y'know something? All of my bitching and complaining about the his treatment of the OOT aside, there's something Lucas said back in '99 (I think it was the 60 minutes interview) and also something that a good friend of mine said about Lucas making the prequels that rings true. In that interview he was asked "why have you decided to keep making these movies?" and he simply answered "because I have to." What my friend said (and I think this was pretty soon - maybe only a few months - after ROTS came out) is that "Lucas didn't have to make more Star Wars movies but he did anyway." So I think what Lucas really meant was that no one was forcing him into it but him.
Now, getting back to my bitching and complaining about the OOT ....
Funny, so far the only way I've invested in either format is by getting the blu-ray disc of Blade Runner. I don't even have an HDTV! It's just that I already have the old dvd and the 2006 remaster, which I picked up knowing full well that it would likely be included in the '07 set. When the final cut was released I took the bus up to NY to see it on opening night and then saw it twice more when it opened in DC. Several factors led to me getting it on bd. The biggest is probably that the documentaries would all be on regular dvd's that I could, y'know, actually watch. Those were the only things in the set I was really dying to see anyway since I've already seen the original version (letterboxed on that scifi channel broadcast back in June of 2000, wish I'd taped it!) and of course the 1992 and 2007 versions. Also, between those three versions I kinda feel like I've already seen the international version, so I'm not really dying to watch that either. I can wait to watch the workprint. I didn't find out about discs 2 and 4 being regular dvd's until I read a review of the set, and then WB announced their plan for blu-ray exclusivity. I'd already been hoping for various reasons that it would be the format they'd go with anyway. That, coupled with the fact that I'd have to shell out for the briefcase just to get all five discs on regular dvd, plus the fact that I already have both of the old releases made it a no brainer to get it on either hddvd or blu-ray and not regular dvd.
anyway, here's my perspective on the whole thing:
If VC-1 is as good as a whole lot of people are saying it is, it won't go away for a while (if at all) as long as blu-ray is still around as a format. Microsoft will continue making royalties off of sales of bd's using that codec. Toshiba is screwed, yes, but let's not forget that blu-ray players are backward compatible with dvd and so toshiba will keep making some sort of royalty off the sales of bd players. Time Warner must've not really ever had much faith in hddvd since they've been format neutral for just about as long as blu-ray's been on the market. Maybe the aforementioned standard dvd royalties coupled with whatever deal they signed with the BDA made it that much easier to just drop hddvd altogether. WB probably also looked at the really big picture and saw hddvd exclusivity as prolonging the race and keeping either format from really taking off, though who is to say what would've happened had they not sided with blu-ray?
One thing I said several months ago is that once one of these formats wins and becomes the new standard, it'll be all we ever really need. I still stand by that because just as vhs, beta and laserdisc were the first analog tv formats, hddvd and blu-ray are the first hdtv formats. I'm convinced that the reason there even was a format race in the first place is because these companies realize hi-def is the future of television. I mean, how soon are we going to see televisions produced in a large quantity that have a resolution greater than 1080p? We're finally beyond NTSC and PAL which means we can watch movies at 24 frames per second just as they are in the theater. From what I've read here and there, people used to watch 16mm prints of movies on a projector at home. It would seem we finally have in these new formats the television equivalent of that.
If they really are throwing T3 out the window I find that hilarious considering this is being executive produced by the very same people. I wonder if they did what they did because they wanted it to take place today in 2007 and in order to do that in the timeline established by the last film, 2007 would have to be in the post-apocalyptic Humans vs. Skynet world. You all do raise a good point though, it simply hasn't acknowledged T3 "so far," and considering how crazy of a premise those first two episodes had I wouldn't be surprised if they end up back in 1997 by the end of the series and T3 ends up staying in continuity after all. In any event, it's always interesting to see a franchise make the leap from big screen to small screen, especially when there's another big screen installment just around the corner ....
Speaking of that Blade Runner set, I picked it up last week and the documentary is three and a half hours long with several hours worth of featurettes on top of that. McCallum's line about 100 hours of documentaries for the next Star Wars release (assuming he wasn't misquoted) doesn't seem so far fetched now.
Since no one's answered my question (though don't get me wrong, I've enjoyed reading whatever else you people are saying on the bd vs. hddvd subject) I'll ask again if it's at all possible to update a profile 1.0 player to the latest profile.
This is actually something I've been wondering about for a while.
