Fang Zei

Harmy and Ryan McAvoy, what format did you see it in? 2D, 3D or hfr 3D?

They seem to be basing that claim off of pure presumption.

CGI looks pretty good now, as Abrams himself showed in Star Trek '09. The shaky-cam in the Falcon shot kind of reminded me of the imperfections in the miniature shots in the OT.

CG Jabba in the movies from '99 onward is like a bad game of telephone.

TPM Jabba looks kind of like ROTJ Jabba and '04 Jabba kind of looks like TPM Jabba.

The funny thing is that I still prefer cartoony-looking '97 Jabba to the '04/'11 version.

There are so many different scenarios that could happen. One big factor in all of this is Abrams and his nostalgic sensibilities. When it comes to an OT re-release I'm sure Disney/LFL have the final say in what happens and what doesn't, but this retro trading card stunt with the names of the characters is seriously making me wonder what their current thoughts are on the revised version of the true originals.

walking_carpet said:

hearing about stuff like this makes me more resigned that they will only show the SE versions of the OT next year when promoting TFA.

and since the rumors are leaning towards the Empire still running the show in this GFFA, they probably should do another version of ROTJ that removes the planet celebration montage...since apparently nothing was really accomplished.

 

i dunno...just sell us the damn OOT

When you say "show the SE" I'm assuming you're referring to a theatrical re-release?

To be fair, I never expected them to do a wide theatrical re-release of an OOT restoration, not in a million years. That would be great, don't get me wrong, but my hopes were never set that high. A wide re-release would be the SE version. It just lends itself to 3D conversion way more than the unaltereds. Like I said in another thread, that shot of cg Sni Snootles has been calling out for the 3D treatment since 1997! The irony is that we just last year got a 3D theatrical re-release of The Wizard of Oz, a movie that's not only way older than the original Star Wars but also almost completely unaltered!

I once had this idea that they could simultaneously re-release the SE in theaters in 3D at the multiplexes and make the bulk of their $$$$ that way, but also put out the restored OOT at the repertoire movie houses. Again, this was just a nice thought I had, something I knew (and still know) will probably never happen. Doing something like that would place both versions on equal footing, and we've seen in other examples that the most recent version of a movie tends to take priority. Disney might be in charge now, but George put his good friend Kathleen Kennedy in charge of Lucasfilm. I doubt she would want to totally reverse his policies and bury the SE while bringing back the originals. Spielberg did exactly that with E.T., but he's the director. I don't see George endorsing such a move with Star Wars.

So yeah, I don't think they'll put the restored unaltereds back in theaters. I'd love to be wrong, though.

Baronlando said:

Like the vintage trading cards as a way to reveal the names. Every time they pander to my old ass with nostalgia it completely works, I'm such an easy mark. (And gives hope to getting the originals out).

It made me feel the same way. I can't help but wonder if this was JJ's idea or if it was simply thought up by someone at Lucasfilm/Disney. Either way, it had to be ok'd by corporate before making its way to EW.

Man, I really hope they've been secretly restoring the OOT and are just keeping an extra-tight lid on it.

darklordoftech said:

Movie studios are always finding excuses to rescan and remaster. We won't be dealing with those 04 scans for much longer.

Like I said earlier, there are now much newer transfers of Willow and the Indy films than there are of Star Wars. Lowry's 2004 clean-up of the OT and 2003 clean-up of the Indy trilogy were impressive at the time, at least in terms of the clarity it brought out in those films, but LFL/Paramount/Spielberg still realized it wasn't good enough for Indy and I bet Disney realizes it's not good enough for Star Wars.

The Spike tv broadcasts have run their course, and maybe Disney is deciding whether they should start showing the movies on one of their tv channels or put them up on itunes or netflix.

As of now, there will be a 4k blu-ray format available by this time next year.

I've been in DC itself for the past couple years now (grew up in Falls Church, VA).

