Yeah, I don't know why, but even if you choose "Worldwide," not all foreign listings will show up on your country's version of eBay. This item doesn't show up in the worldwide search results on the main (U.S.) site, or on eBay.co.uk - it *only* shows up on eBay.de, even though the seller ships worldwide.
Weird...
Sweet mother's cookies, that looks terrible. Harmy, when you revisit ESB:DE, you need to address issues like this. Talk w/ Adywan, where'd he get the 35mm scan?
sans_fi said:
Curiously enough, 1981/82 was also the date when he got lazy, and decided to wrap the story with one movie (Return of the Jedi) instead of doing the whole second trilogy with Luke searching for his sister etc, and fighting the Empire for 3 more movies.
That's not really what happened. Read The Secret History of Star Wars. Appendix D, The Legend of the Sequel Trilogy, examines all the rumors and myths, as well as Gary Kurtz's claims that are often simply taken as the gospel truth about the sequel trilogy.
The sequel trilogy was not condensed into ROTJ. There doesn't seem to have been a set plot for it (remember, Lucas was making this stuff up as he went along). "No, there is another" was originally supposed to be a vague setup to this sequel trilogy, and didn't have anything to do with Luke having a sister.
Because "the other" turned out to be Luke's sister, some people conflate the mention of Luke's sister in the first draft of ESB with "No, there is another." I think Kurtz may have been conflating various ideas that existed at various points in time of what was to happen in the sequel trilogy - the possibility of Luke's sister showing up in later episodes (c. first draft), the possibility of "the other" showing up in later episodes (c. Kasdan's drafts), but I don't think there was ever a single set plan that was "totally tossed out the window" by Lucas, as Kurtz claimed in the Film Threat interview.
As for not going to Tunisia, I'm sure it was budgetary reasons, since Tatooine exteriors comprised a much smaller part of the film, and it wasn't seen as necessary to pack up the whole crew to another far-flung location shoot for only a few scenes. (And I'm not sure that Lucas, Howard Kazanjian, or Harrison Ford would have relished another trip to Tunisia so soon after the torturous production of Raiders...)
Lest we forget, Empire was an amazing film, but it was a grueling production, the shoot ran overtime and went overbudget, and Lucas went through much stress and anxiety. Again, read The Secret History of Star Wars.
Every Stephen J. Cannell show except The A-Team has the licensed music eradicated, right down to omitting entire episodes.
It was never that bright AFAIK.
The Blockade Runner still have red details instead of maroon, and the explosion still looks a little reddish. Can you possibly try to tweak that shot further?
Also, the Blockade Runner's lasers in the flyover still don't really glow like they did in the pre-SE versions. You fixed the colorless Star Destroyer lasers back in 1.0, but the Blockade Runner lasers still look too thin, opaque and "flat" to me, especially when they're overlapping the Star Destroyer. Compare to the GOUT, the widescreen bootleg, and Puggo Grande. Even in the SE, the shot right after the flyover still has the Tantive lasers glowing correctly.
If you think these shots look fine as they are, you don't have to change them.
Most of the clips are the 97SE - I can tell from little things like the recomposited trench shots, and the little pan on the "I think we took a wrong turn" wide shot. However, it's not the same transfer from the video releases and digital broadcasts. As you pointed out, the Jabba clips from ROTJ have English subtitles on the image. It seems to look closer to how the SEs looked in theaters. Some of the ANH clips don't look like they have the pink shift - can anyone compare to the digital broadcasts?
I'm not sure what the film source of the non-SE clips is. There doesn't seem to be any fading, but I can see dirt, hairs, etc. It's hard to gauge the film quality, because the quality of the video transfer isn't very good. It's very low-res, soft, fuzzy, visible aliasing. They're not from any existing video transfer, but there's stuff like ringing and color bleeding and chroma noise on the crawl, that make the clips resemble an analog video transfer from the 80s. It seems like they cranked out a quick-'n'-dirty 480i telecine for the non-SE clips; it may have even been at 4:3 non-anamorphic and upconverted to 16:9. (The excerpts of dailies and workprints look to me to have similar issues with image quality.)
