Fang Zei

captainsolo, that's exactly why I would hope that by the time LFL gets around to the 3D theatrical re-release in 2015 that they actually bother to do a new 4K scan. This will be an ancient, 11-year-old 1080p master (hell, it's ancient today in 2011!) and by then it will have been about time for them to do a new scan anyway. Even with movies that were only shot in 1080p, I'm pretty sure the effects and everything are rendered in 2K (so the live-action stuff is upscaled slightly, I'm pretty sure Clones and Sith were done this way, the scope version of Avatar also). Not that I could care any less, I'm not giving Lucas my money until he gives us the originals. I wouldn't pay to see the movies in post-converted 3D even if they were from the original versions!!!

This is why I think it is ultimately about money and not about vision to George. Why else would he have even bothered to put out the GOUT instead of nothing at all? That right there is proof to me that it's all about money because the guy didn't even want to spend money to remaster the thing, he just wanted to make money off of it.

I'm not subscribed so I can't read the whole thing. Six years could mean from 2005, but they didn't actually start airing it until 2008, so it could also mean 2014.

Ugh, what the hell ever happened to George? It's like in the mid-90's his whole philosophy of film-making suddenly changed.

"Hey, George, how about we get three great directors, one for each of the prequels???"

"Nah, I'll just fill the original trilogy with cgi and direct the prequels myself. That way, they'll look better by comparison."

Let's nevermind the fact that the guy hadn't directed anything since 1977. Seriously, when you're in charge of a billion dollar corporation, it's pretty hard to be an artist at the same time. I just don't think you can have it both ways.

Episode I was GL's midlife crisis.

Which makes me wonder when the Spike deal expires, as those are also still the 2004 versions.

I literally just read all that text out loud to myself (and had a blast doing it). Has that photo of Leia been seen anywhere else? It doesn't look familiar to me.

George Lucas makes it pretty damn hard to be a Star Wars fan these days.

Gaffer Tape, I wholeheartedly agree with you concerning the theatrical versions of the prequels. Like I said in another post, it would be nice if GL showed some goodwill towards the fans by throwing in the theatrical cut of TPM with the blu-ray 3D package next year.

I should clarify for everyone on these forums that Lowry's 2004 restorations were only done at 1920:1080 (a.k.a. "Full HD"), not 2K. I know this because there was an audio recording of a press conference that I downloaded from TF.N back in '04 and someone asked the Lowry guys what resolution they were working at. They answered "1920:1080" and the journalist went "oh, so, 2K?" and the Lowry guy specified "Uhhhh, no, 1920:1080 HD."

re: The DNR on TPM.

You've gotta be kidding me if that's how the actual blu-ray looks. That's Predator: Ultimate Hunter Edition levels of bad DNR.

Poor George.

Star Wars became the biggest thing ever and he just couldn't handle it.

The mother of all vfx errors to me, and something I'm assuming they still haven't fixed for the blu-ray (unless they have???), is during the Battle of Endor.

When the Death Star II fires off its superlaser for the second time, we cut to it blowing up a ship as rebel fighters fly past the camera. The camera is rolling clockwise (or counterclockwise, I don't remember) relative to the forest moon below.

The only problem is that the fleet of big ships in the background rolls in unison with the camera!!!

Whoops!

This was obviously something they forgot to think about back in '83 when they were doing all of that complicated optical compositing.

skyjedi2005 said:

"He also tried to get Ron Howard to direct the Phantom Menace"

Is this true???!!! First I've heard of this!

The subject of why other people didn't direct the prequels is the one I'm most fascinated by, and thusfar I've come across next to zero info regarding it. I don't remember even Zombie's book having much on it.

In the Leonard Maltin interviews on the '95 vhs, Lucas mentions "I might direct the first one." Where did you hear about Ron Howard???!!! Yeah, obviously he and Lucas go all the way back to Graffiti and then worked together again on Willow, so I'm not exactly surprised to find this out. I would still love to know where you heard/read about this, though.

Okay, this thread exploded over the last couple days. I've simply skimmed over each page, I'm not gonna read each and every post on the last 15 pages.

My reactions:

-Jabba's Door - first off, why did they add this? Secondly, it looks terrible.

-The blinking eyes - so now they've actually created a continuity problem as the ewoks don't blink in the ewok movies.

-Han's de-freezing: You have got to be kidding me! Just like Jabba's new door, it looks terrible. What was the rationale for this anyway? It's almost as if Lucas is ashamed of the early 80's optical effects that don't gel with the look of the prequels, so he's just slathering it in bad photoshop.

-Obi-Wan's ridiculous howl: I'm not gonna lie, that literally made me laugh. Freakin' hilarious!!!

I'm sure there are more "surprises" yet to surface so I'll just leave my comments at that for now.

Now that I think about it, I guess I was kinda preaching to the choir with this thread.

Anyway, the reason I chose those dates is that those are the dates for the 3D conversions of ANH, ESB and ROTJ, respectively.

.... until 2015/16/17 for ultimate editions of Star Wars, Empire and Jedi, respectively? Because at this point, that's the absolute earliest chance I think we have of seeing the OOT properly restored.

