CatBus

Yay!

Could also be a bug in the mixdown from 6.1 to 2.0 in the software somewhere, if that’s being done.

PM sent.

Also saw the same issues with the audio tracks right off the commercial discs, so I doubt it’s specific to a version. It may be hard to test if the conditions for making it fail aren’t fully understood – Matt may be invaluable here, as the only one who can reliable repro the issue. I could extract and re-encode the DTS-MA audio if that would help (I have all the right tools for it), but I’m heading out for a week, so I’m not sure if someone else wouldn’t be better for that.

There is definitely something odd about the audio track – I’ve seen this same behavior, but I forgot which software it was that did it (could have been a version of VLC). I’ve been using burned discs so I don’t see the problem on my hardware player. I’m wondering if the DTS lossy core isn’t the same as the DTS lossless – that way it would only appear in players that had trouble decoding the lossless. I saw the same with the audio on the official discs. To test this/fix this, you could decode the DTS-MA lossless to multiple WAVs and then re-encode it again, and then presumably the lossy core would match the lossless audio again.

ThatPixarGuy said:

I, myself, prefer Despecialized for it’s cleaner and polished look. The various 4K restorations all look incredible though; I guess I’ve never been one to watch or own a film exactly the way it was seen in a theater.

In my case, the drive-in with the little metal clip-on speaker and the reel that broke partway through isn’t anything I’d ever want to repeat. Not that the film wasn’t amazing anyway, but still.

Challenge accepted. We have to get a preservation of the Original Trilogy into the Seed Vault.

DrDre said:

CatBus said:

DrDre said:

Projected Derann print:

Any idea what bulb was used for that photo? A lot of old films projected with a newer xenon bulb or some such thing will look much cooler than they would have theatrically with a vintage bulb. Not saying this one was, but it looks pretty cool to me.

I don’t know, but I recently saw one of these prints projected, and it looked very similar. This is also what I see on 1997 SE frames I have. I’m personally more interested in what is seen on the print, because while it’s great to use vintage bulbs, the underlying assumption is, that the bulb burns at the same temperature as it did a few decades ago, whereas I believe lights become warmer with age, and so projecting a film with a vintage bulb may not be the most accurate representation.

That’s a fair point about aging bulbs, but any recent projection you saw was also likely with a cooler bulb unless someone went really out of their way. Still, I like your results regardless of the bulb discussion, and that’s what matters most. I’d consider your take a neutral “what’s on the print” timing. Even if you do want to bias it for a tungsten bulb down the line, your timing is still the best place to start.

DrDre said:

Projected Derann print:

Any idea what bulb was used for that photo? A lot of old films projected with a newer xenon bulb or some such thing will look much cooler than they would have theatrically with a vintage bulb. Not saying this one was, but it looks pretty cool to me.

I don’t get how it’s even possible for 44rh1n to send people a Dungeon Master. I mean, that’s cool and all, but put air holes in the packaging.

CHEWBAKAspelledwrong said:

Darth Lucas said:

While I think it’s looking pretty darn great so far, I think I ought to throw my two cents into the teal walls debate. I’m sure some of it would have been visible in '77, but it would have been projected with very warm bulbs, which would have counteracted the teal in the walls a bit, not a ton, but a bit. I don’t have much of a preference, as I think either way is going to be “accurate” in one sense or another. However, I do think you’ve gone a bit overboard on that teal look in certain shots. For instance, I’m seeing quite a bit of teal in Leia’s dress in some of those shots, which I don’t think would have been the case. It may have picked up a bit from the walls around the edges of her dress, but it’s not reflective enough of a material, I think, to have the wall color drastically affect our perception of the dress color itself.

Just a little nitpick, but I think it’s worth addressing.

Question from a person clueless in this process: how much of this would be attenuated if using a TV set to warmest (which I do) vs viewing on my relatively cool computer display?

Hard to say. One display’s warm setting won’t match another’s, and I doubt any preset would emulate a tungsten bulb very well. I think generally people target a calibrated display, and then any variation from that is considered the display’s fault/user preference. Anything other than calibrated, and you just have to feel out whether you think it looks good or not.

As for Darth Lucas’s observation, I think bulb-matching is a legit aesthetic, but if you want to do it, it should be at the very end. i.e. a neutral timing is best for this stage, as it’s ultimately just raw materials for the larger project. It will then go into the meat grinder of despecialization and grain-matching and so on, and if Harmy wants to give it that tungsten bulb touch of yellow, he can choose to do that in one global final color pass.

calculon559 said:

That wouldn’t happen to be the one frame at the end of Reel 5 I mentioned, would it?

