Roobyoo

Thank you so much Harmy! Great result!

This looks great! I would love to see the final result. I can’t get enough open mattes.

timdiggerm said:

LexX said:

Well, there’s the confirmation. Congrats to the OP, he was probably the first one to find it.

I almost wonder if OP was actually a researcher for Prop Store, running this by the fans discretely to judge if we’d accept this as true.

(for the record, I do think it’s true)

Haha, no, I am not. It was just a coincidence. I saw EC Henry’s YouTube video and thought ‘Na, this definitely looks nothing like a tennis shoe’. A few days after that I saw 4K83 (or a scanned 35mm ROTJ trailer), and then out of nowhere it hit me directly in the face.

It’s great to finally see the real ‘prop’ after all these years, I must admit. Now give me all the TESB asteroid potatoes!

Fang Zei said:

Roobyoo said:

jpb19 said:

Roobyoo said:

This is a punch into the gut. I recently tried to watch The Phantom Menace (don’t blame me) on Disney+, but the low bitrate and bad sound quality had to force me to turn it off. So I decided to plug in my HDD with an own rip of the film from my Blu-ray, with a prestine bitrate and DTS sound. The podrace scene was like night and day compared to the stream.

Bad bitrate and sound quality? Disney Plus version is 4K. Streams are based on your Internet connection. I prefer digital 4K versions of Star Wars over Star Wars on disc for the altered versions of the six films. I own Star Wars on digital HD. Eventually, I will purchase 4K versions of all 11 Star Wars movies. If you have ITunes, you can download 4K versions locally to your PC and cast the video to a smart TV screen or Roku device.

Resolution isn’t the same as bitrate. The lower the bitrate, the more compression artifacts you’ll get. With a 4k Blu-ray you’ll probably will get around 1000 mbps, although Disney+ in 4k dumps around 17 Mbps.

My internet connection is very good, and I’m streaming via direct cable connection.

I’m guessing that’s a typo, but just to be clear, a 4k disc will peak at 100mbps, not 1000.

Whoops!
Yes, a typo. Sometimes I’m glad not to work at a money bank 😄

jpb19 said:

Roobyoo said:

This is a punch into the gut. I recently tried to watch The Phantom Menace (don’t blame me) on Disney+, but the low bitrate and bad sound quality had to force me to turn it off. So I decided to plug in my HDD with an own rip of the film from my Blu-ray, with a prestine bitrate and DTS sound. The podrace scene was like night and day compared to the stream.

Bad bitrate and sound quality? Disney Plus version is 4K. Streams are based on your Internet connection. I prefer digital 4K versions of Star Wars over Star Wars on disc for the altered versions of the six films. I own Star Wars on digital HD. Eventually, I will purchase 4K versions of all 11 Star Wars movies. If you have ITunes, you can download 4K versions locally to your PC and cast the video to a smart TV screen or Roku device.

Resolution isn’t the same as bitrate. The lower the bitrate, the more compression artifacts you’ll get. With a 4k Blu-ray you’ll probably will get around 1000 mbps, although Disney+ in 4k dumps around 17 Mbps.

My internet connection is very good, and I’m streaming via direct cable connection.

This is a punch into the gut. I recently tried to watch The Phantom Menace (don’t blame me) on Disney+, but the low bitrate and bad sound quality had to force me to turn it off. So I decided to plug in my HDD with an own rip of the film from my Blu-ray, with a prestine bitrate and DTS sound. The podrace scene was like night and day compared to the stream.

I was 5 or 6 years old when I first saw TESB, so I can’t really remember if I was ‘fooled’ by Yoda’s speech about ‘Yoda’. But I do remember that I was very afraid of him. There was something menacing about his apperance (real looking puppet, strange way to speak, lived at a dark place). So it took some years for me to finally realize that he was really one of the good guys!

I made a quick YouTube video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cAVyXMNrdC0

…
And I really hope EC Henry doesn’t consider this as an insult! I just think he is mistaken or did find another shoe used as another model specifically in the Executor destruction scene.

Hello dear members.

Many of us have known that during the making of ‘Return of the Jedi’ one of the special effects artists, Ken Ralston, placed a sneaker as an easter egg within the Battle of Endor. For many years, fans have been trying to figure out where - and if - one can see this shoe. So far there has been no notice.

The YouTuber EC Henry claims to have found the shoe in one of the shots (www.youtube.com/watch?v=JyomUOwLBpA). But he admits himself during the video, that the model he found may look like a shoe, but not like a tennis shoe - as stated by one of the special effects guys. It looks more like a slipper.

I have my doubt about this conclusion that this has to be the tennis shoe easter egg. The problem with the new releases of ‘Return of the Jedi’ is that they denoised the hell out of the movies for the newer blu-rays, streaming and 4k versions of the movies.

