TServo2049

The Japanese laserdisc was in English with Japanese subtitles.

Sure, you can PM me the link.

It the two extra scenes that were not in the American cut, both of them during the Superman/Nuclear Man fight around the world. One of them is in Moscow, the other involves a tornado in Kansas.

Cats Don't Dance did get a widescreen DVD in several European countries (e.g., Germany and Spain).

The Lion King had some animation redone for the IMAX release, and it's carried over to all of the DVD and Blu-ray releases. That'd be a good one to preserve.

Roger Rabbit had a couple digital alterations on DVD. When Baby Herman walks under the script girl's skirt, you used to see him sticking up his middle finger between her legs. Also, when Jessica gets thrown out of the cab, you could see up her skirt and it looked as if she wasn't wearing underwear. The uncensored version deserves a good preservation. Also, the short "Trail Mix-Up" had a "Rigid Tools" pinup in the sawmill that got blurred out on DVD. Here's what it originally looked like:

Is The Little Mermaid the original release or the 1997 one? I know Doctor M did a version which used the Platinum DVD but restored the priest's knee, but I don't know if anybody has done preservations of either of the LDs in their entirety.

Fantasia was remixed for DVD, and IMO it sounds inferior to the laser. That LD needs a preservation with uncompressed PCM sound.

The Snow White, Pinocchio and Cinderella box sets had the original mono mixes on the analog track, I think it would be nice to have preservations of those with the mono sound.

Which ones do you have, sky? Again, I found II already, still trying to find I and III (and the Japanese laserdisc rip of IV, if anybody has that one).

AntcuFaalb said:

bkev said:

Wow. I can't believe the Greedo scene actually made it into a home release looking like that!

Unfortunately, LFL isn't known for giving a damn about home video release quality. :-/

Recall, LFL wasn't as involved with the video releases back then, Fox was doing all the work.

As I said, I am guessing that Fox's French division simply didn't think to look for an English-subtitle-free element of the Greedo scene which looked better than that faded element of the French version. Perhaps they weren't even aware that a superior clean element had been used for the Japanese and North American widescreen LDs.

Harmy said:

Yeah, I took the blue a bit too far in those screens, especially in the first half of the duel. But in this scene, it shouldn't be green like in v2.0 either.

I will admit that the images from the later part of the duel look better in your "after" screens than in the v2.0 shots. The color of Ben's lightsaber looks much more "accurate" to my eyes. When I first watched v2.0 on my new computer, I think this was one of the scenes that made me wonder if there was something wrong with my monitor.

The guy who did the PS78 telecine probably leaned too heavily on the green too, though the color palette seems to match the Senator photo.

I wonder what this scene looks like on the LPP print...

Interesting. I will also note that the bootlegs I've seen sourced from Eastmancolor prints (mthr, PS78) don't seem to have a blue tint like that. At least not that severe.

Here's the same frames in the first capture of PS78, stretched out to look more correct:

That bootleg doesn't tell the whole story of the original colors, nor would any video transfer done in the late 70s, but it does show a version that doesn't look as *blue* as your IB references. Mike weighed in last time this issue was brought up, maybe he can give his thoughts this time too.

These new frames do help me calibrate the colors on my new monitor, though. I think I'd dialed the green gamma down a couple points *too* much, because those blues were starting to look purple.

Harmy said:

OK. First, TServo, I had the same problem when I switched to a new laptop and I ended up getting an external monitor to be able to work on colors, because no matter what adjustments I did, I couldn't get the colors to look right on the laptop's monitor.

Actually, my new monitor IS external. I think that my laptop's colors were wrong, but at the same time, the default settings on my new desktop's monitor and video card don't seem right either. Doing some hue and color level corrections in the video card display settings improved the yellow and purple issues a bit - though I'm not sure if it fixed it entirely.

I do realize that some of these color issues may be a result of working from the modern transfer, and they're just issues I never noticed because they were dulled by my laptop's display.

I know some of them are indeed color issues with DeEd 2.0. I thought the crawl looked too yellow and not "golden" enough on my new display, but Harmy's recent 2.1 screenshot looked much better on said display. That proves that it wasn't just a color issue on MY display.

I don't see any profiles.

I dunno, I may just have been so used to the way my old computer looked. On the computer in general, the colors look great, the white levels look right, etc. It's just the DeEd which bothers me.

Perhaps it will always look this way on this monitor. Perhaps I'm looking at it the way it's meant to look. I just can't tell.

