CatBus

Now that's more like it. Mission accomplished, thread re-railed.

God, I was positive it was gonna be the color of the snow on Hoth this time around. Just shows how good I am at predicting things.

Our opinions are very much known.  No need for further pile-on IMO.  I agree with Harmy that whatever your position on the matter, it's essentially not a very big deal, and I also understand that is the shots are already despecialized in this manner, I am not going to ask him to do it all over again over this.

PM sent.

DavidMerrick said:

CatBus said:

I think of all the things I'll miss the least, it'll be that damned moire pattern.  Thanks Harmy.

 Oh, did that pattern just not show up in the 35mm scan?

It's just much brighter in that area, so if the pattern is there, it's not nearly as distracting.  Honestly not sure if it was on the original prints or if it was one of the weirder '97 Lowryization side-effects.

I think of all the things I'll miss the least, it'll be that damned moire pattern.  Thanks Harmy.

Gar!  Tricked again!  Not sure what I think about that, though.  If they were cropped out, then re-added, then you're actually adding black curved elements somewhere out in the middle of the 35mm frame, which is odd.

Beber said:

how come the framing angles of the whole movie are curved?

That's from the film elements.  Depending on how much the frame is cropped during the transfer, those would be trimmed out.  In other words, the presence of those rounded edges is an indicator to film geeks that we're not seeing very much cropping, that's all.

PM sent.

I believe it was Laserschwert that did a great job re-creating the credits for Star Wars (ended up not being used, but still great).  Might be worth sending him a PM.  All I can do is copy editing the result.

Those are fair criticisms, I think.  Part of the love for the '83 musical number is not because it was great at the time, but because it was made so much worse in '97.

C3PX said:

Vaderisnothayden said:

I suspect that if ROTJ was less triumphant and more downery it might get more respect.

You might be right about that. I can't even remember how many times I have heard people say the movie would have been better had Han (or Lando) died at the end. Really don't see how that would improve anything though.

Well, I don't think Han or Lando's death would improve things per se, it's just that Han has little-to-nothing left to do in Jedi, and Lando loses any ambiguity/complexity in Jedi that he once had, so killing them off (at the beginning, not the end!) is just a way to trim the dead-weight off the film and potentially refocus efforts on the stronger storyline of Luke and the Emperor.  It's not yay-face vs boo-face, in my opinion.  Not that I can speak for all Jedi critics, because I actually like the film.

As for random memories, my favorite nostalgia is in trying to figure out, sometime in 1980 or so, why they leapfrogged over three episode numbers and called Empire "Episode V".  Were they going to fill in the episodes that happened between Star Wars (the presumptive Episode I, of course) and Empire later?  Were the numbers being skipped just to give the impression of time passing?  Lots of fun childhood speculation just on that "missing material", and what it might contain.

Harmy said:

Well, I blended the edges together :-)

I'm getting closer to releasing the final workprint and boy, do I have a few surprises for you guys :-)

Please please please let the Mynock shoot first!

Also, FWIW, I have a ton of new subtitles whenever you're ready for them.  The longer you wait, the more subtitles you get.

Wow, you really matched those sources well.  Not even the tiniest nit to pick.

We have top men working on it.

Top men.

Has any decision been made as to whether this project will be GOUT-synced or not?  Wondering about support for subtitles and alternate audio...

FWIW, I've got 1080p BD-SUP subtitles just itching to be included (and an updated version in the works), but lack of GOUT sync could be a dealbreaker, depending on how far off it gets (subtitles are probably more forgiving than audio, which has issues if there's more than one frame of difference).

team_negative1 said:

We know there doesn't seem to be a lot of interest in Jedi.

I wanted to chime in that I certainly have interest in this project, just nothing to add to the discussion by posting.  I wouldn't necessarily equate a less-active thread with less interest in the thread topic.

Jaitea said:

What would happen to this site if Disney released the BD's of the OT the way we wanted them?

J

I'd be out, in approximately as much time as it takes to write goodbye. For many, including myself, the lack of a proper OT release is the only real reason for being here.