It would be nice if GL threw in a theatrical TPM with its blu-ray 3D package next year, to hold us over.

zombie84 said:

Pagz: In late 2003, Lucasfilm did an HD telecine of the films, which they colour-corrected, added new effects to and had cleaned by Lowry. The 2004 DVD set was a standard-def downconversion of that. The HD version was always intended to eventually become the highest-quality master (i.e. for blu ray), but it seems they did attempt to fix a couple issues people complained about by taking that master and tweaking it ever so slightly.

Someone mentioned before--these are the masters being used for the 3D conversion. I wonder therefore if the extra brightness boost is not actually an attempt to fix anything but merely compensating for the dulling quality of the polarized 3D glasses. Michael Bay did this already with TF3--he boosted the brightness of the master so that when audiences saw it in 3D it would have the same luminance as a regular 2D print. I mean, even TPM is way brighter, slightly unnaturally so in some shots, and it never had any of the dullness and black crushing issues of the OT.

re: the fixes

This makes me wonder if they'll bother to do a fresh scan for the 3D conversion in 2015-17. I mean, if they're inserting fixes like the wampa arm into the 1080p scan from 2004, then maybe Mr. Ward really wasn't kidding when he called this a "digital negative that we can use for theatrical if we choose to do so." Granted, they already did this in 2004 with the new Jabba model, but still....

re: your second paragraph

Zombie, perhaps you're overthinking things a bit? They did a new 2K scan of TPM, and that was probably for two reasons. 1) It needed a new scan anyway since the old transfer looks pretty terrible by today's standards and 2) They needed a nice cinema-resolution scan for the 3D conversion.

But I don't see why any 3D-related tweaks such as brightness boosting would be on the blu-ray transfer since, well, this is 2D.

The suppression of the OOT has got to be the biggest of all elephants in the room when it comes to the subject of the availability of motion pictures on home video.

I am truly convinced that the only reason Lucas continues to withhold it is money. He'll make that much more in the long run, he already has (see: GOUT).

I would be very surprised if the deleted scenes weren't 1080p. Didn't LFL say in so many words way back when (I'm talking at least a year ago) that they were going through the vault cataloging everything????

Oh, wait. These are the same people who said in 2006 that they "returned to the archives" to bring us what ended up being laserdisc masters of the OOT.

Several in this thread have pretty much nailed what's so bothersome about the prequels.

Lucas filled the original films with cgi so that when he made the prequels they would visually blend better with the OT, instead of leaving the originals alone and trying his best to make the prequels fit seamlessly with the OT. Moreover, it's a direct result of that philosophy that the OOT is now buried.

That said, I would love to see the theatrical prequels nicely preserved. Hell, I would think the new 2K scan of TPM could be the basis for such a preservation. Yeah, it's not a particularly good movie, but it was the second highest grossing movie of the 90's (here in the States, anyways). Likewise, the '97 SE of Star Wars should be preserved if for no other reason than its box office significance (still the highest grossing movie to open in January here in the States, AFAIK).

Just under a month until these street.

I bet screenshots will start surfacing any day now.

Seriously, when you look at how Apocalypse Now and Close Encounters of the Third Kind have their original versions nicely preserved for the foreseeable future of home video technology, it almost makes you nostalgic for 1992....

I wouldn't read too much into the exact coloration of things in that trailer, folks. Wait until actual screenshots from the discs are out there.

I know this thread's a month old, but the link in the "save star wars dot com" thread brought it to my attention.

Yeah, I was hoping those early screenshots posted back in June would turn out to be erroneous, but that's actually what the final discs look like.

Personally, I'm waiting until they release competent transfers of both versions. The theatrical blu-rays were of such low quality, and people are so misinformed that they largely passed it off as "the way they've always looked."

As for the color-timing issues on the new FOTR EE blu-ray, well, there are so many factors to consider that I won't go into. What I will say is that the "dissolve to white" after Arwen saves Frodo from the Nazgul is now a "dissolve to a heavily green-tinted white." There's a green tint over the entire running time of the new transfer actually. It's pretty serious evidence that a mistake was made at some point in the pipeline.

Even if they don't do a replacement program, I would hope they fix it by the time the "ultimate" blu-ray comes out (unless, as we've discussed, this really is how PJ and Andrew Lesnie wanted it to look /doubtful).

Six weeks (or so) until this officially streets. I wonder when we'll start seeing screenshots. I'm curious how the new TPM transfer looks.

Back when Avatar came out, 11.00 was the standard price at my theater and real-d was 14.00. The fake-MAX screen there opened several months later (March of 2010 for Alice in Wonderland). By the time Tron: Legacy hit (exactly 1 year after Avatar), the standard price had creeped up to 11.50 and if I remember correctly real-d was 15.50, IMAX 16.50 and IMAX-3D was 17.50.

skyjedi2005 said:

Lucas cannot be bothered with having a branching feature, or you could watch Phantom Menace in its theatrical version and they would include the theatrical audio as heard on the laserdisc.

Not my favorite film of all time however the theatrical cut is so much better than the DVD version which lags.

The only way i can watch the theater version is on laserdisc with burnt in subtitles and dubious picture quality for a late in the formats life Laserdisc release.

I want a blu-ray of the theatrical cut of TPM almost as much as I want blu-rays of the OOT!