An entire bonus disc for each individual film?
Maybe they’re including the extras from the 2011 bonus discs, just broken up among the individual movies?
Notice I’m trying real hard not to get my hopes up about you know what.
If that $329 price is in Canadian dollars, the current exchange rate brings it to $249 American, or just under $28 per film.
THAT’S TOO MUCH MONEY FOR THAT
EDIT: did the math and it works out to ~$36/movie. Absolutely insane. Short of the OOT, i can’t begin to conceive what kind of special features it would need to have to justify that price.
I’ve got news for you - the Marvel Best Buy exclusive set comes with none. It’s only the 4k discs and it was $550. It’s sold out.
It includes regular 1080p blu-ray copies and there was a bonus disc exclusive to the collection, but yeah, it was still almost 24 dollars per film.
Is that price for the Skywalker set in Canadian dollars or US?
Let’s put it this way.
When George was in charge, he never restored the OOT because he didn’t want to pay for it and because it contradicted his vision.
If Disney doesn’t do it, it’s going to be first and foremost because they don’t want to pay for it and don’t see themselves getting a good ROI. Any reasons having to do with George’s wishes will be a distant second.
https://twitter.com/nowthisnews/status/1204960815821946880?s=21
JJ is on our sides
That’s good to hear, and I respect him for being open about his views in this matter, but he sadly also confirms the OOT will not be released for reasons even he doesn’t understand.
As far as he knows.
This is pretty major imo. We have the director of 2/3 of the ST saying on camera in a sit-down interview that he doesn’t understand why the unaltered versions haven’t been restored to modern quality. The most we’d gotten from him prior was casually mentioning he’d shown his kids the original versions in a written interview several years ago (whether this was the GOUT or Harmy is unclear).
Rian hasn’t brought up the subject at all to my knowledge since he was hired by LFL back in 2014, although he did jokingly refer to the SE as “the cartoon version” on twitter the week the bd’s came out back in 2011.
I think, it goes a little bit beyond, as far as he knows. He literally states, he asked about the OOT, and was told a release wasn’t possible. So, I think it’s almost certain the OOT will not be included in the physical release of the 4K versions next year. In this respect it’s also important to note, that the new 4K master was done under the supervision of Lucas before the sale of LFM, making it even less likely the OOT will be restored, as this will be an archive release, not a new restoration by Disney. The release of the OOT is becoming less likely with every year that passes, and with physical media becoming extinct, next year will likely be the last opportunity for such a release, as the SE will forever remain the available versions on streaming services. I just don’t see it happening next year, and so I don’t see it happening at all, sadly.
Those are all valid points, but I’d say the physical 4k release will sell in significantly higher numbers if an unaltered restoration is included, especially since anyone with a D+ subscription can now stream the 4k hdr SE anytime they’d like.
https://twitter.com/nowthisnews/status/1204960815821946880?s=21
JJ is on our sides
That’s good to hear, and I respect him for being open about his views in this matter, but he sadly also confirms the OOT will not be released for reasons even he doesn’t understand.
As far as he knows.
This is pretty major imo. We have the director of 2/3 of the ST saying on camera in a sit-down interview that he doesn’t understand why the unaltered versions haven’t been restored to modern quality. The most we’d gotten from him prior was casually mentioning he’d shown his kids the original versions in a written interview several years ago (whether this was the GOUT or Harmy is unclear).
Rian hasn’t brought up the subject at all to my knowledge since he was hired by LFL back in 2014, although he did jokingly refer to the SE as “the cartoon version” on twitter the week the bd’s came out back in 2011.
I’m going to assume any DCP’s are still HD Branch. The use of it for the TROS teaser makes me wonder if Disney can tell the difference.
They only used that for the D23 preview, which only went up online AFAIK and was never sent out to theaters.
It definitely went out to theaters. It played before my IMAX screening of Ad Astra.
That’s curious.
Did it have an MPAA card at the front? Are you sure it wasn’t just part of the ads before the actual trailers?
Even if I’m wrong and that trailer got sent out as an actual trailer, I’d still chalk the use of the old master up to the fact that this was still prior to the launch of D+, for which we can now clearly see they were saving the new master. Since the 2004/2011 was already sitting on the shelf the trailer people just sourced it from that.
Even if they knew the newer master was pretty much finished and about to make its debut, we forget that the first trailer for RotS that went out to theaters back in late ‘04 used footage from the Lowry master. If it’s good enough to get printed to 35mm, it’s good enough for a trailer today in 2019.
I’m going to assume any DCP’s are still HD Branch. The use of it for the TROS teaser makes me wonder if Disney can tell the difference.
