timdiggerm said:
I think we just learned that Frink is a fellow Marylander.
Screw that. I think we just learned I might be older than Frink.
Going off to check out assisted living options now...
Harmy said:
OK, here's the promised video:
Absolutely nothing to complain about, Harmy. Very nice.
Also, is it my imagination or are you no longer in your cubist phase? If so, that's even better news!
This shot is from the Senator Tech IB print. Less-saturated blue walls, definitely black Vader.
Yes, admittedly this is from a camera with probable auto-white-balance issues, and who even knows about the projection, but still... I just remember this part of the film had some crazy blue problems in the 2.0 workprints and Harmy opted not to make it so blue based at least in part on the Senator reference.
chyron8472 said:
Also, Harmy, forgive me for saying so, but those 2.1 screenshots look really rather blue.
Yeah, Vader looks pretty blue (I get that he's reflective, but wow he's pretty blue). I don't mind the walls though. Isn't this scene pretty close to those "too crazy blue" shots from Verta's IB reference? Is it possible the Senator IB reference shots could help here?
Dunedain said:
Since this seems like it might be the best quality source available at the moment for the original Star Wars stereo 35mm soundtrack, has Hairy_Hen used this as the source for his restored/corrected 1977 Star Wars stereo soundtrack?
He's used it as a source for his 70mm mix, but for fairly small sections IIRC (an explosion on Tantive IV... and that may be it). H_H's 70mm project predates this one and I believe switching over to an entirely new source for most of the audio would have created more problems than it solved--keep in mind that while this recording is clearly the current best-of-breed for 1977 stereo, 1) it is not without its problems, and 2) its better dynamic range is not such a standout when compared to later audio revisions, from which h_h based much of his audio.
And yes, I'm also interested in hearing Empire and Jedi!
Harmy said:
I just decided to use the LPP print as a color reference here instead of the IB print, because it looks closer to what I also saw on some 8mm prints, so it was probably what it looked like on the more wide spread versions and also because I like it better. Though I made it all a little brighter than in the LPP transfer that I saw, as I believe it probably should be, plus it's really bright on the IB print, so with brightness I stuck to the IB as a reference, since that was scanned on professional equipment.
I suspected that's how you came up with the most recent look, and I think it's a good approach and produced good results.
The SUB files, in combination with an IDX file which you should have also extracted, contain graphical and timing information for the subtitles. I recommend using BDSup2Sub for editing them.
Once you load them in BDSup2Sub, you can set an output format (could also be SUB/IDX or something else, whatever format your DVD authoring software prefers), then go through the subtitles one-by-one and mark them as "exclude from export" as needed--sounds like in your case that's most of them. Then you can export a version of the subtitles with just the subtitles you want. Also, you can manually adjust the timing of each sub before exporting it.
Honestly sounds like a complete PITA to me, but I suppose I've done a lot worse.
EDIT: As for "forcing", from what I've been able to figure out, that's handled through DVD menu logic, forced subs do not really automatically display, the DVD menu logic just makes sure they're always displayed when appropriate. At least I think so... so if you're doing a menuless DVD, your parents will have to manually select the subtitle track using the "Subtitles" button on their remote. If you're doing a menu, then it's doable, but, well, that's a question for someone else with DVD menu experience...
This probably comes as no surprise to you, but I love the new look of the Ben scene.
Harmy said:
I've recently seen something that made me rethink the Obi-Wan scene (many of you will know what)
My guess is "Nude Descending a Staircase". But seriously, I hope you get the rendering issue fixed, that's terrible. BTW, is the video source for the renderer on an external (USB) drive? I wonder if the disk I/O is having trouble keeping up with the renderer and it's failing spectacularly.
Thank you so much, and I'm sorry if I stepped on any toes with my recent sync-edit of your ROTJ purist mix. No offense was intended, and I tried to make sure people knew that any problems with it were likely from me, not you.
BmB said:
'course this only applies to digicameras. Not sure how scanning is accomplished.
