Huzzah! Hopefully, someday we will be able to see it, but just knowing it's been found is certainly good enough for now.
msycamore: I agree. Though I reiterate, I would at least like to see the red sun fixed. It literally sticks out like a sore thumb.
Harmy, I get what you're getting at, I don't think it's supposed to be THAT bright, but in the various bootlegs and other sources I've seen, the sky looks a little brighter and has a little more color in it, and the foreground seems contrast...ier?. In yours, the contrast still looks dull (though some non-SE/non-GOUT images, like the Topps Widevision card, look like that too).
Here's the Puggo Grande, which is what Corellian's mockup reminded me of. Obviously, the sky is too blown-out:
And I keep coming back to Moth3r's version of the '77 widescreen boot (even though the color gradiation of the horizon doesn't really register in this transfer):
Also look at the clip at the beginning of From Star Wars to Jedi - on the Japanese LD transfer, it doesn't look overly bright or blown-out, and even though the sky looks a little too bluish in the Luke closeup, the first shot seems "right"...
If anything, please fix that blood-red sun. It's supposed to be orange, and it is not supposed to look as saturated, sharp-edged or opaque as it does in the '04/'11 transfer. Right now, it seems to pop out from the background - it almost looks like it's pasted over the sky, whereas it used to actually look like it was in the sky.
Lucasfilm has the money. An OUT restoration would be profitable. They just *don't want to do it.*
Agree about the possibilities of this, though.
Lucas claims the cyan record is out of sync or out of alignment or something, so it's impossible to use the seps. Impossible my foot - it's just another one of George's lame excuses.
Any time he says it's "impossible" to restore the original versions, it means "I don't want to because I have an irrational hatred of them."
These are interesting - they are not from a video transfer, they're from film, but they have color oddities all their own - compounded by the color inaccuracies introduced by the card printing process. Not sure if this is accurate to the 1977 color timing anyway...
This is more evidence to suggest that Lucasfilm may have good-condition materials for the original version of the film. Maybe not master materials, but fine-grain/early-generation materials. Would a positive that looked this good in 1994 be faded and unusable now? Is this the same as the source print for the non-SE clips in Empire of Dreams?
Intriguing. Reminds me of the Technidisc LD with less of a yellow push.
Interesting stuff. It's a bit unfair to talk about this animation/roto work as "black marker." These were meant to be invisible fixes, and most of them worked - I never noticed any of these until you pointed them out. (In fact, I never noticed the Emperor's slugs before they were pointed out to me, either.)
It's certainly better than some other optical-era roto/matte fixes, like when they had to block out Coca-Cola signs in Grease because the producer had inked a tie-in deal with Pepsi and the set dresser didn't know about it.
A while ago, I opened the DarkSega rip of ESB into AviDemux and started playing with the hue, saturation and color sliders, and I'm beginning to wonder if dialing down the yellow might provide more evidence for how blue Hoth originally looked.
The pre-GOUT transfers of ESB seemed to have a yellow push, I remember Hoth and Dagobah looking very neutral. (I vividly recall watching my old CBS/Fox tapes and wondering why Yoda didn't look green in Empire like he did in Jedi...)
I agree about the yellowish skin tones - bttfbrasilfan's "after" image looks better. (And I already noticed Leia's brown lips in the lightsaber fight test clips...it just doesn't look right to me.)
A permanent Star Wars museum in Marin County would be great; I would visit it.
Heck, a Lucasfilm/ILM museum in general...
msycamore said:
TServo2049, sorry I missed your post. I downloaded that audio file some time ago but haven't gotten around to listen to it yet. When I do, I will definitely pay attention during that part of the opening you described.
That's OK, I think I was hearing things. I now think that like the other pre-'93 mixes, the only explosion sound is that sort of hard-to-hear. The "thud" I heard seems to actually be mic distortion from the timpani in the music.
There were some weird color timing changes in the recomposited Death Star battle. Never noticed the green fire trail before, but I did notice the very saturated orange, pink and purple explosions with no whites in the highlights (cousins of the '04 Tantive blaster impacts?). Look at Red Leader's crash, for example. It's worse in the '04, but you can see it to a lesser extent in the 97SE (even the Empire of Dreams clips which seem to be timed closer to the '97 theatrical prints).
It's a madhouse...
The clips in Empire of Dreams came from a source that looks more like the 97SE theatrical prints than the official video transfers, and the color timing didn't look like this. The version in the first SE trailer was still the original - it had the frame with the TIEs superimposed over the Falcon.
Here's your image (with aspect ratio adjusted):
Here's how it looks in the 97SE trailer:
And the 97SE:
Notice the matte line artifacts on the first two images, especially around the Falcon, and particularly around its radar dish. The 97SE frame doesn't have them, and also has additional motion blurring. And in the SE image, some of the elements are in different positions or aren't synched up the same way - notice the angle of the TIE right below the Falcon at frame right.
Your images look much more like the original than the SE.
I don't remember there being distinct matte lines like these in the SE recomposite of this shot...
