MaximRecoil

DominicCobb said:

Obviously it's not the DVD's fault. It's George's fault for ordering the creation of one of the shittiest looking DVD transfers of all time.

4:3 DVDs from D1 masters were common in the '90s and early '00s, and they looked about the same as the GOUT.

And it's your fault for wasting our time with this nonsense that, while hilarious, is probably killing our brain cells.

 And people like you are the source of frivolous lawsuits, i.e., people who can't understand where the fault logically lies in a given situation. In reality, if anyone's time is wasted here, it is their own fault, given that everyone is here voluntarily. And since you have yet to establish that anything I've typed is "nonsense", that mere assertion can be legitimately dismissed out of hand.

Harmy said:

I was getting ready to type up an answer to that but the whole post is just so unbelievably illogical (as well as misinformed), that the idea of trying to refute it just makes me a little nauseous.

I bolded your unsupported assertions, and they are worth exactly what I paid for them.

WedgeCyan said:

OK... but weren't the widescreen discs for the '04 SE anamorphic? There is literally no reason to have made the GOUT non-anamporphic other than to insult the fans who asked for it.

Yes, there is a reason, and it has already been pointed out. In short, the masters they used were essentially glorified 4:3 DVDs to begin with. To go from a 4:3 DVD source to a 16:9 DVD, you have to upscale the vertical resolution of the picture area. Upscaling the master when authoring a DVD isn't normally done by professionals unless they absolutely have to.

The SE DVDs came from far superior masters (probably 4K scans) rather than 720x480 4:3 D1 tape, so they had way more resolution than they needed to properly make 16:9 DVDs. Unfortunately, these far superior masters were scanned from negatives which had been vandalized by George Lucas and co. in 1997, and then they vandalized the masters even more (additional retcons, bad colors, washed-out lightsabers, way too much grain removal, etc.) in 2004 before using them to author the SE DVDs. These masters obviously couldn't be used to make Star Wars trilogy DVDs, because they were glorified fan edits, rather than the real Star Wars trilogy.

Anyone else who spends any amount of time on TFN may recognize this as the infamous "you're getting what you deserve" mantra.

Only people who don't read so well, given that I haven't said, suggested, nor even hinted at any such thing.

If I owned Lucasfilm, there would be no "GOUT", nor would the underlying abbreviation "OUT" even exist, because there would be no need for it. The work done in '97 would have strictly been a restoration and scanning process. 16:9 DVDs would have been released soon thereafter. When Blu-ray came along there would have been a new release, following a new 4K scan (scanning equipment has improved since '97). Both releases would have been available in boxsets and individual discs. Film grain would have been left intact in both cases.

AntcuFaalb said:

I can just imagine him approaching and hugging his GOUT DVDs like Robin Williams in Good Will Hunting.

"It's not your fault!"

"It's not your fault!"

"It's not your fault!"

Your imagination is wildly disconnected from reality, or from anything which logically follows from reality. Assigning the fault to a DVD because it doesn't work ideally on a TV it wasn't designed for, is absurd. It is not the DVD's fault, it is not the DVD player's fault, and it is not the TV's fault. The fault obviously lies with the person who is trying to fit a square peg into a round hole, so to speak.

By the way, I'm using the word "fault" literally; I'm not anthropomorphizing the GOUT. Saying that it is not the DVD's fault is exactly the same thing as saying that the source of the problem (i.e., the fault) is not the DVD.

Similar things happen when people connect old video game consoles to 16:9 digital TVs, and it is equally absurd to blame the video game console for the results being less than ideal.

DuracellEnergizer said:

Darth Id said:

Looks no worse than the PT to me...

I mean, Christopher Lee doing a quadruple somersault off of the catwalk in RotS is every bit as distracting and disbelief-inducing.  And Ewan and Hayden see-sawing on a Legend-of-Zelda-style rock platform floating on lava?

Hayden skydiving into a hovercar?

It's not worse, but it certainly stands out more in a movie that is CG-light in all other respects.  

It also stands out more because it is just a car stunt, which you'd expect would be done for real, especially in a Hollywood movie with a budget of $60,000,000. The Dukes of Hazzard did hundreds of real car stunts on a TV show budget (setting a few real-world records in the process), and plenty of other TV shows did quite a few of them as well (The Fall Guy, Knight Rider, Hardcastle and McCormick, CHiPs, The A-Team, T.J. Hooker, Magnum, P.I., MacGyver, and so on).

CatBus said:

Oh goody. Well, the majority of the TV's still in service worldwide are 4:3 CRT SDTV's, so we can stop even talking about all this crazy newfangled HDTV crap, then.  I can minimize huge shifts in markets and consumer demand with irrelevant statistics, too!

"Too"? No. In order for "too" to apply, I also would have had to have done it. I originally replied to someone who said that 2006 was "well after everyone already adopted 16:9 TVs", which is obviously false, and not only that, but not even close to being correct. I also said, in that same post, that it was beside the point.