Yeah, Disney's never tried to alter their movies SE style. The Tron blu-Ray has one curious change where they added a tron-like border at the top and bottom of the frame in this one stationary shot of the actors. In a screenshot comparison with an older hd broadcast, the framing of all the shots in the movie lines up perfectly with the blu-Ray, but in that one shot the broadcast looks slightly zoomed-in. A couple years ago I saw a 70mm print of Tron that would've been made in the late 90's / early 00's and I actually noticed a splicing jump at the beginning of that shot.

My guess is there was something visible at the edges of the frame and they optically zoomed in just for that one shot. For the blu-Ray, they must've decided for whatever reason to just hide it with these polygon shapes.

yoda-sama said:

With the EE Blu-ray set of LotR they, quite famously, messed with the color palette, stating they felt they could modify the EE since they already offered the theatrical on Blu-ray unmodified.  So yes, I think they, in particular, are approaching it as they can modify stuff as long as it isn't done to the theatrical version.

 Well, they actually didn't claim to have messed with the color at all, nor did they bother making that defense. FotR wasn't finished as a complete DI in 2001, so both the theatrical and extended dvd's were telecines of the filmed-out negative (or IP or however they did it). Towers and Return, however, were complete DI's from the get-go. They did eventually finish FotR's DI, but this wasn't until 2003 when RotK was about to come out.

For the theatrical blu-Rays, they still used the telecine of FotR. The extended blu-Ray was the first time they went back to the finished DI files and made an hd transfer directly from that. This was always going to yield a different looking image than the telecines, sure, but what people noticed was that the contrast levels, the "peak white," was lower than in towers and return (and, later, The Hobbit). The brighter parts of the image weren't bright like they were in the other transfers of FotR. The big "smoking gun" people pointed to is the "dissolve to white" when Arwyn saves Frodo that, in the extended bd, is more of a "dissolve to bright gray." Everything looked like it had this blanket tint applied to it, and people started wondering if this was really PJ and Lesnie's intention. Maybe a mistake had been made in the mastering chain and no one noticed?

I think even if it was a mastering error they would never admit to it. The money lost in a replacement program of not one but two whole discs would be pretty huge. Most people probably never noticed it anyway.

To sum up my point, that particular change made to FotR may very well have simply been a mistake. I'm just glad it's isolated to the extended version and we still have a relatively good-looking transfer of the version that got nominated for 13 oscars.

I wonder if that change was only made for the EE of AUJ and not the theatrical bd/dvd. I honestly don't care what changes they make for the extended cuts, they did that with the LotR movies where you see Minas Tirith in the background of The Two Towers. But the theatrical release should be an exact preservation of the theatrical version.

I wonder if anyone's compared an in-theater cam rip of AUJ to the theatrical blu-ray to see if Smaug looks different.

Yeah, Lucasfilm had a pretty high opinion of the 2004 transfer, calling it a "digital negative." While that transfer (in its revised 2011 form) has apparently been used to make at least one DCP (the Atlanta screening earlier this year), it's still got a host of issues.

I'd like to think we've seen the last of that transfer even if we haven't seen the last of the SE.

Oh, and I wouldn't be so sure that the 3D version has been abandoned. We know Lucas was doing conversion tests of some scenes in ANH, probably using the '04 master. But that was way back in '07 or '08 at the latest. Even putting aside the outdated quality of the source, whatever conversion tech they were using at the time would warrant a do-over anyway all these years later. Now that Disney's in charge, I really wouldn't be surprised if they're doing a fresh 3D conversion from the newer 4k master to release in theaters as part of the build-up to Episode 7.

Including a disc of the OOT with "cleaned up" vfx just seems redundant to me. Unless Disney were to suddenly reverse GL's policy and make that the next/final version of the SE (which ain't gonna happen), I don't want to pay extra for what would technically be an altered version of the OT. I would never watch it.

Besides, there are a lot of movies on blu-ray with effects that haven't been cleaned up and no one seems to mind. I think people realize a movie is a product of its time and don't let themselves get distracted by effects that look a little wonky today. The same would be true of Star Wars. If not for the fact that the SE has been the most widely seen version for the last eighteen years, I don't think people would give the matte lines a second thought.

darklordoftech said:

Fang Zei said:

darklordoftech said:

Handman said:

darklordoftech said:

Considering that The Force Awakens was filmed on 35mm, will they use 35mm sources instead of digital scans for future releases, both OOT and SE?

