Fang Zei

I hate the look of CPY as much as the next person, but that's how it looked in '99. I don't know what was keeping them from making a puppet that looked just like the one(s) in Empire and Jedi. Perhaps someone can fill me in on that.

Then we have cg Yoda....

On the one hand, it looks like the Empire/Jedi puppet, simply in cg form. Also, they added those rubbery bounces to his ears. The irony of it all! It's like the animators were paying more attention to the old puppet than the puppeteers were!

On the other hand, there's a big trade-off happening here. For all the animators' efforts to make Yoda more real, they only got farther and farther away from what made the Empire/Jedi Yoda "real." Freedom of movement and water in his eyes is not what made the old puppet real. It was that we were seeing something that was literally sharing the same stage, reflecting the same light as Mark Hamill, and that there was a real performance going on before our eyes.

Even Gollum can only have one of those two things said about him in the LOTR movies, which is still one more than can be said of cg Yoda.

The excuses were when Lucas was still in charge, and even back then I was convinced he'd get around to it eventually. Now that there's a larger corporate entity calling the shots, you can bet they'll get around to it sooner rather than later.

Yeah, it's more a matter of principle for me. I doubt I'd ever waste my time watching it either, but TPM's theatrical cut should be preserved if only because it was the second highest grossing film of the 1990's and the most anticipated film pretty much ever at the time. It's historically relevent. AotC is admittedly harder to make similar arguments for, but I'd still love to see the theatrical and Imax cuts of the movie preserved.

At this point, an OOT release isn't so much a matter of "if" but "when" and "how" and "what." How will they go about restoring it? Will they include the '97 version for completionism's sake? What about the prequels? Will they now be stuck in their revised form on blu-ray while the OOT remains available?? What about the "official" version of the OT? Will it be re-scanned or will the lowry master linger on even longer?

I'm betting we'll see completely new designs. There wasn't much (any?) overlap of vehicle designs between the OT and PT. Sure, they foreshadowed the OT vehicles in the designs of the PT, but we never blatantly saw an X-Wing or TIE fighter flying around. Even the big triangle-shaped attack ships that showed up in AotC weren't called "Star Destroyers" until RotS.

Within both trilogies, we see certain ships make recurring appearances. The N-1 fighters from TPM show up again in AotC. The LAAT gunships from AotC show up again in RotS. The Trade Federation cruisers show up in all three PT films. The OT is full of X-Wings, TIE fighters and Star Destroyers. We'll probably see designs in Ep7 that get used in the rest of the ST.

Funny, only after reading Jaitea's post did it occur to me how much the bridge of JJ's Enterprise resembles the bridge of a Mon Cal Star Cruiser.

Oh, and ditto on the whole "Star Destroyer" naming confusion thing. I never realized that until today, feel like a total idiot now.

So far we've got:

-Michael Kaplan as costume designer. He's not only worked with Abrams on Star Trek '09 and the sequel, he also did the costumes for Blade Runner!

-Chiang and McCaig coming back as concept designers.

-Williams doing the music, which should've always been a foregone conclusion.

We're still awaiting confirmation of who the production designer and the cinematographer will be.

No restoration project is that expensive. In the case of Star Wars, they certainly wouldn't need to worry about making their money back. Paramount spent more than a million dollars restoring the Godfather movies back in 2007.

I doubt George even cares about them being out there anymore. He even said at a convention a couple years ago that the original versions weren't being included in the blu-ray set because they were too expensive to restore .... or something.

Re: the whole 3D discussion,

I recall seeing a comparison between the 2D and 3D blu-rays of one of the Ice Age movies. Everything was in focus on the 3D version, while the 2D had depth of field.

This is a whole lot simpler when everything's being rendered in the computer to begin with. You simply do separate renders. But when we're talking about actual photography in the real world, it's a bit more complicated.

http://badassdigest.com/2013/08/02/new-star-wars-might-use-more-elegant-fx-for-a-more-civilized-age/

Several interesting tidbits:

The last paragraph pretty much confirms this will be shot exactly as the OT and TPM were, complete with actual film. Like I said in previous posts, I just hope Abrams can do with Lucas on Ep7 what he did with Spielberg on Super 8.

