Fang Zei

Apparently there are conflicting rumors regarding the next trailer.

A theater in Vancouver says it's dropping October 19th, also when tickets supposedly go on sale.

The other rumor claims we're not seeing it until November but that it is already done and being looked at by the people at corporate, along with some tv spots.

Disney's also going to want to start promoting Captain America: Civil War soon as well. They're gonna be keeping those trailer dates as far away from each other as they can.

DuracellEnergizer said:

Fire whoever's been giving the shitty new comics and novels the stamp of approval and replace them with someone who'll actually say a great big "NO!" to schlock stories.

Abandon the stupid concept of "canon" once and for all and let the writers write whatever stories they may in whatever continuity they wish (be it a previously established continuity or their own personal continuity).

Cancel all the ongoing Star Wars comic series and replace them with a single SW series -- an anthology series containing multiple stories per issue focused on a wide variety of characters from various timeframes. 

Publish fewer novels.

That's it -- that's all it would take to improve the nuEU for me.

Here's the funny thing about the old canon: nothing was ever explicitly de-canonized. Even the Holiday Special counted, on some level.

Which brings us to the whole concept of different levels of canon.

Which is half the reason the EU was rebooted in the first place.

What did George think of the Thrawn trilogy? Obviously he gave the OK for post-Jedi stories to be told, and I remember hearing about how he liked the Dark Empire comic.*

Did the EU just get away from him later on or was it always intended as a cash grab from the very beginning?

Like, he also gave the OK to kill off Chewie in Vector Prime.

I get the impression that the EU writers were leaving a contingency plan for the eventual Episode VII but that George was leaving no such plan for the EU. It simply didn't count, in his view.

*Although, Dark Empire contains one of the three big post-Jedi EU things that George said never happened in that now infamous quote.

Wazzles said:

towne32 said:

Mike O said:

but why spend the tons of money and time on a restoration of a version with a tiny existing interested group of purchasers when the existing versions, for which they already have HD masters, are selling like heroine?

 If they ever want to release in 4K (and not just an upscale), they'll need to either release the 1997 version as-is, or spend money modifying them in some way. That could mean re-building something that resembles the 2011, the OOT, or both. 

 Well not even the 97's as-is would work. AFAIK, the CGI is rendered in like 2k. So to release the current version (or something that resembles it, they would have to re-render the added CGI from 97, 2004, and (probably) 2011, and then upscale the content shot digitally (the Emperor in ESB, Hayden in RoTJ). No matter what, releasing the SE in 4k will be some sort of a pain in the ass. It's likely that the OOT may be easier to restore at 4k since there is no CGI, save for a few wire-frame models that would look fine regardless. 

 They wouldn't have to redo the cgi.

It would be no different from plenty of other movies over the past decade that were 4K DI finishes with 2k vfx renders.

The only real question is whether George is still satisfied with the '97 cgi after all these years. But even if he's not, it's now Disney who controls the purse strings. I doubt they would bother.

SilverWook said:

And I would probably suffer the SE's just one more time if they were shown theatrically in 3-D.

I think a lot of people would, which is why I'm convinced it will happen eventually.

We do live in a world now where The Shield, a show shot on 16mm film, is being remastered in 4K. So I guess anything' possible.

Wally Pfister's expert opinion was that you'd have to scan in 35mm negative at somewhere between 8k and 12k res to really get all the detail it's capturing.

It's just that 8k is prohibitively expensive right now for anything other than capturing and scanning.

Really.

That's because, for starters, 8k is overkill for 4-perf 35mm film.

Also, the vfx shots in TFA, which I'm assuming will make up a pretty sizable percentage of the movie, will not be rendered at anything higher than 4K except for the shots in that one IMAX scene.

When most of your movie is stuck at 4K to begin with, you're not going to gain much of anything by mastering it at a higher res.

On that note, does anyone want to start taking bets as to when the next/final trailer is gonna drop?

