Owyn_Merrilin

ChainsawAsh said:

Bluto said:

I am not aware of any ROTJ 1997 versions out there other than Laserdisc rips.

That’s disappointing. The altered ending is one of the few changes in the entire trilogy that’s actually not bad, and of course it hasn’t been seen in its original form since the DVDs came out in 2004. The extra scenes they’ve added to it since then completely wreck the pacing.

ZigZig said:

Since this project will be 100% theatrical, any theatrical audio track would be in good sync. The original theatrical DTS audio track will be already included.

But this project is not released yet…

That’s actually not necessarily the case. If the prints used to make whatever sources you’re using weren’t missing any frames it’ll be good, but usually there’s at least a few missing around the reel changes, which can cause issues. It shouldn’t be too much of an issue, but in the worst case you’ll need to either conform the video to the audio tracks by inserting a few blank frames, or conform the audio to the video by snipping a little out.

Looking forward to release, by the way! Can’t wait to finally retire my copy of the laser disc rip. The DVD cut really ruins the pacing with all the extra podracing stuff.

rodserling27 said:

Holy cow…best of luck, I’ll say a prayer for ya. Not an easy thing to deal with, I’m so sorry to hear that. 😦

Seconding all of this… although my first thought was something more explicit than “cow.” Hope you get better soon, Poita. This community can’t afford the loss of your arms, much less the loss of you.

DuracellEnergizer said:

Bingowings said:

you meen like Benedict Cumberbatch isnt karn… ?

Of course he isn’t Karn.

See? No resemblance between the two whatsoever.

No, no, clearly he was Haman Karn:

(I would totally watch that movie.)

captainsolo said:

Holy…you can see the hard brickwall cutoff in that waveform. WTF Disney?? I don’t even like the film and I feel bad. BD at home allows for greater dynamic range than the usual terrible theatrical presentations of today…and usually it is left as-is for modern releases…until now. We’ve been fighting loudness in music since the mid 90’s and now it’s coming in movies…come on…what is wrong with people??

You can thank all the people who complain about how movie dialogue is too quiet compared to the music and sound effects for this one – the fact that it’s only the center channel that was brick walled makes that abundantly clear. It sucks, because the biggest reason they have those problems is that people are either watching on a crappy soundbar or the built in speakers of their TV, or they have a surround sound system but it’s got tiny little drivers that they didn’t bother to calibrate. I swear, studios should start tossing in a lossily (not to mention dynamically) compressed track for people like this and having the disc default to it, so those of us who care can go in and switch to the good track, and the people who don’t won’t notice but will also stop complaining.

Handman said:

It has indeed. I think on 4k discs, though.

Yeah, it’s out there. I think on normal blu-rays, not just the 4K ones (which I’m pretty sure aren’t out yet, and definitely weren’t when the home version of Atmos first came out). It’s kind of irrelevant to this discussion, though, since there’s very few commercial theaters that are equipped to play an Atmos track at this point, so new movies still need theatrical 5.1 tracks.

Edit: Added the reply to Handman instead of double posting.

towne32 said:

Yeah. I know I’ve been saying ‘soon’ for a while. But I think I’ve managed to get the comparison shots completed so it should actually be quite soon.

Hey, it could be worse. There’s a certain fan made engine replacement for a certain Star Wars game for which the beta has been coming “soon” for about six years now. At least I have confidence that you’ll get this done by the end of the decade 😛

And this is why I love this place. Pick an obscure, practically forgotten movie that’s been tragically abandoned on post-VHS home video formats, and someone around here is probably scheming to preserve it. I really love Slipstream, and it deserves a widescreen preservation – it’s ridiculously obvious when watching the available 4:3 cuts that you’re missing half the picture. I hope one day such a preservation will happen. Honestly I’d take even just a straight transfer of the Japanese LD, hardsubs and all, but I know you guys are going to do your damnedest to go beyond that, and that’s just incredible.