Then you came along with some novel, nonstandard interpretation of my standard English-language text, along with a misunderstanding of the word "current", and this bizarre combination resulted in you calling for people to challenge an idea that hadn't been put forth by me or anyone else. In the process you attempted to downplay the number of 4:3 SDTVs in U.S. households in 2006 with the word "some" (when "the vast majority" or simply "most" is far more appropriate), so I clarified the word "some" for you.

What I didn't do is draw any conclusions from any of it (no need for conclusions when the point is correction or clarification of facts, rather than an essay or editorial). The conclusions that you think I have drawn exist only in your imagination, not in my text.

Yeah, because non-anamorphic disks failing to scale decently on the new TV's people were buying in droves isn't objective. At least you didn't ask if I was on the rag. Buh bye, Mr. Objective.

It isn't the DVD's fault if people display it on the wrong type of TV. 4:3 DVDs are designed for 4:3 TVs, obviously. Pixel aspect ratio has nothing whatsoever to do with video quality, just as much of what you've typed has nothing to do with any of my posts.

CatBus said:

Hey as long as this pissing match is going on, I can't believe nobody's challenged the idea that a 4:3 CRT SDTV was "current technology" in 2006 just because some people still had them.

Just to clarify: by "some people", you mean that about 85% of the TVs in U.S. households in 2006 were 4:3 CRT SDTVs. "Current" doesn't necessarily mean "new" or "latest", by the way.

I mean, sure, I had one then, but that's because I'm a cheap bastard and always a bit behind the times as a result.  Non-anamorphic DVDs may have passed critical muster in 1998, but not in 2006--not at all.

The GOUT was crap the day it was released, by the standards of the time. You couldn't even find a cheap porn title that was released in 2006 as a non-anamorphic DVD.

 Your text here has to do with disappointment, not with objective quality. 

Harmy said:

They are terms of something being really bad, that doesn't mean you need to put it on some scale.

They are inherently comparative terms by definition. Why would someone say "horrendous" instead of just "bad"? Because "horrendous" means "very bad", i.e., worse than bad, i.e., in comparison to "bad", it is worse:

hor·ren·dous

: very bad or unpleasant

See my post above.

See my post above, or since it is short, I'll just repost it:

As you've said, the 2011 BD doesn't even qualify as a "good BD". Plus, I don't have a massive screen (which would take full advantage of the quality of a good BD and exploit the deficiencies of DVD resolution) to look at your picture on.

That just makes no sense - "You can't judge it by today's standard, because it is a dead format" is exactly the perfectly logical thing to say when someone says "This 8-track tape doesn't sound very good by today's standards," because you can't, because today's standards are higher, so it's perfectly ok for an 8-track tape to sound inferior to a CD, because it is an outdated format and you can't really compare it fairly

It isn't supposed to be a fair comparison, which is why the qualifier "by today's standards" is added. Pretty much the only time people ever say "by today's standards" is when they are comparing something old to something new; that's the whole point. Saying "by today's standards" gives the older thing an excuse.

- what we're talking about here though is the equivalent of a professional company taking that 8-track tape and transferring it to CD and selling it - then if someone said: "This CD doesn't sound very good by today's standards," they'd be perfectly right to judge the CD by today's standards, because CDs are still standard today, whereas 8-track tapes are not.

They'd be more likely to just say "This CD doesn't sound very good." "By today's standards" usually only comes up when the thing being judged is obviously old. But as I said, anything can be judged by today's standards, including new things which for whatever reason don't meet today's standards. There is no rule, logical or otherwise, that limits it to current things (except for the one you made up).

Have you ever heard someone say something to the effect of, "This was pretty good for its time,"? People say stuff like that all the time about old things, and it is simply a different way of saying that it isn't very good by today's standards, hence the "for its time" qualifier.

See my post above.

 You too.

I guess it could be the NTSC-PAL conversion (my GOUT disc is PAL) or the fact, that it isn't exactly the same frame.

The exact frame doesn't matter. The results are the same no matter which frame you choose from that section.

And you don't need a massive screen, you just need to get closer to a smaller one.

It isn't that simple. If it were I could see the difference between 1080p and 720p on my monitor simply by moving closer than the usual ~2 feet away, yet I can't. There is some overlap with screen sizes and viewing distances, but a 22" screen is not nearly big enough to reproduce the effect of a 30' screen from a good seat, even if your nose is touching it.

1920 pixels across a 17.6" wide screen (22" diagonal) = .0092" wide pixels, and 1280 pixels across the same screen = .0138" wide pixel, both of which might as well be equally small to the naked eye, even up close. 