It is, but the frame is not a DVD/BD exclusive – it’s a theatrical frame. It’s mentioned in this thread: https://originaltrilogy.com/topic/Whats-missing-from-GOUT/id/6725/page/1

calculon559 said:

Having said all that, isn’t theatrical sync the same as GOUT sync for Star Wars anyway?

No, Star Wars GOUT sync isn’t the same as theatrical. 4K77 isn’t theatrical sync, they decided to GOUT sync that one. It’s only one frame different. 4K83 was the first project that decided to test the non-GOUT-synced waters.

So yeah, if we go with theatrical, we’re breaking sync for 4K77 and all of Harmy’s projects (and countless minor/derived projects). And we could even opt to break sync for everything if anyone entertains my crazy ideas about how to implement the theatrical frame standard. Which is kinda why I want the project leads to get together and hammer out some sort of agreement, because it has the makings of a giant cluster if each project just decides to just do its own thing.

This illustrates why the GOUT standard had such staying power – it’s been used since 1993 (a decade before the GOUT it’s currently named for existed), so all kinds of projects gravitated to it for mutual compatibility. You could take an audio track from a 20-year-old Laserdisc preservation project and drop it onto Despecialized released yesterday and it would sync perfectly. Changes to this frame standard should be done in a careful, considered, coordinated manner.

PM sent.

PM sent.

Changing the subtitles would be trivial in terms of effort. It would even be unnecessary if the change was just a couple frames (e.g. to the 4Kxx timing). If Harmy decides to change to a standard that’s neither GOUT nor 4Kxx (which would fix at least two issues with the current situation*), then subtitles could still be used, with an offset (and so could some audio). Rendering the subtitle graphics could still take a week or so, but that’s a fire-and-forget process. All I need is lead time.

Audio would take some work to modify, no doubt about that. Much advance notice would be nice.

* the HMDI handshake muting part of the fanfare on some systems, and users not knowing if their audio is properly synced or not, even while watching.

ThatPixarGuy said:

May be a bit too early to tell, but does anyone know if 3.0 will be GOUT or Theatrically synched?

That’s a big question for me too. Last time I asked him, when 4Kxx first started syncing to a new frame standard, Harmy said he had no plans to jump onto a new sync standard (the experience of finally nailing down the one we have now was harrowing enough), but things may have changed in the intervening time. 4Kxx is popular, and it may not be such a drag anymore to move to a new standard.

If so, I’ll happily sync my stuff to whatever frame standard Harmy wants to use, but I’ll need some advance notice. And certainly there are others who’ll need to do the same.

My opinion is that as long as we’re breaking sync on a lot of audio tracks, we may as well get all the major project leads together to discuss it, rather than unilaterally doing it, so we don’t just break sync again later when someone has a new idea for how things should sync. For example, in my opinion, if we’re going to go through the trouble of breaking sync, why not pad the beginning with an extra half-second of silence. That will fix issues where HDMI handshakes mute the first bit of the Fox fanfare on some systems, and it would be just as “theatrical” as any other sync standard out there, since theatrically, there were leaders and previews and such before the film anyway. I’d prefer a big difference like this over something that’s only a couple frames different, so people will know with certainty that their audio is out of sync, instead of just having a vague uncertain feeling that something’s not right, but not being able to put their finger on it.

Zion said:

• I really like the news segment and Wonder Woman/Hulk bumper intro used on the Tasjo and Gormaanda releases

So much this. The references to other shows, the graphics, the music on the various intro bits, it all puts you right back where you were when you were dead certain this was going to be the best thing you’d ever seen on TV.

PM sent.

Broom Kid said:

StarkillerAG said:

I guess it’s just a personal opinion, but I think that the 4KXX versions have much more than 720p of fine detail.

I don’t think it’s a personal opinion at all. It’s easily observable fact.

The zoomed-in image on the left has no more than 720p of detail (it’s from the Blu-ray via 720p Despecialized, resized to 4K to give a comparable size). The image on the right is 4K83 (admittedly, just grabbed the version I had handy, not the latest iteration, but it’s all the same print/scan).

The 720p has some funky contrast boosting to be certain (yay 2004 master!), but even taking that into account, it clearly has more fine image detail. I feel I need to reiterate that I’m not trying to trash 4K83. It’s the best reproduction of the theatrical experience out there, hands down. But to pretend Star Wars projection prints have that much fine image detail is silly.

PMs sent.

