ChainsawAsh

Yeah, having owned legitimate copies of both sets, they seem to be the real deal based on those photos.

They probably shot closeups of a stand-in's hands doing it (probably second-unit), and were going to film more with Hamill later on, then decided to scrap the sequence altogether.

The first one is the one that I grew up with - it's the 1991 or 1992 box set.  It uses the 1985 audio mix, and is pre-THX, so it's from the same master as the Japanese Special Collection (if I'm not mistaken on that).  I love the VHS sleeves for those, as well - I've even made DVD covers based on the design.

The second one is the 1995 "Faces" set, the last time the originals were released until the 2006 DVDs.  They use the same master as the 1993 Definitive Collection/1995 "Faces" LDs, and the 2006 DVDs (though, since it's fullscreen, it's possible that a different master was used, I'm not 100% sure on that).  It uses the 1993 audio mix.

The "Faces" set has a bunch of DNR (digital noise reduction) applied, which makes it smear pretty bad in motion scenes.  The earlier one doesn't have this, but detail isn't quite as good in non-motion scenes.

Note that neither one of those contains the "true original" version of Star Wars - they both use the 1981 "Episode IV: A New Hope" crawl, as did all home video releases pre-2006.  The earlier ones' audio mixes are more true to the theatrical mixes than the "Faces" set, but they're still not quite the same.  (At least for Star Wars and possibly Empire - not sure about Jedi's audio mixes, and no one around here seems to be.)

Have you tried updating/replacing your drivers?  (Note that I haven't used Windows in two years, I'm a little rusty when it comes to that)

Alright, let's see if I can respond individually here:

@Johnny Ringo:

Very good mockup on erasing Dan from Rorschach's death!  It's far superior than anything I've been able to come up with thus far.  A few notes on it, in the interest of improving what's already pretty damn good:

- The glow isn't quite right ... it's a bit too bright, and feels like a Photoshop Gaussian blur (which is what I assume it is, since that's what I've been trying as well) - if you notice on the original image, the glow isn't that much brighter at its "core" (that is, closer to Dr. M) than it is farther away.  It's pretty much a uniform darkish blue that slowly dissolves away.
- The snow where Dan used to be looks a bit too much like a Photoshop brush - I'd suggest possibly using the same snow from the right side of the frame?  Not sure, though.
- Can't really comment on the "snowflakes," since my monitor's very dusty as it is, but they look pretty good to me.

And I know what you're saying about trying other ideas, but the two shots where they're both in the frame are 100% necessary shots - in this one, it's where Rorschach takes his mask off, and the other one, it's where Rorschach explodes.  I don't see how the scene can work without those two shots.

If you'd be willing to try this with actual motion, that would be greatly appreciated - I'll take any help I can get with these scenes.  And you would, of course, be appropriately credited in the final product.  :-)

Now, about the "red shift" idea - I'll either go all-red, or none at all.  I don't think the red at point-of-impact would work very well, but I may do an experimental attempt at it.

I'm not a big fan of the end-credit-quote-pictures idea.  It may work for a trailer, though.

@Jono11

If you have a good-quality copy of the old DC logo, I'll definitely use it.  The new one just feels too modern.  I don't mind the WB and Paramount logos, though (and there's obviously nothing I can do about the "Legendary" one, since the company was founded in 2005).

Johnny Ringo said:

Couldn't convince you to do the title black on yellow?

 

I'm on the fence on this one - it could easily go either way.  I'll probably try it both ways, then decide which looks best.

Not sure whether I'll tint the Comedian-death shots or not.  Again, I'll probably try it both ways.

And the movie-as-graphic-novel thing is pretty cool, JR - I like it a lot.

That's actually a pretty interesting idea.  I don't know if I'll be able to make it work, but damn it, it's such a good concept I'll try!

This is why I started this thread so far in advance of the actual editing - cool ideas like this that I would never have thought of.  Thanks!

