This has pretty much been confirmed to be boxset-only and no individual SKU's, right? Then I'd guess the next dip would be individual SKU's. We all remember when that happened on dvd....
Nope, AotC and RotS were filmed with 16:9 1080p cameras and then cropped to 2.35:1 (so the resolution of the original live-action footage would actually be 1920:817, just like any other 2.35:1 movie when viewed on blu-ray). I'm pretty sure that the effects were done at 2K though, so 2K would be the resolution of the final master if I'm not mistaken.
The '04 SE is a different story. It's currently stuck at 1080p. I would hope that if Lucas ever decides to release them theatrically he'll remaster them at 2K. A 2.35:1 movie from a 1080p master wouldn't look too good projected up on a movie theater screen.
..... and Empire's DP, Peter Suschitzky, is still working. He's shot every movie David Cronenberg has made for the past twenty-some-odd years.
Nerfherder said:
Great. Yeah, it's expensive... But not to a billionaire.
My thoughts exactly - the guy makes me sick!
Ridley Scott managed to get 5 cuts of his film onto one superb and AFFORDABLE blu-ray set (including the workprint - imagine Lucas doing that with Star Wars), and I'm sure he's not as loaded as Lucas...
Yeah, but that's the sad irony. Think about it. Warner Brothers (one of the EEEEEEVIIIIIIILLLLLLL big Hollywood studios Lucas was fighting against) actually needed to go all out with the blade runner set in order to get people to buy it. Lucas can throw the scraps from his table and do ten times the business.
Anyway, even if Lucas intended to include a remastered OOT in this blu-ray release he wouldn't be proudly announcing it, so I wouldn't take this as a sign it's definitely not happening. Frankly, I don't see how he thinks this will do comparable business to the '04 set with nothing but the '04 version in hi-def and deleted scenes. That's what the most ridiculous part of Lucas' whole "it would be so expensive" comment is....
YOU'D BE SELLING IT FOR MONEY!!!!
Yeah, it's still American Zoetrope. The only difference in terms of credits is the new Warner Bros logo at the beginning, which is funny since the old logo is still there right afterward.
Like I said, there's no copyright for anyone besides Warner Brothers. At worst, they signed a deal with Lucas not to include the original. At best, they simply didn't include it in the dvd/blu-ray because of the restoration and remastering required. Who knows.
Oh, wow, I thought from the title that you meant the entire thing! Would've really been amazing timing considering that recent screening in Baltimore.
captainsolo said:
There is no reason that they couldn't have included the original. It is simply because the original is withheld.
WB included both cuts of Dark City on the Blu ray.
What's curious about THX is that LFL didn't even exist at the time it was made. I sold off my dvd a few months ago, but I'm pretty sure the fine print doesn't say anything besides "copyright Warner Brothers." Makes sense, since they payed the 300 grand to get it made back in the day. What's not so clear is who footed the bill for the director's cut.
In any event, it's a pretty good bet that even if there wasn't some agreement with Lucas not to include the original version, WB did it to avoid his ire. I mean, it would've kinda been an awkward situation to have both cuts officially out there two whole years before Lucas even bothered to throw us the scraps of the GOUT.
I seriously wonder if there would've been any consequences for WB including the original version. It may simply have been an issue of disc space. I remember throwing those discs into my computer and they were both pretty crowded, so on dvd the inclusion of the original would've meant a three-disc set.
Bah, I'm probably over-thinking the whole thing. Like I said, it will be interesting to see if the blu-ray is single-layer or not.
No way in hell it's anything but the director's cut. Move along, move along.
Was the starfield redone for the '81 version (and that's why the constellation is circled in that photo?)?
Zombie, I was reading your article on the history of the SE and I have a question (or two):
I've always assumed that when Lowry said they were working at 1080 resolution that they were actually talking about what we all think of when we hear the words "1080p" and "HD," in other words a 16:9 image with a resolution of 1920:1080. Not all movies have a 16:9 aspect ratio. A couple hundred of those 1,080 lines have to be sacrificed in order to fit a scope film such as Star Wars. I'm assuming then that when Lowry said they were working at HD res on Star Wars, what they really meant was 1920:817 for the actual 2.35:1 image itself. Would this be correct?
