TServo2049

I'm trying to download the Usenet fixed version with SABnzbd, and it gets stuck on part003.rar because it says it's encrypted. What gives?

I couldn't answer that any more than you could. He only posted there a couple times in March.

Perhaps he gave up and decided to pursue other ventures. That's a very real possibility.

Whatever is the most current official version, that's the one that represents George Lucas' original vision.

We've always been at war with Eastasia.

Laserman is alive, he posted on Mike Verta's forum a while back.

Sounds good.

Now I feel guilty for sending you on a wild goose chase for laserdiscs when you could have just gotten the VHS. :(

Wonderful. I saw a theatrical screening of The Blues Brothers back in June, it was from a clean and likely fairly recent LPP print, but it still had the original 1980 theatrical timing. It had this same pastel look.

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!</Vader>

Seriously, was not expecting that. It's as if some higher power doesn't want us to find the digital track...

OK, I used Avidemux to stack the fields of that sample. I can't find any pattern, every field is smeary. In no instance does a single video frame, or even a single video field, exactly correspond with a single film frame.

The bottom field seems to be a bit ahead of the top field, too. Look at how you can see both sides of the shot change at the same time:

Since this telecine has no pulldown and no discrete reproductions of individual film frames, I'm not sure if this can be IVTC'ed. The closest I could think of would be to toss out the bottom fields, resulting in a progressive, half-resolution image. It would still be smeary, but there wouldn't be any interlacing, and it would also "unsqueeze" the picture.

I will say though, this sample looks great for a 70s bootleg. I can definitely see a marked increase in quality from the original capture. And I love the color; this is probably the closest representation of the timing of the original Eastmancolor prints that we'll ever see.

I can't wait to see how this project further progresses.

On the subject of telecine smearing, I actually don't know that much about telecine, I'm just calling what I see in old transfers.

Here are some examples of this pickup tube lag/decay issue, from one of the most egregious instances I've ever seen, the Warner Home Video release "Nelvanamation." These are individual fields, extracted using SeparateFields in Avisynth.

First, the old Saul Bass "worm" logo that WB was using at the time. Since it's red and white on black, it clearly illustrates what I'm talking about.

No, the text is not supposed to leave streaks like the credits to one of the old Christopher Reeve Superman films. Those are "ghosts" of the previous frames of film.

Notice that the closest "WARNER BROS" is not as opaque as the one right behind it. That's because the next frame is showing up "prematurely", at partial opacity. This is what I meant by two adjacent frames being picked up in the same field.

Now notice that only part of the next frame shows up, and at a different opacity than last time - you can see it sort of trail off about halfway up the "WARNER BROS".

Sounds like what SpacedRanger was talking about, though this transfer doesn't seem to have the exact issue he mentioned. I do remember seeing *some* old smeary transfer where when there was a cut to a new scene, you could see the top or bottom half of one scene show up "superimposed" over the other.

Now it looks like the two frames are picked up at almost the same opacity.

Again, the next frame seems to be most visible at the bottom of the screen.

Actually, I don't know what's going on - the "early bird" frame seems to be visible from top to bottom, but its opacity isn't regular. Look at the bottom left corner, where there's red in one frame and black in the other, and the red gets more translucent as you go up, but doesn't go away.

I don't even know if this can be called 3:2 pulldown at all. Each of these smeary images shows up in the bottom field of one frame, and the top field of the next.

I know this has nothing to do with PS78 itself. My point is this: Maybe the PS78 transfer has this kind of issue, and there are no "discrete" frames to speak of. If so, perhaps it'd just be best to blend the identical fields together to make it 30p?

I trust that Darth Mallwalker can figure out what to do after he sees the raw captures. (Actually, I'll look at that sample myself and see what I find when I break it up into fields.)

My interest is definitely not waning. I've been kind of sidetracked by other stuff, so I haven't been keeping up with the thread, but that absolutely does not mean I've lost interest.