Will it actually be absolutely impossible for the early adopters of non-ps3 profile 1.0 blu-ray players to update to the newer profiles? Even players without ethernet can still accept updates via cd, so what exactly would stop the older players from being 100% compatible with everything future discs will have to offer (besides internet features, of course)?
hmmmm, you know, the whole "whether or not you'll even notice the difference" question is an interesting one. Honestly, once I found out how NTSC actually works I suddenly had a huge reason to stop buying standard dvd's now that there are hi-def formats. Of course, this didn't stop me from picking up stuff I hadn't seen before just as long as it was a pretty low bargain bin price, by which I mean it costs just about as much to buy it brand new as it would to rent it. There was even a crazy sale back in September where I picked up The Doors (remastered!), Bound, Pi and Glengarry Glen Ross for just 3 dollars a pop. Even with just one hi-def format sticking around, it's good for standard dvd prices.
The resolution isn't really what does it for me, and after all you really do need a 1080p tv to see the difference. How do I know? Well, I'll get to that in a moment.
I remember watching the blu-ray of Pirates 2 and the only difference it made was that I could sit a ways from the 50" 1080i DLP and not have to squint. Then, over thanksgiving, I saw some blu-ray movies on a huge 1080p projector and let me just say it was akin to 2k digital cinema as far as I'm concerned.
Which brings me back to the question of how good standard dvd's look. I don't even have an hdtv, but the computer has pretty good specs and the 1024x768 monitor is hooked up via DVI which means not only can it display anamorphic discs at their full resolution, it can make them look pretty damn good too. I read a thread recently (not on this website) where a guy was saying he can't stand watching standard dvd's now that he has an hdtv. Unless this guy is some kind of super, uber videophile, I'm really questioning what his hardware specs are. Standard dvd's look amazing on my friend's 60" sony lcd (being played on a bose dvd player with 5.1 in case you were wondering). Heck, even on my other friend's zenith lcd over coaxial they look frickin' amazing!
To be totally honest, I miss not knowing about how 24p sources have to be slowed down to 23.976 in order to be telecined to ntsc. A large part of me has simply gotten used to everything that's available on dvd and how good it can look and sound, not to mention the fact that while not every single person has a dvd player, a whole helluva lot less have hi-def optical disc players. Even if the new formats produce an experience that's closer to watching an actual print, when I look at the screencaps on dvdbeaver it just seems "off" to me, like I'm looking at a really hi rez digital file. I dunno, maybe it's just not a good representation of how the blu-ray/hddvd actually looks under optimal conditions and/or they're just not capturing still frames in the best possible way. Their reviews for the new blade runner set kinda illustrates what I'm trying to say. The screencaps from the hi-def have really blown out contrast while the ones from the standard dvd pretty much perfectly resemble what I remember seeing in the theater. Again, I'll give it the benefit of the doubt and chalk it up to hardware limitations.
HDDVD showed up first and it's been losing ever since the beginning of 2007, finished spec or not. The "it's cheaper" argument would be great if I actually saw a significantly lower price on them than blu-rays. In fact, I'm pretty sure they're always the same price as BD in the newspaper ads .... unless of course they're hddvd/dvd combo discs in which case they're even more! Hey, the good thing about the Warner announcement is that even if dreamamount and uni decide to remain hddvd exclusive for years to come (unlikely), at least we won't have to make up our minds about which format to get Warner's stuff on.
Well, at least it will be a company that has actually had a stake in hollywood as opposed to microsoft. I mean seriously, which is the lesser of two evils there?
The only real advantage I see hddvd having over blu-ray is that you can get combo discs, but I see a number of drawbacks to that. One is that quality control for these combo discs is apparently horrible, DVD-18 is unreliable enough. Another is that it seems to say to me that the hddvd camp doesn't expect its own format to take off. Why else would they bother to include the analog-compatible transfer?
It seems like Blade Runner is going to be WB's acid test for which format is doing better at the moment, because there is absolutely no difference at all between the hddvd and blu-ray releases as far as I know.
according to thedigitalbits' review, which just went up earlier today, all of the versions of the movie are in 5.1 except the workprint which is only 2.0
Also, don't forget they said "existing prints are in bad condition," which seems to confirm that they didn't actually track down and destroy all the prints like we thought they did. I think the assumption that Lucas didn't remaster the OOT because he thought it would be too expensive (and maybe it actually would've been) is an accurate one.
