CatBus

The 35mm scan we've seen so far is very beat up in some parts (reel changes in particular), and pretty dirty overall.  It will take a lot of effort to clean up even the best-looking parts to blend convincingly, so I'd imagine Blu-ray footage will likely still be used except for parts that need despecializing.

But yeah, long term, that's what Harmy meant when he said a good 35mm preservation might leave him out of a job.

You went to high school in that thing? You're braver than I thought.

Now there are three of us.

TV's Frink said:

CatBus said:

grainger said:

I don't like superheroes, and don't watch superhero movies

That's okay, Batman's not a superhero!

 Good point!

More to the point, I don't like vigilantes, and I generally dislike vigilante movies, so I'm pretty meh on most Batman films.  I liked Unforgiven though, so I guess it depends on some other factors.

grainger said:

I don't like superheroes, and don't watch superhero movies

That's okay, Batman's not a superhero!

Wrong thread, sorry.  I meant for Star Wars.

D'oh! on both counts ;)

...but you are the only guy with those Technicolor references, so we're still going to bug you about it.

SW should be around 18GB, ESB around 20GB, ROTJ around 7-8GB (because it's still at version 1.0).  There are official AVCHD encodes that are all around 7-8GB.

danny_boy said:

But what about Artoo in the canyon?

I was under the impression(please correct me if I am wrong) that the 1977 prints had a dusk look for that scene.

In the 82' VHS it looks like daytime.

In subsequent releases on home video (at least from the mid 90's onwards)  it looks like dusk again.

Regarding R2 and the canyon, I really don't know.  It's quite likely this scene was shot bright and then filtered dark somewhere along the line.  If the early VHS tapes went back to a pre-filter source (and the trailer presumably also used something fairly far upstream to get unfinished lightsaber effects), then they'd have gotten the bright shot.  I'm not sure there's any way to tell if the bright shot ever made it into a new batch of theatrical prints--I personally strongly doubt it, but I suppose we can only know for sure by checking those very pink prints still in existence for signs of its previous color.

EDIT: And even if all that did happen, I'd call it a production mistake or accident rather than intentional re-timing, unless I could find evidence someone actually wanted the change.

Looks like you didn't hurt it, but what you've got there is a re-encode someone else did, and based on filesize alone, I'd say it's dreadful compared to Harmy's original version.  That said, it's probably still worlds better than the Blu-ray, so that doesn't mean you can't enjoy it.

Seems incredibly unlikely, and IMO easily explained by fast-fading film stock.

Certainly Technicolor showings were not retimed--they just took the existing Technicolor reels and spliced in the new crawl/flyover using the cheaper filmstock.

doubleofive said:

DominicCobb said:

I've never walked out of the theater for any film, prequel or otherwise, no matter how bad. Don't get the reasoning behind such a decision.

Because you could probably be doing something better with your time.

Precisely. There's shopping to be done, dinner to be cooked. Hell, even sleeping. If you set aside two hours of your day to do something, it has to at the very least be better than washing the dishes. If it's not, then there really is no point in staying.  That said, I'm pretty sure I've only walked out once--if you do it too often, you're obviously not filtering the movies you choose to watch well enough.  It's rare for a movie to be so bad you want to walk out, and for you not to get a whiff of that well before you buy the ticket.

I managed to make it through TPM and AOTC, but I left during ROTS.  I went to see it expecting it to be bad (a friend had two free tickets). Unfortunately I'd seen most of it (I made it to the lava planet fight thingee) before I decided I'd paid too much.

EDIT: Actually I did pretend to go to the bathroom during AOTC.  So I left the theatre and hung out in the lobby for a bit, then took a deep breath and went back in after I felt I could take some more.  Does that count as walking out?

I noticed the Episode V crawl doesn't appear to have as much "light bleed" around the letters in the Grindhouse release.  Could this just be due to the brightness/color balance being different, or is this really sharper than the Blu-ray/DeEdv2 crawl?  If it is, I wonder what they did during the transfer to make it bleed like that.

Well, my story only answers some peripherally-related questions:

I realized that the world in general might think the prequels sucked before TPM even opened.  There was a popular theatre in town that opted not to show TPM when the whole world was still getting hyped for it.  When asked by a local reporter, they said they always had to consider if a movie "had legs" or not based on a preview screening, and TPM, in their opinion, did not have legs.  My reaction to the story was that I thought the only way for a new Star Wars movie to have no legs would be if it were two hours of Lucas vomiting on the camera.  Anything better than that, even if only slightly better, would make money.  Turns out I was right, but not the way I'd hoped.