Harmy said:

OK, so I just had to do it... Here's a comparison between the GOUT upscaled to 1080p, the 2011 BD scaled down to 720x576 and the back up to 1920x1080 and the BD in its native resolution - I'd say, that it's pretty clear, that the difference between the GOUT vs. ANAMORPHIC is more pronounced then the difference between anamorphic vs 1080p. And yeah, I know that the official SW BD is far from being reference material but the difference here is so large, that I think it's definitely enough to show the GOUT's horrendity and terribleness ;-)

And I'd say, that the biggest flaw of the GOUT transfer is simply its age - the technology used to make the transfer in 1993 is just hopelessly outdated and was already hopelessly outdated in 2006 (hell, the transfer in this comparison was made in 2004) and the transfer was mediocre even for the technology for which it was originally made, as evidenced by LD fans and home-video enthusiasts complaining about it back then.

The number of pixels in the digital master is one thing but the actual resolution is another - just like it's been demonstrated that the BD doesn't actually resolve as much detail as 1080p could, the GOUT also seems to resolve less detail than the 274 lines of resolution could.

As you've said, the 2011 BD doesn't even qualify as a "good BD". Plus, I don't have a massive screen (which would take full advantage of the quality of a good BD and exploit the deficiencies of DVD resolution) to look at your picture on.

Also, what happened to the detail/grain in your GOUT screenshot? It looks slightly posterized. This is what it should look like (mine on the right, yours on the left):

Harmy said:

Erm, no "more horrendous" and "more terrible" are comparative terms - "horrendous" and "terrible" are simply terms of horrendity and terribleness - something can be horrendous and terrible and that in no way implies that nothing could be more horrendous and terrible.

I've already explained why "horrendous" and "terrible" are inherently comparative terms. The very concept of such words demands that something better exists or can be imagined, and therein lies the comparison. And, as I've already said, "horrendous" and "terrible" are both "bottom of the barrel" terms, which also demands things above it in the barrel, either real or imagined.  

But ok, you want a scale: VCD - 1, GOUT - 2.5, Good DVD - 6, Good BD - 10.

I find your scale odd, because on the line between VCD and BD, the GOUT and good DVD are relatively close together, which I illustrated with the 30 foot screen example. The 30-foot screen example pushes the best home video format we have toward its limits, which makes it a lot easier to see how inferior formats compare to it. Do you really think there would be a drastic difference in perceived quality between a good DVD and the GOUT when displayed on a 30-foot screen?

And excluding outdated technology from the debate is in no way arbitrary, it's logical.

It is not only arbitrary, but it is counter-intuitive as well. The very concept of judging things "by today's standards" implies that the thing you are judging is not up to today's standards, which usually means it is old, obselete, etc. In nearly all cases where things are judged "by today's standards", the thing being judged is something that hasn't been manufactured for many years. Someone might say, "This 8-track tape doesn't sound very good by today's standards," and that would be perfectly normal. What would be abnormal (and arbitrary) is if someone then said, "You can't judge it by today's standards because it is a dead format".

And yeah, sure on a 30ft screen, what you said may be true to a point, although even then a proper anamorphic DVD would make a huge difference over the GOUT, I've seen both the GOUT and the 2004 DVD projected on a large screen and the difference was still very big, although in both cases it wasn't very good of course.

Well, I explained the point of the 30-foot screen example above. Yes, BD is a home video format, but when making objective assessments of quality, you have to consider its potential (even if that potential is usually not realized in practice). When you push BD to its limits, the differences between various DVDs in the pond become trivial next to the ocean between them and BD.

But we're talking about home video here and yes I would personally never go back to watching even anamorphic DVDs but I remember when my dad first got a 1080p HDTV, I was testing the GOUT on it and my dad saw and he immediately said that it looked like crap and asked if I was sure there wasn't anything wrong with it, so I tried putting in the 2004 DVD and he was like: "See, now this is HD!" And when I put the HDTV 1080p version on (I was playing all of that from my laptop) he was like: "Meh, that's pretty much the same." True story.

On my 22" CRT PC monitor (Mitsubishi Diamondtron, 1920x1440), sitting only a couple feet away as you normally do with a PC monitor, I can see the difference among a bad DVD, a good DVD, and 720p. I generally can't see the difference between 720p and 1080p however. But 1080p has quality that doesn't become perceptible until you get into much larger screen sizes. 1080p/2K is enough resolution for commercial theater-sized screens (AotC and RotS for example).

AntcuFaalb said:

MaximRecoil said:

PAL loses points simply because you are stuck watching films in fast-forward

I'd take 24->25fps over 3:2 pulldown any day.

I wouldn't. 3:2 pulldown doesn't bother me in the least, plus it gets automatically IVTC'd back to the original 24 full frames per second (technically 24000/1001 FPS [~23.976 FPS]) when played on a progressive scan DVD player (and pretty much all DVD players are capable of progressive scan).

Harmy said: I already pretty-much answered the VCD argument in this post. But I could elaborate - the fact, that something even worse exists doesn't make the bad thing less bad - if you had gout, the fact that you could have potentially got cancer instead, won't make your gout any less bad.