I'm sure there are some differences, but the principle of oversampling would apply in either case, I'd imagine.
captainsolo said:
...truth be told I have never seen a home disc or digital print look better than 35mm no matter the condition.
I think I may be able to at least partially explain the divergence between the studies' numbers and peoples' experiences, but it may take someone with a photography background to flesh in the details and/or point to the studies I'll be referring to. Numbers are not entirely pulled out of my ass, but they're from my memory which is about as bad, sorry.
Back when digital cameras (we're talking still images, now) started going mainstream, there was a lot of discussion about when they'd finally overtake 35mm quality-wise. Someone finally did a study on the smallest resolvable detail on 35mm vs digital and determined that (IIRC) ~4 megapixels was equivalent to 35mm. This result, of course, was laughed out of the room--because anyone could easily tell the difference between a 35mm still and a 4MP still, and the 4MP image looked like crap relatively speaking.
But it turned out that there was a meaningful difference between the two standards: "smallest resolvable detail" vs. "ability to tell the overall difference". Because digital images have pixels aligned in a grid and analog images do not, it takes something on the order of 3x to 4x as many digital pixels to create an image that could not be distinguished from 35mm (the human eye can perceive aligned pixels and interprets them as lower quality than unaligned pixels at the same resolution). Both camps still considered themselves correct because they technically answered their question accurately--but nobody sells 4 megapixel still cameras anymore.
Anyway, thought this or something like it could apply here.
zombie84 said:
Yeah, I don't buy that study either. I've done extensive lab-quality tests of my own using Panaflex cameras, resolution charts and 35mm film, and I wasn't getting those results. 800 is a believable number, but 500 in the average? Sorry, there's a reason why we don't screen really good VHS tapes at theaters. There is great generational loss, but 500 discernable lines is pretty crappy, I find that hard to be typical, plus there are things other than resolution, which was the problem with early HD.
That's the problem with "average". Assuming a credible study, they were averaging in hundreds of crappy 16mm slasher flicks shot in low light. That's what could have been at the average theatre at the time, right? And "globally" average too?--ugh, so Bollywood comprises most of the sample, great. See the problem? Averages are meaningless when trying to make a statement about something specific. Ask any woman who wants to be a firefighter, and is told the "average woman" isn't strong enough, but nobody bothers to check if she's strong enough...
danny_boy said:
Peer reviewed International studies conducted in theaters across the globe concluded that the average release print has roughly 500-800 lines per picture height.
I understand the difference between negatives and release prints, but 1) you're still only talking resolution (a single aspect of "quality"), and 2) averages hide the fact that there's some variation between release prints, and even within a single print. And what about colorspace? What about audio?
I certainly wouldn't say Star Wars theatrically was 4K equivalent, nor did I intend to imply that. Certainly some of the scenes with multiple optical effects are sub-DVD quality in the resolution department, but luckily that does not apply to the entire film, though it does bring down the average, perhaps even down to the levels you quote. Audio is still Blu-ray quality (lossless, let's ignore the channel variations) throughout, and colorspace is better. I'd say resolution exceeded 2k at the peaks, but neither of us has any data to back that up or refute it, so feel free to consider that claim dropped. FWIW, my >2k claim is simply from the observation that when the local theatres switched from film to digital 2k, everything looked worse resolution-wise, and it didn't start looking good again to me until they upgraded again to 4k. Certainly this was with a non-random sampling of films, possibly not average ones like yours, and like yours they were also not Star Wars, so it doesn't really apply.
msycamore said:
And to bring this back to the threads original question, tell you the truth I have not seen episode II and III in their entirety, only clips and segments here and there, quite hard to avoid. But I'm pretty sure already from what I've seen that Jedi doesn't sink as low as those two in my view. I promised myself that I never was going to watch another after Phantom Mence but now a friend of mine has given me an opportunity to do so and I've sort of mellowed to the idea, and I must admit that I'm actually a bit curious to finally watch them in a morbid way.
