NeverarGreat said:

CatBus said:

I guess I should add that while snicker used the RGB channel differences to reconstruct clipped highlights, I think in the Death Star hangar example he uncrushed the blacks by pulling usable detail out of the BTB data, and I'm not sure if you've been making use of what unseen detail is lurking in BTB and WTW.

There is definitely a great deal of data hiding in the superwhites or WTW in Star Wars, and it can be pulled out if you don't clip the detail through a colorspace conversion, but how would it be possible to pull useful data out of the superblacks, since most of the data is random noise within a point or two of RGB 0,0,0?

Well, I don't know the technical details behind snicker's methods, but there was clearly something usable there for that one shot.  Either it was specific to that shot, or maybe the channel separation trick provided some benefit there too, i.e. separating signal from noise.

I guess I should add that while snicker used the RGB channel differences to reconstruct clipped highlights, I think in the Death Star hangar example he uncrushed the blacks by pulling usable detail out of the BTB data, and I'm not sure if you've been making use of what unseen detail is lurking in BTB and WTW.

Not sure if this is applicable, and it's way before your time here, but there was a user named snicker who had an interesting idea about clipping (with actual good results!).  Basically because not all channels were boosted equally, not all channels clipped equally.  For example, on a lot of clipped colored lights, the red channel is clipped, or possibly the blue channel, but the green channel retains some detail, which could be used in restoring the shot.

Anyway, not sure if what he did was exactly scriptable, but he produced some impressive results, where previously clipped/crushed data seemed to be restored to bright red lights and I believe also the black "pit" in the death star hangar.  Anyway, you might find someone here with more technical detail, but I thought since you're messing with clipping anyway, it couldn't hurt to mention it...

DrDre said:

CatBus said:

DrDre said:

I believe I have solved the problem of crushed whites, and blacks for the CollorCorrect GUI v1.2.

I have to say, this might change everything for me.  Back when you were color correcting the Blu-ray exclusively, I was inclined to believe that contrast boosting on the Blu was destroying your highlight detail.  But then I saw the same thing when you corrected the GOUT and I thought something must be wrong with the method in general.  I didn't complain because frankly I felt you were catching quite enough flak already, and were still doing interesting work in spite of the problems.

Now... things look very promising indeed.  Keep up the good work, and I'd like to see more captures using this new method.

 Could you explain with an example?

The stormtrooper on the far right's chest:
http://screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/139124

Artifacts in the highlights on C-3PO's leg:
http://screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/140781

Lots of highlight detail lost here:
http://screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/142085

Seeing those shots redone with the new method would be very interesting to me.

DrDre said:

I believe I have solved the problem of crushed whites, and blacks for the CollorCorrect GUI v1.2.

I have to say, this might change everything for me.  Back when you were color correcting the Blu-ray exclusively, I was inclined to believe that contrast boosting on the Blu was destroying your highlight detail.  But then I saw the same thing when you corrected the GOUT and I thought something must be wrong with the method in general.  I didn't complain because frankly I felt you were catching quite enough flak already, and were still doing interesting work in spite of the problems.

Now... things look very promising indeed.  Keep up the good work, and I'd like to see more captures using this new method.

PM sent.

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Only if you Photoshop Vader's freaky bushy eyebrows off.

mverta said:

There is truly no force in the universe more powerful than the human ability to rationalize.

Have to throw my predictably pessimistic hat into the ring with you, there, Mike.  While it's true in a general sense that 90% of everything is crap, and we tend to only remember the good stuff, so the past has a rosy tint, there are other trends, big trends that outweigh all of that.

In my opinion, sometimes studios are risk-averse and sometimes they're not.  When they take more risks, they can produce truly great (and also terrible) things.  When they feel risk-averse, the best they can usually hope for is decently entertaining.  We have been in a risk-averse period for a long, long, LOOOONG time.  Not saying good stuff isn't made, but often it happens outside or in spite of the studio system.  The last long-lasting "risky" period was the so-called auteur movement, lining up more or less with the seventies.  The crap was phenomenally crap, but the good stuff was divine.  Nowadays, it's generally by-the-numbers with good execution, or by-the-numbers with poor execution.  Bleh.

My wife and I have been complaining about the "Hollywood Writer's Strike" for the last ten years or so, even though we know there sadly isn't one to explain all this.

EDIT: I'd add City of God and Amelie to poita's generally pretty good noughties list (Million Dollar Baby notwithstanding...)

I don't remember anything about a new higher-bitrate video encode, but then I also don't remember breakfast.  I'd say go for it.

I've offered a few updated files to the guy who was working on it, and haven't heard a peep back.  Not that he can't roar back into action soon, but I think he got sidelined for a bit.

On the other hand, a menu-free Blu-ray is very easy to make with tsmuxerGUI and ImgBurn, nothing to it really.  It's how I prefer to watch these.

No, but it is a bit of an inside joke.  We've had one estimate that was wrong by over a year.  Basically, "when it's done" is your most accurate answer.  If you want inaccurate answers, I can set you up with that too.

Right now, Harmy is very busy with real life, and his priority is getting Jedi up to 2.x-quality, and even that may be a long wait.  Only after that's done will you see any movement toward 2.5 on ESB.

PM sent.  The older the preservation, the less complete the built-in subtitle support would be.  Eventually I hope excellent subtitle support just comes standard with any preservation, without having to ask for a separate download--but we're not quite there yet.

EDIT: However, the latest release of Star Wars Despecialized does have English subtitles, so if yours doesn't, you've got an old version and should definitely consider an upgrade--there have been major improvements since the subtitle-free 1.x series.

So I won't book that flight to Virginia just yet if I'm parsing that correctly.

My guess is the MKV support in your player is pretty rudimentary/buggy.  You might try to make a proper Blu-ray with tsMuxerGUI and ImgBurn.

I care.

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I don't hate magenta -- I pity magenta.

Easterhay's got some competition, it seems.