Harmy

I’m just thinking about making this recut of the 2nd and 3rd film in the Lord of the Rings Trilogy, so I thought I’d bring it up to see what people thought:

I love FOTR and I don’t think that needs improving.

Now, I’m sure many of you will disagree, but I was quite dissapointed with TTT because for my taste there was too much redundant action and not enough story to justify it. And I thought ROTK would have been really good if there wasn’t so much cheese in the end and if it was a bit shorter.

So I came to a simple solution. Cut some of the action from TTT (namely the whole scene with the hyenas and the subsequent Aragorn subplot, at least half of Helm’s Deep battle etc.) and add all the Frodo scenes from ROTK up till Shelob (the spider) and end TTT in the moment where Sam thinks that Frodo’s dead and takes the Ring, so that it seems like Frodo died and Sam has to complete the quest.

And then ofcourse recut ROTK so that those scenes wouldn’t miss there and cut on the cheese in the end maybe even remove an ending or two (last time I watched the movie I counted them and there’s no less than seven).

I haven’t even started yet, just wanted to know what you guys thought.

Yeah, I'm totally serious, it's dubbed in Czech, I could post a clip of it later but my CPU is totaly occupied reeincoding my HD ESB Partly Despecialized at the moment.

Edit: I added a link to the clip to my signature.

Timstuff said:

...however in the defense of (ugh) George Lucas, Peter Jackson's movies are less than 10 years old, whereas Star Wars was 20 years old when it was "Lucased," and the original production was pre-digital.

Well, that is even more in Lucas' offence, not defence, because LOTR was shot in digital age, new CGI shots or cleaned up effects wouldn't probably stand out as badly or at all. But in STAR WARS, you're aware that you're watching a 30yrs old film and suddenly a CG shot (and a very obvious one too, because it's like 12 yrs old) jumps at you and takes you out of the movie completely and makes you even more aware of how old this film is.

msycamore said:

I think captainsolo means the '97 SE not the '04, I'm not entirely sure but I would be surprised if they didn't have the same colors, they should be from the same problematic telecine.

I'm not sure about that, the broadcast versions are anamorphic and the quality seems to be too good to be from the same transfer the 1997 laserdiscs and VHS used but I don't know.

Also I dug out a back up of my old STAR WARS VHS, which is definitely a pre-1993 transfer. There are a few funny things about it:

1) The first the first scene is squished to fit the roll.

2) The saturation is not low at all, on the conrary the image is totaly oversaturated.

3) It is a dubbed version and in the Greedo scene the English subs are kept and Greedo is dubbed so he doesn't speak an alien language at all.

4) The dubbing is pretty funny. When Luke ask 3PO to tell him about the rebelion, 3PO says something like: "I'm not very good at telling stories, I don't know how to put them, I'm not Spielberg."

Here are pictures of it:

Click to enlarge.

OK, I always read comments about how horrible the 2004 sound mix is and how it has switched rear  channels and stuff but what about the stereo mix included on these DVDs?

Is that the same mix or is it a different one and if it is indeed the same one, why even bother putting it to the DVD, shouldn't a stereo set up just play 5.1 the same way as it does the same mix in stereo?

Added new clip for version 2:

watch on youtube.com

Oh, I hope he's ok, I sometimes also suffer from migraines and it's horrible.

But I thought this was pretty funny and that it would be much more consistent with the prequels:

 

cap said:

...gets a call from his master.

“Hey, V-Man.  I was just at the grocery store, and you’ll never guess who’s all over the tabloid covers!”

“Yeah, I know.  Luke.”

“We can’t let him become a Jedi.”

“No shit, Sherlock.  Don’t worry, I’m on it.  I don’t have him yet, but I will soon.  Then we’ll turn him to the Dark Side.”

“You realize, of course, that if he doesn’t turn, we’ll have to kill him.”

“Yes, I realize that.  *Sigh.*  We still on for Poker on Tuesday?”

“You bet.  (Get it?)  See you then.  May the Force be with you.”

No offence, but I think this is all bullsh*t, I don't like the prequels and I hate the idea of adjusting the OT to match with them. If the prequels were never made or were made with more thought of matching the originals (which is the way it should have been not vice versa) we could think that Vader became evil by choice, out of lust for power, not because he was lame. And we could think that he never knew that this woman he once raped had a son (or, as we sadly later learn, twins). But then, when he chases Luke in the Death Star trench and he feels that "the force is strong with this one," which must have been pretty rare in the dejedied galaxy, and later hears that this boy's name is Skywalker he can surely add two and two together. But I think the theory that he'd known all along and even knew where Luke and Ben were is totally off the track and can only be thought of because of the inconsistencies the f*cking prequels created...

OK, using this and Ady's AVCHD I made a partly despecialized HD version, which I might decide to make available but only if 1) I get Adywan's permition to do so as it's mostly his work anyway and 2) if I'm satisfied with the quality results when the compresion is finished.

Oh and sorry, didn't wanna hijack this thread  but I don't know wheather a new thread about it should go to fanedits or preservations. Could somebody please help me with that?

