TServo2049

Hello,

I was just thinking about the extended TV cuts of the first three Superman films. I used to have multi-gen VHS dupes back in the days of tape trading (which I stupidly got rid of at some point), and I’ve noticed that while fan edits are out there, I’ve had little to no luck finding preservations of the TV cuts themselves.

I know that BLAKSVN/ANGRYSVN did preservations of I, III, and the 93-minute cut of IV, but none of them are on MySpleen, and there haven’t been any Usenet uploads within the last 4 years or however far back the longest newsreader retention periods go.

The Superman II “Restored International Cut” preservation recently resurfaced on a certain public tracker. There’s an AVI version of the first film there too (presumably derived from the BLAKSVN release), but a recent commenter said it only times out to 173 minutes. Even when you multiply that by 1.04 to account for PAL speedup, it still comes up 8 minutes shy of the full 188-minute running time, so either it comes from an edited broadcast or the AVI conversion was botched (I’m guessing the latter). The actual BLAKSVN preservation is out there, but there are no seeders, so it’s stuck at 57.3%.

And as far as III and IV go, I’ve had no luck finding preservations of the longer cuts anywhere. With tracker and file locker shutdowns, deletions and link expirations on surviving lockers, old torrents going unseeded, and old Usenet uploads falling off the back end of retention periods, I’d hate to see preservations like these vanish into the mists of time.

So is there any way the BLAKSVN Superman preservations could be exhumed from obscurity and made available again?

I was watching this again, and noticed something odd - there's these weird jaggies, like it was deinterlaced by dropping half of the fields. It gives it this really low-res look.

I know that this project has been completed for a long time, but is there ever any chance of a revised version without these jaggies?

The original soundtrack for The Wrong Trousers is on the original U.S. DVD (the Fox release with the green cover), but the film is slowed down by 4%. I believe that's the only DVD release to have the original music, I have the original UK DVD release but I can't remember if all the music is there.

The original music can also be sourced from laserdisc, and that version would have uncompressed PCM audio.

FYI, Fox is still distributing I-VI, so shouldn't they get a copy too?

Oldfan said:

I feel mostly the same way. Although I have to wonder, did Kim Dotcom feel the same way before he heard the helicopters?

See my comment about us being "small fish in a big pond." My point was that the studios are chasing the Megauploads of the world, not us.

Read my above comments. Hamill has trashed the Special Editions and prequels, I don't think he has any interest in returning to SW.

Knowing how Hamill feels about what's been done to Star Wars already, I have a feeling he's gonna say no.

And Harrison Ford as old Han Solo would be as depressing as Harrison Ford as old Indy.

Re: that Photoshop: Give me a break. Marvel fans went through this angst three years ago, and in retrospect, it was all for nothing. I'm sure Lucasfilm will function as a basically autonomous entity just like Marvel does.

Really, nothing has changed. Star Wars is still being beaten like a dead horse, and I still plan to ignore anything new from the franchise. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

And as for OT.com, when you stop and think about it without resorting to the standard kneejerk reactions about Disney, do you really think they're going to care about us any more than Lucas did? This isn't Fox shutting down Buffy fansites in 1998.

IMO, we don't owe our continued existence solely to George Lucas' magnanimity. We owe it to the fact that we're small fish in a big pond. I don't think Disney's lawyers are going to care about us any more than Lucasfilm's lawyers (who I'm sure will still be in place under Disney ownership).

If someone wanted to to shut us down, they'd have done it a long time ago. I'm not losing any sleep over this.

Well said. That's Mike Verta's take on it, and it's mine too. The angst is all based on the popular conception of Disney, but in truth, I don't think we're going to be on their radar any more than we were on George's.

To quote another property acquired by Disney, until such time as the world ends, we will act as though it intends to spin on.

I bought the CAV box set of Snow White at Half Price Books for $10. I believe there are some extra/larger still galleries on it that didn't show up on the subsequent DVD/Blu-ray releases, and there's an analog version of the original mono mix (which is on the latest release, but it's Dolby 192kbps).

I don't have an LD player or the means to capture, so if anybody wants to make a preservation from this, I'll gladly send it to them.

Uncorrected PAL is 720x576, corrected PAL should be 768x576. 768x326 is basically 2.35:1, so the 768-pixel width seems right.

Is this at NTSC pixel ratio? Remember, at 1:1 pixel ratio, NTSC is 720x480, an aspect ratio of 1.5:1 instead of 1.33:1.

NTSC has a pixel ratio of 8:9, so to calculate the correct ratio, you have to correct the resolution from 720x480 to 720x540 before cropping. It doesn't seem like you did that.

At the correct resolution, I'm seeing an AR of about 2.30:1-2.32:1. And if you weren't aware already, there's some sort of anamorphic distortion issue where the image gets thinner on the ends.