There are parts where they cut from SE footage to pre-SE and back, like Red Leader's missed shot, where they cut in the original version of the X-wing pulling up from the explosion. We go from this:
To this:
To this:
Look at the second image: It seems out of focus, there's jaggies on all of the sparks (compare to the third image), there's haloes on everything.
It looks to my eye like the vertical resolution is even less than the GOUT. On the SW logo pullback, the lines in the logo start "bobbing" and losing definition very quickly.
Perhaps it wasn't deemed necessary to do high-quality transfers just to be shown as clips in a documentary (as I already said, other archival film in the documentary has a similar low-res look).
I think it's DE 1.0?
Another interesting thing - what's with all the shadows when the Stormtroopers burn through the door? The shadows aren't that dark on any version I've seen, including the widescreen telecine. It looks neat, yes, but...is it accurate?
What exactly did you do, Harmy? The greenish tinge around the shadows makes me think of the general color schemes I see in the Senator screenshots and 70mm cell scans, which is a good thing, but I just don't remember the flames causing *that much* flickering and black shadows on the corridor walls...
none said:
This next group falls into the significant recoloring of 2004. The Bacta tank is well just too cyan for me to not consider this a deliberate recoloring/change.
https://picasaweb.google.com/102542760950977079734/EmpireSpecialEditionChangesHD#5673185657492064338
Again, just for fun, here's the 70mm film cell of the scene on the right - look at all that green and yellow at the top, it doesn't even show up on the theatrical bootleg:
That's OK Russ, besides, I'm in the U.S., I have no way to play PAL VHS anyways.
Just for fun, here's the same frame from a 70mm film cell - for whatever reason, the ESB cells seem to have the least fading/most accurate color balance of the three films:
I'm assuming that frame came from one of those limited-edition 70mm film cells that were sold under license from Lucasfilm. It's anybody's guess just which 70mm print it was from. They claim to be from a "master print taken from the original internegative," and judging from the lack of any substantial dirt or damage, I'm wondering if these were backup prints in the LFL archives that weren't actually screened.
Looking at images of the cells currently available on eBay, it's interesting to note that none of the ANH cells have the black mag stripes on the ends; the 2.5mm to the left and right of the perforations are clear. Not sure if it's because the striping had flaked off, or if the print was never striped in the first place (would they have gone through the trouble of making a new 70mm print in the 90s - unstriped since it wasn't meant to be screened - just to make these cells?)
ESB, however, does have the stripes; one of the cells currently on eBay even has a visible "EASTMAN" stamp. Judging by the quality of the colors on the ESB cells, even today, could they possibly be from an LPP print made for the '85 reissue? (Were there ever any LPP 70mm prints made of any of the trilogy?)
If they were from a print that late, it wouldn't be a surprise that it was the revised edit...
16mm at drive-ins? No way. They would have been 35mm, just like any other regular cinema.
I have no idea if those 35mm prints were of the early cut, or if all 35mm prints were of the more familiar version. Didn't 70mm prints have a longer lead time due to the extra work? (The first Star Wars would have been an exception; I've heard Ben Burtt talk about how the Dolby Stereo mix had to be rushed out so that it could be tested for the wide rollout of the system, so I'm guessing that the 35mm prints were made first in that case.)
I'm not sure how we'd be able to conclusively figure it out. On TrekBBS, I once asked a similar question, if any early 35mm prints of Star Trek II just said "Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan" like the 70mm prints did; I never got an answer on that.
As for that frame, I think it's 70mm. My guess would be that the later prints made in summer '80 were of the revised version. There's no reason why this second wave couldn't have been derived from the "fixed" version.
Oddly enough, the '93 timing reminds me of some of the teal/orange rejiggering that goes on today. This is before digital grading as we know it, how is it that the corridor has no orange in it, but the window still does?
So if your digitized versions don't look very good, anybody else want to attempt preservations of the 1995 UK fullscreen tapes then?
For any other films, I would never want to see P&S versions, but for the OUT I'd be interesting in seeing the '95 PAL fullscreens / any PAL fullscreens due to the high level of detail in the starfields...
