On a scale of 1 to 10:
Star Wars - 10
The Empire Strikes Back - 10
Return of the Jedi - 10
Revenge of the Sith - 7
Attack of the Clones - 6
The Phantom Menace - 5
Rogue One - 5
The Force Awakens - 1
Shatner did it. 😉
Some of the U-matic decks I used in college looked similar. The studio had been built and equipped when the campus was built in 1975, but due to lack of funding the whole thing was in mothballs until 1986.
One of my instructors liked those old dinosaurs better than the front loading models, as you could "pop the hood* to do routine cleaning and maintenance.
That VCR is a beast. By the way, I just rewatched that scene and it was a baseball game that he recorded, rather than football (which I guess is apparent in your screenshot anyway). That TV brings back memories. When I was a kid we had a 25" console TV similar to that, an RCA. I loved that TV.
Super VHS was marketed to professionals. We had an editing system for it back in college, one of the first models Panasonic put out. I actually learned how to edit videotape on those behemoths. Most of my own video projects I shot on S-VHS. And a then brand new local tv station in the early '90’s here was almost exclusively S-VHS, save for a couple Betacam decks.
Well, there were professional standard VHS machines (“broadcast decks”) too (Panasonic AG-6810 for example), but VHS, like S-VHS, was still considered a consumer format in general (there were even about a dozen pre-recorded movies released for S-VHS). 30 lines of chroma resolution is well below the NTSC broadcast standard of 120 lines. From what I understand, S-VHS and ED-Beta were only used professionally as a lower-cost alternative to Betacam SP, which was the de facto standard.
Also, I’m finding conflicting information about ED-Beta’s chroma resolution. At least one source says 100 lines (which is the same as Betacam) while others say 30 lines (which is the same as VHS, S-VHS, Betamax, and SuperBeta). I’m inclined to believe it only has 30 lines, because if it had 100 lines it would be superior to Betacam SP (higher luma resolution and equal chroma resolution). A Popular Science article from June 1988 indicates 30 lines:
In the ED Beta system the color (or chroma) part of the video signal is recorded at the same frequency as earlier systems.
The earlier systems were SuperBeta and Betamax, and those both definitely had only 30 lines of chroma resolution.
It was one where a wealthy (or at least well off) character had a deck in his home to tape football games without the express written permission of the NFL. Columbo should have arrested him for that alone. 😉
Yeah, I saw that one not too long ago. The mistake he made was resetting the guy’s watch to the correct time, not knowing that he always set his watch 5 minutes ahead. I didn’t notice his VCR was U-matic.
Based on my high school and college experiences U-matic was better than VHS but below the quality of Super VHS (400 lines) which I used extensively well into the 1990’s. Extended Definition Betamax at 500 lines might have made a splash had Sony marketed it more aggressively.
Yeah, I would expect S-VHS to exceed U-matic, though it was light on chroma resolution (30 lines), so it wasn’t considered broadcast quality (it wasn’t marketed to professionals anyway), despite its high luma resolution. ED-Beta was a “prosumer” deal, with 100 lines of chroma resolution. It was roughly equivalent to DVD. VHS was far too ensconced by that time for any other videotape format to make a dent in the consumer market though.
Not sure exactly what the BBC used in house at the time. That Dr. Who site frequently refers to the original episode masters from the 70’s being Quad. (Long since dubbed off to digital formats.) Shooting video on location away from the studios was rare and usually done on film. U-matic made some early inroads in news gathering as it was portable and didn’t have to be rushed to the lab for developing. The gear was still damn heavy well into the 80’s though. I once walked around for a while with a deck slung over one shoulder, the camera on the other and a battery belt around my waist. After taking all of that off I felt like I was on the moon for a little while. 😉
I’m going to assume Quad for that Mark Hamill video then. I can’t see any other videotape format available in '77 having that kind of quality. The quality is on par with at least Betacam SP, which didn’t come along until '86. I never realized that Quad was capable of such quality. I’d like to see a good Quad recording natively displayed on a professional CRT monitor (like a JVC Pro HV-M300VSU).
Unlike what happened with Doctor Who’s early years, Blue Peter apparently took great lengths to preserve their broadcast history. One reason several clips from lost Who episodes survived is they were used on Blue Peter.
