RU.08

oojason said:

Nice one lads, thanks.

I’m looking forward to seeing the film itself - and didn’t bother very much with the leaks (and only watched a few of the numerous tv spots available).

I did see those photos appearing online last night - but given the lack of context for me there’s nothing that puts me off seeing it.

Ah right, don’t let us cynics deter you! I’ve read all the spoilers months ago so I know the whole movie inside out without having to see it (although they re-edited the film and only had it finalised in November). Let us know what you think after you see it!

The issue I have with “fan service” and “nostalgia” is that neither plays well when overused or crammed into every scene. The chunkiness of the Millennium Falcon’s gunning seats was one of best “nostalgic” elements, one of the worst ones was CGI Grand Moff Tarkin in Rogue One, in my opinion anyway.

I would have given this film a chance had Colin Trevorrow directed it. But when he was fired for “creative differences” that spelled for me the writing on the wall: they wanted a yes man. They incorrectly attributed the fan-backlash of “The Last Jedi” to Rian Johnson having too much creative control, rather than the alternative hypothesis that they put out an unfinished movie because they worked to a rushed production schedule which didn’t allow for the necessary re-shoots that would have been required to fix most of the “unpopular” elements. True enough that having Luke living as a cynical old hermit would never have gone down well, but other things could have been fixed for example force-ghost Yoda using Palpatine’s force-lightning, Luke making a force-hologram, Princess Leia’s superwoman-like flying through space, all of that stuff could have been corrected with a few re-shoots and perhaps a delayed release date. So if there’s anyone to blame for that movie going down badly, it’s the Mouse not the director in my humble opinion.

Another concern of mine is George Lucas himself - JJ brought him back on-board earlier this year to help. But he wasn’t at the World Premiere and reports are:

That he was very unhappy with the film.
That Disney/Lucasfilm/JJ disregarded most of his input anyway, despite bringing him in.
That he wasn’t even invited the World Premiere!

Also the world premiere was not held for its intended audience. Honestly this is the most ironic thing of all - Star Wars is meant to be a children-friendly family franchise, and yet the world premiere is held for Hollywood and media bigwigs with no children in the audience! There’s half a chance the film won’t even be suitable for young children - this is the mistake George Lucas made way back in 2005 with Revenge of the Sith: I knew a lot of parents that were Star Wars fans who felt unhappy that the movie was not suitable for their pre-teen children. Anakin’s slaughter of the younglings is what they felt made the movie unsuitable for young children. We can sit here unhappy that Lucasfilm won’t release the theatrical edition, but imagine being a parent in 2005 and you’ve been mislead into believing that the PT was a child-friendly trilogy, parents felt just as betrayed about that in 2005 as the people here felt betrayed by the 1997 Special Edition replacing their beloved originals. As aptly observed here “Twenty years after its release in 1999, we shouldn’t view The Phantom Menace as the worst Star Wars movie ever. Instead, it’s actually the best one for small children.” Out of all the Special Edition changes, censoring the blaster shots was clearly a decision to make the violence more child-friendly (I reckon young children would prefer the 1997 special edition of the original trilogy compared to the OOT, things that look silly to adults like CGI Jabba are things that they love).

yotsuya said:

I just read through the tagged twitter comments (no spoilers to speak of) and they are generally positive. A few hated it or thought it would divide fans. Others thought it would unite fans. From the gist of the reactions, it reinterprets parts of TLJ while embracing other aspects of it. A definite change from TFA.

Yes but there’s nothing in this film that’s exciting or new. For example:

Kylo’s character arc is exactly the same as Anakin’s. Lured to the Dark Side by Palps, and redeemed by someone he loves.