Also, AOTC and ROTS were shot with 16:9 1080p cameras and cropped to 2.35:1, making the resolution 1920:817, right? But were the effects also rendered at such a low resolution (in theatrical exhibition terms) or were they done at 2K? If they were done at 2K, then I really wouldn't be surprised if Lucas redoes the '04 restoration. Remember, Gone with the Wind and Wizard of Oz were also restored at 1080 that very same year and for the very same purpose, only to be redone at a much higher resolution just a few years later.
Like I said in another post recently, I can at least understand WB not putting out the original version(s) of THX, but that's not how I look at Graffiti. It's had one of the biggest gross-to-budget ratios of all time. It's in the national film registry (just like Star Wars). It's just ironic how the only cgi tinkering done to the film is that one single shot.
I still say, given its relatively short running time, WB could've easily fit both cuts of THX on a dual-layer blu-ray. Actually, I'll be curious to see if next month's release ends up being a single-layer disc.
Has the theatrical cut even been released on home video at all? I know it's kinda pointless, since the longer cut released several years later is basically what Lucas wanted out there to begin with, but I'd still like to see what those handful of people saw in the art house theaters back in March of '71. Five whole minutes of running time is kind of a bigger difference than adding a few words to an opening crawl.
There were screenings of the director's cut the week the dvd came out back in '04. The screening at the Aero will more than likely be this version.
By the way, has the '04 master of the trilogy been digitally projected anywhere? I'm not talking about throwing in the dvd, I mean Lowry's HD master. There was that 30th anniversary screening of Empire earlier this year with Harrison Ford. Did they show the '97 or was it the '04?
Zombie, thank you so much for starting this site (and everything you've put up on it so far)! The article about the film materials is outstanding. Can we look forward to a similar one covering the other 50% of the movies, the sound mixes?
Ah, good point digitalfreak. We're only up to October in terms of announced blu-ray releases. Announcing the Indy bd's at c5 is totally within the realm of possibility. These lucasfilm titles never hit a new format on a significant anniversary anyway. It really does seem like every last catalog title is hitting blu-ray this year, LFL probably feels the pressure.
I just caught American Graffiti on one of the local tv stations and couldn't help but wonder when Universal will put that on the docket for blu-ray. THX is due next month from WB and the absence of the original version kinda feels like a nail in the coffin, though it doesn't have the cultural significance of Graffiti and Star Wars so that's at least understandable.
Something I randomly noticed after the end credits of Graffiti was a quick flash of the title shot, only it was letterboxed unlike how the movie had been presented. I think it was the revised version, don't know what it was randomly doing at the end of the broadcast transfer though. The title shot back at the beginning was - I think - the old version (hard to tell from the cropped-for-tv framing, but I don't remember clouds). Found a nice comparison right here actually.
The GOUT aliasing issue actually brings me to a question I've had about NTSC dvds in general:
Are NTSC dvds* 23.976 fps with 29.97 fps flags or are they 29.97? There's several reasons I'm confused on the issue, but the GOUT relates to it because I remember the talk back in '06 about how they IVTC'd the '93 laserdisc master in order to make the dvd progressive. Also, one of the online reviews said something along the lines of "although progressively encoded, the discs suffer from aliasing." So was the IVTC'ing to get it from 60i to 30p or was it to get from 30p to 24p? Someone please clear this whole issue up for me!
*just to avoid confusion, the examples I'm thinking of are new release titles made from 2k/4k masters.
Yup, I gave up going to tfn and posting in their forums a looooong time ago.
oh yeah, totally forgot about C5.
Y'know, 2012 would make more sense as a release date for the bd at this point. Indy was rumored to be hitting the format this year and .... still no announcement. A lot of big catalog titles are hitting this year, but not all of them (for example, still no word on Lawrence of Arabia). 2011 is Raiders' 30th and '12 is Star Wars 35th. If they actually end up remastering the OOT, we'd get it just in time for the mayan apocalypse.