U-Matic began life as a home video format that was too expensive for most people in the early '70’s. An early Sony U-matic home deck appears as a rich man’s toy in a Columbo episode as a plot device. It was still cheaper than most broadcast gear, and Sony refocused it’s efforts. It was firmly the format for colleges, small tv stations and other institutions by the 1980’s. Betacam was way too expensive for the college I went to. We received programming as an affiliate of National College Television on U-Matic tapes until direct satellite delivery took over in the 90’s.
I take great exception to your characterization of Betamax having used it many times over the years. U-matic was never more to me than a major pain in the ass back in college. The decks broke down so often you could set your watch by them.
Betamax was more or less the equivalent of VHS, 250 lines vs. 240 lines for VHS, and both Betamax and VHS recorded a lowly composite signal. U-matic was 280 lines (330 for the SP version) and recorded a Y/C signal (S-video), and Betacam was 300 lines (360 for the SP version) and recorded a YRyBy component signal, which is better than Y/C. When I said Betamax was junk in comparison, I was referring to picture quality, not to the quality/reliability of the hardware.
There were a few Columbo episodes featuring VCRs. Are you referring to the one where the guy has a home surveillance setup, complete with a room that looks like a TV broadcast studio? And Columbo solves the crime by magically zooming in on a speck-sized part of the video (a letter or an invitation or something) and it becomes crystal clear and readable?
What do you think that Mark Hamill video was recorded on? If not U-matic (and it does seem to be higher quality than U-matic, as far as I know, that only leaves Quad, and possibly 1" Type B or C, though that’s cutting it close for the time frame (some sources say Type B/C came out in '76 and others say '78). I’d be surprised if it was on Quad and they saved all those recordings, considering Quad reels are big (12 inches in diameter and a little over 2 inches thick, with storage boxes for them being 15 inches square and 4 inches thick), and with each one only holding an hour of video, it wouldn’t take long before you’d need an awful lot of storage space, and money too, at $300 each. If that’s what happened, then that’s impressive.
I don’t think the BBC was using U-matic for broadcast purposes.
U-matic was a common broadcast videotape standard before Betacam came along in 1982. I suppose it could have been Quad (Ampex Quadruplex), which allegedly had excellent picture quality, but those were massive reels of 2" wide tape that cost about $300 each (for 1 hour of recording time), and as such, recordings were rarely saved; they were typically recorded over and over again, as many times as they could. The tape reels were so wide and large because the recording heads didn’t use helical scan, which is what allowed high-quality, yet compact, videocassettes to be possible.
The site you linked to seems to only have information on the restoration of Dr. Who episodes which exist in oddball formats. For example:
Back in 1978, Ian Levine heard that KCET TV in Los Angeles was about to show `The Dæmons’ as a two-hour compilation. He wired an American friend the money to go out and hire one of the then brand-new Betamax VCR’s, and to buy two one-hour tapes, at that time the longest tape available. The machine was obtained, and the broadcast recorded in its entirety, except for a gap of about twenty seconds during which the tapes were changed over. The Betamax tapes were brought over to England and, as TV standards conversion equipment was not generally available to the public, the tapes were copied onto 525-line U-matic cassettes, retained by Levine ever since.
So in that case it was a recording of an over-the-air NTSC broadcast onto Betamax (which was consumer-grade junk to begin with, compared to broadcast-quality formats such as U-matic and Betacam), and then dubbed to a U-matic tape, still in NTSC format.
The Mark Hamill video seems to be significantly higher quality than U-matic or even Betacam is capable of (even allowing for the extra 20% lines of resolution of PAL vs. NTSC), so I’m guessing it was Quad (though it seems strange that they would have saved the recording considering the size and expense of those reels). I’ve never seen a Quad transfer, but I’ve read that the high-band and super high-band versions from the '60s and '70s had “excellent” picture quality. The TV broadcast of The Nutcracker (1977) was on Quad, and was preserved, and is available on DVD and Blu-ray, so that would give an idea of what Quad was capable of. I’m not even remotely interested in buying it though.
I can’t but Sledge is a lost treasure.