In the comments, someone mentions they were at some event with Phil Tippett and he mentioned he was working on some super secret project that in all likelihood is Ep7.

There's also a particularly interesting story someone heard from "a friend at lucasfilm" that kinda takes the idea of George having limitless control and flips it on its head. Worth reading.

What sucks about STID getting post-converted is that Abrams not only wanted to stick with film but also shoot some of the movie in IMAX. The studio let him do so, but they still mandated a post-conversion since they were spending so much on the movie and needed a guaranteed return on their investment. Because they were focusing their resources on the 3D, rendering the cgi in native stereo and so forth, they weren't able to render the IMAX shots at their full height. As a result, the handful of IMAX 15/70 2D prints have the IMAX shots matted down to 1.66:1, as opposed to the full 1.44 height of the frame. The Imax 15/70 3D prints of the movie apparently cropped the 1.66 image to fill up the entire screen for maximum immersion, losing information on all four sides of the o-neg.

Therein lies the propensity for tacking on the 3D. When so much of the movie is being done in the computer anyway, why not just convert the live-action stuff and be done with it? It's too bad there aren't more 15/70 theaters out there. I feel like that would've earned more respect for Abrams' intentions from the studio heads. But since his name isn't Christopher Nolan and the name of the franchise isn't Batman, I guess it was a no-brainer to make an extra four dollars per ticket from the thousands of 3D screens out there instead of settling for an extra five dollars a ticket from the only few hundred imax screens out there (which would then be an extra six dollars a ticket because it's imax 3D).

It would actually make perfect sense for Disney to open Avengers 2 and Ep7 at opposite ends of May. Last year, the big memorial day movie was Men in Black III. It'd been three weeks since The Avengers opened and it was the movie to finally knock it from the #1 spot at the weekend box office.

If Disney opens Star Wars on memorial day weekend (as damn well they should) and assuming Avengers 2 is once again the #1 movie for the three weekends preceding, they could end up enjoying six or seven weeks as king of the box office.

Oh, and on the whole "how will it be shot" debate, I think it's quite likely Abrams will shoot this thing in 2D. All four of his other movies were shot on film, in cinemascope, just as the OT was. Perhaps the "on film" part might change (they could go with Arri Alexa 4:3 cameras), although I'd think JJ would prefer actual film if it's still available next year. Disney will in all likelihood convert it to 3D to squeeze an extra hundred million out of the box office.

I don't see Hollywood's obsession with 3D blowing over anytime soon. If the vast majority of the movie-going public don't know whether or not the movie they're seeing was shot in 3D, the studios are just gonna keep on exploiting that ignorance. Even I have to admit the conversion tech has come a long way. My pre-screening of Man of Steel ended up being the 3D version (projected in real-d) and I found everything quite natural-looking. The only real drawback was the darkening caused by the polarizing filters. Also, while I didn't go see the full movie this way, the converted opening scene of JJ's own Star Trek Into Darkness (shown in front of Imax 3D screenings of The Hobbit) looked pretty natural as well.

Also, it's important to note that while converted 2D footage will never be as convincing as the actual native material, more and more of these tentpole releases are having their cgi rendered in stereo. So, there's at least something "truly" 3D that people are getting out of these converted movies.

Not destroyed, not by a long shot. The original negative is conformed to the special edition edit and may no longer be viable as the basis for a restoration unless the pieces that got altered/replaced were in fact put into storage back in '96. Even if they were, I'm pretty sure the optical shots had completely faded beyond repair by the mid-90's because of the unstable film-stock used to composite them (they were thrown out and re-composited digitally), so they would need a second-generation source anyway.

For this and other reasons, it might make more sense to simply use an interpositive or the separation masters and use that as a starting point for an OOT restoration. Even then, it would still take a little thing called "time" and some "effort," both of which would require something called "money" to be spent. That's all George really meant.

