Knightmessenger

skyjedi2005 said:

I think the colors on the japan special collection are more accurate.  Too bad the image is soft and interlaced and is from a grainy old master again with washed out colors several generations away from the original.

 The 1993 master probably would have looked worse, in terms of color fading, had it not been color corrected by THX. So the gout may not have been the original color but it seems like the first major attempt to faithfully restore the color back and it turned out pretty good. Besides the canyon, the binary sunset has color differences between the THX and pre THX releases.

Those are some good comparisons. I've said it before but someone should upload caps from a 1997 transfer to the screencaps page.

The Gout look really sharp too in those caps. 

Ziz said:

dark_jedi, I meant the film itself.  I've only checked WM and Target, haven't had a chance to check BestBuy or FYE yet.  Are they carrying it?

 I didn't even know this was coming out so I was surprised to see it earlier in an FYE. I also saw a new release of the Breakfast Club which was long overdue.

Yeah, the book you're referring to. Isn't that the picture that's missing one of the sun's. It otherwise looks just like the Special Collection screenshot.

It has been discussed that the scene is definitely darker in those areas you mentioned than on pre THX releases. But it was supposed to be shot day for night. I have a good screenshot comparison on another computer but ever since the new software, I haven't been able to properly embed any screenshots into the forum.  

Why couldn't they have just used the '97 print for the dvd release, then come out a few years later with a proper "ultimate restoration" dvd with more time. The clips from Empire of Dreams looked fine, I think most people would have been very happy with that for a dvd release.

Then Lucas could have double dipped and given people more of a reason to buy the movie again. Instead the exact same 2004 version has been released 4 times on dvd. And maybe 5. I'm now seeing the sucky 2004 silver covers sold individually in stores but with the sticker that they also have the original version. Does this mean LFL is trying to dump their excess stock of cases from the first two box sets?

As a matter of fact, why did Lowry even need to "restore" the films again when they should have been in excellent condition from 1997?

triple post

triple post, it did something weird.

Trooperman said:

Color correction is tough, and like someone else said, Photoshop is one thing, but motion is different.  Unless there's some kind of automated process, I really can't see us being able to isolate specific elements and change saturation locally frame and frame.  

 I think what you would need is the ability to control saturation for shadows, midtones and highlights. In addition to the ability to adjust the color for those levels separately .

Clean, bubbly and soapy are good adjectives. That's exactly how I would describe the 2004 transfers too. I don't think it was a good restoration because they removed too much film grain.

I much prefer the 2006 gout because that looks like an actual film transfer with grain. Not great but at least it feels authentic.

EDIT: someone mentioned 192kbps dolby surround. Isn't under 200 kbps pretty lousy? Is that low or high for most dvd releeases? What about the 2004 versions?

As for the grain, I have a theory why it's so prominent. I think the blacks were taken down in a quick adjustment to make the black bars finally be black. This would make dark grain on bright surfaces such as Hoth more apparent.

Someone could use the official Lucasfilm comparison for screenshots of all the alterations to post. Is there the ability to make a poll here? That would be cool because I've always felt a majority of the changes are either generally liked or hated overall. There doesn't seem to be a lot of 50/50.

EDIT: Didn't realize this was 4 years old and recently bumped. Still think this is a good idea so long as there's the ability to make a poll.

Max_Rebo said:

However the '97 version isn't without it's colour problems, for example Hoth is possibly more blue that on the '04 DVDs.

I didn't know Dark Jedi had done a '97 extras disc, I'll PM you about a trade. I haven't thought much about extras, as a minimum I'd want the 'making of' stuff so it has everything the VHS has, but I will think about this more later on.

Wow that's a really messed up capture, I'm doing a load of VHS transfers of home movies at the moment which is unfortunately slowing down progres on other projects, but I have a PCI capture card so I don't know anything about DV boxes, good luck getting that sorted out.

 

Do you have any examples of the color problems on the '97 versions? Even my reliable Sonic Record now is not copying discs lately. Well, not discs that were made with my dvd recorder. Ones that were burned from a computer might work.

Believe it or not, I've have the PDI capture card. But I've had even less luck getting that to work and DScaler which I downloaded to use it likely was the cause of the hard drive going bad about a year ago. I think I'm going to take it back into the shop (again) but I first want to upload one of the high school hockey games I recorded to my youtube account.

http://www.youtube.com/user/Knightmessenger

I've been watching some of your updates on youtube and I'm pretty impressed as usual. And I got to see the entire Star Wars Revisited on youtube. It was interesting seeing my name in the credits, even though I don't remember giving any suggestions for that edit.