One of the funniest sitcoms ever. I never missed an episode back when it originally aired.
https://youtu.be/RDZZDmEyKIM (be sure to watch it in 1080p)
It appears to have been shot on video rather than film. How is it possible for it to look so clean? The interview was in 1977, so that’s before Betacam existed, which means it was most likely shot on 3/4" U-matic tape. But it looks cleaner than any U-matic transfer I’ve ever seen. For that matter, it looks cleaner than any analog Betacam transfer I’ve ever seen, and Betacam was an improvement on U-matic.
On this site - http://www.thegreatbear.net/video-tape/copy-umatic-tape/ - there are a couple of screenshots of transfers from U-matic, one using the composite signal and the other using the superior Y/C signal (AKA: S-video). Both of them look exactly like I’d expect U-matic to look like, and not even close in quality to that Mark Hamill BBC interview video. And that is after a digital transfer and YouTube compression, both of which incur loss. Imagine how good the master tape looked.
Here’s a lossless screenshot from the “Sledge Hammer!” DVD release, which was shot on Betacam in 1986 - https://i.imgur.com/0pCbJf7.png. It’s not as good of quality as that Mark Hamill video. Note the ghosting, video noise, and lack of fine detail (compare how much fine detail there is in Mark Hamill’s hair compared to David Rasche’s, for example).
I think it might be source from iTunes?
I don’t think iTunes has it, but Netflix supposedly does:
https://www.netflixmovies.com/true-lies-1994
I don’t have a Netflix subscription, so I can’t see what the quality is like, or even if they really have it. They don’t give any technical details about the video stream, and there are no user comments at the bottom of the page.
It had NL subs so maybe it’s from NL.
It looks pretty clean, the pans are without any strobe.
Yes, the only subtitles it has other than English are Netherlands/Dutch, which suggests that whoever created the torrent was from the Netherlands. Whether or not that’s useful information for identifying the source, I don’t know.
If it came from a streaming site then the streamed source probably isn’t much better than the torrent file. Streaming sites usually use crap bitrates; far lower than a Blu-ray. One thing is for sure though: somewhere up the line a decent, progressive, HD transfer of this movie exists, and in the original 2.35:1 aspect ratio, which is exactly what would be used to master a Blu-ray.
It was encoded almost exactly 3 years ago, so whatever the source was, it isn’t new.
Edit: According to a few posts I’ve found on forums, you can get True Lies in HD through VUDU’s “disc to digital” thing, whatever that is:
If you have the DVD, you can do a disc to digital conversion at VUDU and get the movie in Hi Definition.
It’s my go to version when I watch it, nice transfer with great sound.
The movie doesn’t show up in their catalog when you do a search for it, but it’s there when you do the disc to digital, or at least it was.
There are many movies that they have in high definition and OAR that aren’t available elsewhere, including many Disney titles.
And there’s also this assertion from the same forum thread:
True Lies came out in Blue Ray in the Czech Republic and Germany, years ago but not in the rest of the aria odd, can someone explain this.
Others on the thread dispute that claim though.
Does anyone know the source of the file available online which is called “True Lies 1994 1080p.BluRay.5.1.x264 . NVEE”? It is only 2.95 GB, so the quality isn’t great, but it didn’t come from the D-Theater release. For one thing, it is 23.976 FPS (indicates progressive source) instead of 29.97 FPS (interlaced source) and it doesn’t have those interlacing artifacts during motion scenes, such as ghosting, strobing, and fluttering brightness that the D-Theater rip has. Also, it has the theatrical 2.35:1 aspect ratio, unlike the open-matte HDTV broadcast sources I’ve heard about.
It has the word “BluRay” in the file name, which is impossible, right? However, it does have all of the characteristics of a Blu-ray rip/re-encode. If only it were at least 8 GB in file size it would be awesome. It is still better to watch than the 13.1 GB D-Theater rip I’ve seen, because in the case of compression artifacts vs. those nauseating interlacing artifacts, the former is the lesser evil.
Here’s a screenshot comparison - http://screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/211463
As you can see, the 2.95 GB mystery source file has none of that ghosting/smearing/whatever you want to call it that the D-Theater source has throughout.
Well there was no extra resolution because they were transferred in 1993 in SD. But of course, if they’d bothered to scan the three films in 2006 they could have given us anamorphic DVDs.
Well, that’s beside the point, which is: being able to zoom and crop doesn’t make it as good as a proper anamorphic DVD. However, if there were PAL D1 master tapes for the 1993 laser discs, those have extra vertical resolution compared to NTSC, so you could do an anamorphic DVD transfer without having to upscale it as much.