StarkillerAG said:

I guess it’s just a personal opinion, but I think that the 4KXX versions have much more than 720p of fine detail. There’s some stuff there, like the details on the Tantive 4 door frame, that haven’t been noticeable in any previous release. It isn’t as good as a restoration from the negative, but it’s definitely HD.

The Blu-ray definitely has some spots where color boosting clips the detail out of the image. Typically red lights, but you can occasionally see it elsewhere. And there’s a bit in Jedi where the film scanner was just out of focus for a few minutes (already fixed in DeEd). But seriously, these are exceptions to the rule. The Blu rays had more fine detail than a projection print, and the difference is still apparent scaled down to 720p. The UHD’s even moreso, in spite of being DNR’d into oblivion.

StarkillerAG said:

That’s actually not true, there’s still plenty of GOUT footage in ANH and ESB Despecialized. The inclusion of 35mm footage in ROTJ Despecialized is the reason why that’s arguably the best-looking of the trilogy.

I just don’t like how a lot of the time you seem to undersell the 35mm releases, saying that they’re no better quality than the GOUT, when they look much better to my eyes.

There’s 35mm footage in ESB too, but you’re right that the percentage of 35mm footage goes up chronologically through the trilogy. Star Wars has lots of GOUT footage. Add them all up, and most of the original footage in the Despecialized trilogy is from 35mm, but yes there’s still too much GOUT.

I wasn’t implying that projection prints in general weren’t better than the GOUT. I’m saying that for that particular original element of Boba Fett flying behind Luke in one scene, the 35mm sources didn’t provide appreciably more fine detail than the GOUT. It’s one shot, and a blurred composite at that. It’s not that surprising. I’m not a big fan of 4K77 to be honest, but I’m a fan of 4K83. It looks good. Much better than the GOUT. And, like the person I was responding to stated, much more consistent levels of detail than Despecialized. Consistently low, yes, but consistent nonetheless.

That said, I will state without any reservations that Star Wars projection prints – even unusually good prints like the one used for 4K83, don’t really have enough fine image detail to max out 720p’s capacity. I’m not saying 4K is wasted on them – the film grain is better resolved at 4K, there are clear benefits to oversampling from an historical preservation perspective, and so on. But when you watch Despecialized at 720p and 4K83 at 4K side-by-side, there’s a reason Despecialized has so much more fine detail. This is why 1080p Blu-rays remaster from negatives or interpositives. There’s more detail there than can be seen on a projection print, and 1080p resolution would reveal that.

Again, this is not trying to say lack of fine detail is bad. Lack of fine detail is what people saw in the theatres. That’s literally how projected film prints look. If that’s what you’re after, then 4K83 is a pretty great reproduction of the experience. I just personally prefer something that looks more like a respectfully restored Blu-ray release. As of 4K83 1.6, lack of fine detail is my ONLY gripe about 4K83, and considering that that’s baked into the source, I feel like I’m effectively stating that it perfectly achieves its goal of reproducing the theatrical experience. If that’s underselling, I don’t know what to say.

calculon559 said:

At this very moment, I’d say the 4Kxx versions, mostly because the quality across the whole feature is basically the same throughout, whereas Despecialized varies from 1080p to barely DVD quality. Having said that, if Harmy can pull off what he’s trying to do with Star Wars Despecialized 3.0 and beyond, his versions would become my preference, especially since I’m still watching stuff at 1080p so any minor differences between the sources at 4K would become negligible.

I wouldn’t expect too much improvement in terms of “quality seams” in newer Despecialized releases. Most of the original footage in the current releases of Harmy’s trilogy is from 35mm print scans (not necessarily from the 4Kxx project, but comparable amounts of detail). In Jedi, for example, there’s only one original element taken from the GOUT, and he only did that because the 35mm theatrical scans didn’t have appreciably more detail than the GOUT for that shot (think about THAT for a second!). The optical duplication process used to create theatrical prints from 35mm negatives simply blurs out fine detail, and it doesn’t matter what resolution you scan a projection print at, you’re not going to get that detail back. When you notice certain parts of Despecialized don’t even seem to have 720p worth of fine detail, more often than not, that’s from a 1080p or 4K 35mm print scan, not the GOUT.

That said, since the UHD’s aren’t covered with fake grain like the Blu-rays, it may be possible to grain-match the various sources without over-graining the 35mm footage, which might help to a small degree. Also, the Jedi print used by the 4K83 project is a bit of a unicorn, so there may be a hair’s improvement to be gained from using 4K83 as a source. But these will be very, very incremental improvements at best. The huge quality jump will come from the UHD source, and that will make the quality seams harder to hide, not easier. Not that Harmy may not have learned a trick or two in the intervening years.

Now we’re cooking.