Harmy

Yeah, I think it would have been fine in TDK and TDKR, if it was just different AR for entire long scenes, but I also found it pretty jarring, when the AR changed for just one shot (usually establishing shots) - in those shots, if they just cropped them to 2.35:1, they'd still get the extra resolution without the jarring AR change.

I've also just recently seen Von Triers' Nymfomaniac, which also has shifting AR, which I felt was pretty jarring (although I guess that may have been the point of it in that case) but it was made even more noticeable by the fact, that on a 16:9 TV, insted of having more picture information on top and bottom, for the 16:9 scenes, like in Nolan's films, you got a windowboxed video in the center of the screen, which was of course more faithful to the way it would have been in a cinema, but I really didn't like it for home viewing.

And I've seen Gallaxy Quest at least three times and I don't even remember any AR chages.

Oh, it's possible that it was just for SW then.

I don't think those 70mm cells were even taken from actual prints - I think I've read somewhere, that they were 70mm blowups of single cells made as collectibles.

I just bought the theatrical BDs (they were so dirt cheap that I just couldn't not - I paid like 10 bucks for the whole trilogy) and I skimmed FOTR and what's interesting is, that the DNR seems to have been applied selectively - there are many scenes, which look beautifully detailed, with a natural layer of grain and then suddenly cut to the next scene (for example when Gandalf first comes to Hobbition and there's a cut from the shot of him standing outside Bag End to the shot of him entering the door, shot from inside the Bag End interior)  and suddenly it's a grainless muddy mess and it stays that was throughout the whole interior scene - in fact, all the Bag End interior scenes seem to be affected by the DNR, whereas the exteriors look great. I really wonder why they did this, because judging from the HDTV captures, those scenes weren't any grainier or dirtier than the others.

OK, I just received a few raw ESB shots from Puggo and they really confirmed for me, that releasing these projects as DVD, especially DVD5, is a really bad idea - if the raw files were upscaled to 720p and then encoded using some non-prehistoric codec, they could look great! For me, the PG and PSB DVDs are pretty much unwatchable, but what makes them unwatchable, isn't the fact, that they are grainy 16mm transfers with a lot of dirt in them - all that actually adds to the cool factor of this project - it's the ever-present super-ugly mpeg2 compression. See for yourselves:

http://postimg.org/image/4bngio7pn/full/

(Top: The PSB DVD Bottom: The raw file)

Yeah, there was never any doubt in my mind that Team Negative 1 had real prints - from the very first clip it was clear that they do. What was unclear until later, when they finally posted some HQ clips, was whether they have the technology to do a decent transfer of those prints - and as it turns out, they do - some of these shots I received have better detail than the BD - as discussed here.

@yoda-sama: I used two different methods - in the first two shots after Luke cuts himself free, I overlayed the 97SE over the footage and set its blending mode to color, thus giving the whole shot the colors of the 97SE. In the last shot, which looked kind of weird with very washed-out skintones in the 97SE, I rotoscoped the saber.

Yeah, I guess the consistency isn't 100% but I'd say it's good enough now.

Oh, BTW, I got a green light from Team Negative 1 to say that the 35mm scans come from them. So, thanks Team Negative 1 - without you, the quality of this edit would be much lower, because those shots were the most obvious despecializations in there :-)

That's what I thought, it was only that in this shot, it seems it would be more complicated than in those other cases.

Well, they said the manufacturer refused to replace/refund it, because of the pins.

What's interesting about this shot is, that it wasn't recomposited, when you superimpose the SE with the original, they are perfectly aligned (except of course for the window, which was changed) and the SE shot also shows signs of optical compositing.

I also wonder how they originally created the effect - I would have expected a still image to have been painted in the widow but the characters are actually moving.

Much appreciated guys - it seems the returning of the broken motherboard won't work out (they found that some of the pins on the CPU bed were slightly bent and tey said I must have done it and gave it as a reason to not refund me for the mobo, even though I'm convinced it can't possibly be what was causing the problems, which didn't appear until I put in the additional RAM), so this will help a little to cover the cost of the new one.