And only people unaware of the forthcoming digital transition would buy one.
Not necessarily. I bought one in 2005 (32" at Wal-mart) specifically because the writing was on the wall for CRTs at the time, and I wanted to buy a new one before it was too late. I still have it and I still use it for ~240p video game consoles and DVDs. I love CRTs and hate LCDs with a passion. I use a CRT for my PC monitor as well, though it can resolve much higher resolutions than a ~15 kHz TV can (1920 x 1440 @ 60 Hz). I use it for watching HD content.
It doesn’t get Lucas off the hook for offering up a technically inferior product using then 13 year old video masters and calling it a day.
I never said that it did. I said that not everyone was upset about it, i.e., it was fine for people using standard CRT TVs.
It is sad CRT’s seem to be no longer manufactured. Seeing a Ms. Pac Man machine with a 16:9 LCD grafted into the cabinet just looks wrong.
I bought three new Happ Vision Pro 19" CRT arcade monitors in 2007, just before everyone stopped making CRT arcade monitors. I put them in my Atari Missile Command, SNK Ikari Warriors, and Capcom Street Fighter II machines. They are still like new because I don’t put many hours on my arcade machines (the same goes for the 32" TV I bought in 2005). My Nintendo Super Punch-Out machine has its original pair of Nintendo/Sanyo 20-Z2AW monitors (Nintendo monitors are a special case; they invert the colors and have a built-in audio amplifier, so they aren’t easily replaced with a standard arcade monitor), but I swapped in a pair of like-new, burn-free picture tubes (which took a long time to find), replaced all of the electrolytic capacitors, and put in new flyback transformers.
I hate that CRTs are no longer manufactured, especially with regard to CRT arcade monitors. If I didn’t have CRT monitors for my machines I’d rather never play them again than put LCDs or any other form of digital display in them. But in addition to the CRT monitors I already have installed in them, all of which are like new or refurbished, I also have three spare Nintendo/Sanyo monitors, an Electrohome G07, a Wells-Gardner K7000, and a Wells-Gardner K4900, all of which work. I’m confident that I’m set for life, given that I don’t have any plans to acquire any additional arcade machines (four of them is plenty for me).
I saw one of those once uber expensive Sony HDTV CRT’s just put out on the curb with the trash a couple years back. Always thought those were cool, even if they weighed more than a subcompact car. 😉
The best direct-view HD CRT I’ve ever seen was the HV-M300VSU from the JVC Professional Video line, which had an MSRP of over $4,500 - http://pro.jvc.com/prof/attributes/specs.jsp?model_id=MDL100107&feature_id=03. It is also the best direct-view TV I’ve ever seen, period.
Can you think of any other 2.35:1 DVD releases from 2006 that were non-anamorphic?
No, but that doesn’t have anything to do with what I said.
It doesn’t matter really since most modern players can crop and zoom a non-anamorphic disc.
It still matters if you have a display which can take advantage of anamorphic DVDs. Cropping and zooming is just a kludge. It doesn’t give you the extra resolution that anamorphic DVDs have. Of course, all DVDs have the same resolution (720 x 480 for NTSC), but anamorphic DVDs use more of the available resolution for picture content, whereas a letterboxed non-anamorphic DVD wastes more of the available resolution on black bars (letterboxing).
With a standard-resolution CRT TV it doesn’t matter, because the effective increase in resolution isn’t noticeable, and there are no display format issues either, because anamorphic and non-anamorphic DVDs display exactly the same on a 4:3 TV, assuming your DVD player is doing its job properly. Note that standard-resolution, 4:3 CRT TVs were still being sold new in mainstream stores until at least 2007.
I own that set. The GOUT is the same, non anamorphic widescreen with black bars on the top and bottom.
George had to make everyone angry. The people who wanted widescreen had to deal with letterboxing, and the people who wanted full screen had to deal with widescreen.
Not quite everyone. The GOUT is fine for displaying on a standard CRT TV. Anamorphic has no benefit in such a case.