Ryan McAvoy said:

Ronster said:

HDTV Broadcasts are already in terms of quality going to fall behind and how on earth will 8K get transmitted through the air.

Maybe because there will always be bandwidth limits on how high you can go, physical media will make a come back. 2K streaming and 8K physical discs. PT streaming online, and ST and restored OT on 8K Blu-Ray discs ;-)

Seeing as how the ST will likely not be finished at anything higher than 4k, probably not.

The Ugnaughts are supposed to be from the nearby Anoat system if I remember the old EU correctly. I always thought they were saying "The No-Add system" until I turned on the dvd subtitles.

Anyway, McQuarrie's floating islands of moss with their humanoid inhabitants flying around on thrantas is something I could see being added into the background of the Bespin arrival (before we actually see Cloud City) or just added editorially like they did with the cloud car that flies past Leia's room.

It was probably a stretch in '97 when all they could do was add the refinery, another McQuarrie concept, into the foreground of one of the shots. But now that we're in a post-Avatar world, showing the native lifeforms of Bespin would certainly be possible.

Speaking of Bespin, it would be cool if they added all the crazy stuff from the McQuarrie paintings for a future "ultimate" SE. As it stands, it's the only planet we see without any indiginous life whatsoever. Yavin IV at least had trees.

This is why it wouldn't be surprising if Disney/Lucasfilm simply commissioned an SE 2.0 to not only redo stuff that wouldn't work in 3D but also fix blatant vfx errors still present in the 2011 version.

John Doom said:

What about ROTJ in 3d?

"Masters of Teras Kasi takes place between ANH and TESB."

Sense: that video makes none.

It will happen eventually, if only because they've finished converting the PT and the ST will also be in 3D.

If we consider that RotJ would be hitting theaters in 3D less than a year and a half from now (if they'd actually kept to the original, pre-disney schedule), it wouldn't be surprising if they simply decided to get it done now, ahead of Episode VII.

So here's a question, unanswerable at the moment but I'll throw it out there anyway.

Do you think Disney will put out Episode VII on 4K blu-ray day and date with the regular blu-ray or are we looking at a similar situation to TPM where they stagger the releases on the different formats?

Granted we'll be much earlier in the life of this new format than dvd when TPM came out, so it actually wouldn't be unreasonable for Disney to hold back on it. They did something similar with that second Pirates movie on regular blu-ray.

Crystal Skull and the Clone Wars movie were both day and date blu-rays back in the earlier days of the format, although - at least in Crystal Skull's situation - it helped that the format war had officially ended and Paramount was no longer putting out movies on hddvd. With no format war this time around, Disney might just want to get their biggest title out there in the best available format as soon as possible.

In any event, I see the release of the other six movies on the new format as an inevitability. Yes, even the prequels. Most of the initial titles from Fox were only finished in 2k anyway, it's the expanded color and hdr they want to show off. The prequels can still benefit from the former but maybe not the latter.

CatBus said:

I've found torrents to be a perfectly adequate substitute for patience.

You'd think Lucasfilm would've caught on to that by now.

Just as the proliferation of the ld-to-dvd fan preservations led to an official unaltered dvd release, we're now at the point where we have a perfectly serviceable substitute for an unaltered blu-ray.

Not clicking on that link as I don't want to go in knowing too much (didn't I say I was gonna stay out of this thread entirely?), but I do recall the early rumors saying something about the third act having a huge "I am your father" level twist/reveal.

The overall sentiment I've been getting from those in-the-know has been that TFA is most similar to ANH tonally but has a very cliffhanger-y, Empire style ending.

SilverWook said:

Would be a way for Lucasfilm to make the 3D conversions finally pay off.

Were all six shown in 3D at Celebration this year?

No, just the PT.

It was the first time RotS was shown in 3D if I'm not mistaken. I wasn't there, not even on the same coast, but I've shared my thoughts in the past about how three-dimensional RotS already looks in regular 2D projected on blu-ray. Assuming they didn't drop the ball on the conversion, it must look amazing.