Welp, kinda wish I'd gone to this as I'm only an hour away in northern VA. Didn't read all the details until just now. I'd seen the thread title but I'm just so used to reading so much non-news in regards to the OOT that I thought this was no exception.
Obviously I was wrong.
Still, it warms my heart to hear people having such a good time in that youtube clip. Seeing camcorder footage of an actual 35mm print projected in a theater ..... it's unreal.
Ugh, kinda feel like Bart and Lisa after the nerds pulled the tv's power plug just as Scratchy was finally gonna get Itchy. An opportunity like this is probably never gonna come around again.
But with me it'd be like preaching to the choir. Just thinking of all those people watching the OO Star Wars in the highest quality possible gives me a slight boost of hope for our cause!
Why does that illustration of Vader's Castle remind me of the Nostromo from Alien?
zombie84 said:
Yes, the 2004 release was done in 1080. It was scanned in 1080, new footage was integrated and it was color corrected in-house at Lucasfilm, then sent to Lowry for clean up.
I don't think Lucas will ever re-do it. Why would he? The prequels were done in 1080 as well (except Episode I). If ROTS had its effects done in 2k then they are higher resolution than the actual film. And either case, who gives a flying fuck, Lucas can dick around with his special editions until he dies for all I care. Re-doing it in 2k is almost pointless because there isn't much difference; 8K is becoming the new standard, but I guarantee you no Special Edition will ever be in 8K.
Also, why would going to the negs be counter-intuitive? Today you wouldn't re-conform the physical negative, you would do a DI, just like the 2004 special edition doesn't actually exist physically on the negative. If Lucasfilm ever got serious about the original film it would be easy to make a restoration from the negs.
re: the resolution,
hmmm, I guess if it's gonna look good enough up there on the big screen then it doesn't really matter if it's 1080 or 2K. This isn't the first time I've raised the question of what resolution the "masters" for AOTC and ROTS are. I'm similarly confused over Cameron's Avatar, since that was shot in 1080 but "mastered" at 2K. Maybe that's only done at the very end of the equation, i.e. the digital intermediate for the 35mm and digital prints. At the end of the day, the resolution of the visual effects doesn't matter so much as how convincing/photorealistic they are.
I think I can now stop being so hung up on this issue of resolution.
re: the negs,
That's not so much what worries me. What worries me is them not getting it 100% accurate to how the film was originally conformed. I guess what they could do is use a print from '77 for reference (the quality wouldn't matter) and then match up the high-quality negs to make sure everything's there.
It's just that for whatever reason I think it would be smarter to just take the best quality IP they have. Maybe I'm just thinking too much about that Blade Runner set and how they used IP's for the older versions and the o-neg for the final version.
zombie84 said:
My feeling is that Lucasfilm will do the least amount of work possible (i.e. just scan one source and say here it is, i.e. the IP or a print)...
Actually, I would prefer they do exactly that (scan an IP). It really doesn't make any sense at this point to try and reconstruct the original conformation of the o-neg, it really just seems counter-intuitive. It doesn't even seem like Lucas himself wants to hold onto the o-neg for purposes of his preferred version. He's got the Lowry master now and 1080p is good enough for him.
That's what makes it all the more frustrating - he doesn't even feel like preserving the version he does like at an optimal resolution. Even the prequels had their final effects done at 2K (unless imdb is lying).
Has it been 100% confirmed that even the new effects for the '04 version were only done at 1080? Were the changes done first and then the Lowry restoration, or was it the other way around and the changes were only done at 1080 (TPM Jabba, etc)?
I dunno, it really wouldn't surprise me if the '04 restoration is eventually redone at 2K. I would hope they're gonna do that if Lucas really does plan for the movies to be shown on the big screen again at any point in the future. I mean, how expensive could the '04 restoration have been? Surely it wasn't more than a drop in the bucket against the record breaking first day sales of the dvd set (128 million bucks or so).
Jeez, it seems like I'm always nothing but questions on these boards.
Actually, that American Dad episode pre-dates the GOUT debacle. Spooky, but true.