They only used that for the D23 preview, which only went up online AFAIK and was never sent out to theaters.
I’d be very surprised if they were still using the outdated 1.9k 2004 OT master yet again for the in-theater marathons when there’s now a true 4k cinema master that people can stream from their couch in 3.8k.
Didn’t one of the earlier drafts of the original Star Wars’ script have a closing crawl teasing the setup for the sequel?
I also wonder how much people’s aversion to spoilers will play into TRoS’ box office. A significant percentage of the opening weekend audience will likely be there just so they won’t have to worry about any surprises getting ruined for them via social media posts.
So, have only some of the ‘04/‘11 changes been redone but others pulled from the same source? Off the top of my head, so far we’ve spotted the aurebesh tractor beam readout on the Death Star in ANH and Anakin’s eyebrows in RotJ as having been redone.
What about the blinking Ewoks? R2 spazzing out during the Endor battle? The first shot in the approach to Mos Eisley (which now has ‘97 and ‘04 changes)?
Will the forthcoming “filmmaker mode” standard apply to colors/brightness/contrast or just to other picture settings like the soap opera effect?
It will apply to everything. Apparently the main push behind building in a “filmmaker mode” was making sure the soap opera effect was turned off, but otherwise this seems to be pretty much the same as the movie/cinema mode pretty much all hdtv’s already have.
It’s also important to note, as discussed upthread, that even this new “filmmaker mode” won’t be the same thing as a proper calibration. Hopefully it’ll mean every tv with it built in will be as close as possible to calibrated “out of the box” at the push of a button, but the only way to know for sure that all your settings are exactly where they should be is by breaking out the scopes, taking measurements, and adjusting everything accordingly.
I checked quickly and it looked like HD footage from the blu-ray to me. I didn’t take a close look but the shots that I saw of original footage looked pretty shitty to me, definitely not HD.
That unaltered shot of the Falcon and the last remaining fighters flying away from the Death Star right before it blows up and the unaltered Death Star explosion are still there. I don’t remember if the SE shots earlier in the doc are replacing unaltered shots or if those were already SE.
HDTVTest evaluates the OT and ST in HDR on Disney+
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VGZmMjPJiAk
Vincent of HDTVTest is a respected reviewer and display calibrator. He doesn’t get into color grading or anything like that, but it’s an interesting look into whether the OT on Disney+ is true HDR or just some contrast tweaks (spoiler: it’s not real HDR).
I wonder how much of the issue is “fake HDR.” They may have simply intentionally graded it that way, giving it a restrained HDR pass. It may also be that there isn’t a whole lot of dynamic range to squeeze out of the camera negatives at this point, if there ever was to begin with.
But if I had to guess, I’d say that even if they could have gotten more HDR “pop” they still chose not to, if only so that the OT would still recognizably look like the OT. For all the time they’ve spent keeping the OOT buried, Lucasfilm sure seems to be striving for authenticity as far as the color and contrast goes.
Fang Zei said:
What about the theatrical prequels and the 120 minute imax cut of AotC?That AOTC IMAX cut (Burtt edited it himself, correct?) is like the holy grail. Many have tried to replicate it, so far as I can tell none have figured out how to get it exactly right. I’d love to see it again - I only saw it the once, almost 20 years ago now, and would love to check it out again.
I imagine it will probably be lost to history. Even if the digital imax master from before they printed it out to 70mm still exists somewhere, it may never see the light of day.
I still have my faintest of faint “recreated Original Versions as a bonus feature on the box set” hopes holding on.
Essentially - a Disney-created “despecialized edition.”
To me that’s about the only way the boxset would become a “must buy” for anyone. If there’s nothing exclusive, like the theatrical versions, then most people will be fine just having them to stream on D+.
This way, they can use 4K Star Wars to drive up D+ membership, and still have something left to help sell the boxset next year.
To me it feels inevitable, the only question is how comprehensive they get.
For example, do they include the ‘97 SE as well? What about the theatrical prequels and the 120 minute imax cut of AotC? Do the earlier versions get relegated to only 1080p sdr on disc while Maclunkey gets to shine in 4k HDR?
But yeah, considering there’s going to be a huge overlap between D+ subscribers and those who were planning on buying the 4k discs, I don’t know how Disney plans on selling them in big numbers without including something “truly special.”