PM sent. And if you don't know how to go about using the .dlc files, the answer is somewhere in this topic.

doubleofive said:

http://picasaweb.google.com/doubleofive/StarWarsComOfficial2004ChangesESB

Uploaded the ESB Official Changes, with captions. For those curious on what Ady may or may not have changed back.

Awesome, thank you so much for that.

It seems like almost every single fx shot in ESB was digitally altered :-(

doubleofive said:

 

EDIT: checked the official pictures, never noticed the cloud change. Sorry.

 

Hey, where'd you get these pics, I remember seeing this comparison on starwars.com back in 2006 and I keep looking for it but can't find it anywhere...

Oh, and wow, does the original look way more scary...

Well, I'm not a magician... But maybe we could ask Adywan, he'd probably be able to pull that of ;-D

I've been quite bussy lately so I haven't really started working on version 2 before now, but here's a first new "extended" scene, Han shooting first...

youtube

Tell me what you think...

adywan said:

...there were about 5 missing frames. I had reconstructed whole this with the missing frames in that shot for ESB:R (and i didn't use the GOUT for the missing frames)

I see you have stripped all of the blue out of that shot in your video.

 

Lord_Vader:

Where did you get the missing frames then? I tried reconstructing the Wampa scene before and this was always one of the obstacles.

And yeah I did deblue it so it would fit with the rest of the footage.

 

adywan said:

Now the video on youtube really can't be used to show that you can't really see much of a difference between the low & hi-res sources because of its crappy low bitrates...

...The scene you want to try is the Lando announcement one, but not just place the shots that were blended together in but actually start by using a HD source for the transition. Then you really do notice a huge jump in quality. Plus you will see the problems i went through with trying to match the HD to the GOUT so i could blend in certain element because there is so much frame distortion between the two its just not a simple thing like join the two together.

 

Lord_Vader:

Yeah, that's true about YOUTUBE, but the shots in the Wampa cave do blend with the HD quite well after some denoising, which of course blurs the detail out of the shot but as there wasn't much detail to begin with it did improve the shots.

And yes, the Lando scene would definitely stand out as it does stand out even in your DVD, not much but it does. But like I said before, if I'm gonna make an HD version for me to watch, I'll only remove the changes that bother me and this isn't one of them.

TV's Frink said:

Lord__Vader said:

GhostAlpha26 said:

I haven't seen Ady's Theatrical Reconstruction yet but what shots are in his version that weren't in the original 1980's version?

...

EDIT: Oops, misread the question, Ady's reconstruction is exactly as it was in the 1980 original...

Well..not exactly.

OP:

adywan said:

Now this isn't a 100% true theatrical version as i didn't want to use the low quality GOUT to replace the newly zoomed and cropped cockpit shots that appear in the SE version but all of the SE elements have been removed.

Yeah, sure, I was reffering only to the wampa scene.

GhostAlpha26 said:

I haven't seen Ady's Theatrical Reconstruction yet but what shots are in his version that weren't in the original 1980's version?

OK, did you watch the scene on YOUTUBE? Because if you did, then your question is exactly what I hoped to hear, you actually couldn't tell which of the shots were not HD :-)

And to answer you, it's just two shots: the one of a moving shadow in an empty cave right after Luke wakes up and then the brief glimpse of the monster when Luke tries to pull his lightsabre.

EDIT: Oops, misread the question, Ady's reconstruction is exactly as it was in the 1980 original, it is his AVCHD that keeps the SE Wampa scenes.

I reposted the Wampa HD scene to YOUTUBE with fixed audio.

BTW. while making that video I noticed the whole wampa scene is a lot bluer in the reconstruction than the AVCHD. Why's that Ady?

OK, I gave the wampa scene a shot at 720p and I think the results aren't bad.

I used Adywan's AVCHD and the THEATRICAL RECONSTRUCTION to put together the Wampa scene as it was in the original TESB, exept for one shot, which I didn't mind in the SE, who can tell which one it is? :-D

You can check it out on YouTube

Yeah and Han's airbrushed shirt is kept in the AVCHD as well.

Ok, there are 79 of the ESB_THEATRICAL_ADYWAN_partXX.rar files and than there are the ESB_THEATRICAL_ADYWAN_volXXX_XX.PAR2 files, what are those?

Well, I only hope this doesn't end up like the Lord of the Rings Blu-Ray. And I'm of course talking about image quality, not the fact that LOTR only came out in the theatrical version, which we'd love for STAR WARS and which is what LOTR fans complain about (understandably). But to get to the point, the LOTR Blu-Rays are sourced from the same master used for the several years old HDTV broadcast (from about the same time as the STAR WARS HD broadcasts) but they made a new encode for Blu-Ray which actually looks worse than the broadcasts due to an extensive DNR (Digital Noise Removal):

Blu-Ray:

HDTV:

Click on the pics to show full resolution (I recommend doing so to see the difference)

So we could end up with the 2004 transfers of STAR WARS looking even worse then the HDTV broadcasts we have now :-(

Oh, right, is there any chance of getting the subtitles text file for this one?