I absolutely agree with MaximRecoil’s feelings towards digital projection. All of the movies I’ve seen in theaters since the transition have had grey blacks. The last time that I brought this up on a forum, people just didn’t understand - “durr…you can’t get blacker than #000000”. xD
I made a thread to reply here - http://originaltrilogy.com/topic/Digital-projectors-in-movie-theaters-and-other-things-digital/id/47478
I absolutely agree with MaximRecoil’s feelings towards digital projection. All of the movies I’ve seen in theaters since the transition have had grey blacks. The last time that I brought this up on a forum, people just didn’t understand - “durr…you can’t get blacker than #000000”. xD
I’ve gotten the same response from people in forums. I think most people are so used to the poor black levels of digital displays now that it seems normal to them. In 2008 and 2009 I was working with my older brother Will in Arizona, and he’d gone out of his way to obtain a JVC HV-M300VSU (original MSRP: $4,519), which was one of the best direct-view CRT TVs ever made. The picture quality was stunning, even with relatively low quality video sources, such as 700 MB MPEG-4 ASP encoded “DVD rips”. In any event, when his highfalutin friends came over, all of whom owned the “latest and greatest” digital TVs, Will’s TV confused them. They marveled at the picture quality, the great contrast / deep blacks, and couldn’t understand why their TVs didn’t look like that. That was over 7 years ago, and most people had already been Digital Display Indoctrinated even back then.
In addition, I’ve yet to see any new TV technologies replicate all of the advantages of CRTs, including durability. Plasma has a slight fuzziness and wears out. Regular LCD has grey blacks. OLED is close, but also wears out. The closest is LCD with full-array RGB backlighting (edge-lit isn’t as good). Solid blacks, good colours. But CRTs still have better contrast.
A shame that SED never happened…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surface-conduction_electron-emitter_display
This is funny, because it reads almost exactly like many posts I’ve made over the years. I was excited about SED back when it was first making news about a dozen years ago, and it is very unfortunate that nothing ever came of it. With that said, it still wouldn’t have been as good as traditional CRT technology in one area which is very important in my opinion, i.e., it is digital, which means it has a fixed resolution, and only video content which matches the fixed resolution of a digital display looks good (or as good as it is going to look on whatever digital display you’re using). Video content with a different resolution has to be filtered/scaled to fill the screen, which is ugly. The effect is easy to demonstrate on a PC with a digital monitor. Just switch Windows to any resolution other than the monitor’s native one, and see how crappy it looks. Multi-sync CRTs don’t have that problem; so on the same TV you can watch a Blu-ray or a DVD and they will both look as good as possible; no scaling/filtering artifacts whatsoever (because CRTs don’t scale/filter anything; they just sync to a different frequency).
BTW, Pretty much all films since the 90’s have gone through colour timing via digital intermediate. Modern vinyl records also tend to have gone digital at some step during production.
That doesn’t surprise me. I’ve long thought there should be an analog audio encoding format for optical discs. Several years ago someone pointed out to me that it has been done, but it never went anywhere. This is the link they gave me - http://www.positive-feedback.com/Issue58/analog.htm
Of course, even if such a thing did catch on, the studios would probably still be capturing/mastering the songs digitally, which defeats the purpose.
With regard to projecting video, CRT projectors best approximate the look of projected film, but unfortunately, they are no longer manufactured, and they aren’t particularly suitable for commercial theaters anyway, due to their relatively low light output (lumens) and, because the 3 CRTs are driven at such high intensity in a projector application, they are very prone to screen burn, which isn’t good for a projector which would be in use all day, every day. They can’t be beat for a properly blacked-out home theater room though. The best one (which still commands a lot of money if you can find one), the Barco 909, is capable of 3200 x 2560 resolution and is good for up to a 29’ wide screen, more than enough for a home theater. The U.S. military stockpiled Barco 909s for a long time after they went out of production (they used them in their flight-simulators - https://www.barco.com/en/References/2005-02-07—US-Navy-MSAT-display-system.aspx), because they couldn’t find any digital projectors which would cut the mustard. I don’t know if they’ve moved on yet or not. They were also commonly used in planetariums.
TServo2049 said:
There actually is at least one 70mm IMAX print, it’s playing at the Tech Museum of Innovation in San Jose, CA. I saw it, it was a trip. But we’ll never get it.(Are there any 35mm prints in release, or only 70mm IMAX ones?)
In addition to the 35mm prints that small-time theaters in the U.S. will get their hands on soon enough, there are guaranteed to already be plenty of 35mm prints that have been sent to places such as Mexico, Africa, South America, etc., that haven’t widely converted to digital projectors.
