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Magic_Al

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Join date
26-Aug-2004
Last activity
3-May-2007
Posts
12

Post History

Post
#271219
Topic
crawl generator (link)
Link
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/271219/action/topic#271219
Time
That generator program is cool. If only used the right fonts. That's crucial to "feeling" right.

As best as I've been able to match visually (and thanks to starwars.com at least identifying the correct typeface families), I think I have the right fonts. The correct movie title font is Univers Light Ultra Condensed. It is distinctive for its very tall, skinny letters. The rest of the crawl is in News Gothic Standard Bold. News Gothic is most easily distinguished from many incorrect fonts that are used by looking at the bottom of a lowercase g: it should be a closed oval, not a hook. The Univers title font should be 2.8 times the size of the News Gothic text in the crawl. The Episode number line above the title, although the same News Gothic font as the body text, is 1.3 times larger.

I have a 2D template (for creating crawls for Jedi Outcast/Jedi Academy where the game engine does the 3D part) which was made by "tracing" the Episode IV crawl on de-perspectivized screencaps of the actual crawls that were available at theforce.net. By making my text overlap the original exactly, I'm reasonably confident of accuracy. here's a rendering from my template that might be helpful to some. My advice is to replicate a movie crawl exactly and then change the text to your project. It pretty much has to be right after that!

LucasArts and their partners almost never get it right in Star Wars games so anyone else who hasn't is in good company.
Post
#208064
Topic
ORIGINAL STAR WARS TRILOGY OUT 09/2006 BY LUCASFILM
Link
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/208064/action/topic#208064
Time
I too have no problem with digital cleanup to the degree of Raiders. What drives me nuts is inconsistency more than anything else. Most infamously from the Raiders DVD: they fixed the reflection when Harrison Ford faces the cobra but NOT when Karen Allen does it moments later. Nobody at ILM can be that blind or careless and the only explanation is that there was budget assigned to fix the one shot and not the other. No doubt budget is the same Force that mandated which lightsaber shots got fixed or not in ANH'04. Lucas may use his own money for everything but that doesn't mean he'll spend what fans wish he'd spend. We're going to get the best OUT DVDs Lucasfilm thinks worst-case market demand will profitably reimburse them for.
Post
#207703
Topic
ORIGINAL STAR WARS TRILOGY OUT 09/2006 BY LUCASFILM
Link
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/207703/action/topic#207703
Time
I wonder what the "level of quality" is. Will it be comparable to the Indiana Jones DVDs?

It could be the most comparable thing is the E.T. DVD release, which included the "no-guns" SE and the original theatrical release on 2 discs. The E.T. SE has 5.1 sound while the original is Dolby Surround, similar to what Lucasfilm has announced. Both versions of E.T. are anamorphic and show about equal grain but the E.T. SE has deeper color contrast. If Lucasfilm gives us at least the same level of quality as Universal's E.T. release I'll be satisfied.
Post
#67280
Topic
STAR WARS DVD Producer Van Ling answers the tough questions!
Link
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/67280/action/topic#67280
Time
It's a fact Lucas had ownership of TESB and ROTJ before the films were even made. It's a fact he hired everybody who ever worked on those films and paid them with his own money to do the job he wanted done. Lucas' description of history is accurate enough, and his belief in his right to alter the films is understandable enough. They were literally made for him.

Turner bought rights to existing films that he had no prior business or artistic connection to, and started tinkering. There's no moral equivalence between Turner's colorization of films and Lucas' continuing creative control of Star Wars.

Lucas' comments against colorization are about the original artists' right to control their creations. Lucas considers himself the lead artist who hires other artists to contribute material that he then selects or rejects to fit what he wants. He collaborated with people 20-30 years ago to get it the way he wanted then, and now he's collaborating with other people to get it the way he wants now.
Post
#67212
Topic
STAR WARS DVD Producer Van Ling answers the tough questions!
Link
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/67212/action/topic#67212
Time
Some of the stuff posted here is just plain wrong.

George Lucas does have and always has had creative control of TESB and ROTJ. Not only has he had legal ownership of TESB and ROTJ from the beginning (and he gained ownership of ANH from Fox in the deal to distribute the SEs), his role as Executive Producer gave him final say on any aspect of the films. As Lucas explains in the ROTJ DVD commentary, the Star Wars sequels were managed more like a television series in which the Executive Producer controls the content and the director is merely hired to do the work necessary to get it on film, whereas normally in film the director is the main creative force. Because Lucas owned the films and paid for their production with his own money, he could assign and define jobs as he saw fit.

Furthermore, Lucas resigned from the Director's Guild of America and the Writer's Guild of America after they fined him for the lack of opening credits in TESB (after the unions had given him a waiver for the exact same "violation" in ANH), so, Hollywood union rules cannot be enforced against Lucas either, since he is not a member.

The bottom line is that Lucas is 100% within his rights to do anything he wants with these films. I don't want to be called a Lucas apologist for pointing out an objective fact.
Post
#66198
Topic
Surprise! DVDs preserve original version after all!
Link
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/66198/action/topic#66198
Time
Sort of.

One of the bigger surprises to me is that, spread throughout the documentaries and trailers of Disc 4, there are substantial clips of the original versions of almost every scene that was significantly changed in the SE. I'm reminded of the Director's Edition DVD of Star Trek: The Motion Picture, on which the orginal versions of updated scenes are archived on the bonus disc, except on Star Trek the scenes are simply thrown together in an incoherent clip reel, while on Star Wars they're incorporated into the documentaries.

