Fang Zei

I wonder if Lucasfilm will wait until May of next year before doing any new physical release of I-VI just so they can have the technicality of fully regaining all distribution rights to Empire, Jedi, and the prequels, or if it makes zero difference at this point whether or not the profits go through 20th Century Fox first since it’s all owned by Disney.

Since Fox owns the distribution rights to ANH in perpetuity, will Disney simply take it away from them and give it to Lucasfilm or would that violate copyright law?

Some people have wondered if Disney might throw the Fox fanfare in front of the ST movies, but I find this unlikely since Fox had nothing to do with their production or even their release. What I’d much rather they do, once they finally retire the 2004 Lowry master and do the 4k SE, is bring the “finished” version of I-VI (including ANH) in line with the ST and simply keep it to the metallic Lucasfilm logo with no sound. I’m not a fan of the current digital and broadcast versions’ using the ‘97 shiny LFL logo with an edit of the cue from the very end of ESB’s end credits in lieu of the Fox fanfare on all of the movies except ANH.

Since nothing from before 2014 is canon anymore aside from I-VI and TCW, I’m wondering if we’ll ever see a NuEU story that gives us an explanation for how Leia and the others were able to justify taking time away from helping the Rebellion just so they could rescue Han from Jabba. Unless that was Leia’s call to make in the first place.

It’s been twenty-one years since I read Shadows of the Empire, so I don’t remember now if it was brought up.

One thing I found curious (and this is going off my fuzzy memory of watching it after downloading it from google video a full decade ago, so I could be remembering wrong) is that IIRC the copyright © at the end of the end credits was 20th Century Fox, not Lucasfilm.

The newspaper comic strips were also copyright Fox IIRC.

Now that Disney’s buying Fox, there’s presumably nothing keeping them from throwing it in on future releases.

Edited to add:

And I now see I talked about this very subject in this very thread almost two years ago.

Restore the unaltered OT and they can legtimize the SE in Episode IX all they want.

Hal 9000 said:

I’m just hoping the scope of the conclusion will feel like it caps off the entirety of the saga. I’m okay with seeing ghost Hayden yuckin’ it up with Luke in the interest of that. Preferably not attempting to look young, with the long locks. Doesn’t have to be made up to look old necessarily, though.

Did I miss this ghost Hayden rumor earlier when I was avoiding this thread for the first thirty or so pages, or is that just pure speculation on your part?

Another thing I’ve been meaning to ask about is the difference in how this 4k project of the trilogy is being scanned in to begin with versus how it was done for the previous go around (SSE, ESB Grindhouse, RotJ).

On the original TN1 35mm project page, I remember seeing a photo of a print being scanned in using a homemade scanner that was basically just a DSLR. IIRC this resulted in light leaking through in certain shots (the Death Star conference room comes to mind).

For the 4k projects, I’m assuming actual professional grade scanning equipment was used?

SilverWook said:

I don’t think anybody does it the old way anymore, if the ability to do so even exists at all. Might as well carp that they didn’t edit the film by physically splicing it together.

Nolan still does it the old way. Ironically, the 35mm segments of his movies had to be digitally processed anyway just so they could go through the Imax DMR blowup conversion. Since Nolan insists on color-timing his movies photochemically, this meant scanning in the 35mm interpositive and digitally blowing that up instead of working from a scan of the negative itself.

For Dunkirk, nothing was shot on a gauge of film smaller than 65mm, so the roughly 25% of the movie shot in 5-perf was blown up optically to 15/70 without going through the computer at all.

Ryan-SWI said:

I don’t think we’ll see it until after George is gone. I get the impression that it is largely out of respect that they haven’t done anything with it. Whether you agree with it being released or not I think it’s pretty obvious that releasing it would be a pretty big F U to George from Lucasfilm considering how adamant he was about it not being made available.

Agree to disagree and all that. I think George has nothing to do with it. After all, the debate over the changes he made to the OT was a very large part of what he was washing his hands of when he sold the company.

I think it mostly had to do with Fox’s ownership of ANH, which will soon become irrelevant.

I stand corrected, then.

Rogue One and TLJ weren’t released on 35mm according to imdb, and Solo wasn’t released on film at all.

FWIW, Episode IX is already listed as to-be-released on 35mm. But imdb is user-based, so this could just be pure speculation based on nothing but the fact that JJ is directing.

ESB was definitely changed color-wise, but it always struck me as the least manipulated of the three in terms of contrast. I’d be interested in getting people’s thoughts on that.

I still wonder what happened with the AotC bd.

I think what Williarob meant was that the 2004 HD master used for the 2011 OT bd’s was regraded from how the OT had ever looked prior to 2004.

Tried it again on my Roku Ultra and it froze up at the same point. The Roku auto-exited the file when it happened and said “cannot play video, file may be damaged or corrupted.”

The old pc I used to download the rar’s is way too slow to playback the 1080p mkv. I’m betting the 2013 macbook air could do it, although I’m open to advice as to which video player to use (vlc, quicktime, etc).