There’s nothing in their comments suggesting there are beautiful new worlds and concepts to get immersed into. Every one of George Lucas’ movies has something new that the Star Wars universe expands into. If we stick with The Phantom Menace, let’s see - we have the Jedi council (love it or hate it) along with Coruscant, we have Alderaan with some really great model work, we have podracing on Tatooine, slavery on Tatooine, a young Obi-Wan Kenobi who is still a Jedi in training under his master, Midichlorians, comical battle droids, underwater cities with soft bubble-like barriers, the Gungans, and we have a Sith apprentice with a double-bladed lightsaber that has been the most popular villain in all of Star Wars since Darth Vader. There’s quite a bit to speak of that are all positive developments for the star wars universe there, and yes a small number of negative developments (the concept of Midichlorians being responsible for the force for example). What do we have in The Force Awakens? Death Star 3.0, older han, older chewie, a mechanic-droid that rolls who is overly-assertive, a young force-sensitive adult who’s suddenly introduced to the force, holograms, a dark lord, the First Order and their leader, a desert planet with a scrap-yard, an old Jedi the last of the order living as a hermit in hiding, a big clunky levitating “speeder”… all of those are existing concepts, there’s nothing really new in it at all. Kylo using the force to stop blaster shots, Luke’s lightsaber calling to Rey, and Rey’s portion-bread are the only really “new” concept introduced and they barely expand the mythology (in fact does anyone know why Luke’s lightsaber calls to Rey in the first place - it doesn’t really make sense). Yes Rey’s portion-bread is really cool, but that’s literally the only thing I can think of that’s a fresh new concept in that movie. JJ could have instead taken some very simple concepts out of the “expanded universe” that have been unused in the films, and at the very least BB8 could have had a different character personality to R2D2. In avoiding the possibility of introducing any “new concepts” that will have a backlash, JJ instead decided to play it “very safe”.

In my opinion that was a mistake, I think most viewers and Star Wars fans will forgive some concepts they don’t like if you give them some they can get behind and love. The sequel trilogy is also incredibly hostile to the prequel trilogy, for example in The Last Jedi when Rose and Finn go to Canto Bight, in the cinema I (wrongly) anticipated seeing the Kaminoans there mingling with their kind. Another clear example being Kashyyyk - that would have been the logical place to find Han and Chewie in TFA, it’s been barely used appearing only briefly in ROS. The prequels introduced new planets and locations with unique designs, but most locations in the sequel trilogy as well as interior set designs feel far too familiar and from the Original Trilogy.

So yeah lots of positive comments, that’s all fine, I’m sure lots of people will enjoy the movie and I wish everyone all the best in seeing it. I just feel this movie isn’t for me. There’s nothing in social media reaction comments (including the positive ones) that makes me think this film will bring some great new ideas and concepts from the Star Wars mythology to the screen that I haven’t already seen before. None of the positive comments were saying “great cinematography with no shaky-cam” - I’m really not a fan of JJ’s directorial style. I should have read this before I saw The Force Awakens because I hadn’t seen a JJ film since Mission Impossible 3, and I wasn’t at all prepared for his style of cinematography, from that article: “It’s a visual holdover from his Star Trek films, and I think it will be a stake in the ground for the rest of the Star Wars saga. The smooth tracking shots we saw in the aerial battles of the prequels will be replaced with a visceral shaky cam perspective. Personally, this is my favorite trademark of his, and I’m glad to see it being put to use in Star Wars. The style really makes it feel like you’re in the environment, feeling the turbulence of the action.” That guy might be a fan of shaky-cam, that’s fine I know some people like it, I don’t mind it being used occasionally, but there’s was absolutely no subtly in the way it was used in TFA, and I find that style when used to that extent unbearable.

I’ll be very interested to and look forward to hear from people on OT what their reactions are for the ending of the film, and also if I’m right about the movie being shaky-cam like TFA, if it is there’s no way I’m paying to see that in a cinema. I know that style has its fans, I don’t mean to criticise but I can’t stand it. If it’s not a shaky-cam movie then I will probably go and see it in the cinema, so please do let us know what the filming style/cinematography is! See this description of JJ’s style written before TFA even came out because what I’m referring to is a disorientating combination of shaky-cam, dolly-shots, snap-zooms, and close-ups, and I’m not bothered by Dutch-angles and lens-flares.

oojason said:

I thought the leaks were based on trailers, tv spots, other promo content and some material from the books & comics leaking early? (with some obvious gaps filled in along the way)

Was this not the case? And somebody actually had more info to leak other than what appeared in the above promo and book content?

