Mavimao

Harmy said:

Harmy said:

Well, I'm gonna need a re-recording of the sources doc commentary first, so if one of you guys could please do that, that would be great!

 

Actually, scratch that for now! Since I'll be introducing the official releases ('04, '06 and BD) in the first documentary, I'm gonna have to re-write the sources doc. narration a bit.

And I like Mavimao's voice and he was the first one to volunteer, so unless he'd rather leave it to someone else, I'm going to give the "job" to him :-)

 

Aw! You're making me blush! Yeah just let me know what to record and I'll get right on it!

I can do the recording if you want. Here's what I sound like:

http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=F8JaL4NERfc

Feallan said:

I'm 99% sure there is only one French dub and it was made in 1977.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GUZk_Bk0lTM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-wePinaPP28

 

The guy, who dubbed Vader in Star Wars (ESB and ROTJ had a different actor) is François Chaumette.

That is correct. When the Special editions came out, they just hired different actors to fill in the changed/new parts. They left the rest of the dubs alone.

Harmy, as per your question: in the 2004 commentary, after the Death Star blows up, there are two tracks playing at the same time, drowning out the commentary voices.  

I looked at the comparison and it looks like Zion's has more detail, even though it seems like the sharpening filter was used a bit too liberally. 

Orbiting the thread at maximum velocity. The 10,000th post will be in range in 11 posts.

17000? You've got yourself a post. 

Or MKV?

I have a few questions about the digital books...

1) If I assume correctly, these 'enhanced' editions will have all the same content as their hardcover copies but with additional stuff like video and audio clips?

2) I don't know anything about these new interactive electronic books (I have a Kindle e-reader and an iPad), will I have a better experience with iBooks or the Kindle app, or does it even make a difference?

Double post. Sorry. (crappy workplace internet)

skywalker89 said:

AntcuFaalb said:

skywalker89 said:

AntcuFaalb said:

skywalker89 said:

Don't you can use the Soundboard on the official Star Wars  homepage for some parts of the dialogue, original CDs or Vinyls for music and some other source for sound-effects and combine it with original LD-sound, to recreate the movie-sound on your own?

What would be the benefit of doing that?

Creating an audio-file with more than two channels, to recreate some version of an original cinema sound, which don't exist anymore?

Star Wars premiered in 1977 with a mono soundtrack (35mm), a 4-channel (matrix-encoded) Dolby Stereo soundtrack (35mm), and a 6-channel Dolby "baby boom" soundtrack (70mm).

So which one do you consider to be "original"?

Than all 4 are some kind of originals. Can't we recreate all 4 with my suggestion?

First, there are 3 original mixes. Second, what you're suggesting is unnecessary given the current state of SW sound preservations. To start, the Mono was preserved from VHS European recordings and the Stereo mix was taken from Laserdisc in both analog and digital formats. Those two exist in their original forms. The 70mm surround-sound mix has been recreated by OT member Hairy Hen using the 93 dolby mix PCM from laserdisc, de-matrixizing it into 4 discreet channels, adding an LF channel, and fixing the changes done to the mix for the 93 home video re-release by splicing in other sources. 

yoda-sama said:

And still, if the source happens to be analog rather than PCM, there's still a point in putting out his improved track as lossless, so as to keep from losing even more information to additional compression (you lose a little bit every time you reencode "lossy").

Not all analog is alike. LD analog tracks were basically FM radio quality sound. It gets the job done, but it isn't studio quality analog tape goodness. 

Harmy said:

No no no, the mono mix and I think the stereo mix are sourced from lossy sources. Hairy_hen's 5.1 is sourced (at least for the most part) from the '93 LD's PCM.

The Mono mix is indeed from old VHS broadcast recordings, so it is rather lo-fi. The stereo mix is harder to say since it depends if it's from the older Stereo capture done from the analog track of an LD or the newly discovered LD PCM track that HH was going to fix up. 

Really happy to hear that this project has gone above and beyond our expectations and that you have secured so many high quality sources. This is going to be a great release and I look forward to it. 

brycebayer said:

Anctu-

Maybe they are like M.V. and will never release it?  Or maybe they just like taking pictures of prints they buy.  I have been going through the forums and wow this has been going on for a long time.  It's either fake or these guys have real, real dedication.  I applaud them.  If it comes out I'm sure it will be awesome. 

Before on the blog, they would have videos showing different parts of their project. There was the opening credits, the entrance to Mos Eisley, etc. they had a counter of how much footage per reel they had cleaned up. This is far from being 1) a hoax and 2) a private venture a la Mike Verta. 