And the GOUT isn't actually that heavily cropped. The earlier transfers actually may have showed a little too much on the top and bottom (in the JSC, you can sometimes see the bright garbage around the frame during optical composite shots). And due to two different camera apertures being used during filming, framing the transfer to fit inside the smaller aperture will inevitably cause more picture to be lost in the scenes with the larger one, since those shots use more of the film frame.

Russ and I have been corresponding about the 1991 PAL widescreen VHS, and I've viewed some video clips of it. It does seem to be transferred to PAL from NTSC, and it has the exact same "shrinking ratio" problem as the U.S. SWE LD - and I mean "exact", I can see the black bars get bigger at the reel changes, and the before/after difference seems *identical*. HOWEVER...it doesn't have the weird blobs or the splice glue marks from the JSC/SWE!

And here's the 1991 PAL LBX VHS (excuse the quality):

Same shrunken ratio, no glue marks. What is going on here? Is it a different film source that happens to have the same variations as the JSC/SWE one (no Tantive burn marks, cloudy X-wing takeoff composite), but none of the weird blobs or glue marks? Is it the same source but with something like Filmguard applied?

If it was a new transfer, why was it sourced from NTSC instead of being native PAL? If was an existing transfer, why was it never used on any NTSC release? In either case, why does it have the shrinking ratio problem? I thought that was due to a problem covering up the JSC's Japanese subtitles and repositioning the up-shifted image to the center. If this is a different master, it means that the same framing mistake was repeated.

Why do two different video masters have the same issue, and why do the film sources look identical except for the presence or lack of certain damage?

What is this, I don't even...

Same film element as the DC, different video transfer. The color balance is different, the framing is different, etc.

No, the Technidisc version was specifically made to correct the shrinking ratio issue. It's a different transfer of a different film element (the same one transferred for the Definitive Collection/GOUT).

Very very interesting. I had also assumed it was sourced from the JSC/SWE transfer, since it seemed to be converted from NTSC. Back in 2005, Russ Dawson and another user both noted that the '91 releases ran longer than the other PAL versions, and the '91 LBX release of Empire definitely looks to be a straight copy of the JSC/SWE transfer. If they were new transfers for PAL, why wouldn't they be 4% faster like the other releases?

I'm also noticing that the bottom of the pylon is cut off compared to the JSC, and the widescreen image has an AR of about 2.55:1. That suggests that this '91 UK widescreen release was sourced from the SWE "shrinking ratio" version.

That doesn't make sense with what you just said - didn't the "shrinking ratio" SWE still have the glue? One of Mallwalker's JSC/SWE comparisons clearly showed splice glue in both versions. I thought the SWE was just the JSC version modified to remove the Japanese hardsubs - wasn't that the cause of the "shrinking ratio" in the first place?

Can someone check the "shrinking ratio" version and see if it also has the blobs on reel 3? Also, it'd be nice to see a screenshot of the X-wing takeoff scene, to compare the framing to the '91 UK widescreen VHS.

The bootleg sourced for Starkiller/MBJ/TWC326 has a really bad hue shift. C-3PO tends toward yellow-green, R2's panels are almost purple, and everyone looks like they have jaundice. If you play it in VLC and move the hue slider to the right (between the first two notches), you can fix this, but as you can see, the colors are still degraded by generations of copying.

Before:

After:

So even with the hue fix, you're still just polishing the proverbial turd.

I'm 99.999999999999% sure that's the same bootleg used for Starkiller/MBJ/TWC326. Mono mix? Check. Virtually static cropping? Check. Horrible quality from who knows how many generations of copying? Check.

As for that last part, there is no version of the film which reverses those two scenes. I'm watching TWC326 right now, "Come on R2" comes first just like in every other version ever.

I don't think he's talking about that specific bootleg. I think it's a faulty memory along the lines of "Early prints didn't have the mouse droid scene" or "Early prints had Luke missing with the grappling hook" or "Early prints had the Biggs scenes."

Back in the Usenet-and-VHS-trading days of 1995, still relatively few people had seen that bootleg, and no other versions had yet surfaced in the fan community, so there was still rampant speculation and hearsay.

With all the sources we've accumulated in 2012, any claims of missing scenes, additional scenes or different ordering of scenes have been disproven. If there's anything we haven't yet discovered, it's going to be something like the X-wing takeoff, a subtle variation in the versions we already have.

So in short, no, there is absolutely no truth to that statement. Myth busted, case closed.

Thanks! To avoid hijacking this thread, I'll continue the Pyramid LD discussion in PMs.

OK, I grabbed a new screenshot from the TWC326 version of the cropped, mono mix bootleg. I used VLC to correct the hue, decreas the saturation a little, and very slightly sharpen it.

Not much better. The planet still looks like a blob of color. Still, my hunch is that this is the cloudless composite.

Also, the guy with the cat-face emoticon showed me the version of the scene that appears on the French pre-THX "pyramid" laserdisc box set.