Ah you can see from (most of) those photos there’s not proper cinematic masking, which gives away it certainly isn’t from the premiere screening. There have been deep leaks for ages, all of the screenshots confirm them. Heck even TFA’s plot leaked in full months in advance. The entire ROS plot leaked on Reddit, plain and bare, for all to see, around three or four months ago.

Thanks goes to whoever edited my above post I didn’t know how to post a spoiler. Here are the photos/screenshots so far:

7. No pictures, gifs, memes or other similar links to pirated material - including cams, mobile phone recordings, screeners, leaks, pre-retail releases, or ‘for your consideration’ award leaks etc.

Nothing in those photos makes me, personally, want to see the film. I’m personally thankful to have seen & read the leaks because at least I know this film isn’t for me instead of buying a ticket and being disappointed.

So this is what I imagined being said here:

(SPOILERS FOR A SCENE FROM TROS)

7. No pictures, gifs, memes or other similar links to pirated material - including cams, mobile phone recordings, screeners, leaks, pre-retail releases, or ‘for your consideration’ award leaks etc.

And we have a whole bunch of social media reactions from those at the world premiere. This is definitely not a film for me. I’m not a fan of JJ’s directorial style (I don’t like shaky-cam in general), much less the idea that this is a film full of “nostalgia and fan service”. No thanks.

Terri Schwartz

I’ve seen #StarWarsTheRiseofSkywalker. It’s… a lot. There’s a lot I like and some I loved but overall my feelings are pretty mixed. It felt like an apology for The Last Jedi in some ways and a sequel to The Force Awakens in many, which I found frustrating.

To add to that, I found the first two movies felt like they ignored the prequel trilogy too much. The PT may not be universally loved, but they have lots of great moments. The duel of the fates, Ewan McGregor, Natalie Portman. As a friend of mine once said after we had just watched the midnight premiere screening of Attack of the Clones “I would have gone to the dark side for her as well!”

Anyway, it sounds like ROS is not a film for me unfortunately, but I do hope there are others that enjoy it nonetheless.

Some photos from what’s probably a test screening ahead of the world premiere have leaked: https://imgur.com/a/EU94pXC (they also confirm these two separately leaked photos)

A preview encode of Sleeping Beauty is now available for all donors. Please PM me for more info.

A donor only preview encode/early release is now available for all donors. If you donated to this project, and I haven’t sent you a download link yet, please message me.

Dek Rollins said:

By the way, when you mentioned the credits being original, what did they actually look like? was there no Donna Smith credit at all, or did it scroll up at the beginning of the credits during the fade-out like in the German DVD print?

Yes the credits started scrolling up over the picture like that before it faded out completely. I meant there was no static credit, it was probably the first credit scrolling up as seen in your screenshot.

The only thing that looks noticeably off in the BD is the text at the start of the film (the future war text and the credits) - that’s all much softer on 35mm.

Dek Rollins said:

The colors are definitely washed out, but the general color biases are what I’m referring to. I think that skin tones are too frequently pinkish, and some scenes seem very dark, but most of the scenes I’ve compared look somewhat similar to the Blu-ray, and match your description of the print you saw pretty well.

The skin tones, like most 35mm on the era, are frequently yellowish in the daylight scenes.

I posted in the fanres thread that I think it seems to be the most accurate (I meant generally, though I didn’t really specify what I thought was accurate about it in that post), and that it matches the dozens of 35mm frames posted online rather closely, so I would think that the biases introduced by the telecine were subtle. With the washed out contrast it wouldn’t be projection accurate of course, but a subtle regrade of the BD on a shot by shot basis to try and match the color consistency of the DVD seems like a worthy effort to me.