Yeah, there are still fan edits and preservations of unrelated films, some of which I've been involved in. But really, a proper OT release? Our work is done.

But I think the key words in your question are "the way we wanted them".  Let's say a good-quality BD release of the OT happens someday. I'm assuming it won't have the '77 crawl, won't have the original six-channel mixes (not to mention no mono mixes), and it will have some sort of screwed up video issues (DNR, boosted contrast, weird colors).  That's probably quite enough to keep this site going with its current dedicated following, even if the appeal to new users is reduced.

Yeah, much as I like to geek out on the other despecializations, I must agree that it's the starfields and black levels that are really giving the 2.x previews that cinematic feel for me.  It's a huge difference over 1.x, which still had that home video release feel to it.

DELETED: Weird editor issue.

Tyrphanax said:

Empire voted top film of all time by a new poll.

Very interesting to see the films that are not at the tops of these lists. Really reflects the changing of the generational guard. Nice to see many of "our" classics up there.

I swear such lists should disallow films made within the last ten years just to keep the churn down.  Not that there aren't always some fine films within the last ten years, but it's not like people will stop making lists in the future, and they can show up then if they still warrant it.

In the context of film preservation, you could discuss what "our streaming future" means, if that grants the rightsholders the ability to alter their films on a whim, and consumers no longer have physical copies to fall back to.

i.e. imagine how much worse the Star Wars purge would have been if Lucas had the ability to overwrite all our private Laserdisc and VHS collections with the Special Editions.

If anyone here can read/write Hebrew or Arabic, I would be delighted with some assistance.  There appear to be good-quality (what I'd call "verified") graphical Special Edition subs out there (and I have some for SW, with more on the way), but converting them into text and retiming them to the GOUT may be the death of me.  They aren't useful as graphical-only subs because they're SE subs, so it's convert & retime them, or nothing.  Also, RTL scripts make my head hurt.

The help I need would involve taking an English template, and either transcribing the translations from a graphical image of the translated subtitle, or pasting in an OCR'd version of those subs, and making manual corrections as needed.  You wouldn't actually have to do much translation at all, because that's already done.

I'll try my best on my own of course, but I might not get very far.

IIRC, most home video versions of Star Wars were overly bright in all areas, with washed-out colors, essentially turning dark red-tinted evenings into bright neutral-tinted afternoons, among other things (the matte boxes being very visible on VHS are another example).  My VHS copy is pretty pink-tinted too, so any residual red in the sky is lost in the pink cast over the whole thing IMO.

While Harmy did use HD sources for this, everything was color-corrected to match a privately-owned extremely-low-fade theatrical print, so the colors here are pretty unimpeachable in most cases, although there's a few issues with clipping here and there from the HD sources.  I doubt we should be so lucky with the other two films, although I'm sure he'll do his best ;)

Leoj found a new source for the American Spanish ESB dub.  Not as good-quality overall as the track from roback214, but good enough to patch over the bad areas he described earlier (with the help of the isolated score to help the music blend more seamlessly).  FWIW, the missing scream is just how it was on this dub, so I just patched over the areas where the English audio was overlaid.

So we now have a patched-up ESB track (mostly the same as the original, just a few seconds altered) that sounds pretty much great.  PM me if you're interested.

Okay, so this is weird.  I know DVDs are passé and everything, and that even moreso, MuxMan is ancient and unmaintained, but I nevertheless find it to be an awesome free tool for the job.

But remember a while back how I had to include a modified version of MuxMan because the regular version used the wrong language code for Indonesian (so some players couldn't ID the language correctly)?  Well, it turns out that in the late eighties, three ISO-639-1 language codes got changed--Indonesian, Hebrew, and Yiddish.  And in at least one official standards document out there somewhere, the code for Javanese was mistyped.  MuxMan gets all of these wrong, using the old/wrong values.  So I'll be making another modification to MuxMan to take care of this.

And, as a teaser, there's an actual reason beyond anal-retentiveness I needed to make this change ;)