To Harmy and anyone else: In this image, does 3PO tend toward yellow instead of golden, and the panel around R2's bubble look kind of purple?

Can anyone see some very saturated lavender areas in the fire and reflections here?

Again, do R2's panels seem almost purple-tinged?

Does Leia look yellowish here? What about the reflections off of Tarkin and Motti's hair?

Does everyone seem a little yellowish here? In the IB screening screenshot, it looks golden, but to me this looks more yellow/ochre. Especially Luke's hair.

Does Red Leader look kind of yellowish? Does his visor almost look yellow-green, and his shirt have a yellowish tinge to it?

Does anything seem off about 3PO, or about Luke and Han's skin tones? Do they again seem too yellowish? Do the lighter parts Chewie's fur seem a little yellow as well? Do R2's panels or Han's pants almost seem to have a little purple in them?

Once again, I'm not even sure if what I'm seeing is wrong, or if I was just misled by the way things looked on my old computer. Do the colors look odd to anyone else? Does anybody see what I'm seeing?

Pinocchio had a similar - they used the cels as reference, and "flattened" a lot of the moody lighting effects, like the candlelight in Gepetto's workshop. The 1999 DVD was the last time they ever looked anything near accurate.

Have the restoration team never seen the color test wedges from Snow White? The ones that have been included on every special edition on LD, DVD and BD for the last 20 years? If you look at them, it will be plainly obvious that the cels don't tell the whole story.

Yeah, it definitely switches to a different print at the final shot. I'm guessing that the Greedo scene comes from the same print.

Also, I was wrong about a 1989 German letterbox LD. It was actually *France* that got an LBX release in '89; Germany didn't get one until 1993, and it appears to be the same transfer, or at least the same film source - including the same faded Greedo scene from this French print. The only difference is that it had the German crawl and end credits instead of the French.

I wonder why Fox's French division didn't think to ask for the clean, unsubbed source that was used for the Japanese and U.S. widescreen releases. In fact, in the German OT thread, you can see a screenshot from an 80s German TV airing which has video generated subs, and the color doesn't look as bad as the French LBX transfer:

So either that transfer was done in the U.S. or U.K., or there was a good-looking subtitle-free print of the scene at Fox's German office or somewhere in continental Europe. (Though who knows, maybe this WAS that print as it looked in 1982 or thereabouts, and it had faded by 1989.)

Curiouser and curiouser...

OK, you guys can probably ignore those images I posted. I checked another computer, a Mac, and the bottom ones look completely wrong there too. But the top ones look CLOSER to what I see on my old laptop, albeit not dim, desaturated and yellowish.

I'm thinking it's my new computer's display that needs to be adjusted somehow - even if my old display was wrong, I just can't believe that some of the odd colors I'm seeing on the new one are what Harmy intended. And the problem is that I can't show you because the images won't look the way they do on my display.

But on the same note, due to the white-balance issue, I also know that my old display must be wrong as well...

Yeah. Switching over to my old Dell, the tweaked screenshots look messed up there (which makes perfect sense because I was tweaking them to make the image on my new computer look like my old one).

If the issue is with my entire display, obviously none of the images will look to any of you the way they look to me. For all I know, the top image as it looks on my new computer IS how it's supposed to look, and my old computer is off.

But even if it's inaccurate, I will say that I like the golden, desaturated look that DeEd has on my old laptop. It sort of matches the blues, greens, and pinks I've seen on 35mm prints of Close Encounters and The Blues Brothers. Some shots have odd hues on my new display - R2's panels tending toward purple, the Rebel flight visors looking mustard instead of orange. And I can still see those magenta blaster flashes on my new computer, while on my old one they looked tempered.

Geez, I'm having an existential crisis - was everything I thought I knew about the DeEd wrong? Was everything I thought I knew about the proper color timing of this film wrong?

I just upgraded to a new computer with an ASUS PB238Q monitor and an nVidia GeForce GTX 650 video card, and its color balance is completely different from my old Dell laptop. My Dell has a warm gold cast and a somewhat desaturated look; my ASUS/nVidia combo has a more accurate white balance, but the DeEd 2.0 colors look garish and weird now.

At first I thought it was my monitor that was causing the DeEd colors to look weird, but now I'm wondering if it's my video card settings. Using the video sliders on VLC, and particularly the hue, I was able to match the colors on my new computer to the ones on my old laptop.