Edit: Accidental double post

Drifter1989 said:

I'm never buying the altered editions. Harmy's despeshalized editions are the way to go for now. They made so many DVD releases since 2004 I kinda lost track and stopped caring. I think these DVD re releases are a lucas attempt at trying to trick people to buy altered versions. I've seen a few DVD releases claiming to be 'origonal versions' but weren't unaltered. Even the Blu Ray release by Disney turned out to be altered. Also these DVD re releases are a bit over priced. Some can go for 20 to 30 bucks just for altered episode 4 alone at some places. My friend got lucky and found the special editions of 4-6 on DVD for $10 and I just watched them at his house so I don't have to buy them to see the changes.

I hope George Lucas realizes that the true fans don't want altered Star Wars 4-6. They really should release an ultimate box set that has episodes 1-3 and 4-6 with theatrical unaltered versions as a bonus option and include DVD, Blu Ray, 3D and digital download copies.  

 The DVDs that claim to be the original that you're thinking of are probably the 2006 release. They actually do have the original cuts in there, they're just on the bonus disc, not the main feature disc (which is just a repressing of the 2004 discs). That bonus disc is what you see people on here referring to as the GOUT, for George's Original Unaltered Trilogy.

.Mac. said:

^Lol, just like having all the Elvis impersonators at Las Vegas.

 King, Emperor, what's the difference?

DuracellEnergizer said:

Ryan McAvoy said:

Seeing the Clone Wars was the main reason I bought cinema tickets to those films. But all we got was Yoda saying they'd started in AOTC, one battle above Coruscant in ROTS, a couple of montages and then they were over. What happened to 'Episode II.5: The Clone Wars' Where we spent 2 hours having fun and beginning to actually like our two heroes Anakin and Obi-Wan?

If the Clone Wars were only going to consist of CG Temuera Morrisons fighting CG battle droids, then I'm glad they were glossed over. 

 Funnily enough, we did get the clone wars on screen, and in addition to the CG Temuera Morrisons and CG Battle Droids, we also had a CG Ewan McGregor, CG Natalie Portman, CG Hayden Christenson...

Sadly that cartoon was better than the actual prequels were, by a very wide margin. It finally gave us a heroic Anakin, for one thing.

Kudos on both a great find (a new first gen VHS) and a great transfer of it to DVD. I've got early DVDs that look worse than this bootleg -- namely the Blade Runner and Highlander director's cuts -- and my own VHS deck produces worse results from 10 year old commercial tapes than your process did from a 30+ year old OTA recording. Seriously, great job here.

g-force said:

Okay, just throwing good money after bad here. After not being able to read the iTunes version, bought the Google edition. Good news is, I can at least read it now. Bad news is, after downloading, none of the video content is available offline, meaning, the video content is all in the cloud, and I can't watch it on a plane even though I now own two copies of it!

I've about had it with this fucking DRM shit! Go FUCK yourself Apple, Google, Amazon, B&N. Fuck you!

-G

The good news on that is even if it is stored in the cloud, a motivated enough person with enough knowledge should be able to get the video file in the same way people are able to download videos from Youtube. Any time you stream a video, it's stored somewhere on your hard drive as a temp file. Find the temp file and you find the video. Doesn't help much with being able to see it on a plane (unless you get the videos and keep them on your tablet), but for things like fan edits, that might be an option.

I should note i have no actual technical knowledge of how to go about this, just a conceptual understanding of how and why it should be possible.

Edit: And then I see not only are people working on it, but clips are already up on youtube. That's what I get for not reading the pages that have been written since I last checked out this thread.

pittrek said:

This one seems more interesting : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n4D6L34BkNs - the first widescreen version of the Jabba scene I have seen

Now that's interesting. I remember renting a copy of the original trilogy as a kid not too long after seeing the Special Editions in the theaters. I remember it having a little lead in at the beginning about the restoration process for the special edition (this may have been a rental-only release of the special editions, or a copy of the OUT, I was too young to really remember at the time), but what sticks out to me all these years later is that the mini-documentary was different from the one on the sell through release of the Special Editions. Seeing that clip, I'm pretty sure it was made up of scenes selected from The Mystery and the Magic, if not the whole thing chopped up into three parts. Seems like the ones on the official VHS was too, but it didn't use all of the same clips. That scene with the guy talking in a room with a TIE Fighter model is one thing that sticks out as having been on the rental tape but not the one I later owned.