The fact that something even worse exists matters when placing things on a scale. Adjectives such as "horrendous" and "terrible" are inherently comparative terms in the first place, regardless of whether the comparison is implied or explicit. If everything were the same quality, those and similar terms wouldn't even exist.

In any event, you have already made an explicit comparison when you said the GOUT was "horrendous" and "terrible" (and "unwatchable", which you later sort of retracted), i.e., "by today's standards". And then you made the arbitrary rule that "dead formats" were excluded from the comparison. So, using your own comparison, and your own arbitrary rule (a rule which includes the VCD format), place the following on a scale from 1-10: VCD, GOUT, best-possible DVD, Blu-ray.

This would be true if the lower resolution was the GOUT's only problem - but it's not - it's not even its worst problem.

That's why I said:

On the other hand, a 16:9 DVD containing an e.g., 2.35:1 movie only has a relatively small increase in resolution in the picture area, about 25% more than a 4:3 DVD containing a movie in the same aspect ratio (and this extra resolution is only in the vertical), which is a far cry from Blu-ray having 500% more resolution than a PAL DVD. Having 5 times the resolution trumps having slightly more vertical picture resolution plus less and/or better DNR.

A good Blu-ray is pretty close to the quality of a typical 35mm film print (far from the quality of the 35mm negative however). The huge increase in resolution over any DVD makes the difference between 4:3 and 16:9, and PAL vs. NTSC, and DNR issues seem trivial in comparison.

I only know about the DNR issues with the GOUT from reading about it; I've never noticed them watching it (until I knew what to look for), and no one who has ever watched the GOUT with me has ever noticed anything unusual either. On the other hand, I did watch your Despecialized Edition of Star Wars, and I noticed the difference in quality in various scenes (it didn't prevent me from enjoying it however), and since that was only true 720p for most of it, the lower quality scenes mixed in didn't even represent as big of a discrepancy in quality as it is to go from PAL 16:9 DVD to Blu-ray.

Suppose you have a 30-foot screen and a high-quality 1080p projector. First you show the GOUT and it looks like crap. Who is going to even notice DNR issues when the resolution is way too small for the screen size? That giant pixelated mess would pretty well camouflage any other problems it has.

Then you show a better DVD, let's say your Despecialized Edition source files encoded to a 16:9 PAL DVD-9. It looks a bit better, but not much, because no matter how high quality the video is, the resolution is just way too small for the screen.   

Then you show a good Blu-ray, and now it looks good, and the difference between good and "a little better than crap" is a lot more than the difference between crap and "a little better than crap".

Harmy said:

I'm sure there are parts of the world, where people are still watching B&W TVs but that doesn't mean, that B&W TVs aren't dead technology (not to mention, that there are parts of the world, where people don't even have electricity).

As mentioned by another poster, recent movies are still being released on VCD, so it is not a dead format.

SilverWook said:

That makes me wonder if a digital tuner would even work with a monochrome set?

Yes, it would work fine. It just needs to output an NTSC signal, which all of those digital tuner boxes that you use with older TVs do. NTSC was specifically designed to support color and be backward-compatible with black & white.

Black & white CRTs have an extremely high quality image potential. Just play a game of e.g. Asteroids or any other black & white vector arade game to see it. The reason for that is: the inside of the CRT is only coated with a solid sheet of white phosphor rather than droplets of red, green, and blue phosphors in a triad arrangement. This means that black & white CRTs never have any convergence issues, because there is nothing to converge (only one gun instead of three). On top of that, black & white TV have no shadow mask or aperture grille, so there is nothing between the glass and the phosphor impeding the brightness or breaking up the image. This is why the color vector arcade games don't have such razor sharp lines with such an intense glow as the black & white vector games.

Harmy said:

VCD is a format, which was never really alive :D

It is one of the most successful home video formats in history. Do you agree that VCD is the bottom of the barrel? If so, explain how the GOUT can also be bottom of the barrel.

And I'm actually pretty sure that a really good PAL anamorphic DVD would be closer in quality to a BD than the GOUT would be to that DVD.

First of all, PAL loses points simply because you are stuck watching films in fast-forward; good for projects where you can fix the framerate, but not so good as an as-is release. In any event, a Blu-ray has 5 times the resolution of a PAL DVD. This makes it suitable to far larger screens than a PAL DVD, i.e., 1080p is good for typical movie theater size screens while PAL DVDs certainly aren't. 

On the other hand, a 16:9 DVD containing an e.g., 2.35:1 movie only has a relatively small increase in resolution in the picture area, about 25% more than a 4:3 DVD containing a movie in the same aspect ratio (and this extra resolution is only in the vertical), which is a far cry from Blu-ray having 500% more resolution than a PAL DVD. Having 5 times the resolution trumps having slightly more vertical picture resolution plus less and/or better DNR.