Forgot about that also. Never did get around to picking up the blu-ray.

Anyway, I was convinced George was eventually gonna get around to restoring the OOT someday. Didn't he make some comment at Celebration Europe about how it was still "too expensive" to restore the original versions? That right there pretty much sealed it for me: it was about money. All the Disney deal did was make it that much more of a sure thing, and pretty much guarantee it would happen sooner.

Yeah, except ..... no, at least I hope not. God, would that be dumb. You're probably right, though. I just think it's dumb for them to have built up all that continuity, to say all the while that it's canon, and even needing George's approval to kill off one of the major characters, only to then go and say it never happenned.

How well do you think such a move would go over with the fans? It's been the official continuation of the story for all these years. Wouldn't it be kind of a slap in the face for them to say "it never happenned, deal with it?"

Oh, and I just checked Wookieepedia. The Falcon is still intact in the EU. You're probably thinking of the cover art for Jedi Search, which depicted the ship as having crash-landed on the surface of a planet.

I thought the story was all ready to go back in November. He's the director, not the writer. I know the screenplay itself is a different matter, and it does take time to iron it out, but they've had the better part of a year now to work on it. I'm scratching my head as to why he would still need more time.

I'm wondering if the Holiday Special even still exists in any form at Lucasfilm or Fox. Wasn't the copy that's now out there in the wild made straight from a tv station's master tape of it??

Oh, wait, I forgot they used some shots from the cartoon in one of the web docs for AotC, the one focusing on Boba Fett.

Hal 9000 said:

I don't expect the new films to make anything of the existing EU, but hopefully they steer clear of openly dismissing it entirely. If the films skip 40 years and don't require knowledge of what happened in between, these still might be fun as occasional podcast replacements.

That's exactly how I've been hoping Ep7 will be handled. It would be pretty stupid at this point for them to do anything but this, especially considering the cover art they chose for Crucible.

It's not like it would be all that complicated. They just need to follow a few simple rules, such as setting it 40 years since Endor, keeping certain characters dead and maybe avoiding going to certain planets so they don't have to even bring up the Yuuzhan Vong thing.

I won't spoil anything, but if you step back and look at who's still alive there are some intriguing possibilities for where they could take the new movie.

Besides, if they come up with an original script with original characters they won't need to worry about what EU stuff to reference and what not to.

I've barely read any of the post-Jedi EU, but doesn't pretty much all of it become relevent again in the NJO???

Hal's situation is eerily similar to mine. I remember burning through the GoDV series as a kid, so fast that I even remember telling my mom and sister "it's called Queen of the Empire" several times before they went into town and stopped by the bookstore. Granted, they weren't the longest reads. Shadows of the Empire got read once it hit paperback at Crown Books. I seem to recall a paper add slipped into the packaging of the Episode I vhs as being the first time I heard about Rogue Planet. Pretty exciting to have Greg Bear - one of the big names of science fiction - writing a Star Wars novel. Reserved it at the library and finished it .... Just in time for one of my relatives to get it for me as a surprise birthday gift which I took to the store and exchanged for something else.

The library also provided The Approaching Storm two years later.

The number of unread Star Wars books I have is just embarassing. Even Splinter of the Mind's Eye is among them (the 90's paperback with the GL intro), purchased at the same used books place where I found a '76 paperback of Star Wars: From the Adventures of Luke Skywalker. Later, at a different used books store, I'd track down first edition pb's of Empire and Jedi as well. All four of those will definitely get read in the next two years.

I did finally read Heir to the Empire at some point, but never got around to finishing the trilogy (yup, books 2 and 3 are still sitting in that pile). It will always be considered "the most important" by many people simply because it was the first official Star Wars novel set after ROTJ, and it'd been eight long years. It's set five years post-Jedi, so books set in the intervening years (like Truce at Bakura, X-Wing, Courtship of Princess Leia and Tatooine Ghost) were written later.

