CatBus

Stotchy said:

CatBus said:

three of which I can handle like my existing official Blu-rays: glue them all together, put a string through the middle, and suspend them inside one of the cavities in the walls of my house, so nobody accidentally watches them or stumbles across them and thinks that I like those films enough to buy them

This is really funny.

That is seriously what I did with the 2011SE’s. You glue the shiny sides together so it’s really clear what’s on the disks. Star Wars and Empire on the sides, Jedi in the middle, a little offcenter so that you can see some of its cover too. They’re currently hanging inside the wall cavity of my youngest child’s bedroom closet.

Broom Kid said:

that’s all well and good but the thing you want is so worthless to me I wouldn’t just destroy it, I’d turn it into something so unusable I’d put it INSIDE the walls of my home so I wouldn’t have to pretend I even own it unless the Fan Edit police come and investigate me.

That’s a pretty fair summary, actually.

It’s hard to believe there’s no implication there of subtly suggesting or demonstrating that accepting any conditions by which this set might have value is being frowned upon.

To illustrate my point, replace the various iterations of Star Wars with ice cream flavors. I think Strawberry sucks and I’d never buy it, and if someone gave it to me for free I still wouldn’t eat it and would just throw it away, and if any somehow got on my tongue I’d have to wash my mouth out. And yet in spite of that, I’d have no ill opinion of you at all if Strawberry happens to be your most favoritist flavor ever.

Because people have wildly different preferences on things, and that’s all fine.

Broom Kid said:

I would like to own the official product. An official version (possibly taken from new elements, even) of the full scores to ALL the Star Wars movies in that set, synced to picture. That doesn’t exist yet. It’s never existed, in fact. if this set has it, I’m going to buy it. I don’t know why this has become such a point of contention.

After re-reading the last page of this thread, I’m just not seeing any contention. I just see people who want different things, and are making different choices based on what they want. You want the isolated scores and don’t mind the 4KSE versions of them. Other people don’t see any value in the 4KSE versions of the score (or any of the other films). Everyone here’s a rational actor making purchasing decisions based in their personal preferences. The expression of a different preference is not an implication that your preference is wrong for you.

As for me (and probably like many here), I have interest in only three films: the unaltered original trilogy. I would absolutely buy a grossly overpriced boxed set containing nine films that I have no intention of ever watching in order to get those three films. But those three films are nowhere to be found in the set that’s been announced.

At the moment, that means no sale, because there’s zero value (to me) in that set. If, however, a good-quality fan reconstruction of the films I actually want arrives that is based on those 4KSE’s, according to the rules of fan edit ownership here, I will buy them. And if this set is the only way to get them, then that’s 27 really expensive coasters heading my way, 24 of which I suppose I can immediately throw away, and three of which I can handle like my existing official Blu-rays: glue them all together, put a string through the middle, and suspend them inside one of the cavities in the walls of my house, so nobody accidentally watches them or stumbles across them and thinks that I like those films enough to buy them, but good enough to fish out if someone ever questions my legitimate ownership requirement for the fan reconstruction.

Yes, I commented in the other thread (try not to cross-post) that this clipping is a by-product of the optical duplication process. Projection prints have some crushed blacks. There’s nothing 4Kxx can do to recover them because it’s that way on the prints.

Vladimon said:

A very helpful thread for forum newcomers such as myself who have found it difficult to know is what in the sea of all these different cuts, versions, preservation projects.
I will add that while the 4K project versions are the most accurate to the originals currently out there, they all have crushed blacks when compared with the blu-rays or Harmy’s Editions. Correct me if I am wrong on this, but that is what I have seen in all the versions so far. So, just consider that u will be losing quite some detail in the dark areas/scenes in the 4K versions. Still, very nice to watch, I love the grain too.

It is not your imagination. That’s a normal by-product of the optical duplication process – each generation of duplication (negative -> … -> interpositive -> … -> projection print) reduces fine detail, adds grain, and boosts contrast. That’s just how it works. By the time you get to a projection print, there are multiple layers of grain, a substantial loss in detail, and you get clipped whites/blacks. But that’s the “theatrical look” – it’s what film actually looks like projected in a theatre. So if that’s what you want, then 4K77 and 4K83 have you covered. But in these days of Blu-rays and digital projection, people often have a preference for that less-contrasty, more detailed look.

Since the Blu-rays (and thus Despecialized) are based on elements further up the duplication chain, they have more fine detail, less grain (even without taking into account DNR), and less severe contrast/less crushed blacks. You will see some clipped reds in Despecialized that aren’t clipped in 4Kxx, however, because of some of the color boosting on the Blu-rays. That would presumably be taken care of using the 4KSE, which seems to be much better in terms of color.

That said, 4K83 loses surprisingly little due to clipping, and looks much better IMO than 4K77. Honestly my biggest complaint about 4K83 right now is the color – it’s a shame that something based on the Blu-rays has far more theatrically accurate colors than an actual film scan – but DrDre is well on his way to fixing that problem, and then after that it will be a close match indeed.