Wonderful, looking forward to it after your vacation (and after mine - I'm going up to Canada tomorrow, specifically BC/AB).

Can the image even be properly IVTC'ed? The problem is that this was done on the older kind of telecine which used pickup tubes. The lag in the tubes caused moving objects to smear, especially light objects over a dark background.

I don't know if there is any clear 3:2 pattern like the later flying-spot systems which did pick up discrete frames. I can't really figure out how the pulldown system worked on the older process - from watching old transfers like these, it seems like even if you were to pull the fields apart, they'd still contain the picture info from adjacent frames smeared together.

I barely even know what I'm talking about here...maybe someone else knows more?

Just want to reminds everyone that the cropping diagram in those images is not accurate, it's a 16:9 HD video diagram stretched out.

I did a bunch of research about the apertures and ratios and stuff, you can see my work peppered throughout this thread.

As I discovered, the cropping thing has an added layer of complexity because the film used two different camera apertures. Have you looked into that at all, -1?

A while back, I did some comparisons of the GOUT and Blu-ray framing over frames from the LPP print. The images were small and lossy, so I eyeballed details between the three versions and came up with framing estimates, then drew them over the film frame using MS Paint.

The dark blue border is the Blu-ray, the light blue one is the GOUT. Since these are resized in the message, the borders may be hard to see. To get a look at the full-sized images, right-click and select "view image" or whatever the equivalent is in your browser.

These two also illustrate the two different camera apertures. Look at how the bottom frame has more black space on the right side, and notice how even though the exposed area is different, light-blue right boundary of the GOUT stays in about the same place on the physical frame.

The cropping seems consistent - though with things like sky, I wasn't able to determine the framing as well, which may be why my GOUT border is higher than my Blu-ray border in the second comparison. (Also, the DVD/Blu-ray version may have been cropped differently from shot to shot.)

In all, I think I did my best with -1's low-resolution images. I may do more comparisons later.

i551 said:

It's too bad the lpp print isn't available yet.  I wonder, how do the known theatrical bootlegs treat those shots?  I'm rather skeptical of this simply because we've never noticed it before, as far as I know, anyways. Perhaps it was just on ib prints?

From the bootlegs I've seen, the scene never looked like this in the non-IB Technicolor prints.

This is what it looks like on AntcuFaalb's PS78 bootleg (short for Porn Shop '78, because the VHS tape was bought at a porn shop in 1978). It is almost certainly sourced from a first-run domestic 35mm print, meaning it's Eastmancolor by DeLuxe:

And before you ask, yes, the whole bootleg has this greenish look. Back on page 139, Batesy1970 said that all the original prints he's seen had a similar greenish hue.

This is how the same shot looks in the Moth3r bootleg, also sourced from an American Eastmancolor print. It's his color-corrected version, as the source was a multi-generation dub where the chroma had degraded and the magenta information is oversaturated. That's why it still looks kind of pinkish:

(Anybody wanna post a shot from the raw, non-color-corrected version?)

So I think the IB is an anomaly. Remember, the IB prints are not the ultimate authority - most of the world saw the film as it looked on the standard Eastmancolor prints. And even those may have had variations - the Moth3r bootleg has a shot of Red Leader ("Red Leader, we're right above you!") that has an orange tint, but other bootlegs (Starkiller/MeBeJedi, Catnap, Puggo Grande, PS78) have that shot with normal color.

pittrek said he wants it to look like it did in American movie theaters in 1977 - that would mean how the Eastmancolor prints looked when they had all their color intact.

AntcuFaalb is working on a much higher-quality preservation of his bootleg tape, and even though it's analog NTSC colorspace (which Brits like to call "Never Twice the Same Colour"), it's still an important clue to how the colors originally looked on those prints.

So in closing, I agree with Mike Verta, "bring those two bastards in line" with the color timing of the rest of the scene.

Harmy said:

Yeah, no. I'm not redoing the credits, sorry. Especially since the assumption is that the credits I'm using were the more widely seen version in '77, so it's not even a contradiction to have them together with the '77 crawl.