If you do the same thing with Empire, do you want our real names?

Did you color correct them as well to remove the rediculous timing they did?

Was the 2 disc dvd in the deluxe cardboard sleeve not that good? It came out in 2004.

I thought the Phantom Menace looked pretty good on dvd. It didn't seem overly smooth like the rediculous Lowry cleanup of the OT. Clones looked like crap and III was a little better.

I only saw Crystal Skull in the theatre once. While I thought it looked okay, the part at the end where the thing was spinning around and the woman got sucked up, it looked very obviously CG as if it was really blurry and clipped whites.

Does anyone have the previous HD version of Blade Runner that was superior to the first dvd? The archival versions on the dvd appear to have the highlights artificially boosted and some questionable color timing. I'd like to see screens of an earlier HQ version as well as what the '87 laserdisc looked like.

http://www.bulletsnbabesdvd.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=2401

http://www.bulletsnbabesdvd.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=4199

vaderios said:

-Angel

 Please don't change the shot of Anakin on the balcony. That is one of my favorite shots in the entire movie. And one of the few that I thought looked good. It reminds me of an overcast day in Florida so the lighting has always been realistic to me.

As for the top one, I hated those all CG shots like I'm sure you all did too. But while I think the new color tone is better, the contrast appears to be boosted, resulting in clipped whites. What is improved is that it's no longer a monochrome brown tint on the entire frame. Is there any way the sky in the background could be tinted more like a normal blue one? So that it doesn't blend in with the rocky landscape and practically everything else. The problem with this shot is that everything has the same basic hue, resulting in a murky image worse than some older 1ccd camcorders. Adding a slight blur to the background stuff might help if it is possible.

The others, it's important to remember not to add too much contrast. It can actually make the dynamic range look smaller. What is really missing from the movie is color purity and separation.

As for that OT footage as a reference, I think the clip from Star Wars looks much more balanced and drastically better focused.

Possessed said:

Someone could completely remaster ANH's audio, to remove that tinny sound it has and make the dialougue flow better.

Isn't the PCM stereo of the 1993 mix pretty good? Or even '97? Did they really gain much more clarity by attempting to use as many higher generation generation sources that were poorly mixed together.

Personally, I'd want a second look on the color correction. It's .5 past light speed ahead of the 2004 dvd's and the difference feels like a state of the art restoration. Sometimes, I'm wondering "Was the movie really supposed to be that clear." But the job by Lucasfilm was so TERRIBLE that I've said many times I'm not sure if it can be completely fixed. In particular, I thought the face tones on the Death Star looked a little washed out and pale. But I was watching this from a youtube upload.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DSATV2vnhAQ
Unfortunately, the guy who uploaded said he only had Windows Movie Maker and it wouldn't let him display it properly. So you have a 2.35 movie in a 16x9 frame pillarboxed instead of letterboxed.

Well, I saw your rescuing Star Wars video. And I noticed the scene where Luke rescues Wedge and blasts a tie fighter right before he would have flown through it that it had the really big scratch that is on the Gout and even one of the 1997 trailers I think.

Did you just use the regular episode II dvd for the images? What are you using to enhance the images? I think you did a good job with the colors but in some ways I feel like I prefer the original images more. It looks more like Blade Runner which is cool however this is still in the time of peace in the republic. So everything should still look somewhat new and shiny.

I don't know. I suppose it will be up to Trooperman. But I think the city shots look realistic instead of obviously just being desaturated. For the shot of Mace Windu there needs to be a way to alter the color of the background separately from the people.

g-force said:

 aside from a slight increase in top cropping for ANH, it should be the same. There seems to be some bad lines at the top and bottom of the film that I have always debated on cutting off or not. These are even worse on Empire and ROTJ, so I decided that they should all go.

-G

 Could you show us an example of these lines. The laserdisc transfers I obtained had a line at the top and bottom that looked halfway faded compared to the rest of the picture. I think it might have something to do with the laserdisc and video master originally being interlaced. If I went frame by frame by constantly hitting the pause button, I noticed the frame seemed to shift up and down a line every frame. So maybe the end lines of resolution are combined with the black letterbox part so they look half visible at normal speed. I don't see this viewing the Gout on my tv so I assumed it was cropped out already by Lucasfilm for the dvd release.

If they came in recordable sleeves, does that mean they were recorded off tv? Are there any interviews or trailers before the main feature plays? As long as you can tell us that, at least one of us should be able to figure out what you have and if it is worth your time to transfer them to dvd.