Honestly, if Lucas thought the GOUT would sell any better than it did (and it sold pretty damn well all things considered), then his ego has grown larger than any of us could've possibly predicted. I think maybe he's finally gotten over the "it's my movie" mantra and is thinking about giving us fans what we've been asking for. This isn't THX-1138 (anyone on these boards actually see that movie in a theater back in '71?), this isn't Young Indiana Jones, hell, this isn't even the Indiana Jones movies (which, to my knowledge, Lucas hasn't prohibited screenings of the original prints of anyway), this is motherfuckin' Star Wars, and a lot of people care which version it is. Granted, it might not be quite as many people as I'm thinking it is. After all, I can remember a time when I would spot the '04 boxset lying around at the place of every single person my age I'd visit. But I'm convinced that was just because it was star wars on dvd finally, not because it was the SE or that they even cared which version it was. Even considering that, people were talking about the original versions when September of '06 rolled around.
I don't doubt that Lucas honestly thought people would prefer the Special Editions when he wrote those words back in '95, but for crying out loud, he's had ten years to get over the fact that they don't. Now that Spielberg has shown him up (or whatever) with the new close encounters release, Lucas doesn't really have much of an excuse to not do the same with Star Wars. Granted, he would have to go through more trouble since you can't just seamlessly branch both versions onto the same disc, but how would it not be worth it? I think one of the reasons Spielberg decided to go all out with the blu-ray release is that he realized people wouldn't have much of a reason to buy it if he didn't. The reason we still might not get what we want with the next Star Wars release is, well, it's STAR WARS and not close encounters. People probably will buy it again when it finally hits hi-def just like they did with dvd back in '04, and maybe we OOT fans are more of a minority than we'd like to think and Lucas will just have to decide if it's worth the trouble just to please a few more fans.
In any event, I say three more years at the most until we see the next release. Close Encounters hit dvd in '01 so that gives some idea.
I'm hoping that when Sansweet or whomever it was said that they weren't planning another home video release because of market saturation or because the GOUT didn't sell well or whatever, that it was just a cover for them planning to bring out the big guns and actually remaster the OOT several years from now (just not the very year after since it would piss off all the people who paid good money for laserdisc transfers on dvd. The shortest amount of time I can think of between a laserdisc port release and an actual remastered release of the same movie is two years and that's Conan the Barbarian).
Some of you may remember my own saga with completing this collection (probably not, in fact it would be weird if you did).
I got the '95 vhs of ANH for Christmas that year.
Cut to early May of '05, I'm back home from college for the weekend to look for a summer job. I stop by my local video store and they've got the '86 vhs of Jedi on sale for 5 dollars! There isn't enough money in my wallet so I race back home (takes, like, a minute), race back and buy it.
Then only a week later I'm in southern Delaware with some friends at a record and tape traders and I notice the '95 vhs of both Empire and Jedi. At last, my collection is complete! Then I get home and find out that the Empire tape is basically shot. There's static like every single second and the tape is wrinkled on one edge. I'm not totally ruling out the possibility that the magnets in my bag fucked it up (it's a flap bag with magnets that snap together instead of those plastic things) since the Empire tape was probably closer to the magnets than the Jedi tape, even though I'm pretty sure I put stuff in between the tapes and the magnets (in retrospect, it was pretty stupid to even put them in there at all).
Back then I was convinced the store had sold me a bad copy and was torn up by the fact that the complete boxset had been lying right there on the shelf, I just hadn't gotten it since I already had a copy of the original movie.
Then January of '06 rolled around and I discovered the whole fan preservation thing. After a couple weeks of torrenting, I had the cowclopsv2 trilogy. But that's really only good for watching on my computer or on a widescreen tv (which neither I nor my parents have), and I'm not getting the GOUT unless it's like 2 dollars per movie. Speaking of which, Black Friday is right around to corner so who knows maybe that'll happen.
So, today I decide for whatever reason to stop by the CD cellar and as it turned out they had the '95 boxset and I ended up getting it for a cool 5 dollars.
First off, I have a question for anyone who knows the answer. The logo on the ANH box and sticker says 20th Century Fox but the boxes and stickers for Empire and Jedi say CBS/FOX (I know there's nothing wrong since the copies I got in Delaware were like this also, I'm just curious). Does this have something to do with the rights to ANH switching over the Lucasfilm around that time?
Anyways, I find it hi-fuckin-larious what's written on the box, considering what would happen in later years.
"The appeal of Star Wars has gone beyond anything I could have ever imagined. I am pleased that for the final video release of Star Wars in its original version, we can present it with the best sound and picture quality yet available, thanks to THX digital mastering.
In the years to come I hope you, your children, and your children's children will enjoy not only this trilogy but also the adventures yet to come in the continually unfolding Star Wars universe."
-George Lucas
This also raises something I was going to start a thread over but I'll just ask here. What are we going to do if, several years from now (because you know it'll be at least that long), the next release is announced and the remastered OOT isn't part of it? Will we resign ourselves to the fact that we'll have to wait until the movies enter public domain so we can hire Robert A. Harris?