Harmy said:

MaximRecoil said:

"Unwatchable" and "horrendous" and "terrible" are terms which denote the bottom of the barrel, especially when you think all three terms apply in combination. The LaserDisc releases were worse, so where are they on your ladder? The VHS releases were worse still; where do they fit in "by today's standards"? How about the VCD releases?

If we give this a number scale, 1-10, with 1 being "unwatchable" and "horrendous" and "terrible", and 10 being the best Blu-ray releases, then the VCD releases would be a 1, the VHS, Betamax, and CED releases would be a 2, the better LD releases on a high-end player would be a 4, the GOUT would be a 5 (the best DVD releases would be a 6 or 6.5), and Blu-ray would be a 10. One could argue slightly different numbers for each of those, but I'd love to hear a logical argument for giving the GOUT a 1.

 Simple, we are talking today's standards - VHS and LD are dead formats (and were in 2006 as well), so they don't enter into the debate about today's standards at all.

Anything can be judged by today's standards. But even if you want to arbitrarily limit it to formats which aren't technically "dead", then even if the GOUT had been the best possible DVD release, it would still only be marginally better than what we got when compared to the best possible Blu-ray.

By the way, VCD isn't a dead format, and it is worse than VHS.

TV's Frink said:

Wait, what is the GOUT if 1 = 1 full glass?

I'm excited to see if this conversation gets any sillier.

 You mean: any sillier than your non sequitur?

Harmy said:

Anyone's disappointment about the pixel AR doesn't make it "unwatchable" and "horrendous" and "terrible"

I'll let peoples' own words speak for themselves, and more than one person has listed the 4:3 AR as their chief or only complaint about the GOUT.

- the fact, that it was a 13 years old transfer at the time of release, with heavy DVNR on top of that, is what makes it "unwatchable" and "horrendous" and "terrible," certainly by today's standards but it was at least "horrendous" by 2006 standards too. Back in the day, I was happy watching VHS on a CRT screen - today, I find the same combination unwatchable, because I'm used to a much higher standards.

"Unwatchable" and "horrendous" and "terrible" are terms which denote the bottom of the barrel, especially when you think all three terms apply in combination. The LaserDisc releases were worse, so where are they on your ladder? The VHS releases were worse still; where do they fit in "by today's standards"? How about the VCD releases?

If we give this a number scale, 1-10, with 1 being "unwatchable" and "horrendous" and "terrible", and 10 being the best Blu-ray releases, then the VCD releases would be a 1, the VHS, Betamax, and CED releases would be a 2, the better LD releases on a high-end player would be a 4, the GOUT would be a 5 (the best DVD releases would be a 6 or 6.5), and Blu-ray would be a 10. One could argue slightly different numbers for each of those, but I'd love to hear a logical argument for giving the GOUT a 1.

AntcuFaalb said:

MaximRecoil said:

the question of objective video quality

The use of the DVNR1000 was not only heavy-handed in 1993, it was unnecessary*. I can see the smearing on my 13" 4:3 CRT (Sony KV-13FS110). This looked like shit in 1993 (DefCol LDs), 1995 (Faces LDs), 2006 (GOUT DVDs), and now.

And, yes, people complained about it in 1993 on Usenet; mostly on alt.video.laserdisc.

I know this is just my opinion, so it's certainly subjective, but I think it comes a lot closer to being objective than many of assessments given in previous posts.

(* FWIW, I've seen the pre-DVNR1000 master used for the DefCol ANH. It's not that dirty; certainly not dirty enough to make the use of the DVNR1000 a requirement for release. I think this is just a case of George&co. wanting to play with toys again.)

At least your opinion isn't self-contradictory, unlike the opinions of people who praised the '93 and '95 LD releases, and fan-made DVD transfers from them, yet bash the quality of the GOUT.

Harmy said:

No, but it is "unwatchable" and "horrendous" and "terrible" by today's standards and it was at least "horrendous" by 2006 standards.

Which means that, according to you, the GOUT-source parts of your "Despecialized Editions" are "unwatchable" and "horrendous" and "terrible". Actually, they go beyond those things, because they've been upscaled and re-encoded (among other things I'm sure), all of which results in inevitable loss relative to the source.

Gogogadget said:

Gogogadget said:

Really don't see how anyone can defend the GOUT.

It's the best officially released source we have yes, but it's still unwatchable.

"Unwatchable"? More hyperbole. "Unwatchable" is a good word for those VCD encodes of theater bootlegs shot with a low-end camcorder that were circulating on the internet in the late '90s and early '00s. It is funny that this site thrived for years on copies of the OUT that were inferior to the "unwatchable" GOUT. I guess no one was actually watching their LDs or LD-to-DVD transfers back then, you know, because if the GOUT is "unwatchable", the LDs were "extra unwatchable" and the LD-to-DVD transfers were "extra, extra unwatchable".

Maybe you should try a TV for which 4:3 DVDs were intended.