How about Metalstorm: The Destruction of Jared-Syn? The DVD is not only not in 3D, but it's also pan-and-scan. Universal cheaped out and recycled a P&S video master that was done for pay cable some time in the 90s, rather than do a new transfer in widescreen. (To add insult to injury, it's one of those P&S transfers that has the credits in letterbox format...)
There is a field-sequential bootleg DVD originating from the VHD, but the picture is pretty fuzzy; I think it was sourced from a VHS *at least* a generation removed from the original VHD...a direct rip of the VHD would be great.
"You must do what you feel is right, of course..."
(I love saying that.)
Van Ling didn't do EoD, Kevin Burns did. Someone would have to ask Burns where their footage came from.
Here are some more screenshots of the OOT footage in EoD. The actual 35mm elements must look better than these transfers (or at least they did when these were transferred).
http://imageshack.us/g/502/vlcsnap2011111308h15m21.png/
And here's a comparison of the same shot from two different places in the documentary - the original and the SE:
It's weird how the pre-SE clips look like an old video source, but they can't possibly be, can they? Look at how much more picture there is in the top image. They practically transferred the entire frame - sometimes you can even see the edges. And the fact that there's other footage in EoD (dailies, raw effects passes, etc.) that also has this jaggy, low-res look makes me think that these were transferred at the same time. Also, I don't think that LFL would have an old video transfer lying around with the '77 crawl on it. If they are old video transfers, I'd love to know the circumstances, since these clips do not come from any transfers that were commercially released.
Could the clips from the first film be from George's Technicolor print? The fuzzy, dense look of the '77 footage makes me think of late-80s/early-90s video transfers that were made from IB Technicolor prints. (Ones that immediately come to mind are the Image laserdiscs of the 1937 version of A Star is Born and the Fleischer animated Gulliver's Travels, or the Criterion LDs of Black Narcissus and The Red Shoes.) They had the same high-contrast look, with all the darker areas showing up as murky, and the bright areas being kind of blown out. As has been pointed out time and again on other forums, IB Tech prints do not transfer well to video because of their high contrast and density.
Also, is it just me, or does the Death Star explosion look better than any of the other pre-SE clips? I don't see any jaggies there - and that's the most accurate-looking color I've seen on any official video transfer of the scene. Could that clip be from an entirely different video source than the other clips? Lest we forget, pre-SE footage showed up in the original SE trailer (the original ROTJ DS explosion, as well as the original version of Wedge blowing up the TIE fighter - which only appeared in the first "President's Day weekend" version).
I still insist that LFL is not telling us the whole truth with regards to the condition of the OOT elements. It provides them with a convenient excuse for why they can't release them again.
That's not laser rot, it's something on the film. You can tell because it's horizontally stretched due to the anamorphic lens.
Looks like someone accidentally spilled India ink on it. :)
This guy: http://originaltrilogy.com/forum/topic.cfm/Laserdisc-I-have-an-X9-for-use/topic/13458/
When you do your revised version, will you do any color correction to individual shots? I recently noticed that in the lightsaber training scenes, when the saber appears as cyan or greenish, the whole image takes on a similar yellow-green cast. The more green there is in the saber, the more green there is in everything else in frame.
The shot where it looks the most green is "You don't believe in the Force, do you?" If you compare it to the other shots with the same camera setup, you will see that Luke's skin, his outfit, the walls, etc. also skew more greenish in that one shot than in any other. Would you consider adjusting the colors in each shot, so that the colors (including the light blue saber) are basically consistent from shot to shot like they were in the theatrical prints? (This consistency is also in evidence in The Making of Star Wars - not the optical compositing progression montage, I'm talking about the actual excerpt from the finished film).
(And I was just thinking - that guy in the Netherlands with the X9, do you think he could do a better-looking rip of this disc?)
russs15 said:
4 Another odd thing I have found is that the 1995 ANH Fullscreen release Fox Logo has changed from the slanting 0 to the upright 0 like this...
The weird thing is that ALL the Widescreen PAL ANH releases also have the original slanting 0, even the 1995 THX Last time only and 1995 Executor box set. It just goes to show the inconsistency in the release of Star Wars films on video in the UK.
This also happened in North America - IIRC, before 1995 the only fullscreen version to retain the original logo was the time-compressed LD/CED version. Strange that it was the *1995* UK release that replaced the logo - was this release THX or non-THX?
I think Empire became more popular in the Star Wars resurgence of the 90s, as the all-grown-up original fans critically re-evaluated the trilogy. I think back to Dante's comparison of Empire and Jedi in Clerks, which came smack in the middle of this era: "Empire had the better ending. I mean, Luke gets his hand cut off, finds out Vader's his father, Han gets frozen and taken away by Boba Fett. That's what life is, a series of down endings. All Jedi had was a bunch of Muppets."
Different company. CBS handles the Trek TV shows, Paramount handles the movies.
I hate that mode that generates extra frames to make something look like 60fps. That literally gives me motion sickness and migraines.
I have nothing against The Hobbit being in 48fps. It's like Doug Trumbull's Showscan format. And I believe that the original Star Tours ride film was shot at 30fps instead of 24, and it doesn't look like a soap opera.
It's not the same as this awful 120Hz/fake 60fps thing that makes 24fps film move like a student film shot on a camcorder.