I don’t have a nice professionally calibrated display to watch the 19SE on, so take this with a grain of salt, but is anyone else noticing a jarring color difference between the cg and model shots during battle of Yavin or is it just me? I remember it looking more consistent in ‘97 and 04/11 (they just kinda sucked all the color out for the latter)
The model shots were all re-comp’d digitally in ‘97 IIRC, so they should be newer pieces of o-neg just like the cg shots and therefore not degraded color-wise like the older parts of the o-neg. Maybe what we’re seeing is this modern scan in 16-bit color bump up against the limitations of whatever was rendered out in ‘97? Bill Hunt did mention in his quick take that the ‘97 cg shots now look all the more jarringly dated in the ‘19 version, so maybe this is part of what he was talking about.
More evidence that this version use the 1997 special edition as its base, with subsequent changes being re-created fresh.
Which was always going to be the case since the o-neg itself was conformed to the SE edit of the movie back in ‘97.
Btw, I guess this means the initial scan (before they redid the ‘04 and ‘11 changes) was/is the 1997 version exactly as it existed back then. I’m not going to hold my breath, but this does at least mean they’ve now got that version scanned in at the highest possible quality, not to mention roughly 80% of the unaltered OOT camera negative as well.
IIRC, there was a rumor several years ago that every last piece of film in Lucasfilm’s vaults were being scanned in and catalogued. Perhaps this 19SE is just the tip of the iceberg.
Re: the 19SE OT looking duller colorwise compared to the 2004 master, there’s a couple things to consider here. For one thing, we’ve gotten so used to the ‘04 look that it seems jarring.
The other thing to consider is the OT’s place in the context of the I-IX saga and how we go from the colorful prequels in the waning days of the Old Republic to the sterile, totalitarian reign of the Empire in the OT. The ST seems more “naturalistic” in its look to me than either of the other trilogies.
Obviously this puts aside how the OT actually looked in its original run and in ‘97, but the consensus seems to be that the new master looks much closer to the original colors than the ‘04 did anyway. The prequels, meanwhile, also seem closer to their theatrical colors than they did in 2011.
Could the desaturated look be a result of the streaming compression?>
No, compression or resolution won’t affect saturation.
But HDR vs SDR colorspace and brightness will make a difference.
SDR has a smaller colorspace, so it’s less saturated by definition.
Seeing the screenshot comparisons between the 19SE and the 04/11 reminds me in a big way of the differences between the old blu-ray of The Matrix (which, it’s worth noting, would’ve also been from an hd master created in 2004 just like the OT blu-ray) and the remastered-in-4k blu-ray included with the UHD release.
Btw, I noticed Clive Revill is still listed in the end credits of the new 4k version of ESB as the voice of the Emperor.
Could the desaturated look be a result of the streaming compression? Vudu undoubtedly uses a higher bitrate than Disney+, closer to what you’d be seeing on an actual blu-ray. A proper screenshot comparison will tell the story.
Also, since no one’s brought it up yet, presumably the new 4k masters are what will be used from now on for the dcp’s that get sent out to theaters?
Ewok eyes
Yes, everything post-1997 has been redone. I’m guessing the 1997 scenes have their pre-2004 compositing too? Not sure. (were 97SE shots recomp’ed in 2004 or am I remembering that wrong?)
The recomps were done in ‘97 from what I remember.
EDIT: nevermind, just realized I might’ve read your question wrong. What exactly do you mean by “recomping the 97SE shots”?
It’s all guesswork, but TPM got a new scan for the BD, so it’d be odd if they did another new scan a year later for it.
There’s nothing to scan. The movie was essentially “rebuilt” directly from the digital filmout tapes in 2011 (they were still readable after more than a decade) in preparation for the blu-ray and the 3D version. That rebuilt master is what they’ll be going back to from now on to make any new transfers of the film.
If anyone here went to go see the 3D release of The Phantom Menace, please tell me what the master and color grading looked like. Did it look like the 2011 Blu-ray, or this new Disney+ version?
I didn’t see the 3d release. But skimming through the movies the Prequels are just upscaled Blu-ray. I.e. nasty teal shift in Aotc.
No, they are not. The color grading is markedly different, more muted like the for the OT, and obviously HDR. I also don’t see any evidence of a blanket teal shift. There are plenty of blue skies, and white clouds in AOTC.
Ah, I’ve only streamed the HD version on disney plus.
The hd version doesn’t look like the blu-rays either, though. Whether you’re watching it in hdr or sdr, the new D+ transfers look like they’ve been made “fresh from the source” and not recycled from the hd masters prepared back in 2011 for the blu’s. I was streaming the beginning of AotC yesterday on D+ in regular hd and the colors looked noticeably closer to how I remember it looking in the theater and on dvd, without the teal cast of the bd.