I’ll send you a link to the current version – the Latin American subs have gotten several revisions over the years, so the latest version is very different from what is included with Despecialized, for example. If you have changes to the latest version, you can just PM me with new translations for specific lines or links to updated files.

I wouldn’t try making revisions to the copies you have unless they’re current.

Thank you 005. It makes me unaccountably happy every time I read that they forgot to reapply a 2004 or 2011 change, because I somehow imagine the next Despecialized Editions arriving a day earlier for each one.

PM sent.

All the versions are 720p – please report people selling them.

Oh my God, think of the possibilities! It could be like buying the naming rights to a stadium.

This UHD Star Wars release was brought to you by AFLAC.

I should point out that Star Wars won an Academy Award for editing (due in no small part to the work of Marcia Lucas), so being in awe of its original editing is not unwarranted.

I should also point out that in the very first post-theatrical edit to Star Wars (in which the crawl was revised in 1981 to give Star Wars an episode number and title), the editors fucked up so badly that you have to watch an entire planet miss its audio cue by several seconds at the beginning of every single home video release of Star Wars except the GOUT.

And that pretty much set the bar for all future edits to the OT. Regardless of who’s to blame, Star Wars editing has been an unqualified shitshow since the revisions started.

I’d say 4K77 and 4K83 are your best way to re-create what it would have looked like in the theatre, aside from color issues. 4K77 is a bit of a rough ride, but 4K83 looks very good.

Despecialized is more like what a respectful official Blu-ray release would have looked like. Because it’s based on scans of negatives rather than projection prints, it’s a little cleaner, has better contrast, and has a lot more fine detail (yes, the 720p DeEd has more fine detail than a 4K print scan – it’s all due to the sources). It also has much better colors IMO, although that could change as more color adjustments to 4Kxx come out. The downside is that DeEd is based on multiple sources, including special editions. However, I’d be hard-pressed to identify any “seams” in ROTJ DeEd, I’d have to look very carefully to see them in ESB, and Star Wars is, well, simply not as good as the other two.

I still personally prefer DeEd for all three films, mostly because what I’m looking for is something like a Blu-ray that I’d buy in a store, not what I’d see sitting in a movie theatre in the 80’s.

I’d categorize all the rest as “special interest”. I love me some Puggo, but I can’t say I’d recommend it very broadly without reservations.

Thank you very much for the detailed response. Yes, my room acoustics are definitely the biggest unaddressed problem, and it’s likely to stay that way (bad corners, smallish nook in a weird-shaped medium room, large hard reflective parallel surfaces, you name it). The most likely way out of that hole, for me, is to build a new room designed for movie playback from the start – and that’s honestly not very likely.

It’s good to hear that subwoofer calibration seems to be a perennial problem for everyone. It was a little annoying to fix one thing only to discover another, but it was also a learning experience, and now I know a little more about how these things work.

Yes, I do always listen at lower-than-reference, and that’s really the source of lots of problems, from the Fletcher-Munson curve to dialogue intelligibility. My receiver does have a night mode, but it only works for certain types of audio tracks (DTS, I think), and I find it compresses the dynamics a little too much for my tastes (it’s probably designed for listening at much quieter levels, and is only on/off, not adjustable), so I never went too far down that road. I’m not sure about dynamic EQ, so that’s definitely something for me to look into longer term.

So far the 1.5dB boost to the center has been going okay – a little less riding the volume button (not gone though), without any noticeable ill effects. Certainly it depends on the mix, though, and I’m trying to keep the amount of the boost well under 3dB to avoid surprises (centered loud SFX, etc). It will probably take many tests before I’m certain I’m comfortable with it. And if it all goes to hell, I’ll knock it back down to even with the other channels and ride the remote some more.

And thanks for the scene lists. I haven’t had the chance to listen to any of these in 5.1, and I’ll definitely pay attention. I just kinda wanted to iron out all of the major gremlins first before I did that. Although I didn’t come right out and say it, your audio mixes have become the definitive Star Wars audio experience for me, and I’m sure I’m not the only one. So thank you very much for that as well.

I’m gonna leave before people start pointing out problems with Ghost Dad.

PM sent.

ray_afraid said:

Many people hate the addition of Hayden because if, like me, you only watch the OT, Hayden comes out of nowhere, while we just met Sebastian as Anikin moments ago.
And it makes sense that he would return in the form he was redeemed in and, more importantly,
as someone Luke would recognize.

The Blu-rays fixed that. Now instead of appearing out of nowhere, his disembodied voice yells at Vader as Vader throws the Emperor down the chasm. Then, a few scenes later, you see him hanging out with Obi-Wan and Yoda. So it’s… wait, no, it’s actually even more incongruous, even if you recognize the yelling voice as that guy from Shattered Glass who somehow ended up on the Death Star and thinks it’s a good idea to scream at a pissed off Darth Vader, although I’ll admit he is smart enough to stay offscreen while he’s yelling.

But back on-topic, the Emperor change sucks too. But it only makes the scene worse, it doesn’t make the scene utterly incomprehensible.