And that's an interesting read - I was aware that the font was Futura Extra Bold, which is convenient since I already had that font.  I didn't realize how much extra work went into it - I'll try to keep the (new) opening logo as faithful to the original as possible (definitely using yellow against a black screen, which will dissolve-invert to black against a yellow screen, then the title dissolves away, leaving just the yellow, which then tracks out of the smiley-face pin).

Kurtz wasn't involved with the production of Jedi, so he likely wouldn't know whether a 3-strip was struck for it or not.  That's a question for Howard Kazanjian (can't be bothered to check if that's how it's really spelled, it's 2AM here and I'm tired as hell).

I think the idea that Palpatine would become the Emperor was common knowledge, but the fact that Palpatine and Sidious were one and the same was supposed to be a surprise.

I caught it immediately the first time Sidious was shown in TPM, but I knew several people that insisted that they were different people.

Having not seen Gran Torino, I can't really comment much (since I skipped the comments about that film, not wanting to be spoiled).  But I find myself astounded every once in a while - at this stage in my life, it's become very rare, since I've seen so much bullshit like this - at just how ignorant people can be.

But District 9 looks great, eh?

russs15 said:

If the audio on the initial release is as crap as you say it is, whilst I thought it was the best I have heard through my basic system, I cannot wait to get the new AC3 file added to the copy I have.

Of course, the downside is that I will have to watch TPM again afterwards..........

Ditto.

Don't forget that the Ultimate Cut will include additional footage of the newsvendor and the kid to transition between Black Freighter and the film itself.  That's why I'm waiting until then to do this cut.

I still say just using the 3-strip archival prints would be fine for the OOT - many films have been transferred at very high quality using similar prints, without ever touching the o-neg.

I'm definitely going to attempt that.  I'm resistant to the idea of cutting it up into a 12-part "miniseries"-type thing, simply because I'm fairly certain that some of the "chapters" are much longer than others in their filmed state.  It would be a little odd to see a 40-minute "episode," then the next one is 10 minutes.  I don't know if the difference would, in fact, be so extreme, but I'll see how it works when I get to the edit itself.

Exactly.  Sorry if my wording was confusing.

zombie84 said:

I think people just don't understand the film process. Its not like the physical negatives were altered. Such a thing is impossible. Once the film is on film, its permanent, you cannot change it. What happened was certain parts were replaced. The original restored negatives were put in storage and replaced with newly-created ones involving CGI. People really don't understand the filmmaking process so when LFL says "the originals were destroyed" people assume it means they were chucked into a furnace, when it really means that the O-neg no longer conforms to the 1977 edit--which it hasn't since 1981, since that is when the "ANH" crawl was added. Technically, the "original" film was "destroyed" 3 decades ago. Fixing it requires simply hiring neg cutter to retrieve the shots from storage and putting them back in the O-neg conform so that IP's can be struck.

You've got it on the nose.  But the thing is, conforming (at least today - this may not have been the case at the time given the prevalence of splicing tape seen on the laserdiscs) is, by its nature, a destructive process.  Two frames past the end of shot A are scraped off, leaving (effectively) blank leader, while two frames before the beginning of shot B are also scraped off.  These are each then cemented to black leader, alternating back and forth between reel A and reel B (shot 1 is on reel A, shot 2 is on reel B, shot 3 is on reel A, shot 4 is on reel B ... ) - these two reels are run through an optical printer, and out comes the interpositive, with everything put together nice and smooth.

But in order to remove any sections from the original negative, which is cemented into two separate reels like that, you have to destroy the head and tail of each shot, since it's fucking cemented down.

So, assuming this process was in practice in 1976/77 (I honestly don't know if it was), then changing the original negative would, in fact, destroy at least parts of the shots that have been replaced/altered.  In going through ANH for my Trilogy edit, I noticed that several frames are inexplicably missing from many shots that have been altered for the SE - this, in my opinion, supports the theory that this conforming process was used, and those frames were destroyed because there wasn't any other way around it.