In terms of preserving film history, these DVDs do a better job than I expected. No, you don't get to see the version of the movie that Lucas now considers incomplete, but you DO get to see almost all the stuff you remember, treated as historical material. Give credit where credit is due -- since 1997 most of the TV specials about Star Wars have used clips from the SE as if no other version ever existed, but the documentaries on these DVDs acknowledge and show the true original material quite thoroughly.
Post
#65892
Topic
Proof OOT has been restored? + DVD quality Pre-ANH footage!
Link
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/65892/action/topic#65892
Time
Lowry would have wanted to work from the most original source possible. The SE stuff was done digitally so in order to bring out the most detail in the underlying photographic image (in scenes where digital stuff had been layered on top of original photography, and in scenes where photographic elements were digitally recomposited) they would have wanted to work with the original, non-SE negative, and then ILM would have had to recomposite newer digital effects onto Lowry's HD remaster. That, however, would be a lot more work than using the "1997 SE master" as the starting point.

It gets completely insane if you think about what "negative" really means in the context of the most complex FX scenes that were originally assembled with ILM's old optical printer. A space battle scene would have a background plate negative, then there are negatives for each effects element, and all their mattes. If you digitize each element's negative separately, you then have to reassemble all the layers of the scene and match the original registration and color correction of each element. They did NOT do this, or there would be no matte boxes anywhere in the DVD, and there are. Truly rebuilding the film digitally from scratch (in a way that preserved all the original photography) would be a staggeringly monumental undertaking.

Because everyone's saying the SE scenes look better blended with the original film now, it might sound like they did it the hard way, but on the other hand they've talked about not having enough time so that would suggest doing it the faster way. The faster way would be restoring the SEs rather than the O-OT. They may have used a combination of techniques, though. For FX scenes that aren't as complex as, say, ROTJ's space battle, they may have gone back to the O-OT for the negative and then recomposited the FX on top. And clearly, the O-OT was completely digitized at some point, if not for the DVD then for the SE.

I think I read that the bonus materials were made simultaneously with Lowry's work to meet the DVD release date, which means the bonus materials are NOT made form Lowry's restoration because it wasn't available yet. So you're probably looking at the O-OT footage as it was remastered for making the 1997 SE. That wouldn't explain the pre-Ep. IV opening crawl's restoration but maybe they just had that done separately for the DVD.

It would be interesting if someone in the know would dissect it all in an article sometime.
Post
#61772
Topic
reality: everyones got to boycott
Link
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/61772/action/topic#61772
Time
The SE is not the DVD.

In ANH, the Greedo scene has been tightened. From leaked footage, Greedo now shoots exactly 2 FRAMES before Han does. That's less than 1/10th of a second at 24 frames per second. Also, in both the SE and the DVD Han shoots Greedo TWICE. Also, the DVD restores Han's, "Yes, I bet you have," as it sounded pre-SE.

Jabba's appearance in ANH has been redone from scratch and screenshots from the SE are no more representative of the DVD than pictures of the Irish actor who was on the set. Jabba looks a LOT better on the DVD, better than his appearance in Episode I.

Also, the DVD of ESB removes the scream added when Luke jumps after the duel, and actually FIXES flaws in the original like in the shot on the Executor bridge that is obviously flipped backwards, the officers uniforms have been digitally corrected so they appear to be turned around correctly. That is an indisputable improvement.

Finally, the incredible work done restoring the sharpness and detail of the film and recompositing original effects will make the blending of digital effects into the movie appear far more seamless. When you actually watch the films you will feel the story being told more intensely than before simply because you can see so much more detail and it seems so much more real.

Experience the films as they are now. Hear the story in your mind based on what you see and hear, not on what you remember. Feel, don't think.
Post
#61768
Topic
What Did Vader say?
Link
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/61768/action/topic#61768
Time
Prowse DID read all Vader's lines on set. In the 4th draft script of Star Wars (easily googled), Vader's line is exactly as James Earl Jones reads it. It's possible David Prowse read the same line on set but maybe paused or read it more slowly and Lucas decided JEJ should read it the way that sounded best rather than reproduce Prowse's reading. Because Tarkin is standing still in the next shot, the editor had to stay on the wide shot with Vader gesturing until Tarkin stops walking. To me it looks like the editor just didn't have enough takes to choose from.
Post
#61427
Topic
Next generation bootlegs
Link
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/61427/action/topic#61427
Time
Greetings. Been lurking a while, usually post at TFN... anyway, I love this site for helping me appreciate O-OT bootlegs so I'll always have the version of SW I grew up with, even though I'll buy and love the official DVDs. I thought I'd share an image quality comparison I put together. Obviously a "restored" O-OT made from the official DVDs would be compelling, though I doubt it'll be possible to have uniform image quality when restoring non-SE/DVD footage given the lack of good source material. No pre-DVD video source is even remotely close to the official DVDs' image quality. Without Lucasfilm's cooperation the only hope would be to find someone with O-OT film prints and the ability to digitize and restore them.

Anyway... this comparison obviously altered its content by each example being resized to the same dimensions and additionally compressed to jpeg, but all four suffered equally so it's still an OK comparison.

Bandwidth saving thumbnail to catch the eye:

Click here for the real image.