There's also the possibility that Mace Windu is still alive out there somewhere. He got electrocuted, lost his hands, and got thrown out of a building. If Luke could survive what happened to him on Cloud City after (at most) a few months training, there's no reason to think one of the most powerful Jedi Masters at the time of the purge couldn't have survived the injuries we saw Windu take.

Not that this is really my idea -- I've seen people talking about how he should have survived and shown up in the EU in the past, and it's a passable argument. Not compelling enough to say he /did/ survive, but a good enough excuse if he happens to show up at some point.

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.

The little interviews at the beginning definitely need to be preserved, those alone make this worth it.

Speaking of which, I remember renting a set of the movies after the theatrical release of the Special Edition, but before the home release. I think they were a rental only edition of the special editions (the kind that studios used to release so they could make extra money off the rental places before they made the sell-through release), but I guess they could have also been a really late set of the OOT.

The reason it would have to be really late is it had a short featurette about the restoration for the Special Edition on it, but it was a different one from the one on the sell through VHS set. Does anyone know anything about this?

SilverWook said:

More pics.

http://www.ew.com/ew/gallery/0,,20647938_20695713,00.html?hpt=hp_t3

Bit of a tangent, but that link led me here: http://www.ew.com/ew/gallery/0,,20647938_20361457,00.html?stitched#20770650

It's a similar collection of pictures for the Empire book, but what's interesting is the specific picture. It's a picture of Irvin Kirshner's copy of an early version of the script, and what stuck out to me was the line where Yoda says "the tree, remember your failure at the tree." In the final movie, that line had the word "cave" instead of tree.

You're probably wondering what's so interesting about this, and here's the answer: there's a note in the annotated Heir to the Empire where Timothy Zahn talks about why he described the cave as having a tree growing out of the top of it. He says it was because the track on the soundtrack album used in that scene was "The Magic Tree," and he wanted to gracefully solve a discrepancy that had bugged him growing up listening to the album over and over again. Looks like we now finally have the real answer, which is that the title of the song is a holdover from an earlier version of the script.

georgec said:

cain spaans said:

I have a question what if in the future Vin Diesel was in a Star Wars film what do you think?

Fast & Furious - Tatooine Drift

"You never had me. You never had your speeder."

You know, if they cast him in a cameo as the leader of a swoop bike gang, that could actually work. Not a major role or anything, just a neat background detail.

Ryan McAvoy said:

Would love to play some old SW PC games but I can never get win 7 to install them.  Once win 7 has the game installed it runs it fine, which is wierd.

This is a few months late, but since the thread has already been necro'd, I may as well explain this and share the workaround.

Basically, modern computers almost all run 64 bit versions of Windows. 64 bit versions of Windows are backwards compatible with 32 bit programs, but not 16 bit programs, whereas the older 32 bit versions of Windows did, in fact, work with 16 bit programs.

The upshot of this is a lot of older Windows games had 16 bit installers, even though the games themselves were 32 bit programs. This is why the installers don't work, but the games usually do. There is an exception for some games from the early 2000's that used some graphics card tricks that are just no longer supported (Sadly Episode I Racer is one of these, and it's so badly affected that it's totally unplayable), and there's also some /really/ old Windows games where the whole program was 16 bit, but those are fairly rare. Most of these older games have fanmade installers for them. If you just google "Windows 7 installer (insert game name here)," you'll probably find what you're looking for. There's this one site in particular where this guy from Germany has made installers for basically all of the 90's/early 2000's Star Wars games.

Also, if you're trying to  play a DOS game, that's really easy to get going with. There's a free and open source emulator called DosBox that will get you up and running in no time. When you buy an old DOS game from Steam or GoG.com, it actually comes with a copy of DosBox set up to run the game from a shortcut -- there's no updating done to the games themselves. If you have a copy of an older version of Windows (3.x, 95, and 98 are all good options) you can even install it within DosBox to play those pesky 16 bit Windows games. I've got a copy of Sim City that I run in Windows 3.1 on a Windows 7 machine that way.