It's taken such a 'long' time because the project evolved from a 'oh wouldn't it be nice...' To 'oh I have a couple of prints, but they're faded and / or warped' to 'how the hell are we going to transfer these prints?' (There was no way in hell a professional house would touch it) To 'oh we hand built a machine to help us transfer all of this footage' etc etc. it went from a dream to a reality and this takes time logistically to figure out all of this stuff. 

A 70mm blow up print is also cropped more as 70mm has a 2.2:1 aspect ratio. 

Owyn_Merrilin said:

Tobar said:

Harmy said:

And now imagine what kind of detail level could be achieved if they did a proper 4K scan of the original negative, when even a poor 1080p scan of the o-neg, that doesn't actually resolve much beyond 720p, can show more detail than a 4K scan of a projection print.

I wish that could still be done. This was taken from a recent article about the rediscovery of Black Angel, the short film originally shown before ESB:

Tanaka: I remember when we were working on the Star Wars restoration, that was a different process. I think we optically recreated interpositives. But in order to do this, it went through some kind of warm chemical bath cleansing. The weird thing about Star Wars was that it was made up of different film stocks, so it went through this bath and they didn’t know what would come out on the other end...

Parker: You mean if it would survive or not? ‘George we might destroy your entire film, but it’s... we think it’s going to be OK.’

Tanaka: There’s a space battle shot and a close-up on Hans Solo, and the original negative is coming out of this cleaning solution and it’s just acetate.

Parker: It’s all clear. Oh no, did the bath dissolve it?

Tanaka: Yeah, it dissolved it, depending on the film stock.

='(

 

That is absolutely horrendous, but at least the entire film wasn't destroyed. If it's Star Wars we're talking about, and not Empire or Jedi (which seems likely, considering how much worse the deterioration supposedly was on Star Wars, and how many stocks of varying quality it used), if Disney were to get serious about resoration, they could go back to a technicolor print, or maybe even the technicolor separation masters, and still wind up with something higher quality than you can get from a standard 35 mm release print. I'm sure that's what they had to do for the special edition, anyway -- there aren't exactly any scenes where it's just a black screen with a description of what's missing, afterall.

Even the 97 restoration had to use dupes made from the separation masters at certain areas. Perhaps the chemical bath was the reason why...

But yeah, any restoration of the original 1977 Star Wars will not come 100% from the original negatives. Perhaps a combination of OCN, separation dupes, interpositives/negatives. With today's technology, this is rather par for the course with typical restorations done (especially with much older films that rely on a lot more dupe material to reassemble). 

Hoth is pink-ish white! :p

Great examples! I'd love to hear the details on your new process. 

Brooks said:

Harmy said:

... the problem is that the best source that is likely ever to be available to us is a theatrical 35mm print, which most likely doesn't even resolve 1080 lines to begin with - the best you can hope for is to get about the same level of resolution as the official BDs 

I'm confused about this.  The detail lost in the generational losses between the negative and the theatrical prints mean that a theatrical print scanned at 4k or higher would be equivalent in detail to the negative scanned at 1080p?

Imagine taking a CD and making an mp3. Then take the mp3 and convert it to a large 24 bit 96khtz wav file. Is the wav file better than the original CD? In terms of numbers yeah, but no amount of processing is going to bring back the detail lost in the initial CD to mp3 conversion. 

Brooks said:

What resolution were the scans used for the official blurays?  I don't know much about motion film, I've been scanning my still photo negatives at 4800 dpi and that works out to about 100mb a frame too.  I would love to see a frame of motion film scanned at 4k (or 10k, wow!).

The official blurays were done at 1080p. They were originally for the DVD release. 

This is really awesome news -1 team!

I am curious about a few things...

Are you scanning all of your new sources with your homemade transfer machine or elsewhere?

Do you find that the transfer machine you built can output in great quality and do not feel a scan from an"official" machine could do any better? 

Are you planning on fixing any of the footage that was warped in the initial ESB print or has that gone bye-bye in favor of the new sources?

Is Hoth blue or white???

Antcu, send me a PM with your email address and I'll send you a wetransfer link when I get back from work.

TServo2049 said:

Mavimao said:

Space Kaijuu said:

Ah, Jurassic Park and its weird combo of open-matte and hard-matted scenes.

It was actually common practice for films to have their special effects shots hard-matted. Less area to work with = less work to do.

That's not why. It's because VFX were usually done in VistaVision, with a wider AR. For the final negative, they were reduced to hard-matted 4-perf.

Oh right, silly me. My mind was too stuck in Jurassic Park where the special effects were done electronically and not photochemically. 

Space Kaijuu said:

Ah, Jurassic Park and its weird combo of open-matte and hard-matted scenes.

It was actually common practice for films to have their special effects shots hard-matted. Less area to work with = less work to do. 

If the rest of the film is open matte it's simply because it's copied directly off the negative.