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.
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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.
Nice article, and very neat new discovery! And thank you for all of your hard work over the years. Without someone out there finding each and every wart, we’d hardly know where to apply the wart remover, would we?
EDIT: Although you might have to explain to oldsters what to do about that pound sign thingee at the end: #ReleaseTheOriginalTrilogy. Typing it into my fax machine placed an international call 😉
PM sent.
PM sent.
I think I’ve mentioned this before, but if anyone understands both Japanese and English very well, I have a question. I have two sets of Japanese subtitles. Right now, I’m using what I believe are the original theatrical subtitles. The second set I believe is the home video translation. I suspect that the theatrical translations were rushed and not as good as the later home video translations, but I have no way to verify this on my own.
So if you happen to know both Japanese and English well enough to compare two Japanese translations and tell me which one best captures the meaning of the original English, I have a job for you! Let me know if you’re interested.
Why not put them both on Project Threepio and label them correctly?
I’ve only got about 1/3 of the new one synced and usable, and I’m not inclined to sync the rest unless it’s better in some way. Eventually the whole thing may be usable, but it’s my lowest priority.
Also, I’m generally only interested in the best translation, which at least eventually would mean one set of subs per language. For example, the theatrical Japanese subtitles said “Revenge of the Jedi” (historically interesting, but inaccurate for the final film), and our subtitles, based on the theatrical subs, have already changed that to “Return of the Jedi”. And all the Furigana is gone, re-translated a few parts, and the timing is different. So we don’t really even have the theatrical versions in Project Threepio anymore. I know there can be sentimental attachments to certain typos and inaccurate translations, but that’s not really the point of this project, which is to translate the English dialogue as best as possible. Slight exception for the burnt-in Greedo/Jabba subs in other languages, which have a 35mm option for those who want to reconstruct the theatrical experience of those films, warts and all.
PM sent. There are lots of unofficial re-encoded versions of the Despecialized Editions (to reduce file size) out there, and I’m sure most if not all do not include subtitles.
I’ve been assuming he’s talking about this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Cinema_Package
But talk of rolls and seals has muddied matters considerably.
I think the going rate for ROTS is you have to pay about $1000 for someone to take it off your hands. I’d need quite a bit more.
The Galician dubs are now ready, with the caveats mentioned earlier. These are also from recordings of TV broadcasts, but they aren’t in nearly as good condition as the Basque dubs, and Star Wars and Empire are both missing small bits of dialogue. The good news is that we do have translations for these missing parts, so the next version of Project Threepio will fill those gaps.
More to come, and yes I’m saving the best news for last.
Argh, no README and just SRT files. Sorry about that first impression.
Glad it’s working out now. Basically the SUP files are pre-rendered into graphics, so there’s no longer any room for player error with fonts, positioning, etc.
There should be a README file included which explains it all. In general:
English also has “mono”, which is for use only with the mono mixes, which have slightly different lines and timing from the more common stereo/6-channel mixes. At first I thought there was more than one mono mix for Empire, but there’s only one so the 16mm nomenclature has been removed in the most recent versions and it’s just “mono” now.
If you want the English subs for the default English audio, what you want is -native, or -sdh-native, depending if you want the other audio cues for the hearing impaired or not.
Also, ideally, you wouldn’t be messing around with SRT files at all. I think I lost this fight long ago, but the complete Project Threepio files include SUP files, which are better all-around and don’t some in quite so many different flavors. But they’re considerably larger, so are not included with Despecialized.
PM sent.
Thanks to laozi, we now have complete trilogy dubs for Basque, and will soon have incomplete dubs for Galician. Both of these are OTA recordings of TV broadcasts.
It seems incomplete dubs (dubs with a few chunks missing here and there) are likely to become more common as we rely on sources like this, losing audio due to aging videotapes, badly-placed commercials, hitting the record button too late, and so on. On the plus side, Project Threepio will have subtitles for all of the missing Galician dialogue in the partial dubs (but, sadly, no complete-film subtitles), so we’ll effectively have a complete translation of the trilogy into Galician.
As a linguistics nerd, I’ve always been interested in Basque. What does it sound like? Now that I’ve heard a lot of it, to me it sounds like a Spanish person speaking nonsense words. Most of the sounds and inflections seem very much Spanish, but the words? Aside from a few loanwords, no similarity at all to Spanish or anything else. And the written language is like nothing else I’ve seen, again aside from a few loanwords. All in all, it’s pretty cool.
With much thanks to laozi, the next version of Project Threepio will have complete Basque subtitles for all three films. In addition (again, thanks to laozi), it will have Galician “titles” subtitles that cover the parts of that dub that are not translated. And there will be more to come.
And, in related news, I’m going to have to say goodbye to my longstanding Project Threepio signature. I can only shrink the font size down so much as I add new languages, and the next release will push me past the 600px width signature limit. So goodbye to the classic “Struggling to restore STAR WARS to the entire galaxy” logo, and hello to the punk rock “London Calling” logo. It’s square, so it gives me a lot more room. And besides, Project Threepio is getting pretty punk rock these days if I do say so myself.
Hoth was definitely blue – moreso in some shots than in others, this being one of the bluest ones. I believe Poita’s image was not yet corrected for age-related fading, and also was just a photo of a projected image, so there’s all the autobalance/room lighting/projection issues mixed in as well, so it’s not reference quality. But it’s a lot closer than the Grindhouse version. Mostly because IIRC Grindhouse was severely faded and the “restored” colors were more of a guess, and it looks like they may have used GOUT as a reference (and GOUT is known to be both desaturated and pink-shifted).
Also chiming in with my hopes that Poita is doing okay.
PM sent.