Not sure if you’re being intentionally thick but on the off chance you really didn’t understand the comment, let me explain - Team Negative 1 is creating a digitized version of 35mm film, just like the DCP of Star Wars TFA you saw in the cinema was a digitized version of 35mm (and 65mm) film, so if you’re expecting this project to be closer to the projection quality of 35mm than the DCP, you’re going to be disappointed, just like you must be disappointed with all Blu-Rays and other digital media.
“Intentionally thick”? What are you talking about? I know exactly what Team Negative 1 is doing, and anyone who got the impression that I don’t, didn’t properly read what I typed.
The problem with the image quality of TFA when I watched it at the theater was due to the digital projector. Had they projected that exact same DCP through e.g., a Barco 909 or Sony G90 CRT projector (or better yet, a pair of either one of them in unison) it would have had glorious image quality. Also, had they simply made a film print from the film source and used a film projector, it would have had glorious image quality. Even 100% native video looks better when transferred to film and shown through a film projector than if left in video format and shown through a digital projector, because film projectors are capable of better black levels than any digital projector due to film doing a better job of blocking the backlight for areas that are supposed to be black (and that outweighs the generational loss of transferring video to a film print in my opinion).
The best black levels come from CRT projectors though, because they aren’t backlit at all. The CRTs generate their own light (via energized red, green, and blue phosphors), and for blacks, the CRTs simply don’t generate any light for those areas. For an all black screen, the CRTs would simply be off, while with other forms of projection, the backlight is always on and something has to attempt to block the light for the black areas.
By the way, high quality, high resolution video (such as Blu-ray, or Team Negative 1’s digital scans from 35mm film prints) looks fantastic through a CRT projector, very film projector-like; potentially a bit better even (assuming the scan/encode is of high enough quality and resolution to be a ~faithful representation of the film print), because of the CRT projector’s better black levels.
I do hope that guy knows this is a digitised version of a 35mm film and neg one isn’t distributing actual 35mm prints out or he’s going to be so dissapointed.
What guy? It is a safe bet that everyone here knows that, by the way. 35mm prints of any of the OT movies are not only very expensive (usually 4 figures), but they are big and heavy as well (about five or six 2000-foot reels, weighing about 50-60 pounds total).
Well. That was absurdly off topic.
The OP mentioned future plans of doing transfers of the SE and the prequels. Someone else mentioned TFA. Then someone mentioned the practical non-existence of film prints of TFA, and I pointed out that there should be plenty of TFA film prints soon enough, along with the reason why. That wasn’t off topic at all, much less “absurdly”. As for the side note, well, of course it was off topic somewhat (though still on the topic of film prints); that’s what a side note is by definition, which is why I prefaced it as such.
And then the SE, and the Prequels.
You forgot about The Fanfic Awakens!
That would be a pain to get their hands on considering there’s like 2 prints in existence.
I thought TFA was an utterly ridiculous/worthless movie, but there will still be plenty of 35mm film prints of it once it hits the second-run theaters. A lot of small time theaters still only have film projectors, and even though the big studios won’t make them prints anymore, there seem to be middle-men that will. A couple of years ago a couple of local small-time theaters were trying to raise funds for digital projectors because of the announcement that they could no longer get film prints. However, just this past summer I watched the new Terminator movie at the drive-in on 35mm film (they still only have a film projector). According to their Facebook page, they found a source, despite their fears of impending doom from a couple of years ago. It wasn’t just the new Terminator movie either; they showed the then-current crop of second-run movies all summer long on film (I had to sit through “Minions” as part of a double feature before I could watch Terminator Genisys).
As a side note, I’m never going to a movie in a theater with a digital projector again, and when film projectors finally die out for good, I’m never going to a movie theater again. The only good thing about the new Star Wars movie was that it was shot on film, but that was entirely negated by the digital projector. Digital projectors can’t match the black levels of film and CRT projectors, so the blacks in TFA (shots of outer space for example) were dark gray, making the movie look like it had bad contrast, and like crap in general. I hadn’t been to a first-run theater since 2007 when I took my nephew to see Transformers, and they used a film projector at the time, so this TFA foolishness was the first time I’d ever been gypped by a digital projector (and it will be the last time, too).