Vector Prime was one of those books that was a "must read" because of the hype surrounding it. I read dark tide I: onslaught and then skipped ahead to Balance Point once it hit paperback, but that's when I stopped bothering. The internet made it so much easier to get the cliffs notes version of what was going on in the books.

I did end up burning through the clone wars novels after getting Labyrinth of Evil from the library and loving it. Of course, this was around the time of RotS' release, "the last Star Wars."

Crispin's Han Solo trilogy and Tatooine Ghost still sit unread down there, along with one-third priced copies of the Agents of Chaos books from B. Dalton's going out of business sale.

adywan said:

danny_boy said:

 

I actually have the Sony vw1000es 4K home cinema projector.

The Star War's blu's(both prequel and original) look absolutely phenomenal on it.

But.....

Due to the increased resolution offered by the projector....(all be it upscaled) the limitations of the analogue techniques used in making the OUT are far more pronounced.

In particular , scenes and shots which where optically composited exhibit noticibly softer looking images than 1st generation material.

4K(and to a lesser extent 2K) is ruthless in exposing these discrepencies.

By  their nature large portions of the original films featured such material.

A 4K master and a  4K Digital Cinema Package(DCP) may be too "harsh" on the OUT .

One of the reasons why Lucas opted for a 2K master.

Can't disagree with you more on this. They look terrible projected at 4k. TPM is actually worse than any of the OT, but AOTC & ROTS do look good. The problem you are seeing has nothing to do with the techniques used at the time of filming, but the way the transfer was mastered. The worse shots are the ones that weren't recomposited. Instead they just DVNR'd these shots to death. You can even see that they did this to some elements that they did recomposite. Plus, the scanning done in the 90's for these elements produced a lot softer results than a scan done today and, with the special edition, we're pretty much stuck with that. That's you problem right there as to why they look so soft. Add Lowry's so called clean up into the process and this is what you get.

Now, the person who invited me to the 4k viewing , also had something that came as a little surprise. He had a 4k scan of a 70mm reel from ESB (which is why he invited me really it turns out). It was unfaded, which came as a bit of a surprise. Now we compared this to the blu-ray and the 4k scan looked so much better, even if it was dirtier. Now this shouldn't have been the case, right? we did some side by side comparisons with some screenshots and there are effects shots that are smeared to hell on the blu-rays and have some very bad artefacts caused by this. I just wish that he had more than one reel so i could have done some more comparisons (and that he would have given me a copy of the scan). He also had a full scan of a tecnicolor ANH, which we only had time to watch bits. That looked amazing but it was noticeable which shots George deliberately downgraded.

So, redo all the compositing using todays tech and don't scrub the hell out of the elements and you will see a hell of a lot of difference.

Why did George only scan the OT in 2k? Because of the 2 PT films being shot in 1080p? Does he really want his older films looking better than he new ones with the tech that he was pushing so hard for? Probably not

But the blu-rays of the OT were such a piss poor job i can't see how anyone can say they look amazing, because they don't, especially when projected @4k.

Those films could look hell of a lot better than they do now if only someone who gives more of a crap about the quality than just getting the job done and maximize the profits.

That's why I can't help but wonder if the Lowry master will still be used for the inevitable 3D theatrical re-release. When Lucas randomly changed some shots for the blu-ray (the rock in front of artoo, the door to jabba's palace, etc), a lot of people assumed he was doing it for the eventual 3D version. Seemed a little weird (to me, anyways) for those changes to have made their way into the movies so early when the release dates for the 3D versions were still years away.

I can't really fathom a 1920x1080 master of the OT, a master which was only really ever meant to hold up to scrutiny on HD video, being used for a 3D conversion. Jim Ward called it a "digital negative," but this was back in 2004, an eternity ago in terms of tech. Wizard of Oz, Titanic and Jurassic Park all got new 4K masters before they were dimensionalized. Maybe it's a different situation with the OT-SE, since there are now many cgi shots and those may or may not still be sitting on the servers at ILM somewhere (I kinda doubt it). So, the filmed-out negative would be the only source for those shots, or they could redo them from scratch with modern cgi.