Here's a preservation/reconstruction project I'd love to see: SCTV. Although Shout! Factory tried to clear as much as they could for their DVD releases, some stuff still couldn't be cleared. Also, not all of series 2-3 were released on DVD, and none of series 1 and 6 were released either.
In Canada, Comedy Network and Comedy Gold are running SCTV, I'm guessing that they're the late-90s half-hour syndication edits (which do have some music-related alterations, but I bet that there's some music that's intact on those versions that's not on the DVDs).
Using the Shout! Factory DVDs, the Comedy Network airings for the episodes not on DVD and to provide audio for any sketches that retain original music on Comedy but not on DVD, footage from older recordings to restore any sketches or music missing from the Comedy airings (and maybe even to matte out the Comedy Network watermark), and using the comprehensive episode guides online (specifically, at SCTVGuide.ca), I think it could be possible to create reconstructions of the uncut, unaltered versions.
Any SCTV fans around here who wanna take up this challenge?
Yeah, I can see that very slight color change as Luke turns his head. It's not just Luke, or the building behind him, the color of the whole image seems to shift very slightly at that point. I think that might be one of those color fluctuations that Treadwell noticed way back in '97 upon seeing the SE in the cinema. I quote:
"The color timing was inconsistent; skin tones would go from pale to pink IN THE SAME SHOT. Most noticeable when Ben and Luke first meet Han."
So this could be a flaw in the SE film element, and not just with the color grading of the '04 transfer. Not sure what caused these issues in the first place - maybe it had something to do with the fading and deterioration in the negative, and when it was restored, the color correction/recovery made these problems stick out. (And of course, the '04 timing made things even worse...)
Looking at those comparisons, it looks like the ITV broadcast used the '77 flyover. Look at the Y-shaped cluster of stars at frame center near the horizon of Tatooine, the density of the shadow on the foreground moon, the thinner halo on the horizon that actually looks like a glow and less like it's painted in (something which the '81 composite made much more obvious).
However, I remember reading years ago that the ITV broadcast had the ANH crawl (squeezed?). I also read that it doesn't have the Tantive burn marks.
Russ, can you confirm what crawl is on the ITV broadcast, and whether or not the Tantive marks are there? I've never heard of a version with the ANH crawl and the '77 flyover, and I've also never seen a source with the '77 flyover but no burn marks and no original alien subtitles...
Yeah, as I said before, I hate hate *HATE* P&S, but for these films, the P&S versions are still interesting to look at because of all the detail that is lost in the 4x3 letterbox versions, and the lack of any official high-res release. It's a crying shame that you have to give up almost half of the image to see the starfields at anything coming close to the original level of detail.
How many preservations are there of the fullscreen PAL versions? And not just of the original film, but of Empire and Jedi as well? The 1995 PAL VHS versions would be interesting, they're probably the highest-quality cropped transfers. (And here's a question - is the DVNR different on the P&S versions? Since this is before HD, I'm guessing they had to transfer it two times, because they couldn't derive the P&S version from a higher-resolution source.)
Troyig88 said:
Thats great! I love when you do the tiny little things. So you are going to pass on the original star feild when the blockade runner is fleeing from the star destroyer?
The starfield in the SE *is* the original, isn't it? Didn't they go back to the '77 elements for that? (Hence the blue lens flash on the Star Destroyer engines, which is an artifact that was more visible in the original '77 composite than in the '81 recomp, but was extremely overemphasized in the '04.)
SilverWook said:
Pan and Scan refused to die in the U.S. thanks to consumer confusion/ignorance/indifference, and the studios' lack of any real effort to educate people about those black bars. There were some widescreen VHS tapes in the 90's as well, but if you were really into seeing movies the best way possible, you bought an LD player.
It was probably sales of widscreen tv's taking off that finally nailed the coffin shut.
IMO, HDTV/Blu-ray was the final death blow for 4:3 P&S consumer media. Before HD, pan and scan yielded the maximum vertical resolution for a 2.35:1 film. Even on an anamorphic PAL DVD, a letterboxed 2.35:1 image only had 435 lines of resolution, less than the 480 lines of SD NTSC. It's a miracle that we've been able to extract any kind of passable anamorphic or HD image from the ~272 lines of actual picture resolution in the GOUT.