The bias introduced by the telecine is anything but “subtle”. I’m very sorry to disagree.

I think I’m going to try doing that with my updated regrade, and maybe those of us who are not quite satisfied with the BD will be happy with an alternative that isn’t far off from it. I’m curious, for everyone who has my regrade and enjoys it over the BD, would you guys be interested in something that stays closer to the BD and just makes subtle shot to shot changes?

I think this film is well worth doing a scan from a print, you’ll see the colours on the BD are faithful but there’s some subtle differences here and there. I mean no disrespect, but re-grading is a fool’s errand unless you’ve seen it projected yourself.

Anyway, would you say the projection was accurate to the old German DVD, the one that was transferred from a print?

No. The colours in that version are washed out, and it was not transferred digitally it was very obviously done by telecine which never produces a projection-accurate result regardless of whether you’re using a release print, a TV print, or whatever. I do not think it was even transferred for DVD - it looks like they used a broadcast tape literally transferred in the 1980’s for that release. It’s a full-screen transfer, outside of the US no one did full-screen transfers for DVD, even in 1997. And when they did the first digital restoration, and broadcast it, it was in widescreen.

Just to clarify, the print you saw was an original one and not a 2001 re-issue?

Yes completely original, I can confirm it did not have the Donna Smith or Harlan Ellison credits.

The big issue I have with what you say about the Blu-ray’s accuracy is that there is evidence that the Blu-ray’s color biases in some scenes are not always consistent with the original prints.

None of those scans look anything like projection. Just taking the second one as an example - Reece was nowhere near that dark, he was clearly visible in that scene.

Anyway, I’m glad you weighed in here. By the way, what did you think of my old regrade?

It was better, but I can’t say it’s an improvement on the bluray. The bluray looked spot-on. I don’t think it is completely spot-on mind you, but it’s very faithful.

That was the latest update I had made when kaosjm posted about the print he saw and said that I was spot on for most of the film. He did note that the beginning and future war stuff was sometimes very cyan and teal, which I acknowledged, but I never ended up implementing any changes like that because until now I was set on doing a single global adjustment for the majority of the movie. That’s why the shots in those comparisons have inaccuracies, too.

There is less colour in those scenes which is why they look more blue, besides that they have the same teal/cyan/green hue as the rest of the film’s night scenes.

I find it hard to believe that the print you saw had a yellow/green push in the highlights like the Blu-ray does, but I haven’t had the opportunity to see a print in person, so I can’t say anything from experience.

I’m sorry to hear that I hope you do get to see it sometime! Last year I saw T2 on 35mm. 😃 The really funny thing was when I was leaving the cinema, literally in the company of just two strangers, they were talking amongst themselves about how it was interesting they saw a print rather than a digital projection.

I’ve just seen this on 35mm, and I can tell you the 2013 MGM Bluray looks faithful and much, much closer than your regrade. Visuals of course are only one thing, the original mono mix is obviously nothing like the bluray - but the sound on the print is absolutely thumping.

I’ll post some examples (regrade on top, 2013 MGM Bluray on bottom):

This is how it actually looks on a 35mm print:

The re-grade is too dark and has turned the background navy blue where the backgrounds are often cyan or green.

One of the scenes in the film where the background is very obviously green and not blue or cyan is when Sarah is driving through the tunnel, I just checked the bluray and sure enough it looks correct:

That’s exactly how it looks on release prints, and the road looks green as well as it does on the bluray.

Griffith Observatory:

The colour cast has been removed in the regrade, but this looks moreorless accurate:

Furthermore I don’t remember seeing a single night scene where the background looked so neutrally grey.

Rear-screen projection future war:

These scenes looked really amazing, and felt very intense.

The bluray looks fairly accurate. While it’s impossible for me to say for certain for every scene, what I can say is that most scenes like this had at least some cyan in them and did not look as blue as the regrade. It was also quite easy to tell this is a back-screen effect on film from the way the background is out of focus - nevertheless it still looked great.