The irony is that the opticals could still look better thanks to better scanning technology, the benefit of being completely photochemical in nature. It occurred to me just now, as I was writing this, that fresh new scans of the vistavision negatives would benefit a 3D conversion immensely since you already have the individual components of those shots separated out.  

You could have a point, though. Maybe Lucas honestly doesn't want the old movies looking better than the new ones. It's a little crazy, though, that we've gotten not one, but two new scans of Raiders since 2003* and Star Wars is yet to be revisited. The SE itself still has a bunch of problems that weren't fixed in '04, like transparencies and movement errors (I say that having never watched the blu-rays, but from what adywan is saying they weren't fixed).

A truly updated version of the SE coupled with a 3D conversion could be mind-blowing for today's audiences, not that I'd ever pay money to go see it. The question, ultimately, is whether GL would be interested, since he'd surely have a say in such things.

*I wonder if this was more at the behest of Paramount and Spielberg than Lucasfilm, though. All three Indy movies got new 4K scans / 2K finishes circa 2008, and I even heard there were new 35mm prints made from these masters. Raiders got scanned yet again last year (6K scan, 4K finish, or something crazy like that) and got a short run in liemax. It's this newest 4K master that was used for the blu-ray of Raiders, while the 2008 2K masters of Temple and Crusade were used for their blu-ray transfers.

danny_boy said:

 

I actually have the Sony vw1000es 4K home cinema projector.

The Star War's blu's(both prequel and original) look absolutely phenomenal on it.

But.....

Due to the increased resolution offered by the projector....(all be it upscaled) the limitations of the analogue techniques used in making the OUT are far more pronounced.

In particular , scenes and shots which where optically composited exhibit noticibly softer looking images than 1st generation material.

4K(and to a lesser extent 2K) is ruthless in exposing these discrepencies.

By  their nature large portions of the original films featured such material.

A 4K master and a  4K Digital Cinema Package(DCP) may be too "harsh" on the OUT .

One of the reasons why Lucas opted for a 2K master.

And Lucas is not the only one.

Bob Gale said that Back To The Future(another film featuring optical compositing) was mastered from a 1st generation Interpositive for the Blu Ray release in 2010.

The original Superman films have also been scanned at 2K resolution from 1st generation interpositives.

Not because studios are trying to save a few bucks....but because 2k is good enough and scientific studies have confirmed this.

Blade Runner gets  alot of hype for having been restored in 4K  and is wrongly compared(by Zombie) to Star Wars.

But  Blade Runner's release package was downrezzed to 2K for distribution for the 25th anniversary in 2007.

It was never projected in native 4K

(i.e it was a 4K master downrezzed to a 2K DCP and then upscaled on a 1st Generation Sony 4K projector----which few cinemas had back in 2007)

It is also worth noting that the distinction between 2K digital cinema projection and Blu ray is not that great.

2K projection is 1080 vertical X 2048 horizontal

Blu ray is 1080 vertical X 1920 horizontal

A miniscule 6 % difference.

Th only real differences are not in resolution......but in compression.

The average DCP is estimated to be 250gb....blu ray maxes out at a compressed 50gb

2K projection also has slightly higher colour bit depths.

Just to make things more convoluted....an uncompressed 2K file maybe better looking than a compressed 4k file.

So resolution is not the only factor in delivering a good all round product.

 

 

 

 

 

 

I remember you bringing up the Blade Runner thing before. Are you sure there was no true 4K projection of The Final Cut? I saw it opening night at the Ziegfeld and it looked pretty impressive up on that bigass screen. I just assumed it was true 4K. Are you sure you're not jumping to conclusions based on that recent article at AVS Forum about how After Earth was mastered at 4K but only shown at 2K due to the lack of "true" 4K capabilities in many theaters???