Really not worth it. Morbid curiosity was my only motivation too (and a free ticket to see ROTS), but if you didn't think it could get worse than TPM, it does. And then it does again.
That said, they're forgettable enough that any harm done won't last.
Easterhay said:
I never said they messed up with continuity in the prequels.
The fact that you didn't say it was kinda my point, because the very problem your son pointed out was in fact a continuity problem in the prequels, even though the scene revealing the continuity problem was in ROTJ. I was fully aware you did not realize this fact yourself.
And thanks for the tips on how to speak to my son and your condescension towards him, catbus.
I called your son "astute", which is a compliment (feel free to verify this, I'll wait). The condescension, on the other hand, was not aimed at him at all.
captainsolo said:
From 2005-2008 I gave up Star Wars entirely. For someone who as a child had been an incessant fan, (My childhood was comprised entirely of Film, Literature, James Bond, Star Wars and Batman) this was really hard to do but I just found I didn't care anymore.
It occurred to me that since I went through this stage too, our whole collective experience may fit the Kübler-Ross "stages of grief" model. So here we go:
Denial: "No way will Lucasfilm pass up a chance to cash in on re-releasing the unaltered trilogy. They'd never let that goldmine go to waste!" Uh-huh, sure.
Anger: We may not all say George Lucas did something nasty with our childhood, but everyone has a little generalfrevious buried deep down somewhere.
Bargaining: *cough* Petition *cough*
Depression: The phase described by captainsolo above.
Acceptance: "Don't want to preserve Star Wars, Mr. Lucas? Fine, I accept that. Now we'll just have to save the damn thing ourselves!" A little more defiant in tone than you'd expect from something called "Acceptance", but I think it works.
When an imperial probe droid encounters an enemy it is unable to effectively combat, the Empire has programmed it to self-destruct to prevent the enemy from gaining anything of value from the captured probe droid. An AT-AT is likely a million times more useful to an enemy than a probe droid. And IMO they didn't hit it that hard.
Also AT-ATs would be totally sanitary on Hoth because no bacteria/mold could grow on it. It just tastes better cooked.
EDIT: Shit. Forgot that most imperial vessels are infected with worms to begin with. Even the original Death Star had an infection in its garbage compactors. They had to cook the AT-AT to kill the worms. Also it tastes more like turkey than chicken.
And Leia ordered it destroyed to cover her tracks, so nobody found out she'd been feeding rebel information to the Empire this whole time.
Define "pretty soon" ;)
I guess I could add that between my "lite" purist phase (I like the originals better, but no big deal, and I even tolerated the pre-97 crawl/flyover/audio revisions, even though I didn't much like them) and my "hardcore" purist phase (made subtitles in 24 languages and made some of my own audio tracks to make sure the originals lived forever, even made a commentary track over the 77 mix so I could pretend the 93 revisions never happened), I went through a period from say 2001 to 2011 where I was willing to just let Star Wars die. I didn't watch the trilogy for around a decade, and didn't see much point in disappointing myself by trying (I know several fans still in this phase).
Then my first kid started approaching the age where I'd want to show him Star Wars, and there simply wasn't anything commercially available worth showing him (and still isn't). So I came here looking for nothing more than a simple cleaned-up anamorphic GOUT transfer, found a hell of a lot more, and the rest is history. I'm now pretty sure I'll do private theatrical showings for friends on a regular basis to do my part in keeping Star Wars alive.
Father Skywalker said:
What's is the main problme/issue here, exactly???
For 20 years, the original films were available for average people to see in better than Blu-ray quality. All you had to do was go to a theatre showing them, buy a ticket, and watch. Today, if a theatre is caught showing the original films, they are quickly confiscated.
Back in '97, most didn't immediately see the impact of this policy change. Like you said, the public still had VHS tapes and Laserdiscs, which, while certainly not as good as 35mm film, were good enough for most people's televisions at the time. And since going to the theatre was falling out of fashion even then, people might not have considered exactly how much better the films looked before they were reduced to VHS and Laserdisc.