Not sure which was more widely seen - I will note that more of the bootlegs have the early credits than the later.

It's your call, of course. I think it's better to recreate the revised version, since then you don't have to recreate the botched transition where John Barry's credit scrolls up *through* Jack Purvis' name as it's fading out.

Wow, I'm getting X0 Project flashbacks reading this. Can't wait to see the results.

RRS-1980 said:

I think you misunderstood me: I said official, which means Lucasfilm, not fans. His claims about such restoration being too expensive would be nullified this way - the project backers would prove there's a need and money in this.

As I've said before, Lucas' "too expensive" claim is almost certainly just an excuse. It's not about the money. Lucas can afford to restore the original versions, and he knows it. His refusal to do so is not out of miserliness, but out of stubbornness and ego.

Even if a theoretical Kickstarter project would raise a ton of money from the fans, Lucas would never sign off on such a thing because he just plain doesn't want to restore the original versions, even if it doesn't cost him a dime.

msycamore, it's because both the cropped, nth-generation pre-ANH bootleg and the pre-ANH Swedish-subtitled "PuggoKrig" print have the revised credits.

The first film uses the same transfer as the Special Widescreen Edition, 1993 Technidisc pressing. (In fact, I believe it first appeared on VHS, before the LD repressing.)

Empire and Jedi, AFAIK, match the SWE discs, including Jedi's letterboxing still being shifted up like the Japanese Special Collection.

As for PAL, the pre-THX PAL widescreen transfers are confusing. The French/German widescreen LDs seem to use a different source element than the NTSC JSC/SWE transfer. I know that unlike the JSC/SWE, the French and German releases switched to an awful, dark, faded, grainy dupe for the subtitle-less Greedo scene.

The 1991 UK widescreen tapes, however, seem to be converted from the NTSC widescreen transfers seen on the JSC/SWE discs. The weird yellow-green hues in that Empire frame are evidence of this. And as Russ said waaaaay back in 2005:

For some bizarre reason, the 1991 Trilogy Special Widescreen Edition films are approx 4% longer than the other releases I have.

Star Wars 118 mins and 122 mins
Empire 119 mins and 125 mins
Jedi 126 mins and 132 mins

It is almost as if there is some type of framerate compensation to make the films play for the same length of time as the same as the theatrical and NTSC versions.

It appears that he was right, and they just transferred the NTSC versions to PAL. I would bet that the first film even has the "shrinking ratio" problem.

In comparison, it would seem that that the later UK widescreen tapes used the "PAL GOUT" transfers seen on the French "Coffret Trilogie" LD set.

OK, I finally downloaded these and listened to them. Apparently, these are not the *original* mono mixes, they were restorations/reconstructions done by Paul Rutan.

They sound to be in some sort of rechanneled "duophonic" simulated stereo, and most of the songs still come from higher-fidelity sources than the dialogue scenes, but at least they utilized the mono mixes of the songs, instead of dropping in the stereo album mixes like the MPI versions.

I would still like to hear the true original mono mixes someday. Anybody got any recordings of old TV airings from the late 70s/early 80s?

Is the analog at least CX-encoded?

FWIW, LDDB lists these inner-circle mint marks for the remastered-sound release:

97-137A1-01   12D80846
97-137B3-04   14C80146

These "stealth" repressings are nuts. I'm worried how many we might have to get before we come up with a real digital-sound pressing. Almost makes it seem worth it to track down the expensive Japanese widescreen release...

Much thanks! I'll download these when I'm finished defragmenting my hard drive.

Remember, these movies were meant to be seen on a big cinema screen. You *would* be focusing on certain parts of the image. It doesn't justify pan and scan, but I get what you're saying.

Finally, my prayers have been answered!

Will these be full-size VOB versions that can be burned to DVD?

Isn't the TPM VHS copy-protected? You need to find a way to bypass that if you want to test the machine with that tape.