It seems like you don’t plan a Grindhouse because the prints are better than ESB. Sounds fair, although, just having watched the ESB grindhouse I would be very excited to see Jedi unstabilized and with scratchy reel changeovers - The imperfections in the print go a long way to recreating a theatrical feel and aren’t in the least bit distracting- it’s what we miss about going to a cinema right?
I agree. I just watched the “grindhouse” release of TESB and it was awesome. It would be nice to have a matching “grindhouse” set of all three movies, even if they are not all at the exact same level of “grindhouseness”. This has always been my idea of a perfect home video version of any movie, i.e., straight from a film print and nothing else. We never get that from official home video releases.
Wazzles said:
Please stop. I came here to talk about a possible 4K transfer and you have successfully perverted the thread into an entirely new tangent. Is it too hard to agree to disagree? What's with all this lawyer talk, anyway?
You're confused. Every one of my posts on this thread has been in direct reply to someone else's post, and has been relevant to said post. So, to clear up your confusion: everyone who has been arguing about the GOUT (including the people who can only manage to comment on the argument from the peanut gallery) has "successfully perverted the thread into an entirely new tangent" (I haven't been arguing with myself, obviously). Do you want a list of usernames, or do you think you can just scroll up and find them yourself?
adywan said:
4:3 TV's stopped being sold here in the UK much earlier than 2006, in fact CRT TV's weren't on sale AT ALL in 2006, only LCD and Plasma 16:9 TV's. You could find them online, just about, but in the main stores, no CRT's to be found. How do i know this, In 2005 my Dad wanted to replace his now defunked 4:3 portable TV, which had a built in VHS player. We went all around the shops and nothing. So he got a 16:9 20" LCD TV with built in DVD player instead. But even then, most people i knew who HADN'T upgraded to a LCD/ Plasma still had 16:9 CRT TV's, not 4:3
I bought a new 32" CRT TV in 2006 at Wal-Mart.
the GOUT was horrendous quality coming from a studio that had access to prints/ negatives. How difficult would it have been to make a scan off one of the prints for these bonus discs? Even without a clean up they would have looked miles better than crappy laserdisc transfers.
I would much rather have a good DVD sourced from a scan of a 35mm film print than the GOUT, especially if it wasn't cleaned up. I love film grain and dust and scratches (as long as they aren't excessive). But what's available vs. what I'd rather have is irrelevant to the argument. Also, the GOUT isn't a LaserDisc transfer.
These were actually LESS quality than the preservations fans were doing at the time. Forget the slight improvement in sharpness of the picture, the digital smearing and the terrible aliasing problems made that release an joke.
I guess you don't know that nearly all of the most popular and well-regarded fan preservations were transfers from the 1993 and/or 1995 LaserDiscs, which were made from the same masters that the GOUT was made from. This means they had the same "digital smearing and terrible aliasing problems" that the GOUT has, because those were present in the 1993 D1 masters. The claim that the GOUT was of less quality is false by any objective/technical standard, given that they are from the same source and the fan preservations have a lot more loss relative to the source:
GOUT = 1993 D1 master --> DVD-9
Most fan preservations = 1993 D1 master --> LaserDisc --> DVD-5
CatBus said:
Well, Frink kinda sucked the magic out of the thread. Now we know that the dude just likes CRTs. Not the way I like CRTs (yeah, I'm one of those), but in an obsessive religious zealot sort of way. All the mystery is gone. The motivation behind bizarre statements about "there is only one true display on which you can watch the GOUT and all others are false displays", it's all sorted out.
Thanks Frink. Jerk.
Yes, "TV's Frink" made great use of his Junior Detective Kit™ (and his non sequiturs and laughably wild insinuations are fantastic, by the way), but anyone who has read at least the last several pages of this thread already knew what "TV's Frink" "discovered". For example, from post 1081:
MaximRecoil said:
They'll get my CRT when they pry it from my cold, dead hands. I'll take the visual qualities of a CRT over any digital display currently on the market, any day, even if the CRT is lower resolution and a smaller screen.
There are only two display technologies that look right to me: CRT (direct-view, and especially rear projection; Barco 909 and Sony G90 being the ultimate examples) and projected film. It sucks that SED displays (the same visual qualities as a direct-view CRT) never happened.