 But... wouldn't they have to make a digital scan of that to release it?

The TPM DVD didn't use a digital scan.

I think you're a little confused...

Since I didn't speculate either way, "Curious" would probably be more accurate than "confused".

 My mistake, but just to clarify, AotC and RotS were finished as DI's from the get-go. This might actually explain why AotC's color-timing looks weird on blu-ray now. 2002 was still the very early days of this technology and whatever they were using back then might not have translated well to the standards of 2011. I have a similar theory about Fellowship of the Ring's extended blu-ray.

TPM was technically finished on film back in '99, but ILM still had almost all of the digital filmout tapes of the vfx shots in readable condition in 2011 so they used those to reconstruct the movie for the blu-ray and the 3D conversion. This got the movie as close to its "true" original negative as possible.

Almost all new movies are finished as DI's now, regardless of how they were shot. TFA will likely be finished at 2k with the exception of the Imax shots which will be finished at a higher resolution.

darklordoftech said:

Handman said:

darklordoftech said:

Considering that The Force Awakens was filmed on 35mm, will they use 35mm sources instead of digital scans for future releases, both OOT and SE?

 But... wouldn't they have to make a digital scan of that to release it?

The TPM DVD didn't use a digital scan.

I think you're a little confused...

Just about all movies made today are finished as digital intermediates (regardless of how they were shot), just as all modern restorations of old movies are done digitally.

Christopher Nolan and Paul Thomas Anderson are the now ultra-rare holdouts who insist on finishing their films photochemically. Even Tarantino now uses the DI process to my knowledge, making his comment about digital projectors being like "watching tv in a movie theater" a little disingenuous.

darklordoftech said:

CatBus said:

Fang Zei said:

Well, we've now seen an actual trailer for Episode 7 without having heard anything from Disney about the OOT.

Anyone think they'll keep this bait-and-switch going all the way up to release?

By "this bait-and-switch", you mean selling the SE as if it were the OT, correct?  

The blu-rays have updated copyrights. There's a big difference between only releasing the SEs and marketing the SEs as the OOT.

You mean the updated copyrights in teeny, tiny lettering at the bottom of the case? Lucasfilm might not be falsely advertising/marketing them as the original versions, but they're definitely cashing in on people's nostalgia by not calling it what it is.

Of course, the question now becomes "what exactly do you call it?"

For seven years there were only two versions of the OT. During that time, the revised version stopped being marketed as such. Then there was a third version, also not marketed as such. Then there was the blu-ray (a fourth version), with the OT once again marketed as IV, V, VI and nothing more.

Calling the various SE's the "original trilogy" might be accurate, but it's still very misleading.

EDIT:

Oh, boy. There's some confusion of what I meant by "bait-and-switch."

All I was talking about was how annoying it is that Disney's stayed absolutely quiet on the OOT front for two whole years and yet we're already seeing footage from Ep7 more than a year in advance of its release date.

It's like they're going "hey, look over there" with all this Ep7 hype in order to distract from the OOT issue. After all, why put it out now when they can just keep it in their back pocket for several years down the road?

Speaking of which, I'm really starting to wonder if Disney isn't just planning on waiting until 2020 to do any new releases of any versions of the movies. In other words, just letting Fox handle it until then. Of course, even after 2020 they'll have to deal with Fox owning SW77/ANH's distribution rights in perpetuity, but maybe they're still gonna wait until then in order to minimize whatever they have to pay / cede to Fox?

We know that all the Ep7-related books hit shelves in September. That would certainly be a good time to release the OOT on blu-ray.

May the 4th would actually be the perfect time to make such an announcement. Better yet, they could say something about it at the convention in April and then debut the OOT trailer on "Star Wars day." May 25th would be even more appropriate, but I'm guessing Disney wouldn't want to distract from Tomorrowland's theatrical release.