ETA:

That's a good point about 2K versus 1080p. Actual 2K cinema projection can look phenomenal when projected on to a 30-40' screen. The independent movie theater only three blocks from where I live just upgraded to a Christie 2K projector. Star Trek Into Darkness was the first movie they showed on it and it looked way better than a blu-ray could ever hope to look. Yes, the pixel count isn't that different, but you're talking about the DCI color space vs rec. 709, 4:4:4 color sampling instead of 4:2:0, and intraframe compression instead of interframe compression. You're essentially seeing 24 high-quality jpegs per second.

Fair enough. I just thought I'd point out how crazy it is that a movie with cgi from 1996/97 is playing as part of an 80's series.

Meanwhile, they're playing a 70mm print of Lifeforce this weekend, shot by Jedi's cinematographer Alan Hume.

Every summer, the AFI Silver here in DC has a "Totally Awesome" 80's series. The other week, they showed a '97 SE print of ROTJ (they showed all three SE's back in '05 to coincide with ROTS being in theaters):

http://afi.com/silver/films/2013/p62/greatfilmsofthe80s.aspx#starw

They make no mention in the description of this being the 1997 version, with cgi that wasn't even possible back in '83. They do at least say 1983/1997 for the year, the correct 135-minute SE running time, and list McCallum as one of the producers alongside Kazanjian.

It's worth noting that they're actually showing Raiders in September after planning it for last year's series and then having to cancel it. It says it's an actual print too, not a DCP.

http://afi.com/silver/films/2013/p62/greatfilmsofthe80s.aspx#raide

I could've sworn I posted in this thread, but I guess not.

Anyway, in answer to the original post, I would think they'd be the same version as the dvd. I mean, the AOTC vhs was released day and date with the dvd, so it wouldn't have made much sense for THX to make two different digital masters with editorial differences. I would think they'd make a digital master first, and then make the dvd and the vhs from that master.

Also, there seems to be confusion in regards to the various versions of AOTC:

When the movie was released in theaters, most movie theaters still used film projectors. As such, the movie had to be locked no later than two weeks before its release, in order to give time to make the thousands of prints necessary and distribute them to the exhibitors.

The digital version was a different story. A hundred or so theaters in the U.S. had a digital projector by the time AOTC was released. The digital version of AOTC wouldn't need the lead time necessary for the 35mm prints. The filmmakers would be able to keep working on the film a little longer and, as a result, the people who saw the digital version would see a different version of the movie.

As fate would have it, the only theater in Virginia showing AOTC digitally was actually the closest one to me (the National Amusements Multiplex Cinemas in Merrifield, which has since closed). I saw an actual print of the movie in downtown DC on opening day, but I never got around to seeing AOTC digitally in Merrifield before they switched it out for Scooby Doo. As such, I cannot say this with absolute metaphysical certitude, but I'm pretty sure the only difference between the two versions is Padme holding Anakin's hand at the end. I'm pretty sure the extra bit of dialogue right after Anakin's confession to Padme about the Tuskens wasn't added until home video (dvdactive's article erroneously claims it was in the digital version).

Like I said, I slacked on going to see the digital version before Scooby Doo took its place, so I can't be a hundred percent sure of all this. But I don't recall reading online during the summer of '02 about any other difference aside from the hand-holding.

....Well, there was someone I remember posting online about how they could've sworn there were two different edits in theaters of that first part of the arena battle (when the alien monsters are first unleashed), specifically the ordering of shots when Obi-Wan and Anakin are talking to each other, "What about Padme?" "She seems to be on top of things," etc.

I also remember reading on the official website - and I think this was in regards to the dvd version - about how there were apparently 80 or so little differences sprinkled throughout the movie.

ETA:

SKot, here's the full page for the image that was linked to:

http://www.dvdactive.com/editorial/articles/star-wars-the-changes-part-four.html?post_id=79223&action=report

The writer doesn't mention where the screencaps for the other version of AOTC are sourced from, but comparison of that obi-wan speeder shot shows that it's spanning too wide of an area for it to be from a pan and scan vhs transfer (and I'm pretty sure there was no letterbox vhs transfer of AotC, right?). This leads me to believe it's from a bootleg of the 35mm version.