Mike O said:

I don’t mean to be crude, but it sounds like good, bad, or indifferent, we won’t get them while Lucas is still alive.

Longer than that. Much longer. When someone is recognized as the creator of an already-wildly-successful property, publishers give their wishes enormous deference. Take the example of C.S. Lewis and the Chronicles of Narnia. The publishers to this day insist on releasing the series in the wrong order. Why? No contract requires that they do this. C.S. Lewis died over 50 years ago. And he also never actually requested that this change be made. However, he did once humor a young fan about the idea or reordering the books, and that exchange was recorded in writing, and someone unearthed it and took it to be the gospel of Lewis. Now, fans are stuck with deference to wishes that someone imagined the creator once had. (Not quite such a bad situation as Star Wars, because you can re-order the books yourself, or use fifty-year-old copies which are every bit as good as the current releases in terms of quality)

Compare that to Lucas. Possibly no contractual requirement here either. But still very much alive, and clearly on the record many times explicitly requesting that the originals be buried and replaced with his special editions. Also probably he and Star Wars are more of a household name than C.S. Lewis or Narnia. No, IMO Disney will let the OOT die merely because Lucas wished it, no contract required.

So the date Star Wars fans are waiting for is the copyright expiration date – when someone other than Disney can release the films as they ought to be. If I thought there was any chance at all this would happen in my lifetime, I’d never have become involved in Star Wars preservation.

We’d need more details on the disc – Despecialized doesn’t originally come in a disc format with menus, so you’re dealing with someone’s repackaging of DeEd. Any ideas about the origin of the disc, i.e. name of the torrent or something?

PM sent.

Also, FWIW, both the fullscreen and a widescreen releases used the same bonus disc, which was always non-anamorphic widescreen. In other words, in the fullscreen release, only the Special Edition disc was fullscreen.

PM sent.

While it’s pretty commonplace for films to be re-edited before home video release these days, few have had edits so substantial that they change the character and quality of the entire film as dramatically as the Star Wars original trilogy.

The closest I can think of is the Director’s Cut of Cinema Paradiso, which adds 49 minutes of material to a classic Award-winning bittersweet nostalgia film to turn it into a fairly cringeworthy stalker fantasy film. Not quite as ugly a transition as the Special Editions, but pretty darn close. Also, the original cut of Cinema Paradiso is not suppressed, which means the only problem is the market confusion of having two very different films being marketed under the same name.

Thank you for your help/validation, and it sounds like I’ve got things pretty well dialed in. I am using an 80Hz sub crossover in the receiver, so the sub is taking more than just LFE. I did a sweep tone and discovered a phase issue with the sub, and now everything’s sounding good – very even response comparing the sub to the fronts, no crazy boominess like you said. Part of the problem with the room, aside from acoustics, is the seating. It’s all over the place, and there’s probably no seat actually within the sweet spot – this is part of why I’m excited to finally have a center channel.

I am looking to boost the center though. After trying it a bit absolutely flat (same response as fronts), it turns out I would not describe the issue so much as dialogue clarity, so much as that I always watch movies with the volume lower than reference levels. That means that the loud score and effects are at my upper volume limits for what I’d like, but still lower than it was “intended for”, while dialog is often simply too quiet. So I ride the volume button, up, down, up, down, through the film – doable, but a drag. At the moment I’m testing boosting the center 1.5dB to see if that helps get the dialog up to good levels without unduly distorting anything else that’s coming through the center. It may be I can’t get one without the other, and I’ll just ride that volume button some more.

I’m mostly looking for OT moments to try out the surround setup, particularly hairy_hen’s mixes. Venturing outside the OT, I’m waiting to give Master and Commander a listen, because I hear glowing things about that.

PM sent.

Creox said:

CatBus said:

Creox said:

Does anyone know WHY Lucas stubbornly clings to his decision? Is he embarrassed about the original release or is he just being that controlling of his creation? or is it something else?

I find his decision to date quite puzzling on the surface of it.

I honestly believe he likes the latest SE revisions better, and it does more closely align with his original vision (in a general sense, clearly not the specifics). Keep in mind that Star Wars and Empire at least were heavily collaborative efforts, and Lucas was not anywhere near the final authority on Star Wars. He was involved, but he didn’t direct Empire and it showed. Other people could talk him out of his dumber ideas, and he was unsure enough of himself that he’d listen.

Now, it’s all Lucas, unfiltered. And yeah, that sucks.

SW is definitely his baby but one that was ran through a lot of other people’s filters before we ever saw it. Yep.

In a lot of ways, Lucas’s filters came off for Jedi, but he was still a bit constrained by characters and storylines that had been established during the collaborative period of the first two films. When he was able to ditch that and work with more of a blank slate, what he got was the prequels. And just as I’m sure the Special Editions better reflect what he wanted to create, I’m equally certain he likes the prequels better than the originals (all Lucasvision, no compromises from the very start) – otherwise he wouldn’t continue clumsily trying to remind the world that they exist (Maclunkey!)