And post 1087:
MaximRecoil said:
The best CRT displays ever made still set the standard for overall picture quality. But regardless of that, I simply hate the look of digital displays; I feel like I'm looking at a glorified calculator or digital watch.
CatBus said:
A call has been made to point out the logical fallacies and misinformed parts of your post, the ones that made Harmy too nauseous to respond to. Much as I think no actual person on earth could be so unaware of the world in which they live, I'm going to respond one more time as if you were not just trolling us.
Consider this baseless and irrelevant editorial of yours dismissed.
So here's your first few. Lucasfilm was sitting on some masters--a 4:3 Laserdisc master for the GOUT and a 16:9 DVD master for the 1997 SE. For the release we're talking about, you say they shouldn't scale the existing 4:3 master
I never said any such thing. I said that it isn't usually done. Practically all DVDs which were made from D1 masters were 4:3 (feel free to list some exceptions if you know of any).
(fallacy 1: strawman--nobody's suggested that they do this).
First: your fallacy claim is based on a false premise (see above), which inherently negates the claim. Second, at least one person has suggested that they should have done this (see post 1118).
Of course, they could have created an entirely new master for the OOT.
Irrelevant, given that I never said they couldn't have. In fact, in post 1079 I said:
"I know, which is why I said it wasn't nearly as good as it could've been (i.e., it could have been an anamorphic 16:9 transfer from a new 4K film scan, had they invested the time and money)."
(misinformed 1: this happens all the time, especially for popular titles;
Negated by your false premise. See above.
misinformed 2: those were not 4k scans for chrissake! This is Lucasfilm, not Sony!)
I said: "probably 4K scans" (does the bolding help)?
Fallacy 2: thinking that the person trying to fit a square peg into a round hole is someone other than the person releasing an anamorphic DVD in 2006.
A 4:3 DVD released at any time, whether in the 1990s or 50 years from now, is designed for a 4:3 TV, period. It is up to the consumer to decide whether they want it, and whether they want an ideal display for it. It was not advertised as being designed for 16:9 TVs, which negates your bizarre "theory".
Fallacy 3: false equivalence. A video game console released in 2006 that had troubles with HDTVs would and should be pilloried (this would be equivalent to the GOUT). Video game consoles released around the turn of the millennium or earlier would and should be given a pass (this is what you're talking about, and it's unlike the GOUT).
No, there is no "false equivalence", given that the analogy focuses on where the fault logically lies. It has nothing to do with people's disappointment. Anything can be released at any time, and it is always the responsibility of the consumer to know the specifications and decide whether he wants it or not. As long as the manufacturer doesn't misrepresent the product, then logically no fault can be placed on them for any problems or dissatisfaction the consumer has trying to make it work with hardware for which it wasn't designed.
By the way, new hardware based on the Atari 7800 and ColecoVision has been released, or is in the process of being released, and no, it doesn't output an HDTV signal, obviously. For someone to buy it, and then blame the hardware for not looking good on their HDTV would be absurd (and illogical).
AntcuFaalb said:
MaximRecoil said:
Your imagination is wildly disconnected from reality, or from anything which logically follows from reality.
I was clearly joking around.
I get that you're all fired up about this, but you've reached an annoying level of pedantry in an effort to support your argument. This level of pedantry does nothing to convince the people with whom you're arguing that your argument has merit and only serves to drive them away. As I'm sure you know, clearing the room of your opponents isn't the same as winning an argument against them.
If you're so sure that your opinion on this matter is the correct one, then walk away and let this thread return to on-topic discussion. There's a lot of wrong information on the WWW and your crusade to remove one item from that set is nothing more than a drop in the bucket.
Most of what you've typed here is a non sequitur. For example, that you were "clearly joking around" is not in dispute, and is irrelevant. Also, I'm not "fired up" about anything; this is a run-of-the-mill argument. Third: you've confused arguing with persuasive writing. I have no interest in the latter.
By the way, I can't "let this thread return to on-topic discussion", because I can't prevent it in the first place, nor would I care to prevent it even if I could. If this thread returns to on-topic discussion, it will be because people decide to make on-topic posts, and they won't ask me for permission to do so. Recently, the people who have posted in this thread have decided they'd rather argue with me (or throw paper cups from the sidelines) than post about "4K restoration on Star Wars".