As you can see, it's cloudless.

LDDB says this release is from 1994, and the packaging resembles the U.S. Definitive Collection, but the LDDB pages for the single-film 1994 discs say they're improved pressings of the same masters as the earlier French letterbox discs. So that would mean this transfer dates back to 1989.

I wonder if anyone has the original '89 French LBX LD, to definitively confirm whether that version has the cloudless composite too. (It would also be nice to see the German pre-THX LDs as well.)

EDIT: Andrea also told me that the French Pyramid LD doesn't have the Tantive burn marks. So apparently, this film source had no burn marks AND no clouds, as well as having the Greedo subtitles (since they had to switch to a different, vastly inferior print for the clean Greedo scene - go figure, the JSC already had it clean and it didn't look like a dark, purple-tinted mess).

It just gets more confusing...

This isn't really related to WhiteMagic per se, but do you still have the French Pyramid laserdisc? I ask because there are two different versions of the sentry watching the X-wings take off - one of them has an extra layer of clouds superimposed over the gas-giant planet, and one doesn't.

The version with clouds appeared on all of the pre-THX NTSC video releases, but the French and German widescreen laserdiscs may have used a different IP (since they had to drop in the unsubtitled Greedo scene from a grossly inferior film source). So I am curious as to what the shot looks like on these French/German widescreen LDs.

I'm interested in the potential results as well.

Darth Mallwalker said:

 

TServo2049 said:

EDIT: Here's Starkiller/MeBeJedi, or at least this is the version I could find on
Usenet.

I'm confused by that statement, since there's two on usenet.
One is called MeBeJedi, the other called the Starkiller.
Which is that you're showing ?

TServo2049 said:

Does anybody at least have a copy of this bootleg without the macroblocking, or is this it?

Depending upon your answer to my previous question, try the other one?
Try the one which doesn't have bitrate allocated for LPCM soundtrack?
I'm just thinking out loud...

 

I didn't realize they were two different preservations - I've heard people refer to "Starkiller/MeBeJedi", but that may just have been blanket references to that cropped, mono mix bootleg transfer.

Mine must have been MeBeJedi, since it had the blocking. I purposely picked a frame that had as little of it as possible.

And BTW, the color looks different because I adjusted the hue, which is way off on the raw version, and turned down the saturation to try to counteract the chroma decay and make the remaining luma detail a little easier to see.

The TWC326 looks a little better, I'll have to download it and take a look myself. (I've been following this stuff since '97, but it's still amazing to think that this used to be the ONLY circulating copy of a pre-ANH version!)

Since the ITV version looks to be an in-house transfer, the film print they received was most likely Academy flat (i.e., the film was unsqueezed and cropped using an optical printer, so the print itself was P&S), but who knows what element it might have been derived from?

If only someone could track down one of those flat 16mm prints that used to appear on eBay, that might answer some of the questions.

Actually, now that I think about it, the presence of the clouds on the ITV print actually makes some sense - remember, it also lacks the Tantive burn marks, which means that the picture might have been derived from the same, or at least a similar, film source as the official video masters of the era. (I wonder if it has some of the same damage, like maybe those dark blobs during the saber training...)

If it was a cropped print, the presence of the mono mix isn't really an enigma, Fox or Lucasfilm or whoever likely just combined the mono soundtrack with the cropped picture element.

One key difference is that, though I believe it has the Episode IV crawl, it has the 1977 flyover, meaning the edit point is right after the crawl instead of at the end of the flyover as it usually is.

Here's what Catnap looks like:

It has the clouds. Not surprising, it shares a lot of printed-in damage and splices with the Puggo Grande print, so both 16mm prints must have been made off the same internegative.

EDIT: Here's Starkiller/MeBeJedi, or at least this is the version I could find on Usenet. I did some hue/saturation correction, but this is the best I could get out of the who-knows-what'th-generation quality:

Well, that's just great. Due to the generation loss and the digital macroblocking (not really visible in this frame), I can't TELL whether or not the clouds are there! My instincts say they aren't, but it's so degraded that the planet just looks like a big blob of color.

Does anybody at least have a copy of this bootleg without the macroblocking, or is this it?

Wow, I really screwed up, didn't I? I guess I meant to say, it's the only version that's *not compressed to 192kbps.*

Another thing which needs to be captured is a PCM mono track from an LD of The Wizard of Oz (perhaps the "Ultimate Oz" box set?). All DVD/Blu-ray releases from 1999 onward have a weird error in the parlor scene in Kansas; before '99, Dorothy said "Oh, Toto, don't..." but in all the DVD/Blu-ray releases except for the original MGM one, it cuts off mid-sentence. Even the "restored" mono track on the more recent releases has this problem.

Again, the original MGM DVD has the mono track as it used to sound, but it's compressed Dolby Digital. An uncompressed version can only be found on laserdisc.