The first time I admitted the prequels sucked was to my German professor.  We were doing a "conversational German" evaluation, so we pretty much talked about whatever we wanted to.  He asked me what I did that weekend, and I told him about going to see TPM, with all those people dressed in costumes and lining up around the block, etc.  He then asked if the movie was good, and... I kinda got defensive.  I said "Well, no, it's not good, but it was a big party--like Woodstock for our generation.  If you asked someone who went to Woodstock if the music was any good, you've missed the point."  But it turned out I was actually wrong on this count--whether the movie was good or not did in fact matter.  I was still very much in denial about the direction Star Wars was taking--I thought the Special Editions were interesting alternate might-have-been versions, but if someone told me Lucas actually intended to erase the classic films from history and replace them with these CGI experiments, I'd have said they were crazy.

The first time I realized the entire modern Star Wars franchise sucked was after seeing AOTC.  It showed TPM was no fluke, and meanwhile the aforementioned crazy talk about the Special Editions was turning out to be true.  There was literally nothing left in the Star Wars universe that didn't suck--the good stuff had been removed, everything left was crap, and the only prospects were for more crap.  This was about the time of my long, dark winter of Star Wars, where I pretty much gave up and let it die.

I went to see ROTS on a lark, with the guy I saw terrible movies with, often with free tickets he could get.  I saw Alien vs Predator and Signs with him, so this could hardly be worse, right?  And besides, this one was getting lukewarm reviews for a change.  Oh. My. God. I thought AOTC was as bad as the prequels could possibly get, but I was so, so wrong.  We didn't talk about it, we didn't laugh about it, we just left.  If the tickets weren't free I would have asked for my money back.

At this point Star Wars films were sharing company with Battlefield Earth in my pantheon of films never to watch again under any circumstances, no matter how drunk.

But then I had a kid, and later another, and sought out the versions I actually did remember loving so many years earlier, and found this place.  It turns out Star Wars actually is great... if you can find it.

Well, I don't know how much extra stuff was packed in there, because what you have isn't the official release.  But basically as long as you didn't re-encode the video (i.e. if it took minutes instead of hours), you should be fine.

I will keep your offer in mind, but I'm currently leaning on one of our very busy other members (Sadako) to finish this job, and I'd prefer if the same translator did all three films.  The reason is that the Japanese subtitles need a little more than just transcription, they also need re-translation in places (for example, SRT files can't really deal with Furigana at all), so there's some stylistic choices and I'd like consistency between the films wherever possible.

I'm hoping to have text versions of the Japanese ROTJ subs in time for the next release of the ROTJ Despecialized Edition.

Harmy said:

Well, if there's ever a full 35mm HD scan of Star Wars made available to me, then yes, definitely (unless of course the scan already looks better than the official BD, which certainly isn't inconceivable).

You're not getting off the hook that easy, mister ;)

IMO, there's still a place for the DeEd's (or something like it), even under this scenario.  It's quite likely a great-quality 35mm scan would still benefit from many things you could do:

- GOUT sync (and with that, all of our great audio options)

- Cleanup/cue mark removal

- Improved color timing to better match our best color references (Technicolor, etc)

- Stabilization

I assume that if a 35mm print was scanned, the "theatrical experience" would be well-preserved, but there are some things commonly done to films for home video that I think are nice to have.

Frankly, much of this would probably need to be done even if Disney themselves did a respectful transfer of Star Wars, so I don't see how it would be all that different if someone else did one.

PM sent.

Lust-In-Phaze said:

Dumb question, but the version of ANH I obtained has a default language setting of Italian. Were I to burn this on a disc, would that be the audio track that appears by default?

The first audio track muxed into the stream plays by default, unless overridden by player settings or the disc menu system.  If someone changed the default track to Italian, you'd need to remux it with an English track as audio track #1 for that to be the default audio.

I've been experimenting with Puggo's 16mm preservations, and the results are in:

Aside from the fact that this project's subtitles don't exactly match the mono mixes in any language other than English, it works well.  The default subtitles won't work with Puggo's releases, but scripts to convert the default subtitles will be provided in the next release.

Now there are two of them!

TV's Frink said:

So am I understanding correctly that it's my fault for disliking the prequels, not George's?

No, it's your fault for watching the prequels. The ring theory might make a lot more sense if you didn't make that rookie mistake.

I suspect the next candidate will be ROTP.  At least for my purposes, I find it better to merge Puggo's reels into a single stream, and de-telecine it back to 23.976 fps before trying to sync.  YMMV.

Yeah, I already have subs synced (probably good enough) to the Grindhouse release, I was just wanting to know if it could be easily improved.  The next version of Project Threepio will include a Perl script for re-syncing to other frame references, but it requires 1) the timecode relative to the NTSC GOUT where the change happens, and 2) the amount of change, with millisecond precision supported but not required, because, after all, it's just subtitles.  Not sure this method will work for everyone, but it works for me.  I already synced Puggo Grande using this script, and am now working on PSB.

How my off-the-cuff adjustments may relate to actual frame differences...well, your guess is as good as mine, but subtitles are very forgiving.