I had the original Star Wars on VHS in the 90s as a young kid, I had a small portable TV in my bedroom and it was perfect, at least so I really thought.

The GOUT was released well after everyone already adopted 16:9 TVs, hell, the other disc in the set was Anamorphic 16:9 and this was at a time when HDTVs were becoming more of a household item and less home-theatre enthusiast too.

If you seriously think the GOUT was acceptable in the mid 00s, then I don't really know what to tell you, because it was shit then and it's worse now.

No, not everyone had adopted 16:9 TVs in 2006 (much less well before 2006), nor even most people. You could even still buy brand new 4:3 standard definition CRT TVs in mainstream stores at the time (e.g. Wal-Mart). 16:9 DVD releases were pretty standard in 2006 because they benefited the ever-increasing number of people who had widescreen TVs, and they were 100% backward compatible with 4:3 TVs, so there was no downside to them.

23.5 million HDTVs shipped in the U.S. in 2006, with a 1998-2006 cumulative total of 54.7 million. There were about 119 million U.S. households in the mid '00s, averaging 3 TVs per household. That's about 357 million TVs, and even if every single one of those 54.7 million HDTVs that shipped from 1998-2006 were sold to consumers and were all still in service in 2006, that only accounts for ~15% of the TVs in U.S. households in '06. Or, if every single one of those 54.7 million HDTVs that shipped from 1998-2006 were each sold to a member of a different household (highly unlikely) and were all still in service in 2006 (also highly unlikely), that still doesn't get you to even half the households.

But this is beside the point, because "disappointment" (which is what your entire post is about) has nothing to do with the question of objective video quality (which is what my posts have been about, including the post that you replied to). You being disappointed with the GOUT's pixel aspect ratio doesn't make it "unwatchable", or "horrendous", or "terrible" by any logical standard.

This may have been already posted, but:

http://youtu.be/4UGV7WVB-bA

It is a short clip from a 1983 interview with Mark Hamill which essentially predicts Episode VII as happening "around 2011".

Puggo - Jar Jar's Yoda said:

Question - would a properly upscaled master released anamorphically exhibit better playback on modern DVD players?  Just curious.

It isn't the DVD player that matters, i.e., they will all playback either 4:3 or 16:9 DVDs without issue. It is the TV that matters. For a 4:3 TV, 16:9 DVDs are of no benefit whatsoever (nor do they do any harm). They will display exactly like a 4:3 DVD, with the exception being that only part of the letterboxing will be hard-coded into the video stream, while the remaining letterboxing will be generated by the DVD player (as opposed to all of the letterboxing being hard-coded into the video stream on a 4:3 DVD).

If you have a 16:9 TV, then a 16:9 DVD will fill the screen properly as-is, and you will get whatever benefits come from increased vertical resolution in the picture area (which is no benefit at all in the case of converting the GOUT or its masters to 16:9, because the increased vertical resolution in the picture area would just be artificial upscaling). The only possible benefit in terms of picture quality would be if you used a resizing filter during the re-encode that you know gives better resizing results than the results of your DVD player's and/or TV's zoom function.

The main benefit is convenience however, i.e., as I said, it will fill the screen properly as-is, like so:

While a 4:3 DVD will get "windowboxed" as-is, like so:

And you have to zoom in to get it to fill the screen properly.

SilverWook said:

MaximRecoil said:

That's awesome that they are building real props to represent ships. I've seen a lot of CGI airplanes and helicopters in Hollywood movies lately, and they are just ordinary, real world aircraft that they wouldn't have even had to build in order to film them for real.

It is the height of laziness when you have a big Hollywood budget and you CGI something (or more likely, just grab a pre-existing CGI model from a hard drive) that exists in the real world.

On relatively low budget TV shows from the '80s they filmed real aircraft (e.g., Airwolf, Magnum, P.I., and many others), yet certain big Hollywood productions today can't be bothered to rent or otherwise acquire an airplane or helicopter and point a camera at it?

 Miniature remote controlled aircraft figured into many of those productions.

And Airwolf was hardly a low budget show, at least not until it's awful last season shot on the cheap in Canada. That copter was expensive to fly, and stock footage was run into the ground towards the end, along with some of the worst model shots outside an Ed Wood film.

All TV shows are very low budget compared to a typical theatrical release Hollywood movie, which is why I said "relatively low budget". There were quite a few aircraft scenes in Magnum, P.I. (mostly T.C.'s helicopter, but also helicopters and planes in Vietnam flashback scenes, all real). Even one scene showing real aircraft flying is more than some Hollywood movies today are willing to bother with.

For a Hollywood movie to use CGI helicopters and airplanes is lazy, cheap, and it looks bad. The first time I remember seeing it was in "Big Trouble" (2002, $40,000,000 budget); a pair of CGI fighter jets, and I've seen it in an increasing number of movies since then.

Scenes of real aircraft are common as dirt throughout movie and TV history. How long before they make a habit of using CGI cars for car chases?