ETA:

CatBus, I was simply referring to Disney hyping Ep7 (we've now seen an actual trailer more than a year in advance of its release date) while staying completely quiet on the OOT (it's been more than two years since they bought Lucasfilm). They've actually stayed quiet on the OT altogether. I suspect you may be right about them continuing to sell the SE as the originals.

Something I could definitely see happening is a 3D theatrical re-release of the OT-SE in September, minted from that new 4k master RMW cooked up. They could follow this up with individual blu-rays (which would include the restored original versions) in early December.

darklordoftech said:

The 35mm version of AOTC doesn't have the line "to be angry is to be human". Do you think that the digital version adding this line was a good change or a bad change?

 As far as I know, the digital version didn't have that extra line either. It was added for the dvd.

It's worth noting that the "I'm a Jedi" segment of Anakin's reply was in one of those early teaser trailers for the movie. It was probably in an earlier edit before it was deleted for the theatrical release.

The question, indeed, is why George felt it was so important to have that moment put back into the movie.

Yup, it was the first nine minutes of the movie and they stuck it in front of all the digital imax screenings of the first Hobbit movie.

Anyway, apparently there will not be multiple versions of the trailer:

http://www.slashfilm.com/star-wars-7-trailer-online-friday/#more-266551

timdiggerm said:

Oh I've always wanted go to the Uptown - That's a good idea.

Maybe I'll see Hobbit 3 there, I dunno.

 They'll likely only be showing the 24p versions of the movie there. I'm a big proponent of seeing movies in the format (and, in this case, the framerate) that they were shot in. That's why I had no problem with the very first early Thursday night screening there of the new Apes movie being in 3D (although I wish they hadn't cropped the 1.85:1 image to fill the screen).

ratpack1961 said:

I can't bring myself to go watch a movie just to see a JJ Abrams trailer.  I did that in 1998 for Episode 1 directed by George Lucas.  It was fun, theater hopping across multiple theaters to see the trailer and then leaving without bothering with the movie (it was The Waterboy).

Also later that same day the Episode 1 teaser was on the internet and ready to download thanks to cam copies.  Anyways I know the new trailer is Star Wars but its just not the same for me.

 Also, they showed it on ET the night before, so if you knew about it in advance you could just set your vcr to record it. Sure, it was cropped a little to fill up more of the 4:3 TV frame just as most movie trailers and ads were in those days, but it was the highest quality you could watch it in short of seeing it in the theater.

Was the TPM teaser officially uploaded the same day it hit theaters with Meet Joe Black or did Lucasfilm wait until later? I was technologically illiterate back in those days and probably wasn't even aware of the concept of downloading movie trailers. The irony is that we had a 180 MHz Mac Performa (from '96) and a dial-up connection, so I probably could've QuickTime downloaded it if I knew what I was doing. It probably would've taken forever though, and I was busy with 8th grade. TV was much more "immediate."

I figured Tysons would be the theater for DC, it's probably the busiest one in the area. Technically it's in Virginia several miles from DC itself, but that just goes to show how Disney is thinking in terms of cities and not random locations.

It also makes sense to have it at a big mall location like that, since Disney is probably hoping to get a lot of the Black Friday crowd.

Have they specified when exactly the earliest showings with the trailer will be? I worked at the Lego store at Tysons off and on for several years (grew up just a couple miles from there) and had to work the Black Friday shift from midnight to 6 a.m. back in 2009. The mall is pretty busy from Thanksgiving night into the wee hours of the morning, but I don't know what kind of schedule the movie theater is on after 11 p.m. or so.

If they really keep a lid on this thing until the earliest screenings Friday morning it might make sense to just upload it right then.

The Jurassic World trailer is airing Thursday night and, I'm guessing, will be officially uploaded in order to avoid losing hits to people uploading it from their DVR's.

Unless Disney really truly doesn't care about what will surely be multiple people uploading cellphone recordings of the trailer starting Friday, they'll officially upload it as well. It kind of defies the point of only putting it in these 100 theaters if it's gonna be everywhere, though.