Originally posted by: zombie84 I think all of the OT footage in EOD is just taken from the Laserdisks though.
You mean they pulled a dr.gonzo/cowclopsv2 when they made it?
This is something I've long suspected, and if it's true that means it's another nail in the "we'll never see the OOT restored/remastered" coffin. Is there any proof of this, like softness or a "blowed up" look, etc?
When thedigitalbits broke the non-anamorphic news in May of '06 they said they were pretty sure the footage from EoD was filmprint-sourced, although their only logic was that it probably couldn't have come from anywhere else and still be in anamorphic video. That said, if one of the earlier laserdisc releases did in fact use the original subs it opens up the possibility that the EoD footage was not filmprint-sourced. I guess it all depends on how you interpret Kevin Burns' line from the '04 press junket that they "were granted Papal dispensation to go back and use the footage from the pre-SE release .... but I will say what was shocking was that those scenes .... in our minds eye they looked a lot better than they do when you go back and revisit them and you do see how the quality of the print (or) - the quality of the negative really doesn't hold up the way you think it might, so you kind of understand why things have been revised and digitally restored."
I remember during the GOUT debacle someone mentioned that dvd's can be made with a flag telling the player that it's a "widescreen" disc even if it's not "anamorphic widescreen," and this can allow for things like automatic xy scaling. Even then, I'm not sure if the player would automatically move the subtitles into the safe zone for zooming or if it's possible to do that at all.
Actually that's the funny part, and it never even occurred to me until now. In the original movie from '77, Obi-Wan never says he trained Anakin (that part should've been more obvious to me) but more importantly he never says Anakin was younger than him. It's just that it's a conclusion that can be drawn when you consider that Owen knew Anakin and Owen calls Ben Kenobi "a crazy old man." Even in Return of the Jedi when we find out Vader and Anakin are the same person, Obi-Wan never explicitly states that Anakin was younger than him, although he did say in the original movie that Vader was a "young jedi." It's just that with the line "when I first knew him, you're father was already a great pilot" you can easily construe that Obi-Wan meant Anakin was exceptionally skilled for his young (as in younger than Obi-Wan's) age. Another possible interpretation is that Obi-Wan says "already a great pilot" because he didn't meet Anakin until he was a great pilot. As for Shaw being much older than Guinness in real life, if you just look at it in terms of the movies it's easy to justify since Vader/Anakin would seem that old after all the lava pit damage he sustained. Nevertheless, that is a failing of the prequels in my opinion. I remember one of the first rumors about Episode III was that we would see Anakin/Vader gradually collecting the pieces that make up his armor. I thought this was a cool idea because it would make the movie a nice bridge to Episode IV, and I was expecting the entire movie to be that, not just the last 5 fracking minutes.
Yea, I re-watched this a couple months ago mainly because I hadn't seen it in a while and "I've learned so much" in just the past year of posting on these forums. Yes, I would also have to say it's quite amusing, especially watching it now ten whole years after it began.
One thing I remember noticing this time, now that I was watching with a more discerning eye, is that George actually seems to get genuinely annoyed at one point during that conversation he, McCallum and (I think) Burtt are having after getting out of the screening room for that first roughcut. One of the two other guys says something in that slow, trying to say it the nicest he can way and George sort of snaps and goes "yea, yea, yea, I know, this and that" just as the camera cuts away.
Another thing I caught the fuller implication of this time around was how Titanic had not been released when Episode I started shooting, so when they're doing the pickups in Spring of '98 that's why George says "we're never going to beat Titanic" when Frank Oz asks him how well he thinks Episode I is going to do. Also, I didn't notice until this time that George was saying "More American Graffiti" and how it only made 2 cents (or something to that effect).
And, of course, seeing that ending with the Rick McCallum premiere and all the fans screaming upon the cut to the title shot conjured up all kinds of feelings, especially after reading someone's account (I think it was magnoliafan's) of pretty much that same thing happening and the very steep downward decline the rest of the movie after the opening crawl was.
CO, I was thinking the same thing about how Lucas probably went in a different direction than he was going to for eps II and III after all of the TPM backlash, and I echo HotRod's sentiments when I say that AOTC is the true disappointment of the PT. It was nothing but filler to get to Episode III, and even parts of that ended up being filler. The reason I look at TPM differently is that it was only the beginning of the story. Lucas could've gone in any direction he wanted to get from there to Episode IV, and it's the direction he took that disappointed me.