Here's how the Fox logo looks on my new computer with default settings:

And here's the VLC approximation of how it looks on my old laptop. It's not exact, because the colorspace of the PNG doesn't seem to match the colorspace of the player (my video card is set to only use 16-235, but the VLC snapshot may be converting the image to 0-255?). Still, it's close:

The problem is, that color setting messes up other parts of the film. Here's the lightsaber duel on my new computer:

Here's what it looks like using the same VLC settings as before:

Obviously, that's wrong. For this scene, I can't match it to how it looks on my laptop. Which is fine, this shot actually looks good with the standard colors on my new computer; on my laptop, Vader's saber looks a little less magenta and Ben's looks a little more cyan, but this is close enough. Also, I know you're planning on tweaking this scene.

I will also say that when I try to use nVidia's control panel to match the colors of video displays to my old computer, VLC's snapshots still output with the colors in the top image. (Maybe tweaking the colors for my entire desktop would fix that, but I'm not sure if those are wrong.)

Which of those images is closest to how the DeEd colors are SUPPOSED to look? Have I just gotten used to colors that are wrong, or is my display actually messed up? I'm not even sure if the images I'm posting will look to you the way they look to me.

Fox is still distributing I-VI until 2020, at least, so isn't this a moot point?

That's good. But is his print also missing the Jor-El first night scene? (I can't remember if his hybrid even had that scene - and even if it did, some of the deleted scenes in his version may have been derived from the KCOP broadcast or something...)

Unfortunately, no. I don't even have an LD player.

In the German preservation thread, grisan said there was just a hard cut to the German credits, and he guessed it was probably a few frames earlier to hide the original iris effect.

Since I doubt that any foreign-language version had a new wipe, I'm now starting to think that the sloppy transition Marvins found was how the original French prints looked. (I'm guessing that the video edit to the French picture element was right before the group shot - with only a few exceptions, the end of the opening flyover shot and the beginning of the final group shot have always been the cut points for every alternate crawl/credit roll.)

I think Chance Bartels has a 16mm print of the complete extended cut. I used to have a VHS tape of his letterbox LD/16mm telecine hybrid.

Have you tried contacting him?

marvins said:

 

Here is the beginning of the french end credits.

 

It's funny to see that in the penultimate frame, we see the english credits and then in the next frame the french credits are there. And the stars background is not the same too.

 

I suppose that it must be so in all the foreign ending credits.

 

The French pre-THX letterbox LD transfer seems to be the same one used on the 1989 German letterbox LD.

Both versions switch to an inferior print for the Greedo scene, suggesting that the main print had the burned-in English subtitles. So it seems that they used an English source, and swapped in the French and German crawls/credits in the video editing stage.

However, I'm not sure if the cut was done during the iris, or at the start of the final group shot. If it was the latter, then this weird edit is a real film edit. (Anybody know how the transition looked in the German closing?)

As I've said before, my theory is that ITV transfer was sourced from a flat, cropped 16mm print, the kind that used to be screened on airlines before the video era.

Notice that there really isn't that much panning, if there's any at all; doing pans in the optical printer was time-intensive, so the operator usually used a fixed position for each shot. If they really needed to get from one side of the frame to the other, they would most often do a hard cut. Look at the first shot of the training remote scene, after Alderaan is destroyed. On most cropped transfers, there's a pan from Luke over to Ben, but in the ITV broadcast, it shows Luke training, then it just jump-cuts to other side of the screen to show Ben.

It can sometimes be quite jarring indeed - the old Video Treasures release of the Godzilla movie "Ghidrah, the Three-Headed Monster" used such a print. Someone would be walking across the frame, and the cropping would switch positions to keep up with them, causing them to seemingly "teleport" to the other side of the screen!

Anyway, if we could get our hands on one of those flat 16mm prints, we could see if the dissolve is there too. (They used to turn up on eBay from time to time.)

The transition between the '81 crawl and '77 flyover is also a dissolve. Perhaps both dissolves were on the print itself - but to answer that question, we'd have to find a flat 16mm that specifically has the ANH crawl.

In other news: In the "Tantive's Orange Items" thread, it was discovered that the 1994 French "Coffret Trilogie" release (the pre-THX release, aka the "Pyramid" box set) does in fact have the burn marks. ,,,^..^,,, had told me in a PM conversation that the burn marks weren't there, but he was obviously mistaken or didn't know what I meant.