Wall of text over, my favorite Star Wars games/series are the Dark Forces series, the X-Wing series, and Episode I Racer. Battlefront II comes next, but it's an also ran compared to these old greats. Episode I racer remains the best racing game I've ever played, Dark Forces and Jedi Knight (I still haven't played the other two, although I've had digital copies for over a year now) were great early FPS games, both of which pioneered new things in the genre (Dark Forces basically beat Duke Nukem to everything but the eye candy, Jedi Knight had an unusual engine that allowed for absolutely massive levels) and both of which had great level design. Shame the source code is lost, they were state of the art at the time in a lot of ways. I'm actually doing a playthrough of Dark Forces right now. I recently set DosBox up with a decent software synthesizer so I can hear the general midi version of the soundtrack, and it's amazing. Totally blows away the Soundblaster version I had as a kid. I also have a Roland MT-32 emulator set up, but from what I understand the only Star Wars game that had that as the best option was the original floppy disc release of X-Wing. Sounds great on Wing Commander, though.

And then there's the X-Wing games. Good lord did they eat up my time as a kid. I got my first joystick to play TIE Fighter, along with the Rebel Assault games, and when it broke years later I wound up getting a second one to play X-Wing Alliance -- which I still have, and since it's a USB model, I can still use it with newer computers. That last one was a lucky find, actually. I ran across a used copy in high school, when I didn't even know there was a game in the series after X-Wing Vs. Tie Fighter. Talk about a nice surprise.

Incidentally, there's a mod for Jedi Knight that takes care of the butt ugly textures and models, called Jedi Knight Enhanced. The modding community for that game is great, they've even made patches and alternate launchers that take care of a lot of the weird incompatibilities it has with modern computers. Shame nobody ever updated the models and textures for the Mysteries of the Sith expansion, but at least you can still play it.

And holy crap was that a wall of text. Anyone still reading, pat yourself on the back, you have a lot of patience.

If I'm following the discussion correctly, that's true, but only if A.) we're talking about a composite NTSC signal (which is what you would generally be dealing with in the 90's), and B.) it wasn't darkened a bit instead of shifted wholesale. 

So long story short, if you're watching VHS, Betamax, or Laserdisc, it's going to be a problem pretty much no matter what. If you're watching a more modern format like DVD or Blu-Ray, which keeps the luminance and chrominance information separate natively, then it's only an issue if you're using a composite connection for some reason. Switching to HDMI, component, or even an S-Video cable would take care of the issue in that case.

The first Schumaker film is still pretty entertaining, it just doesn't take itself seriously. The best part of the whole thing is Tommy Lee Jones and Jim Carrey not just chewing up the scenery, but actually swallowing and digesting it. Granted, that makes Billy Dee Williams not being in it even sadder (I mean imagine if /he/ got to go crazy with that role...), but it's still an entertaining, if campy, film. Batman and Robin is just bad. Whoever was playing Batman in it (George Clooney, right?) did a solid job, but that wasn't anywhere near enough to make up for the awful material, and this time around the villains, rather than saving it by being so off the wall crazy, were just bad.

I've also heard that Perry King, who later got to play Solo in the radio dramas, auditioned for the role in Star Wars.

From the beginning, but not necessarily complete. Apparently they'll be skipping some of the sillier episodes, and expanding a few that were cut for content in their original airing. However, three episodes in, neither one of those things has happened yet.

pittrek said:

SilverWook said:

Are we going to need a kindle, or some other pricey device I don't currently own just to read these things?

Excatly what I'd like to know.

If you have a computer, you've already got the bare minimum hardware you need, it's just a lot more comfortable reading these things on a smart phone, tablet, or e-reader. Commercial e-books are usually either a .epub or a .mobi, and there's reader apps freely available for both. Amazon even has a free kindle app for basically every device you can imagine.