CatBus

darklordoftech said:

Speaking of color references, what did they use as a color reference when creating 97 ESB and 97 ROTJ?

No idea. Even though they had Technicolor prints for Star Wars, I doubt they used them.  Since the only reason for using a color reference is for historical accuracy, and historical accuracy was already out the window with the Special Editions, my guess is they just winged it for all three films.

TV's Frink said:

Fang Zei said:

I was in 8th grade when TPM came out and just a couple weeks from turning 14 (way to make me feel old, guys).

 Shut up, I was 25.

:cries.

Exactly. If this release ever happens, it's likely to be deficient in some manner and destined to become merely a better-quality source... which would still be fantastic as far as I'm concerned, because that's what we need.

Oh, I think most of us agree it's a tedious and painful film to actually sit through, but I agree with the others it's the high point of the prequels, with ROTS easily the lowest point.

Baronlando said:

Fang Zei said:

The IB Technicolor prints can only be used for a color reference and not a source scan.

 They are scannable now, with modern equipment.

If you have something higher up the duplication chain than a projection print, use that instead.  Technicolor prints are very good quality projection prints, and I think are actually one generation higher than your typical 35mm projection print, but they are still projection prints.  Lots of detail from the negatives has been lost.  On the other hand, Technicolor prints retain their color better than most anything else (assuming they got the right color to begin with, which was a bit of an issue with Technicolor in its earlier days, but not really with Star Wars), so for a color reference, you could do a lot worse.  So I agree wholeheartedly with Fang Zei, if you replace "can" with "should".

DuracellEnergizer said:

Am I the only one who finds these women creepy? Seriously, it's like The Stepford Wives meets The Shadow over Innsmouth with these girls.

There are women in the photo? I was too busy making sure Tatooine's twin suns were the right color. But now that you mention it... totally agree.

m_s0 said:

pittrek said:

 I'd love to see an 8K transfer of the Technicolor prints they still have

Wouldn't that be overkill?

Yes.

Also, FWIW, transferring right off the OCN typically does not result in anything like accurate theatrical colors, so some sort of color grading does need to happen when creating a new HD master.

Sometimes they honestly try to do a good job, but don't (and for the life of me, I don't understand why) use any sort of color reference.  You end up with Blu-rays that look quite good, but totally unlike the theatrical colors (example: Do the Right Thing).

Sometimes they go through the trouble of matching the color temperature of a projector bulb from the same era and end up looking totally unlike all previous home video releases, and people don't believe the colors are accurate even when they actually are.

And sometimes they go all revisionist.  In many cases, it's because the color grading was done by people who grade things in teal and orange all day long, and they just go through the same process they always use, and somehow they manage to get someone to sign off on it.

I was having a discussion with my German professor (in German, it was a fluency test), and I got around to discussing what I did the previous weekend, which involved joining the crowd of camped out Star Wars freaks on the sidewalk outside the big deluxe downtown theatre.

I described the costumes, excitement, and people all around having a good time out there on the sidewalk.  Finally he asked, "Was the movie any good?" I said "No. But it's not about the movie, it's about the Zeitgeist.  Like Woodstock--who cared or even noticed if the music was any good?"

At that point, I kinda hadn't yet quite processed exactly how disappointing the movie was.  It would only have been like Woodstock if none of the musicians even showed up and they tried to entertain the crowd with a mime, and the drugs ran out in the first hour, and the concert lasted all week...

I'm hoping that people actually having to know/find their language code is a bit of a short-term anomaly.  As new projects come out, I hope they'll just mux in these tracks with the correct language code and then nobody will need to download Project Threepio as a separate package.  They'll just play the video and their player will display the full language names in the subtitles menu.

This is ultimately designed as a supply-side project, even though the SUP files have yet to actually be used in a preservation--and the language codes can be helpful for disc authors (keeping the filenames as short as possible can be a virtue with certain authoring software), as well as for many of the utilities I use for creating the subtitles in the first place, so they're staying as-is.

FYI, I'm doing a little housekeeping and this will involve a few changes to naming conventions in the next version.

First off, I'm getting rid of the "-forced" suffix, because the titles are not actually forced, they're just the sort of thing that is typically forced.  So rather than confusing people as to why those subs are not actually appearing by default (as truly forced subs should), I'm changing the name to "-titles", at least for now, because these subs are for onscreen titles.

I probably won't ever make truly forced subtitles, if for no reason other than the fact that the language tagging conventions for subtitles are inadequate to get it working properly in many cases--if you have your system set to display Chinese forced subtitles if available, great--does that mean Mandarin or Cantonese, Traditional or Simplified, and so on.  I will, however, include a utility in the next version which will allow people to easily mark subtitles as truly forced if that's their preference.

Speaking of Chinese, I'll also be changing the Mandarin tags to something a little more correct by modern standards.  So zh-cn will become zh-cmn-hans and zh-tw will become zh-cmn-hant.

I remember shortly before the premiere, there was an article about the big upcoming event in one of the local weeklies. One of the local theatres had the option of premiering the film and had declined, and the owner was interviewed saying something to the effect that they can't show films if they can't expect to run them for a decently long period, and after having seen the film, their opinion was that the film just didn't have enough legs to be worth showing.

At the time I was thinking "What?!? There are people ALREADY in line to see it at other theatres!  It has such a huge built-in fanbase that even if it were a howling dog of a film, it would still make money!"

Too bad I didn't pay closer heed to that statement. I paid full price, proving my own point, I suppose, but at such a cost.

Sure.

The Despecialized Edition contains an M2TS file, which is the video and audio all "muxed" together into a single file.  (This is from memory, I may be skipping some important steps, so you may need to experiment)  Open that file on tsmuxerGUI, and then add the 720p SUP file from Project Threepio.  Then set the target to either AVCHD or Blu-ray, depending on what you're making, and that will create a new folder structure.  Then you can use ImgBurn to actually put this on a disc.  Some of this is explained in the Project Threepio README.