That release also had the cloudless composite. It's interesting that every single official release, bootleg or print with the cloudless composite has the burn marks (or had to use DVNR to remove them). The 80s transfers without the burn marks all have the cloudy composite.

Now if only we could find out whether or not the Derann print has the burn marks...

none said:

Thanks to ,,,^..^,,, who provided Tantive Orange Item captures of the LaserDisc Coffret Trilogie : Edition Collector from 1994.  Their quality (one hard edge the other more faded) is similar to the 1993 Technidisc msycamore captured.

http://fd.noneinc.com/Glitch/starwars-tantiveorangeerrors/starwars-tantiveorangeerrors.html

Interesting, he told me there were no orange marks on that version. That source also has the "cloudless" Yavin X-wings composite.

If it's the same transfer as the German "Silver Screen" letterboxed LD, it cuts to a different (and considerably inferior) print during the Greedo scene, presumably because the main source had the burned-in English subtitles.

The Greedo scene looked fine on the Technidisc, but I don't know if it was dropped in from the JSC/SWE transfer, or if they had found the same source used for the GOUT by then. (The German letterbox transfer was done in 1989, I believe. Replacing the German crawl and credits with the French ones would have just been a matter of video editing - and I'm betting that the master film source had them in English anyways.)

You_Too said:

TServo2049 said:

(Remember, the original was the only big restoration project of the three.)

I didn't know that. So they didn't touch the negatives of ESB and ROTJ? I guess at least those two negatives still exist in their original form then!

Remember, I said "supposedly." But now that I think about it, they would have had to go back to the raw, unedited camera negatives to recreate the wipes.

I do know that Zombie said that "ILM used the IP's for pretty much all their work in ESB and ROTJ." I guess that's why I said that "supposedly" the O-negs weren't utilized for the film at all, but my conjecture may well be totally wrong.

I don't KNOW that much about the film sources, it's all educated guesses and deductive reasoning. Like, the JSC has to be from the same IP as the 80s video releases because they share the same damage and glue marks, which means that unless they come from two different IPs that share all of the same flaws, the JSC doesn't come from an IP made in '85.

I don't know if that "1985 IP" was used for ANY video releases. The Technidisc/GOUT source was an older element which had stuff like the Tantive burn marks printed in. Those could not have been on the negative, because the video releases, which did come from newer IPs, lacked them.

Maybe the "1985 IP" was the source for the 1991 UK widescreen tape? Although that transfer comes from a source that looks similar to the '82/JSC one (no burn marks, "cloudy" Yavin takeoff composite), it's not the same because it lacks the glue marks, and the weird blobs throughout reel 3.

There's also the question of the pre-THX French/German widescreen laserdiscs, which have the same cloudless Yavin composite as the GOUT, but according to a member that has the French LD, there are no Tantive burn marks. They also had to cut to an alternate, inferior film source for the Greedo scene, suggesting that the main source had subtitles. Was THAT the 1985 IP? I have no idea.

I'd love to have cold, hard facts, but I don't actually have any. Sorry if I gave the impression that I knew something any of you didn't know -- I'm just guessing, and my guesses may be wrong.

I now return you to our regularly scheduled discussion of this preservation project.

The IP used for the JSC was not made in 1985. It was made, at the very latest, in 1982, because it is the same source used for the early video releases.

Also, the JSC IP and Technidisc/GOUT IP can't be the same, because the latter source lacks the glue marks at almost every cut.

Finally, wouldn't an IP made in 1985 have been on some kind of low-fade stock? Supposedly, the 97 SEs of Empire and Jedi came from interpositives, and if they were usable in 1997, that must mean that they hadn't faded. (Remember, the original was the only big restoration project of the three.)

Correction about that AVI version of BLAKSVN's preservation of the extended cut of the first film: The missing 15 minutes (173 min. vs. 188 min.) is not because it's missing any scenes, nor was it due to some screwup in the conversion. I had forgotten that it was missing the end credits. If you take 188 minutes, subtract almost 8 minutes of credits, and then factor in the 4% PAL speedup, you get about 173 minutes.

Still, I'd love to see the full-sized DVD preservation rather than just an AVI conversion.

I was just thinking about how it's really hard/impossible to find the BLAKSVN preservations of the Superman extended cuts. It's depressing how it's sometimes quite difficult to find and exhume past OT projects.

People talk about how overreliance on digital storage media could hinder future film preservation, but it already seems to be taking its toll on preservation preservation.