TServo2049

At least you have the Derann of the first movie, that's the most "important" one.

Zombie's site says Derann released a similar scope Super-8 of Jedi. Some outfit called Classic Home Cinema released Empire, also in scope.

I understand completely why he's not releasing it, and I support him all the way. Kevin Brownlow continued to restore Abel Gance's Napoleon for decades, even while Francis Ford Coppola and the other rights holders prevented him from making it available to the public. Now, all parties have worked things out and it's finally going to be screened in Oakland, CA this coming spring. I think Mike has the same general mindset - he says it's not being made to sit on a hard drive, it's going to be "available to the future" when circumstances change. He calls it an investment, and I totally agree.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XaDlP-kmzWk

This is a detail from the Mos Eisley shot he just posted. I think it's clear now that he's working from a high-quality (possibly IB Technicolor) print scanned in 4K.

I tell you, this detail-recovery thing looks amazing, and I get how it basically works. In a stationary shot like this every frame of a print has a different part of the negative detail in it, and he's taking all that detail and combining it back together.

Pardon me if I sound like a sycophant, I'm not, I'm just amazed by what he's doing and I support it.

Sure looks like it to me. He just posted great-looking images of Greedo w/ original subtitles and Mos Eisley (and it is a GOUT-only shot, ddonna, this is NOT a hoax). The color balance reminds me of what I've seen of the Senator print.

Hell of a lot of detail, sharp as s***, it has to be a film print. He also said that he's not using telecine, as the quality is not sufficient for what he's doing. He previously referred to his image of the SW logo as being 4K. Take from that what you will.

georgec said:

Exactly. The stop-motion effects in Carpenter's The Thing are some of my favorites. They're so real and organic. Lucas' CGI stands out like a sore thumb and can't hold a candle to those type of more natural effects.

The FX were actually mostly mechanical/makeup FX, only the beast at the end was stop-motion (and most of that was deleted from the final cut).

Anyway, the point I was trying to get at was that it's not that pre-CGI effects techniques "bring out the best in storytelling." There have always been movies that overly relied on effects instead of story. Pointing to pre-CGI movies that relied on effects at the expense of story does not change the fact that since the advent of CGI, more big-budget A-list Hollywood productions have been relying on effects as a crutch at the expense of concentrating on a good story (with the Star Wars prequels being no exceptions).

Yes, there were films before CGI which relied too much on effects and had weak/poorly executed stories. Remember, my previous Lucas quote is from 1983, only four years after The Black Hole, which was just such a big-budget A-list effects epic with a subpar story.

It just seems more prevalent now than it did then; films in the post-Star Wars, pre-Jurassic Park on the whole tended more to use effects as a "tool, a means of telling a story" rather than an "ends to themselves." Not always to be sure, but as CGI became easier and more cost-effective, and as more summer blockbusters showed that the cheap thrills of effects could distract audiences from a weak story, Hollywood got lazier about storytelling. And that's it, it's not malevolence, it's laziness. Why go through the extra effort of trying to come up with a quality story when you can wow moviegoers with digital eye candy? There's less incentive to focus on storytelling rather than take "the quick and easy path" of churning out a half-assed, unoriginal story and filling the void with more FX. CGI, or more specifically the over-reliance on CGI, enables poorer writing to become more acceptable - it is not the sole reason, as there are plenty of badly written modern movies without effects, but it sure doesn't help.

There are good and bad effects of all kinds, and there's also the ethos of "special effects are just a tool, a means of telling a story." (Can't quite remember who said that :) )

I'm still amazed at how much I "buy" the character of Gollum; I can't "buy" the Na'vi in the same way. And for all the examples Boost mentioned, you have King Kong, or the original 1954 Godzilla, the original Alien, Carpenter's The Thing, Cronenberg's The Fly...all *good* stories.

TKF821 said:

P.S. : I own super-8 copies of the three original Star Wars movies (not 16mm). They are in English, widescreen, and stereo : no special editions, no additional FX or scenes. Just the original as we watched them back in the 70s and 80s.

Wow, you mean you have the Derann scope Super-8's? :-O That's awesome.

As long as it's not the high-pitched ricochet from '93...I think Treadwell spelled it "KABMPH!" :)

BTW, I finally got to listen to this mix on my sound system, and it sounds great.

You can join his forum for free, I did. Don't see the issue here...

Mallwalker did post an AviSynth script for the DarkSega rips of ESB and ROTJ when he reposted them on a.b.sw. Snipt's server isn't working for me right now, so I can't access it, and I don't really have any AviSynth experience anyways.

I'm not sure whether the "silently rejected" means that nobody has used his script yet, or if it's referring specifically to the X9s.

mverta said:

Something you may not have noticed before (actually, this crowd probably has, come to think of it):  Blue drop shadow on the closing credits.