Terminator enters police station:

Once again the regrade looks, to my eye, off. The only thing wrong about the bluray is that I’m pretty sure in that shot you could not see through the sunglass lens on the print (but you can in other shots). This is because prints don’t have much detail in the blacks.

Terminator in front of sugar glass:

The regrade is wrong. The bluray looks faithful. There are no scenes in the present (1984) that look as blue as the regrade, the only one that may have looked more blue are future war scenes, although I hasten to add many if not most of them had cyans or greens in them. The colour timing on the print was pretty consistent.

This is all largely in-line with what kaosjm reported in 2017. The future war scenes, some of them were “more blue” than the present, but virtually all of them had teal, cyan, or green in them. The scenes that were the most blue were the rear-projection scenes, but even they were not as blue as the regrade.

Visually speaking the bluray is remarkably faithful. Sound is another matter since it doesn’t have the original mono mix.

No, Titanic was shot on Super 35 as well, but is considerably more detailed. Also you can’t pull out detail that isn’t in the negative, and as the remastered bluray is more detailed it shows there is full 2K resolution (or close to it) in the negative even when cropped. That’s what you expect with Super 35 really as you’re not using the full are of the film for picture, films shot that way tend to use the highest resolution (finest grain) negative film stocks available. The film was shown on 70mm as well, so they must have been able to pull out more detail for the 70mm prints. So the low resolution isn’t due to the negative itself, it’s due to the choice of film stocks used for the prints as well as the intermediary process.

If you ever get to see the film on 35mm, and there will be places showing prints, you’ll see that compared with other 35mm films it’s on the lower side of detail and resolution. You’d think because it was a highly anticipated blockbuster that it’d be on the higher side, but that just isn’t so.

Anyway no digital distributor would ever release it looking the way it did on 35mm, it doesn’t look “bad” by 35mm standards, but it’s certainly soft and low resolution, probably about 1K detail. True Lies is probably similar to the detail in T2, but I haven’t seen that projected in a cinema.

T2 on 35mm looks nowhere near as detailed as the bluray. I’d say the resolution in the print is a lot closer to 1K than it is to 2K.

Also all the CGI special effects scenes are more contrasty to the rest of the film. The effects hold up and look good, but the difference is obvious on film as they don’t have the density of celluloid. Your T1 example is similar to the difference when there’s a CGI shot - the contrast suddenly goes way up, very noticeable.

I’m sorry I had to close the Vimeo account (it was stagnant anyway), I’ll be re-uploading some of the videos soon.

Or from the scan-

phoenixobia said:

I’m sorry my bad. The original negative was 1.66 but now the top and bottom has been cropped to fit 16:9.
I have the BATB Laserdisc and it is letterboxed which shows the complete picture.

If you take a look at the link below or google BATB laserdisc bluray comparison, You’ll see what I mean.

http://stayornay.com/toons/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/BatB-WIP-Compare-11.jpg

Some prints might be open matte, but it’s definitely a flat 1.85:1 film.

The one on eBay? No. It’s a 1982 print.

Sorry I thought I had updated the thread. The rescans are done, but I haven’t seen any previews from it yet.

Some of the Youtube comments are crazy, like “download it asap before SONY/Disney decide to remove it…” - no guys, there’s no need to worry, YoshiKiller2S already (generously) shared the raw file so it’s perfectly safe! 😃

Honestly it’s crazy the response you got, considering the relatively modest response to this being shared in HD for the first time:

https://vimeo.com/212361397

Lots of people seem to think that because this trailer was pulled in cinemas it’s less likely to be preserved in high quality - nope! Even the Orphanage, a 2007 film, its trailers are not in HD (I preserved the Teaser).

Many thanks to YoshiKiller2S for this preservation! It looks AMAZING, the scanning facility did an amazing job on this one.

Scanning will take a while.

Not with this project, but support for other projects is appreciated send a private conversation if you’re interested. 😃

The scanner plans to get the rescans done this month. 😃