It wasn't until 1080i that the picture area of a 2.35:1 letterboxed image exceeded the 576 lines of SD PAL. With 1080 HD, a 2.35:1 image uses about 817 lines of resolution. Widescreen TVs beat P&S down, and HD and Blu-ray dealt the mortal blow.
Not only did a letterboxed 2.35:1 image on a 4:3 TV look annoying to many, but you did lose almost half of the vertical resolution. I loathe pan and scan, but a P&S LD in either format still has more lines of vertical resolution than the GOUT.
Of course, the telecine quality, color timing, etc. of the old fullscreen transfers of the OT is inferior to the widescreen transfers. Sure, they're too bright, too desaturated, the contrast is too low, faces look flat with diminished highlights in the flesh tones, and garbage mattes are *PAINFULLY* visible, but every time I watch a P&S version, I seethe inside, wishing that we had the OUT in their original aspect ratios with that much vertical detail. There is no widescreen transfer of the OUT that preserves as much of the detail of the starfields as the P&S versions.
P&S sucks, but I still think the old fullscreen releases need to be preserved. I don't think there are any preservations of the UK fullscreen LDs, are there? And I don't think any of the fullscreen preservations done a few years ago have been IVTC'ed, they're just raw interlaced rips.
That R2 shot, I think it should be somewhere between the before and after. The blue panels on R2 were not originally as blue as the '04/'11, but not as black as your "after" image.
Could you try it on the "You'll be malfunctioning within a day" shot? IMO, that's one of the most blatant examples of those dark blues (or "purple shadows" as I previously referred to them).
Also, do your curves/corrections/scripts reduce the blue haze effect when the Star Destroyer engines come into view? The original '77 composite did have that blue lens flare effect, but it was absolutely nowhere near as overpowering as in the '04/'11.
Anybody got Belbucus' 70mm recording? It was posted on a.b.sw way back in 2006, but I don't think any newsreaders have retention that far back, and it doesn't show up on Binsearch (which I think only returns results back to about 1100 days or thereabouts).
Also, does anybody else notice that in the L.Mayer recording, there seems to be a sound effect for that one explosion flash in the Star Destroyer flyover that didn't really have a prominent sound effect before the '93 mix (when they added that newer sound effect)? You can hear it at about 02:19, it comes out on the recording as a dulled "thump." When you synch the audio up with the flyover visual, that sound seems to match up with that flash. Not sure if it's some kind of glitch in the recording, or background noise, or if it's an actual sound effect in the 70mm mix. Anybody else hear it?
UPDATE: Listening to it again, I now think it's just the way the microphone picked up the percussion in the music, it occurs at one of the "DA DA DA DAAAA DAAA DAAA" stabs in the score. Thoughts?
I downloaded and listened to L.Mayer's recording, and noticed something interesting. During the Star Destroyer flyover, at 02:19, I can hear an audible "thump" which synchs up to that one explosion that didn't have an accompanying sound effect in the stereo and mono mixes, the one where they added that out-of-place ESB/ROTJ-era explosion sound in the '93 mix.
Could this sound be of the "missing" surround effects? Since the morgands1 recording doesn't have the surrounds, you can't hear it there. And since the '93 mix had that newer sound effect, we never heard this explosion effect. I always assumed it was added in to make up for the fact that the original mix didn't have a very audible sound effect there (up until now, all the pre-93 sources I've heard just have something that sounds like the echo of an explosion out in the distance), but now that I think about it, Burtt and co. did replace other sound effects in the '93 mix (like the blaster hit that scares Threepio into the escape pod), so we can't rule out that it was on the mix used as the base for '93, but replaced with the new effect.
(It wouldn't have been only in the baby boom channels, would it? I thought they just extracted the low frequencies from the other channels. And it sounds like it's in higher frequencies than just LFE...)
Of course, it could just be background noise or some glitch in the recording. Anybody wanna weigh in on this?
UPDATE: Listening to it again, I now think it's just the way the microphone picked up the percussion in the music, it occurs at one of the "DA DA DA DAAAA DAAA DAAA" stabs in the score. Thoughts?