Meanwhile, several signs point to this new 4k remaster of the OT having been done years ago, maybe even as early as 2008-2010. It takes a year to really do a thorough conversion of a two-hour movie into 3D. Titanic, a 3-hour movie, took more than a year. If the new 4k scan/remaster was ready before Disney even bought Lucasfilm, then they've had three years to convert the three movies.

On the other hand, I feel like we would've actually heard something about it by now.

I'd actually forgotten about that, joefavs. I could go and double check but I'm pretty sure you're right.

The bigger question in my mind is whether the rumored in-theater saga marathons on December 17th will be DCP's of the 2011 version or an unannounced debut of the 4k SE.

If they're showing the marathon in 3D, I would fully expect the latter.

Can you imagine the crowd's reaction seeing Han shoot first again?

Either way, it still won't be the OOT.

The steel books and the complete saga reissue will undoubtedly be fresh pressings of the discs, so it's not impossible for there to be differences from the 2011 version.

But it would be pretty weird to just make that one change (or rather, a reversal of a change), and to make it now, only a month before the new movie's release.

I actually do give credence to the original rumor from April, but I honestly don't expect to see Han shooting first (shooting only?) again until the 4K remaster makes its way out there.

The fact that the steelbooks are well over a month away makes that comment highly suspect.

However, we did hear this very same rumor back in April the day before the digital versions became available for download, with clarification following the next day that this was actually seen by someone inside Lucasfilm and that it could still be for a future version of the movie.

I'd be shocked if these steelbooks weren't the exact same 2011 discs. It makes sense that we'd see big changes made to these movies for their dvd debut and then again for the blu-ray. Those were both huge upgrades in how people could watch the movies at home and it makes sense that GL would use those occassions to make additional changes. Also, in both cases, it had been seven years since the previous revision (which makes me wonder .... 2018?).

In the relevant thread at the AVS Forum, someone brought up a good point about how Disney will inevitably want to release these movies on UHD blu-ray.

For the OT, they know that another SE, even if it's an SE with expanded color, HDR and in 4k, is not gonna be enough of a selling point. Not nearly as many people will make the jump to UHD like they did with blu-ray. Since those steelbook singles and the reissue of the complete saga set are hitting next month, I'm guessing it's gonna be a while before we see another release of the existing films.

When another release does inevitably happen, probably for the UHD debut, I simply don't see it being a big enough deal to catch people's attention unless the unaltered originals are included as well. Maybe that's when we'll see the grand "all versions" edition rolled out on both regular and 4k blu just as we saw blade runner on the hd formats and regular dvd.

With the right compression, 25GB of space might be all that the final encode really needs.

The newer codecs (AVC, etc) are more efficient than dvd's implementation of mpeg-2. HD is six times the resolution of SD, but only really needs 4-5 times as much space thanks to the improved compression tech. HEVC further improves on this so you only need twice as much space when you jump from HD to 4k.

John Doom said:

I'm not sure: we would possibly get better composited special effects (which would stand better with the new incoming trilogy), but then would we be ever able to see the originals ever again? :\

Well, that's pretty much what the SE should've been in the first place. Instead it ended up more revision than restoration.

What we want is a high quality preservation of the OOT exactly as it was.

IIRC, one of the reasons why the recomps were done was because those shots on the o-neg were irretrievably faded.

Wazzles said:

Fang Zei said:

Yeah, a restoration should and in all likelihood would have the '77 version of the crawl.

I honestly don't care if they include the '81 crawl as an option or not, but since it would be the easiest thing I guess they should do it simply out of completionism for the theatrically released versions of the movies. Although, if we're gonna go down that slippery slope, where do the 70mm edits and the various sound mixes fall on the importance scale?

 I would really love it if Empire was released with both the 70mm and 35mm versions, but I don't think that will ever happen.

Didn't Star Wars ('77) also have a whole bunch of picture edit differences in its 70mm version or am I remembering wrong?

Jedi didn't have any differences if I'm remembering my Wikipedia binges correctly.