I recently saw the teaser from a complete scan of an original 35mm print. And immediately my eyes catched something:

Are you seeing it? Let’s take a closer look with a little help from me:

Let’s zoom in one more time:

It is still blurried, but this looks more like a tennis shoe/sneaker from the 80s.

And it became clear to me why the fans couldn’t find this easter egg for years - simply because the newer ROTJ releases have this and a few other models removed from this shot:

Of course this isn’t a 100% confirmation, but I think it is at least a little closer to the real thing.

We have audio from TESB prints from 1980, and nowhere is this line to be heard - except when Vader is on the star destroyer.

Weren’t there rumours (maybe two or three years ago) that Lucasfilm or Disney was scanning and digitalizing all SW material they have in the archives? By the look of it, they have indeed - or are still doing it. Just look at all this perfect quality BTS material, especially the crew footage of ILM.

Versuch es mit einem VPN. Es gibt auch kostenlose Addons für Browser wie z.B. Firefox.

Mark Hamill in ESB.

I think it’s definitely contracted between Lucas and Disney to not release the OOT. No loyalty. Since 2012 there hasn’t been any official word spoken or written if/why they/they won’t release it. And that’s probably because they won’t endanger another shitstorm on Lucas - at least during his lifetime. Because that is going to happen when they tell us that he is the only reason.

There is nothing solved, and the conclusion is: what you are seeing or hearing is just the final result of general editing. It has nothing to do with the Lost Cut.

“There is too many of them!”

And there is indeed. My all-time favourites are always going to be:

• Vader’s redemption and throwing Palpatine down the shaft (without “Nooooo” of course).
• Binary Sunset
• Speeder Bike Chase
• The rebels flying into the second Death Star
• Luke and the force ghosts at the end of ROTJ (Shaw version)
• Wampa cave
• Asteroid chase
• Yoda in the swamplifting up Luke’s X-Wing

There is to add that I really love every dynamic scene between Luke, Han and Leia - right after they rescue Leia from her prison cell in ANH until Echo base after Luke wakes up.

Slavicuss said:

The new 4K set may prove to be as disappointing as the last two sets (2004 & 2011) for fans of the OUT.

At this point my only hope is that the quality of the SE is good enough to be used for fan edits or restoration. I even don’t care anymore if there are going to be more changes or not.

Z6PO said:

I seem to recall that at the time The Force Awakens was released, people were saying that they would have liked to see the old gang together. But thinking of it, in the original trilogy, Luke, Han & Leia aren’t that much together.

But at least they WERE together in the OT. Now that the three films of the ST are finished, that doesn’t even happen once. I think that’s the point some fans are angry about. With the old films (and the old EU over the past years) they established a fundamental friendship between the main protagonists. Now it seems they were just on for an adventure 30 years ago, and that’s it.

https://ew.com/movie-reviews/2019/12/18/star-wars-rise-of-skywalker-review/

oojason said:

Roobyoo said:

I don’t know if this thread here is the right place, but I think I once saw fan edit covers of these old vhs covers (Digital Remastered THX Edition) somewhere here.

https://s19.directupload.net/images/191130/yatgyojv.png

Does anyone know if these covers still float somewhere around? I searched for them for quite some time now, but couldn’t find them in a decent quality.

The 1995 ‘Executor’ VHS tin box-set covers 😃 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vKIWGE_1Aic)
 

The talented FrankT knocked up a superb set of these - which can be found here:-

https://originaltrilogy.com/topic/Franks-Star-Wars-DVDBD-Covers/id/47698/page/1
 

and I think HotRod may have knocked up a set too - quite some time ago - so it may be worth PMing him about that.
 

Nice! Thank you very much for the quick and helpful reply, oojason!

I don’t know if this thread here is the right place, but I think I once saw fan edit covers of these old vhs covers (Digital Remastered THX Edition) somewhere here.

https://s19.directupload.net/images/191130/yatgyojv.png

Does anyone know if these covers still float somewhere around? I searched for them for quite some time now, but couldn’t find them in a decent quality.

@DrDre: The grading is really great, I have to admit that.

joefavs said:

Is my mind playing tricks on me or does the main title sound a little fuller/richer in TFA? Could they have remixed the score?

I’m also noticing a lot more obvious grain than on the blu-ray.

Honestly that would be awesome. It was a real bummer when I was sitting in the midnight premiere of TFA back in 2015, only to get disappointed by the low opening theme. There was no energy behind the music like there is with the ROTJ opening theme, for example. Same goes with TLJ.

Thanks for the screenshots, Han Solo.

But man… that looks nothing like a 4k remaster. Just like another color grading.
The Solo/Greedo scene is like an abuse of an old rotten corpse, at that point. How many changes did they make to this scene until now?

Jar Jar never looked so good!

Thanks for the news, the samples already look amazing.