Fang Zei

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.

http://vimeo.com/5494280

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.

Bingowings said:

Most importantly Lucas should not have written it all and only directed maybe the first one if that.

ANH and ESB worked because they were team efforts pushed by his energy the rot set in with ROTJ and Lucas should have realised this and played to the strengths of what worked before.

 

This is the only "what might have been" aspect of the prequels that interests me. Frank Darabont should've been the PT's Lawrence Kasdan. Joe Johnston would've been perfect to direct one of the movies. Lucas writing and directing the whole thing himself was what prevented the PT from rivaling the OT and made it "just some prequels." Considering Lucas admitted he only had one movie's worth of material, yeah, he really should have known better than to do the whole thing on his own.

This is sorta stream-of-consciousness, but here's an idea that just came to me in terms of "what might have been" behind the scenes:

Episode I, directed by Steven Spielberg. He's known for working really well with child actors, so he'd be perfect for this (assuming Anakin would still be a kid in the script).

Episode II, directed by Joe Johnston. It's "the one with Boba Fett," the character Johnston himself designed back in '78. Also, there's the Anakin/Padme romance and I can't help but think of Johnston's Rocketeer.

Episode III, directed by Dave Fincher. There's probably a better-fitting director I could think of, but this is what's coming to my mind right now. He's an ILM and/or Lucas alum just like the other two directors and he's known for dark movies, making him a good choice for Anakin's turn to the dark side.

In any event, the original 1977 Star Wars should've remained the last George Lucas directed film.

CE3K is a different story. The differences between the three versions are (mostly) editorial, which made it easy for them to branch all three onto the same disc.

For Star Wars, each version would need its own disc to properly do it justice. We would be insanely lucky to get three-disc versions for each of the OT movies ("current" version, '97, original), but let's just say it did happen. The lowry-restored (unless LFL decides to have that job completely redone) version would be on the first disc. The '97 version would be a on a second disc, mastered from the '97 IP. Finally, the original version would be on the third disc, mastered from its IP.

I wouldn't hold my breath for anything more than a two-disc set (not that many of us care about the most recent version) with the original theatrical version we've all been clamoring for.

With Avatar I'm sure there must have been some theaters showing it in digital 2D in 1.78:1, since they might've had a digital projector installed but not real-d. There were 18 different versions made for U.S. theaters alone. The blu-ray might not replicate my own theatrical experience (twice in 1.78:1 real-d and then a third time in 2.35:1 real-d), but it's absolutely optimized for 2D hi-def presentation.

I joined and invited 40 of my friends.

I'll be honest. Most of the screenshots I've seen from the Fellowship blu-ray look pretty good to my eyes. But there are a few instances where DNR has been needlessly applied. The most egregious example I've seen is this:

http://forums.highdefdigest.com/1883031-post2.html

The hdtv broadcast clearly looks better in that comparison, and that's just unforgivable. If the uproar over this release doesn't get the studios to lay off the DNR once and for all, nothing will.

What's really laughable is how if you go to the menu on the official website there's a tab reading "restoration process" that says "coming soon" when you mouse over it.

http://lordoftherings.net/home.htm

Yeah, there definitely wasn't a restoration for this release, quite the opposite lol. Maybe they're talking about the updates of the extended editions Peter Jackson mentioned he's working on, because there isn't even anything to "restore" in the case of TTT and ROTK since they got complete DI's.

The next release of the SE needs a Final Cut treatment anyway. There are still some unfixed effects errors in the '04 version like the transparency issues brought up in the People vs. GL thread. The most glaring effects error of all is the second time the Death Star II blows up a ship and all of the ships in the background roll with the camera.

Oh, and the deleted scenes are gonna be on the blu-ray no question. They were conspicuously absent on the '04 release and we now know that people at LFL are going through the material. So deleted scenes are a given. I still don't think that's gonna be enough for LFL to get the numbers they're looking for without throwing in a remastered OOT.