I’m pretty sure it’s a denoising artifact – think about using temporal averaging as a noise reduction strategy, and how that can go wrong with a very noisy source (if you consider grain to be noise, which such systems do).
Oh, it’s fun for 10 minutes. At the three hour mark, madness sets in.
Now I’ve got Torgo’s theme stuck in my head. Thanks a lot 😕
I’ve been watching other new 4K HDR transfers of classic movies on Disney+ and almost all of them look infinitely better than the original trilogy. For a movie shot on film, it’s depressing how the 4K version of the original Santa Claus movie with Tim Allen has better use of HDR and left more grain in tact than these transfers of the original trilogy. A silly 90’s family comedy has a better transfer than these legendary movies??? What the heck?
Manos: Hands of Fate has a better transfer than Star Wars.
I think the overall problem is that if it’s a “classic” or “big seller” title, it gets extra attention. A new color grade a la The French Connection, re-inserting some deleted scenes like Cinema Paradiso, or moar Maclunkey like Star Wars. I suppose the logic is: why would anyone re-buy this title a fourth or fifth time if it wasn’t radically different from any version they’ve ever seen before? Which is just a corollary to: Why would anyone buy a movie they’d already seen?
But if you have a niche/meh catalog title, they just hand it off to the intern, who runs it through the scanner and puts the result on the disk. Thus, Shakes the Clown seems to get more respect than Amadeus, when in fact it’s the lack of respect that saved it.
Like Kevin Smith said: in Hollywood, you fail upward.
At some point it becomes a personal canon question. Some people like the mono mix, some people like multi-channel. All of the original mixes are authentic, so it just boils down to which one you like best, as it would be with video variants (70mm, alternate credits, cloudy composite, and so on), regardless of which ones may have technically made it to the theatre first.
I think I personally didn’t feel any disturbance in the Force until the 93 changes, but they were something I was grudgingly willing to endure at the time. The 97 changes were several bridges too far from the get-go and would never be acceptable, and the later versions were just continuations of the 97 freakshow. Now that we have so many great fan-created options, I wouldn’t settle for the 81, 85, or 93 revisions at all. My tolerance for fiddling has definitely decreased since finding this site.
PM sent.
PM sent.
PM sent.
PM sent.
You were lucky. We lived for three months in a brown paper bag in a septic tank. We used to have to get up at six o’clock in the morning, clean the bag, eat a crust of stale bread, go to work down mill for fourteen hours a day week in-week out. When we got home, our Dad would thrash us to sleep with his belt!
Ah, thanks. Yes, activity date indicates he’s safe and sound, if not actually posting anything. The print? I dunno, there were giant fires not too long ago causing a lot of losses. But I’m relieved to see he’s personally still kicking around. And if this project is still going on, even better.
Star Wars will be around longer than any of us.
The quest for the best version of Star Wars will be too.
These new 4K UHD discs are just another rung on the endless ladder. Collect as much of that ladder as you can while you’re here.
For many here, the best official release of Star Wars has been gathering dust for about 25 years, and has yet to be surpassed, even by the new 4K discs. The 4K discs represent new raw material for fan preservations, nothing more. I don’t see any scenario under which I would actually watch them, although I may buy them as required by the rules of fan edit ownership, should a worthy fan edit arise.
Watch the phrasing please. I have some serious concerns about the lack of updates. We all wish Poita well.
While “Star Wars: The Maclunkey Edition” has some appeal, I’m considering dubbing this version “Star Wars: Ultimate Hunter Edition”
ANH caps are up. https://caps-a-holic.com/c_list.php?c=5424
This comparison just shows how good the new ANH transfer is.
It shows how much better this transfer is.
It’s still not as good as it should be.“You can’t always get what you want
But if you try sometimes you just might find
You get what you need”Good tune, man! But, this set isn’t at all what I need.
Better than an on-the-cheap color-mangled DVD master from the early 2000’s ain’t good enough for you?
There’s no pleasing some people.
I finally had a chance to properly check the new transfers out and I’d say the worst issue is the heavy dvnr. I’m surprised no one is complaining about it.
Agreed, but I figured you’d fix that for us 😉
Genuine question: does the FOV of the shot indicate that Yavin IV would be visible from the Death Star? An observer watching from a third point in space (like the camera here) might be able to look on either side of the Yavin gas giant to see both objects, but they might not be able able to see each other nonetheless.