Doing one's own split-screen version once ESB:R is released should be a piece of cake but I personally usually miss like 80% of the changes if it's just a split-screen video, so a still image gallery like this one would be preferable for me to appreciate all the work. But I know from my own experience, that creating a gallery like that isn't exactly easy.

That is a definite NO! For one, I value all the donations and it wasn't a competition. And also, do you really expect me to spend hours going through all the donations ranking them by the amount donated? Not all the donors wished to be in the credits by their paypal name, so that would make it twice as hard to identify them, plus the donations were in like 10 different currencies, so I'd have to count how much the different donations really were. There's just no way.

OK, how's this:

http://uloz.to/xzzPJAP5/saber-mp4

Oh, no, they are just in the order in which the donations came. I will probably try to put them into alphabetic order. Anyone know how to do this easily? I have them as a simple .txt file.

Well, I guess it's just a few frames anyway, so I can just as well put in the extra effort and re-color the saber :)

That may well be, that the more monochromatic version looks more right to you but I assume we can agree that the new version is closer to the GOUT and 97SE references in that regard, right?

Well, I don't know what you're seeing but in most of the new version, the skintones aren't any more red than in the previous version - in many cases, they are actually less red from what I can see.

Faces on the left are from the WP version, faces on the right are from the new version:

I think so, I'm pretty sure there were DCP projections at the Star Wars Celebrations, so I assume they were showing those versions.

Hold on, that's the purple you meant? On the characters, not on the snow and the sky? Because I spent all those hours doing exactly that - creating a curve, which specifically adds red to the characters and not the background and which had to be tweaked shot by shot - in the BD, everything is monochromatically blue (or rather cyan) whereas in all the other transfers, you can see, that the characters have some color and it is mostly red - if I were to turn the cyan of the BD into blue and leave it at that, it would have been super easy but then it would have stayed the monochromatic mess that is the 2004 transfer  and I wanted to pull out the colors of the characters and the tauntaun.

As to the lightsaber - well, it's not missing blue - it's less blue, which is the side effect of having to pull the blues down in general and again of the monochromatic nature of the BD.

Actually, I think that over-all, the 97SE of Empire has pretty good colors as it is - Star Wars had that pink tint but that isn't there in ESB.

TV's Frink said:

KilroyMcFadden said:

• 

  Plaza Atlanta Nope we don't get the print till July 18 th ... Day of ..
  It has been confirmed today Star Wars IV (1977) Special edition .

  
  
•  

 This brain me hurt.

 It confused me at first too but I see now that they mean Star Wars - the film from 1977 - Special Edition. The BluRays also only say 1977, 1980 and 1983 - so when they were telling people it was the original, I'm sure they knew very well it wasn't but they knew that the event will sell out much easier if they say that it is definitely for sure the original 1977 version, only to then turn around once they're sold out and say that they meant the original movie from 1977 but it's the Special Edition of that movie.

I'm still quite curious about the DCP though - is it just created from the BD master, in which case it wouldn't exactly be a world premiere of anything, because those masters have been shown theatrically before.

Well, Frink is right, this is all irrelevant, who's a fan of what - I don't want to watch the BDs and you do and you can and that is perfectly fine. I want to watch the original version in decent quality and I can't and neither can you and that is not fine at all.

We're not fans of the same thing, you and I, I am a fan of the original Star Wars trilogy in its unaltered form - if I had the choice of watching the BDs of Star Wars or staring at a blank wall for 6 hours, I'm pretty sure I'd choose the later. And I wasn't there in '77 either.

IMAX cameras don't only shoot on 70mm (actually 65mm) film - they shoot on 65mm film running sideways, so an IMAX frame has about 10 times the surface area of a standard 35mm frame, which also translates to 10 times the resolution - A 35mm camera negative is speculated to hold the resolution of between 6K and 8K, so you're looking at an analog alternative of what would be like 60-80K digital resolution.