Wow, I always thought that was just part of the color bleed in the pre-SE video transfers. The more you know...

msycamore said:

The documentary used footage from the '97 SE telecine on that flyover that's why the colors on the lasers etc, are fine.

I stand corrected. Just didn't remember the Star Destroyer lasers being that thin in the '97 SE...

The GOUT crawl has a different color balance than the EoD clip; the color on the EoD clip seems more "correct," but I'm assuming that the GOUT version was timed to match the 1993 transfer. Also, the GOUT seems to be sharper (the SW logo doesn't lose as much detail when it gets really small), and have more info on the edges (this was discussed way back in 2006 during the whole flap over the clip in the GOUT trailer, which turned out to be a digitally manipulated version of the crawl, where the SW logo was a lot closer when the text started scrolling up).

I can't compare the flyover, because in EoD they just used the 2004 version and painted over (most of) the desaturated/white lasers. So we get the Star Destroyer shooting thin green lines instead of thin white lines. No idea why they didn't use the original version...

Not sure if it's the same source as EoD but a different transfer. If the source of the GOUT crawl were properly transferred and mastered, it would probably look a lot better than it does now.

The EoD, the GOUT crawl, and the (non-SE) images in Rinzler's book seem to point to the existence of a high-quality source, possibly a separate one from George's personal Technicolor print. Of course, as long as Lucas and co. refuse to rationally and honestly discuss anything relating to the original versions, we can only guess...

mverta said:

Luke's saber is consistently blue in the original Star Wars.

Even in the Falcon scenes, where many transfers show it as white or a sort of slightly greenish aqua in some shots? That was my main question - if the Legacy source doesn't have those color oddities.

That comparison is great, Legacy seems to match that Technicolor print screened last year. (And as far as the 1997 SE theatrical colors go, I can't remember how they looked. At all. The colors look fairly accurate in the trailer, though.)

In Legacy, is Luke's saber consistently blue in the Falcon training scenes? The only version I've seen where it looks blue in every shot is the Moth3r telecine - as I said before, even with the generational loss, I can tell that it is always blue, never white or aqua or greenish. It may also be consistently blue in Catnap, but I can't always tell due to the peculiar color issues of that transfer. It looks blue in the fullscreen bootleg, but that one is so far gone that it's useless for any kind of color reference.

I'm listening to the DJ V3 through headphones with the volume cranked up, and msycamore is right. In both the 1985 and 1993 mixes, after R2's beeping, you can hear "and" mixed in very low, almost at whisper volume.

I'm not sure whether it was intentional, or whether it was an error in the original mix. Perhaps the original mixers intended for the "and" to be there but accidentally mixed it in too low, or alternatively, they might have intended for it not to be there but they didn't completely dial it out.

It's one of those anomalies like "Luke, come on!" in the 2004/2011 mixes of ANH. In that case, Leia did always say "Luke," you can even make out Carrie's mouth movement right before it cuts away, but up until '04 it was always mixed in very, very low and drowned out by the laser fire and explosions.

Just as an aside, on the subject of changes made to the color timing over the years: It's amazing that if you take the Moth3r widescreen telecine, turn up the saturation and fiddle with hue and color levels to try to counteract the odd color shift issues, that even with its lossy multi-gen picture quality, you can still get a sense of the original color structure of the film.

For example, I can see the blues and greens in the Tantive and Death Star interiors. And Luke's saber in the Falcon training sequence is blue throughout - no greenish or aqua cast in the wide shots, no parts where it looks white, it's actually BLUE. (Is it consistently blue in your source, Mike?)

*sigh* I wish someone could track down the owner of the original U-Matic master copies of that telecine. Outside of an actual print, it's probably the closest visual record of what the film actually looked like in '77.

Not really related to Mike's project, just a tangential musing...

mverta said:

I was doing some channel analysis tonight and I remembered something you guys might not have seen before:  Carrie's camisole visible under her robe.

FWIW, I've been able to make that out for a long time.

But wow, there's a lot of purples and greens in the highlights. I never realized how many hints of color there were in the Tantive scenes, everyone always assumes that it was all monochrome whites and blacks.

Gil Taylor's cinematography/lighting* in the Tantive and Death Star scenes was monochromatic, sure, but the more I look at it, the more I see that it's only with successive inaccurately timed releases that they've become truly monochrome (i.e., black/white/gray).

*Not sure how much of a role gaffer Ron Tabera had in designing the lighting. Come to think of it, SW is his only credit anywhere. What else did this guy do?

I have the 2001 DVD, and I always, always watch it with the mono track. I can't stand the new, modern replacement sound effects, especially the gunshots. Why is it that the replacement gunshots in these 5.1 remixes always sound like the guns have silencers?