And do check if they're widescreen or pan/scan. Unless the VHS tapes say "Widescreen Edition" on the cover, it will most definitely be a pan/scan version.

Also, episode III was never released on VHS. So you'll never see an official VHS set of all three prequels anyways.

Orinoco_Womble said:

The X0 team have stated many, many times that they are using material from a number of LD sources, not just the Def Col.  The whole reason for doing this was to get rid of that poxy DVNR smearing that we all hate.  They have also posted a number of pics (which I can't find at the moment) which show the results of combining together multiple captures from different LD sources. 

Don't worry it's no biggie but what I pointed out was that the raw X0 capture is probably about even with the Gout. Now removing scratches and combining it with X0 footage of the Special Collection to remove DVNR will yield much better results than the official Lucasfilm "bonus" discs. (although the Gout is probably a pretty good source to use for any oot restoration)

I do believe there is one thing a little different on the Gout. It appears they did a very quick fix to lower the black levels on the picture. This made the black bars actually black and fixed what had been a pretty washed out picture in some parts. However I think this accentuated the grain and made it stand out more. So the battle in the snow on Hoth and the Tantive IV showed this the most. Still I have to imagine it wouldn't be hard to filter out with todays technology. 
I really hope they haven't given up on this though. I'm sure the work they did could be carried on by someone else. What we need to know is how far along the X0 team got. Was it ever in a format that could easily be burned to a dvd?

I mean this in absolutely no disrespect to the X0 team. I hope they all are doing well and in good health. But it has been about almost 4 years since I believe they started this. I know they wanted to wait until it was complete to release it to the community but I think they should seriously consider making whatever they've got available. (Even if they still want to continue with the project.) I believe that while a perfect video restoration would be ideal,  I think that it would be no shame in having an intermediate stop-gap release so we can have something at least be better than the Gout. This is too promising to just let go and I think the X0 team has spent plenty of hours that they deserve to have a product to show. It was the previous laserdisc bootlegs that finally convinced Lucas to allow the unaltered release in 2006. I think that having a higher quality OOT transfer floating around would push Lucas a little to do a better transfer of the originals for the blu-ray. I'm certain that plenty of LFL employees are looking at gushing over Adywan's versions and might feel pushed more to fix the really bad mistakes from 2004.  

I have many of the screenshots and other captures posted by the X0 team. I'd be willing to repost them (as long as they don't mind) but they're on another computer and I've had trouble getting images to imbed here ever since the new software. (see my recent post on "Shroud of the Darkside")

Why is it so hard to key an image in a forum post at this site? It used to be really simple before the new software. This time I tried using the tree icon (Insert/Edit Image) and it didn't work either.

My internet connection was screwey at the time and is fixed now but still.

I feel that I'd be pretty good at color correction if it was needed. The only difficulty would be obtaining the files and then reencoding them without losing quality because I don't have a lot of experience with that. But I've gotten some experience using the more advanced color correction on Vegas (ver. 4) that can change the hue of just the shadow midtone or highlights. I used it extensively for a music video I did with my sister for The Weepies "Hideaway" song.

Original

<img src="http://img209.imageshack.us/img209/60/carolj1eb4.png" alt="Image Hosted by ImageShack.us" />

Corrected

<img src="http://img209.imageshack.us/img209/3696/carolj3cz7.png" alt="Image Hosted by ImageShack.us" />

Hopefully the images show up. Notice how washed out everything is in the original. The tree appeared to have the same blue tint from the sky covering so it really looked brown. Simply boosting the saturation would not be enough because there wasn't much color separation (is that the right word?) between the different objects. But using the 3 way color feature enabled the sky to look much bluer while the clouds stay white. And the tree leaves now have a proper green hue to them. 

The other time the movie version of Lapti Nek is heard on Star Wars to Jedi. I wonder if there's a pre Mark Hamill voice over tape that still exists. I did read that LFL is doing a very intensive search for all of their alternate footage and deleted scenes so I really hope they fill us in on what is eventually found.

Amazon has a "email me when this becomes available" for anything out of print or not yet released. They have the same thing for the Holiday Special.

Honestly, I hope they take another 5 years on the blu-ray. It gives more time for the OOT dvd's including the new slim sets to sell. And it suggests that LFL actually might put some effort into their next release. With each year, I don't think Star Wars is as big as it once was. People will move onto other things. More people will look at online reviews and learn what the term "animorphic widescreen" is. So the longer they wait, I figure the more spectacular it will have to be to get people's attention, much less their money.