Puggo - Jar Jar's Yoda said:

Maxim, let me try to clarify.  People consider the GOUT a "horrible RELEASE".  A "release" is a particular packaging of a movie that is officially produced and sold.  Releases are by their very definition embedded in the context of their release date.  Given the release date of the GOUT, "horrible" is an apt description because it doesn't meet baseline standards of releases at that time.  You're right it isn't a "horrible movie" or "horrible video quality", but it is a "horrible release".  That phrase requires no additional clarification of context.

A fan-edit is a completely different sort of "release" and would understandably not be held to the same standards.

I don't necessarily begrudge Lucasfilm using the laserdisc master for what he considered a "bonus disc".  I don't even begrudge the excessive DVNR, etc.  It's the non-anamorphic format that makes it a "horrible" release.   In 2006, the choice between anamorphic and non-anamorphic is akin to simply checking a box in the encoder software.  The fact that it isn't anamorphic was clearly to intentionally lower the quality.  With no extra effort whatsoever, Lucas could have improved the video quality dramatically just by filling in the check box as was the case for virtually every other film release of that time.  It is unfathomable that a producer would intentionally lower the quality of a release so dramatically, to sub-baseline levels, and that's primarily for me what makes the GOUT rise(!) to the level of "horrible release".

I didn't reply to anyone who said it was a "horrible release", I replied to someone who said:

"Regardless of how horrendous the quality was"

I also replied to someone who said it was "unwatchable".

The D1 masters were 4:3 letterboxed, 720x486 (or 720x480, depending on the version of D1 tape used) the same as the GOUT that came from them. To make it 16:9 anamorphic you have to increase the vertical resolution of the picture content (and crop the excess letterboxing so that picture + letterboxing still adds up to 480 pixels). In other words, they would have had to "upscale" it in order to make it 16:9 anamorphic, which isn't typically done when authoring retail DVDs.

Normally with retail DVDs of feature films, the master is much higher resolution than DVD (rather than being the same resolution like D1 tape), so making a 16:9 anamorphic DVD is no problem.

This is one way that will give you 16:9 anamorphic for the GOUT:

crop(0, 104, -0, -104)
Lanczos4Resize(720,366)
AddBorders(0,57,0,57)

That will make this ...

... become this:

Then set a PAR of 40/33 when you encode it and your DVD player will display it like this ...

... instead of like this:

And that is the same result as if Lucasfilm had done it, except for an extra generation of loss (which can be ~imperceptible if done right) due to re-encoding it; or you could encode with a lossless codec if you don't mind a much larger file size and it no longer being in DVD format.

So no, it is not just a matter of checking a box; the raw image has to be prepared properly first, and in the case of the D1 master, this preparation involves "upscaling" the vertical resolution of the picture content and cropping some of the letterboxing (or cropping all of the letterboxing and adding new letterboxing, like my AVS script above would do).

That's awesome that they are building real props to represent ships. I've seen a lot of CGI airplanes and helicopters in Hollywood movies lately, and they are just ordinary, real world aircraft that they wouldn't have even had to build in order to film them for real.

It is the height of laziness when you have a big Hollywood budget and you CGI something (or more likely, just grab a pre-existing CGI model from a hard drive) that exists in the real world.

On relatively low budget TV shows from the '80s they filmed real aircraft (e.g., Airwolf, Magnum, P.I., and many others), yet certain big Hollywood productions today can't be bothered to rent or otherwise acquire an airplane or helicopter and point a camera at it?

twister111 said:

Dude you're entering lawyer-like territory. Context is inherent to communication in general. It's usually only questioned when people are confused or lawyers are trying to get some loophole in a contract. People aren't drawing up contracts here needing to specify the meaning of every word.

I already addressed context, and this paragraph of yours doesn't logically follow from anything I said, much less refute anything I said. So once again, the claims I've replied to have no context of the type you're referring to, i.e., context which would change the meaning from an absolute statement to one of comparison. For example, in my first post about this I said:

"I loved the original "TR47" when I first discovered it in '05. However, I played it side by side with the GOUT the other day on my PC and it was horrible in comparison. Not only is the TR47 less detailed/clear, but the brightness and borders of the letterboxing constantly and rapidly flicker in it as well."

That whole paragraph established the context of a comparison, and even includes the words "in comparison" for good measure. Therefore the TR47 is horrible in a certain context, i.e., in comparison to the GOUT, and not just plain horrible. If it were just plain horrible it never would have become as popular as it did.

George Lucas could've kept the originals in great condition and released them to current High Definition home video standards. He didn't simply because he didn't want to. It's not for lack of resources or money he just didn't want to. He wanted to alter films, two of which weren't directed by him, and release his preferred versions in the highest quality. Leaving the theatrical versions in some non-anamorphic laserdisc master state.

Excellent reasons for disappointment. A disappointing level of quality isn't automatically a "horrendous", "terrible", or "unwatchable" level of quality.