Now, not only are those obsolete formats becoming increasingly difficult to play, but two new formats (DVD and Blu-ray) have come along to remind audiences about that quality gap between 35mm film and VHS tape.
The GOUT release (the out-of-print bonus disc DVD release) was a Laserdisc-quality release on the DVD format (not to mention that Star Wars got the wrong soundtrack in this release), so it didn't really do much for fans other than provide a really distorted view of what the originals looked like to the uninitiated. Even today, you'll hear people say that the originals looked all low-res and dirty like the GOUT, that the Special Editions fixed all of that, and that the originals simply aren't worth an HD release!
In summary, the purists remember the period from 1977-1997 when it was possible to watch the OT in super-high-definition, compare it against today when your best officially sanctioned option is a crappy Laserdisc transfer from the early nineties with the wrong soundtrack, and we feel shafted. Especially those of us with children.
Or, to put it even more succinctly, when Beverly Hills Chihuahua 3 beats the hell out of Star Wars in the visuals department, there's a problem.
"Purist" has changed its meaning over time for me. I saw all of the Special Editions theatrically, and preferred the originals from the very start, so I guess I was a purist right away. But it was no big deal back in 1997--I knew that these Special Editions were just the "director's cuts" (or, more accurately, executive producer's cuts), and I would just always make sure to get the theatrical version when it came out on disc. No big deal. I figured there's no way Lucasfilm would fail to make easy money off its fans, so I just needed to wait...
Well, pretty soon I started with the Laserdisc transfers on DVD, which kept me happy for a while (happier than VHS), but the technical shortcomings were pretty apparent even then. I still believed the OT would come out eventually and this whole "the SE is all there is" was just BS to appease Lucas's ego in the short term while they arranged a proper OT release behind the scenes. A few more years went by and the GOUT was released, which was the first time I actually really understood what they were doing to Star Wars. And then The Blu-rays eliminated all further doubt by dropping the "Special Edition" label. They meant to eliminate Star Wars from history and replace it with the Special Editions, and they were succeeding.
Now I'm a pretty dyed-in-the-wool purist by any standards. And the funny thing is, I wouldn't really even describe myself as a Star Wars fan. I mean, I like the movies and all, but I like a lot of others better.
Leonardo said:
CatBus said:
3PO would have to fill in for all of R2's parts. I hate to think how HE'D have to interface with the imperial network. Nope, can't unthink that thought...
Ahhh, thank you very much CatBus! Now I can't help but imagine 3PO shutting down the garbage mashers on the detention level by frenetically humping a hole in the wall.
Also, consider: the power socket gag in ESB would have been funnier, and you'd always have a vague icky feeling whenever 3PO claimed to be "human-cyborg relations".
3PO would have to fill in for all of R2's parts. I hate to think how HE'D have to interface with the imperial network. Nope, can't unthink that thought...
Episode VII: Resuscitation of the Franchise
Episode VIII: We're Gonna Need a Bigger Resuscitator
Episode IX: Flatlining But Still Merchandisable (The Big Cash-In)
I'd personally hate to lose even more grain than we already have from the Special Edition's Lowryization process. A little grain filtering is already baked into the SE because of that! If anything, I'd imagine a proper restoration from original negatives would have more grain than we're currently seeing. IIRC Harmy does add fake grain to his low-grain sources (GOUT, matte paintings, etc) so that they aren't quite as jarringly different from the surrounding scenes, but I don't find anything to be too grainy--in fact, I'm always pleased to see how much grain the film has retained. Grainy film is IMO an essential part of the 70's aesthetic; I'd probably find it distracting if there were noticeably less of it.
Also, low-res sample clips may have extra artifacts from heavy compression, which won't be in the final product.
EDIT: You'll also see more grain in brightened scenes (the ground in the redone sunset, for example)--but that's not because grain was added, it's because the Blu-ray hid a lot of grain by making scenes overly dark, and Harmy's just revealing it again through brightening.