Not only is the remix full of new, out-of-place effects, but there are parts where the music is mixed all wrong. Why is the droning arpeggio in the future war prologue mixed so far back as to be almost inaudible? What happened to those awesome sounds of scraping metal in the main title?

This is right up there with Superman as one of the most infuriating 5.1 remixes I've ever heard. Glad to hear that someone's preserving the uncompressed PCM mono from laser.

Slight tangent - Wow, I had no idea that the X9 captures were finished. I would LOVE to see them properly completed and released by someone. The old 4:3 interlaced DarkSega caps are still the only publicly available versions of the JSCs of ESB and ROTJ...

The pod window may well have been recomped, but the "cloudy glass dome" look of the "before" pic is actually another artifact of our old friend DVNR. The stars were a lot brighter and more visible prior to the DC/GOUT transfer. Look at the JSC and SWE, for example.

Treadwell said:

I read somewhere Muren saying that the lasers and lightsabers (some? all?) were subcontracted and they did not get isolated elements back.

As for the two strips of film thing, not necessarily. One exposure with it overexposed so you get the white core, then another exposure on the same frame with the red line lit normally but the camera out of focus.

Thanks, dunno why I didn't think about the possibility of the animation being shot with multiple passes on the same piece of film. That's more likely the way it was done.

Still, the elements could have been adjusted during the recomposites, in a way that made the cores much more visible than they ended up being in the original optical composites (due to grain buildup, color shifts, what-have-you).

Mavimao said:

 

1) Uh no, they don't need to. Hell, they converted Ep2 to freakin' IMAX! They can use the 1080p masters with decent results.

2) Look at point 1. Point moot.

3) Practically all the effects were recomposited for the 97 re release.

4) Seeing the sales for the Blu Ray...fat chance. People will still go and watch these movies. Although, if anything, they might push George Lucas to release the original versions since there's really nothing left to scrape from the bottom of the barrel.

5) One can hope. After all, I don't think that Laserdisc masters are going to pass on bluray.

 

Either of our scenarios could happen - I guess I should have made it more clear what I meant when I said "this is Lucasfilm we're talking about." It was intended as a "but don't hold your breath" caveat.

I am fully aware that they could just churn out quick and dirty 3D conversions from the 1080P Blu-ray masters. I would not be a bit surprised if they did. But that would be a textbook example of "epic fail," since they already look awful as they are - can you imagine what they'd look like in fake 3D on a giant screen?

(And actually, I don't think that much of the final battle in Jedi was recomposited in '97 or in '04.)

It's the original. Notice the lens distortion on the SW logo pullback, which makes the logo look slightly curved. (Mike Verta pointed this out in his recent image of the logo for his Legacy project.)

Also, there *is* a concave bend, just not as noticeable at first glance. Pause it right when the D in "DEATH STAR" is just about to be fully visible in frame, and look at how much more of the text in the center is still out of frame than on the edges. Also, I think the crawl is a little tilted to one side, too...

There is a color issue as well - the color of the logo/crawl tends more towards the green part of the spectrum on the right side of the frame (turn up the saturation and you'll see what I mean - when there's text in the bottom left section of the frame, it looks golden yellow, but it becomes more of a lemon-lime color further up and to the right). Someone in some older thread brought up how you can see a green tinge on the shadowed side of the Star Destroyer - I think this is part of the same color-shift issue. The fact that the GOUT transfer of the crawl/flyover has a kind of a green push doesn't help. (If you crank up the saturation on the Moth3r telecine, you can see the same "gradient" effect; since it doesn't have the same green push as the crawl/flyover segment of the GOUT, the crawl text looks golden yellow in most of the frame, while in the bottom left corner it comes out looking more red-orange.)

If it were a re-creation, these flaws wouldn't be there.

I will never see a converted 3D re-release of a 2D film, on principle.

The only remotely good things that might come out of this are:

1.) LFL will probably have to do new scans of the OT in at least 4K in order to convert them to 3D;

2.) The original footage that was altered with CGI may need to be rescanned and recomposited from scratch for 3D (though alternately, they might just convert them using the digital files from '97/'04?);

3.) In order to convert any of the original visual effects to 3D, all of the original VistaVision effects elements will most likely have to be re-scanned, restored and recomposited;

4.) The 3D re-release may cause a serious fan backlash, and there is a (very slim) chance that Lucas and co. might end up being shamed and embarrassed into finally releasing the OUT in HD;

5.) If #4 happens, #1-#3 may ensure that there are high-resolution raw digital scans of the OT that can be used as the starting point for a restored/remastered HD OUT.

Preservation-wise, some good MIGHT come out of this whole 3D thing. (Emphasis on "might"; this is still Lucasfilm we're talking about, after all...)