For further proof of this issue, see the extended cut of Mallrats - there are many times when the frame will jump ahead two or four frames, because they wanted to extend a specific shot, but those frames were destroyed in the conforming process.

But then again, since this whole process was designed to eliminate the presence of splicing tape on release prints, and Star Wars has quite a lot of splicing tape visible in its pre-SE state, I could be dead wrong about this.

According to Lucasfilm, the negatives were permanently altered when the SE-added/changed scenes were spliced in after the "restoration."  That's why they released the 1993 LD transfers in 2006 instead of a new transfer of the pre-SE versions - they don't exist anymore.  So it's not that they're "destroyed" so much as "permanently altered."

That's really a load of bullshit, since, even if they did that to the negatives (I have my doubts, but wouldn't be surprised in the slightest to discover that this was true), there's still several three-strip archival interpositives of the pre-SE versions - one (for each film) in Lucas' personal vault, one in the Library of Congress, and I believe one in the UK's equivalent of the Library of Congress, among other places.  Any one of those would be of high enough quality to make a very good 1080p transfer, and definitely a very nice SD DVD.

Technically, Star Wars was destroyed.  In 1996, when Lucasfilm destroyed the original negatives to make the special editions.

If you don't have the 3-disc CE3K DVD, then the Blu-Ray is still worth the upgrade.

And The Dark Knight's shifting aspect ratio isn't OAR - IMAX's aspect ratio is 1.44:1 (preserved on the IMAX Prologue bonus feature on the Batman Begins Blu-Ray), while the Blu-Ray crops this to 1.78:1 (16:9) to fill a widescreen television.

The 35mm scenes are shown in their proper 2.39:1, though.

The AVCHD version uses the DVD 5.1 audio, which doesn't sound half as good as the laserdisc 5.1 that the theatrical DVD uses.

You also have the Conquest Director's Cut to work with now, with the additional violence and original, non-optimistic ending.  Too bad that's only been released on Blu-Ray, though.

Please, no more lightsaber colors - I still advocate for blue and red ONLY in the PT, thus keeping the symbolism of Luke's green one in ROTJ - a new color for a new type of Jedi.  But I do like the idea of Dooku having a purple lightsaber, to keep his nature more ambiguous (though I suppose, if everyone else was blue, green would work for him as well).

I still haven't watched The Clone Wars, but IIRC there's someone doing exactly what you suggest over at Fanedit.org.  I could be wrong, though, it might've just been an idea someone came up with.

He goes to my college.  Haven't met him yet.  It's an interesting interview, he seems like a pretty grounded guy.

--(hopefully) final edit--

Just finished watching this - it's very, very well done.  There's a noticeable drop in quality in the shots not from the HD broadcast, but there's only, what, two of them in the movie?  It's not bad at all, and not terribly noticeable on an SDTV anyway.

Menus are, of course, top-notch, and the "scope" music video extra was a nice touch.  (Glad I was able to help with that, Ady!)

But the real stand-out of this disc is the laserdisc's 5.1 track - holy Christ is it good.  Unless you saw TPM in a 5.1-equipped theater in 1999 (I didn't), or had the laserdisc and a player equipped to output 5.1 (I had neither), you've never heard TPM sound this amazing.  It blows the DVD audio out of the water in every respect.

Bottom line, if you're a purist and a completist like I am, this is a must-have.  Regardless of your opinion of the film, it's almost indisputable that the changes made to the DVD release hurt the film's pacing quite a bit.  This is no longer the case.

Another stellar Adywan release!  Highly recommended!

I think it could have worked had it been shot and conceived that way for the film, but it wasn't, and there's really no way to change it now that the Dr. M ending is in place.

Frankly, to me, the image of millions of dead, mutilated corpses strewn about New York is far more terrifying than an empty, burned hole in the ground.  But I don't mind the movie's ending, and it's not like there's anything I can do about it anyway.