I asked myself the same question when I saw this, but after looking at it a couple times, I’m pretty sure both the Death Star and Yavin IV are positioned such that it’s still a problem. The rotation itself means the camera can’t be too distant (i.e. with a zoom), or the perspective wouldn’t change that much when the camera turned.
PM sent.
Relative to the Blus, sure. But that’s not saying much.
I like my film to look like… film.
Agreed. These are without a doubt the best raw materials for a preservation we have, but IMO they’re not really watchable in their existing form. But that’s okay, we can fix that.
FWIW, Harmy’s already pretty adept at using fake grain – the existing DeEd’s use it to grain-match sources. That would definitely be a major component of anything using this new source.
And I think the new source is worth using. It doesn’t have to be a great or flawless release, it just needs to be a better source than the 2011 Blu’s, which IMO it is. Also disappointed by the grain, but this a solvable problem. And besides, Harmy demonstrated at one point that the grain on the 2011 releases was fake grain anyway – so we’ve already been soaking in it for a decade, this is not a new problem.
I’m amazed that Jabba doing a Pizza Hutt ad hasn’t happened yet.
Soon you will learn to appreciate my Ultimate Cheese Lover’s® Pizza.
The standard Star Wars fonts in the News Gothic/Trade Gothic/Franklin Gothic families are all very close, but come up short on the “G”. Univers as well. So I don’t know, but I can say for sure it’s condensed 😉
Excellent work, Dre. 4K83 badly needed this. Are you working on any other color correction projects now? If not, could I interest you in color correcting the UHD’s?
I think I’ve mentioned before, but as someone who saw it in 1980, it was confusing/unexpected. Clearly Star Wars also dropped you into the middle of the action, but the crawl provided backstory to ease the transition – you knew who the good guys and bad guys were, why they were being chased, and so on. And the beginning of Empire largely followed the same formula. But this was different – the episode number ADDED to the things you didn’t know as the story unfolded. Now you know you’ve missed three of the preceding episodes.
In the end, kids made it work. Clearly a lot of action happened between Star Wars and Empire – Luke becomes a commander, there’s some sort of adventure on Ord Mantell, the Empire regroups, and so on. So retroactively, it became obvious that the three missing episodes were meant to cover all the action between Star Wars, which was obviously Episode I, and Empire, which was Episode V. We didn’t really expect the missing episodes to be filled in by Lucasfilm, so we just made up “Episode III: Rendezvous at Ord Mantell” and stuff like that. We figured the next movie would be called “Episode IX: Revenge of the Jedi” or something and the episode gaps would be designed for us to play around with in our own imaginations.
Which was actually a very cool and weirdly postmodern idea for a bunch of seven year olds to grapple with!
And then a year later, Star Wars got retrofitted with Episode IV, although many of us never learned about that until it came out on home video even later. But by then, our canon was already set: Star Wars would be Episode I forever, and then there was a bunch of “action figures in the backyard” adventures, and then came Episode V. By the time an official Episode IV rolled out, we didn’t need it – we already had our own by then.
And I’m glad they never filled in those missing episodes (kindof like I’m glad they never made any sequels to The Matrix), because there’s no way they could have measured up to what a crew of seven-year-olds came up with. Partially due to the fact that the head kept popping off my Luke action figure, so every episode involved a tragic beheading.
As far as preservation source material goes, I’d say these new UHD releases are distinctly better than the 2011 Blu’s. It really looks like DNR took a heavy toll on the UHD’s, but the color is better – in particular it doesn’t have the clipping due to the boosted magentas that the 2011 Blu’s have. So, more fine image detail, better color, less clipped detail… that’s pretty good. Unfortunately it will still require a bucketload of fake grain to get it looking like a movie, but there’s always something with these Lucasfilm home video releases, isn’t there? Four eyed stormtroopers and whatnot, they never get it right.
Have to say I’m a little disappointed by the grain. I was really hoping the lack of grain/frozen grain on the Disney+ versions was just due to how the stream was encoded, and the disks would be better… but it was not to be. I can’t believe people are still doing this to movies on purpose.
But, hooray for new source materials. Fire up the editors.