If the video still chokes halfway through the movie on the macbook, my only conclusion will be that the usb stick has some sort of issue. I’ve been told it’s probably not a problem with the rar’s since 7zip would’ve detected it when extracting the files.

Either way, I’ve given up trying to get the 35mm OOT together in time for the marathon, but that’s probably for the best since there’s a rather large drop in quality for the middle of the trilogy. Any chance 4k80 will be ready by this time next year?

OutboundFlight said:

Did Disney really have a choice when to came to the EU though? Prefer they make a movie with drama then “well Han couldn’t die here because he’s gotta be around for the Vong war”!

Conversely, if they’d set the ST after whenever they were up to in the EU at that point in 2013, they would’ve had to explain - or find a way to avoid explaining - Chewie’s absence.

It’s also unclear whether it was really Disney’s call to jettison the EU, or George’s. In an interview with Total Film just over a decade ago, George said the story told in the EU post-RotJ wasn’t at all what he would’ve done with it.

But I honestly wonder if there still couldn’t have been a way to tell a story set 41 years after Endor and within the same continuity as the EU that didn’t require audiences to know what had transpired in that time. I guess we’ll never know until someone gets more info from GL and Michael Arndt about the original plans for the ST as of 2012.

Until then, all we have to go on is the knowledge that JJ rewrote the script for VII to give the returning characters a bigger role and this recent interview with George about Microbiotic World.

I downloaded the rar’s of the no-DNR 1080p of 4k77 from mega and used 7Zip to extract the files straight to a 128GB memorex usb stick.

After plugging the usb stick into my sony blu-ray player to check out the movie, I noticed a minor technical issue and a much bigger technical problem.

The minor issue was that the player isn’t detecting the signal as 24p for some reason. I am correct that this should be a 24p (23.976p) file and not 1080i60, right? Could this be happening because I’m watching it off the usb stick and the player can only do 24p from an actual disc?

The major problem was that the movie froze up right around the destruction of Alderaan. It actually locked up my player the first two times it happened and I had to unplug the power. I was fast-forwarding through that scene when it happened the first time, but that’s probably just a coincidence. The second time I tried chapter skipping and got the same result, had to unplug power again. The third time I just let the scene play, and it froze during one of the shots where Tarkin is walking up to Leia. That time I was able to press the home button on my blu-ray remote and exit the video.

Any advice on these problems would be appreciated.

Let me just say, from what I’ve seen of it so far, TN1 has done a magnificent job (I’m dying to see how the Battle of Yavin looks). If Lucasfilm never gets around to restoring the unaltered versions from the superior elements only they possess, it will still be a shame. But thanks to the dedicated efforts of loving fans, it won’t be a cryin’ one.

Another longtimer here, although I’ve been posting just slightly more frequently than The Dark Lord 😉 with some occasional breaks every now and again.

Would Windows XP on a computer that’s easily a decade old be a good way to download this and transfer it to a large usb flash drive or would a 2013 Mac work better? I’d prefer to use the old pc if possible, so any advice would be welcome.

I’d like to get the no-DNR 1080p version in a file format where I can easily play it back on a sony blu-ray player via a usb stick.

Been meaning to chime in on this news since it was announced several days ago, so here it goes.

I think we all knew we hadn’t seen the last of Rogue One’s characters, with plenty of time in the twenty years pre-ANH to explore their backstories.

Now we know what the other tv series they first mentioned months ago will be. Ever since it was reported that Kathleen Kennedy met with Reed Morano at Sundance this year I’ve been envisioning a Handmaid’s Tale type of show exploring how people were indoctrinated into the Imperial way of life in those first years following Order 66. Showing us a single shot of some officers on the bridge of a Star Destroyer at the very end of RotS always felt like a bit of a cheat to me, so here’s hoping we see that developed a little more at some point.

This and The Mandalorian seem to be the entire focus of live action Star Wars at the moment, aside from Ep9. With no big screen productions in the immediate pipeline for after the ST’s finale, 2020 is looking like it will be the perfect hiatus year for Lucasfilm to focus on streaming content. I’m not going to hold my breath for an OOT restoration as well, but I’d love to be surprised.

I wonder if those 50 to 60 hours worth of tv episodes for the show George was developing a decade ago ever see the light of day in any form. Someone upthread mentioned Ron Moore as their dream showrunner. Did you know he was writing one of those episodes?

ChainsawAsh said:

Fang Zei said:

ChainsawAsh said:

Fang Zei said:

Putting aside the GOUT issue, I’m really just curious if 3.0 will simply be the unaltered stretches of the blu-ray (color-corrected, or course) using only the 35mm scans for the parts that were altered. For example, there are still some ‘97 recomps in the most recent version of the despecialized ESB if I’m not mistaken.

I would hope we finally have a viable alternative, but that may have to wait until Poita’s project is done.

I’d be surprised if poita’s project releases before 4K80.

Isn’t 4k80 already expected to take a while?

Yes, but - and I mean no disrespect to Poita here, he does great work, has helped the community in immeasurable ways, and his real-life job keeps him busy, not to mention the various health problems he’s had - of all the film scanning projects he’s begun over the many years he’s been active here, how many of them have actually been finished and released?