The other situations you're talking about are entirely different. The context matters.

See above.

twister111 said:

MaximRecoil said:

 I don't disagree with any of that, but none of that makes the GOUT "terrible" or "horrible". If we place the GOUT on the "horrible" scale, then all of the LaserDisc releases were what? "Extra horrible"? And all of the LaserDisc transfers (TR47, Moth3r, Dr. Gonzo, etc.) were what? Extra extra horrible? And all of the VHS releases? Extra, extra, extra horrible?

Video standards change over time and fans doing what they can with limited resources is substantially different to a release from a multibillion dollar company with every resource at it's disposal. You're removing the context of the releases and comparing them as though they were done under the same conditions.

 Saying that something is "terrible" or "horrible" has no context, thus I couldn't have possibly removed the context. If you add context such as: "The GOUT is horrible compared to such and such", then that is something else entirely.

People were gushing over the Cowclops/TR47 v.2 release (link), and that was right around the time of the release of the GOUT (see post 706). People don't gush over things they think are simply "horrible" or "terrible", no matter who released it. With the GOUT (way better than the things people were gushing over), people are confusing their disappointment with an objective assessment of quality.

Gogogadget said:

Really don't see how anyone can defend the GOUT.

It's the best officially released source we have yes, but it's still unwatchable.

"Unwatchable"? More hyperbole. "Unwatchable" is a good word for those VCD encodes of theater bootlegs shot with a low-end camcorder that were circulating on the internet in the late '90s and early '00s. It is funny that this site thrived for years on copies of the OUT that were inferior to the "unwatchable" GOUT. I guess no one was actually watching their LDs or LD-to-DVD transfers back then, you know, because if the GOUT is "unwatchable", the LDs were "extra unwatchable" and the LD-to-DVD transfers were "extra, extra unwatchable".

Maybe you should try a TV for which 4:3 DVDs were intended.

hairy_hen said:

Pretty sad that 'better than anything else officially available' still has to mean 'full of aliasing, DVNR smearing, excessive gate weave, badly faded colors, and general low resolution'.

It is only used as a source for the Despecialized Edition because it has to be.  Once there are 35mm sources for all the missing pieces, those sections will be replaced.

That's not the point. The fact that the GOUT has enough quality to be used at all in that project is the point. If the GOUT were truly "terrible", "horrible", or "unwatchable", it obviously couldn't have been used with good results in that project (and by most accounts, the results were good).

SilverWook said:

The bottom line is, Lucasfilm took the cheap lazy way out in the hopes fans would put up and shut up. The "bonus disc" designation being part of the excuse.

A non anamorphic DVD did not meet the minimum standard for a release from a major studio in 2004, and it's sure as heck doesn't meet it now. It was roundly criticized on all the major home theater websites at the time, and not just by fans.

It's been a running joke on this site noting all of the low budget obscure cult films that have gotten better treatment on DVD/Blu Ray than the OT.

Fox itself cheaps out on it's Made On Demand releases today. Ancient letterbox and even pan and scan masters are being foisted on movie collectors. Thankfully, Warners does an excellent job with their MOD program.

As for the convenience issue, I can't even zoom a letterbox image coming through HDMI inputs. I have to have the Blu Ray player do it, and I'm not certain all models do that. And there are some early DVD's that look much worse than the GOUT. Even more so when zoomed in.

Maybe one can zoom via component inputs, but players with component output have been phased out, thanks to the MPAA.

16:9 was settled on years before DVD came out. That's why there were widescreen tv's and even anamorphic Laserdiscs in the 90's. (And forward thinking tv shows began to shoot in 16:9 as well.) For the studios to save a few bucks, and use old masters on DVD was disingenuous at best.

 I don't disagree with any of that, but none of that makes the GOUT "terrible" or "horrible". If we place the GOUT on the "horrible" scale, then all of the LaserDisc releases were what? "Extra horrible"? And all of the LaserDisc transfers (TR47, Moth3r, Dr. Gonzo, etc.) were what? Extra extra horrible? And all of the VHS releases? Extra, extra, extra horrible?

A good word for the GOUT is "disappointing", i.e., at the time of its release, it didn't meet general expectations from a major company releasing some of the biggest movies of all time. And George Lucas is to blame for that, obviously. However, given that its quality was better than anything else we had prior, it makes no sense to call it "horrible" when a lot of the stuff we had prior was held in high regard (i.e., the 1993 and 1995 LDs, and some of the LD-to-DVD transfers from those LDs; all of which are inferior to the GOUT in terms of video quality). 

ray_afraid said:

MaximRecoil said:

Also, consider your intellectual dishonesty (i.e., changing the words of quotations) noted.

 When did I do that?

You didn't. My mistake. I made a typo, and when you quoted my post it included the typo and I thought you had changed the quote. Sorry about that. I'll remove that false charge and fix my typo.