Anchorhead said:

The prequels are prominent in pop culture specifically for being so poorly done.

Well, yeah, but in defense of Easterhay's point, there is no such thing as bad publicity.  The Rocky Horror Picture Show was culturally relevant for a very long time for being awful, but the awfulness doesn't equate to cultural irrelevance.  Showgirls eventually tried to embrace the same tactic, with less success.

I think the prequels are more akin to Showgirls than the Rocky Horror Picture Show in this analogy. Instead of David Schmader's color commentary, we've got Backstroke of the West, same thing essentially.  But like Showgirls, I think the prequels are ultimately too boring to survive long in the cultural imagination.

Better, yes--obviously.  But we'd still be here complaining that the 1981 crawl made things worse for no good reason (curse you, Lucas!), that Lowry was still screwing up the transfers to home video, that the mono mix wasn't available (curse you, Lucas!), there'd be a fan restoration attempt to re-create the unavailable 70mm cut of Empire (curse you, Lucas!), and there'd be a healthy argument about whether or not Jedi was actually any good.  The internet was made for complaining, we must allow it to fulfill its purpose.  In other words, if we lived in such a wonderful world, we wouldn't even realize we had it so good.

I think the SW franchise is a lot worse off than the Superman franchise, and I only really like one Superman movie, and the theatrical cut at that.  At least I was able to buy an ultra-deluxe Superman boxed set and throw away all of the discs except one, to get the movie I actually wanted.  No such option with Star Wars.

I dunno, I live way the hell out in nowhere USA and it's typically 4K here.

Easterhay said:

...or at least accept that the prequels have their fanbase and are referenced in modern films as much as the original trilogy was in its day.

Your whole post presented a good point, but this section right here presents the limitations of that point. It's fair to measure cultural relevance through references in other prominent cultural works.  And, in works produced in the same eras, they may be about equal.  In works produced today, they may also be about equal.  I don't know either of these for a fact, but I'm willing to consider the possibility.  But the bolded text highlights the difference.

Star Wars was made nearly forty years ago and it's still a very relevant cultural work.  If someone made a reference to The Phantom Menace in 2036, it will make about as much sense to the audience as a "Dude, where's my car?" joke.  Yeah, that's a prediction, and yeah, predictions can be wrong.  But I simply see no way in hell the prequels will be anything more than an interesting footnote in 2036, akin to the Holiday Special today (which still gets referenced, but not much).

generalfrevious said:

I wonder... Has the relative unavailability of the OOT made its stature bigger than it otherwise would have been?

Wishful thinking. The Star Wars franchise has been sunk so far in schlocky fourth-rate sci-fantasy for so long that only a very few remember, or care, that it was ever anything else. Add to this the fact that the sci-fi/fantasy media markets have flourished enough in the meantime to have a wide range of excellent-quality work from other creators for people to choose from, and, well, there you have it.  The rest of the world has moved on to better things.  The OOT is the only reason Star Wars is still culturally relevant at all, sure, but that's hardly the same thing as saying its long absence has been beneficial to its stature.

I'm secretly hoping hairy_hen has some updated ESB English mixes.  Otherwise I've got his old lossless 5.1 track and a nice lossless 1980 stereo track, but he'd obviously be the best source.

Would not recommend my edit without some serious peer review first.  The last thing I want is a lot of pissed off mono mix fans with pitchforks and torches.  I mean, it sounds good to me, but I only just recently got into the mono mix and the Belbucus track is tried-and-true.  AFAIK only one person has downloaded my hybrid track (which, FWIW, is about 1/3 based on -1's 35mm captures and about 2/3 based on Belbucus).  There could be issues with it.

Harmy--regarding Puggo's 16mm capture, I've got that GOUT-synced in AC3 and DTS-MA, PM me if you still need it.

Harmy said:

I never made any adjustments to the Tarkin picture besides the resizing. But the picture posted here recently is a heavily compressed version of the original picture, which I can't find either.

Also, looking at those pictures CatBus posted, especially switching between them at full resolution, you can definitelly see a difference in sharpness on a big screen but not really in detail - I almost find the 720p ones more pleasing to the eye, because they have all the detail but they don't look so artificially sharpened.

The difference would of course be even less perceivable in movement.

Well, a lot of people would add a hint of sharpening when downscaling to counteract that softening effect, but my examples were simple downscales without any other filtering.  I agree the 1080p images look artificially sharp, but I think the 720p images maybe go too far in the other direction.

Harmy, nothing new to complain about in the new workprint.

Feel free to re-post wherever you see fit, but I think it's really just an interesting exercise at this point.  I feel the point was already made about the weakness of the Blu-ray transfer, this gallery just underlines it.  Someone could probably do a zoomed single-image version like that original Tarkin shot to make it easier to process, but my curiosity is satisfied, so I'm personally not going any further with it.

At the risk of invoking "oh not this shit again", it always bugged me how that Tarkin 720p/1080p comparison wasn't exactly apples-to-apples, with the colors not matching and I believe some image sharpening effects in there too.

So I made a gallery of a couple of other BD screencaps (fullscreen) at 1080p/720p/480p/240p so people could better visualize the loss of detail at each resolution, without getting distracted by changes not introduced by the scaling or re-encoding processes.  I thought the results were interesting enough to share, although I think the Tarkin shot is still adequate for most purposes.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BxypVa35j2XsRHp4Z1hKcU04MWs/edit?usp=sharing

EDIT: To be clear, these results are very specific to the 2011 Star Wars Blu-rays. Different sources would show a different amount of detail, and would produce different results.

Does the Mynock shoot first?  You have to see it to find out!