The movie theater where I work does a Star Wars marathon for the employees-only every year at the end of November / beginning of December, one movie per night. This year it will be Rogue One, OT, TFA, TLJ, in that order. Last year they simply hooked up a bd player to the 2k cinema projector and the sound system and used the official blu-rays. In one of the previous years they hooked up a laptop to watch despecialized, or so I’m told.

I’d love to change things up a bit this year but I don’t want to use despecialized for the OT since it’s stuck at 720p. So I’m wondering if I should just go with TN1’s OT or if the ideal lineup for now is 4k77 non-DNR 1080p, ESB Grindhouse, 4k83 non-DNR 1080p.

Yeah, that seems like a good way to do it. The official 1080p Blu-Ray releases of 4K77 and 4K80 will be out in a couple weeks, but then again, that’ll be the DNR 4K77 and a new pseudo-DNR 4K83 (with adjusted contrast and reel change markers removed), so you might wanna stick with the 1080p MKV versions instead.

Sorry, was “4k80” a typo?

ChainsawAsh said:

Fang Zei said:

Putting aside the GOUT issue, I’m really just curious if 3.0 will simply be the unaltered stretches of the blu-ray (color-corrected, or course) using only the 35mm scans for the parts that were altered. For example, there are still some ‘97 recomps in the most recent version of the despecialized ESB if I’m not mistaken.

I would hope we finally have a viable alternative, but that may have to wait until Poita’s project is done.

I’d be surprised if poita’s project releases before 4K80.

Isn’t 4k80 already expected to take a while?

The movie theater where I work does a Star Wars marathon for the employees-only every year at the end of November / beginning of December, one movie per night. This year it will be Rogue One, OT, TFA, TLJ, in that order. Last year they simply hooked up a bd player to the 2k cinema projector and the sound system and used the official blu-rays. In one of the previous years they hooked up a laptop to watch despecialized, or so I’m told.

I’d love to change things up a bit this year but I don’t want to use despecialized for the OT since it’s stuck at 720p. So I’m wondering if I should just go with TN1’s OT or if the ideal lineup for now is 4k77 non-DNR 1080p, ESB Grindhouse, 4k83 non-DNR 1080p.

Any advice would be welcome.

Putting aside the GOUT issue, I’m really just curious if 3.0 will simply be the unaltered stretches of the blu-ray (color-corrected, of course) using only the 35mm scans for the parts that were altered. For example, there are still some ‘97 recomps in the most recent version of the despecialized ESB if I’m not mistaken.

I would hope we finally have a viable alternative, but that may have to wait until Poita’s project is done.

Is ESB Grindhouse the only 35mm-based preservation of Empire that’s currently out there?

It was mentioned upthread that Despecialized 3.0 will be “entirely 35mm based.”

Does this mean 3.0 will finally be the “best of both worlds” version? In other words, the unaltered 70-80% of the bd color-corrected, with the 35mm scans used for the stuff that was altered, and none of Harmy’s meticulous recreations nor using the ‘97 re-comp shots in place of the true originals?

crissrudd4554 said:

Fang Zei said:

Speaking of which, did we ever determine what film element the unaltered GOUT crawl would’ve been scanned from?

Lucasfilm’s form response letter at the time stated that existing prints were in “bad condition” or something to that effect, but they didn’t exactly help their case by splicing in a newly transferred piece that looked just fine to me.

I’m curious if it’s a recreation after watching this video. In the GOUT the SW logo fades out sooner than it does on 4K77 and the SSE.

https://youtu.be/P1b47UP6ZGI

Does anyone want to chime in on this?

I’m curious myself.

Any legal barrier that was in their way is now gone, or at least it will be once the deal is officially finalized.

The time will eventually come to put out I-VI (and TFA and Rogue One) on 4k UHD. Whenever that ends up happening will be our earliest chance at seeing a restored OOT. If they were going to double/triple-dip the 2011 discs by including a 1080p OOT (like they did with the ‘04 dvd by including the GOUT), they would’ve done it by now.

Of course, now that the Fox buyout is on the way to being finalized I suppose anything’s possible. Maybe they’ll finally restore the OOT in 4k and just put it out on regular 1080p blu, maybe with a remastered SE to go along with it. But when the time comes for the OT on UHD you can bet they’ll include the unaltereds in all their glory.

Being able to watch the SE in 4k hdr, now with a fourth round of changes, just isn’t going to be much of a selling point for a sizable percentage of the fans.

Speaking of which, did we ever determine what film element the unaltered GOUT crawl would’ve been scanned from?

Lucasfilm’s form response letter at the time stated that existing prints were in “bad condition” or something to that effect, but they didn’t exactly help their case by splicing in a newly transferred piece that looked just fine to me.

CHEWBAKAspelledwrong said:

The GOUT is just a low-resolution early 90s master from Lucasfilm (so, ostensibly, from earlier generation sources like the O-neg or separation masters). The SSE is based on release prints, I believe. They’re entirely different.

The GOUT transfers were done in 1993 from interpositives struck from the o-neg in 1985.