adywan

But there is already a 4 hour cut of ROTS which greatly improves on the theatrical version

https://youtu.be/a7x8h2YMmQQ

Leias hologram in Ben’s hut is more transparent in the 2020 blu-ray, compared to the 2011, in the final shot:

https://screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/2683

The 1997 version is the same transparency as the 2011 version

And in the first shot as the hologram appears, there is a strange animated painted blue blob that appears for a few frames over the hologram on obi-wan’s hand

https://screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/2684

That doesn’t appear in the 1997 version

NeverarGreat said:

doc_faustus said:

HD Numerique comparisons
https://www.hdnumerique.com/dossiers/822-test-4k-ultra-hd-blu-ray-star-wars-iv.html
https://www.hdnumerique.com/dossiers/823-test-4k-ultra-hd-blu-ray-star-wars-v.html
https://www.hdnumerique.com/dossiers/824-test-4k-ultra-hd-blu-ray-star-wars-vi.html

From these comparisons, it appears that the 2020 version of ESB has been cropped quite a bit from the 2011 version. Is this accurate?

Yes, i can confirm that the 2020 version of ESB is not only more cropped than the 2011 version, but also stretched horizontally, causing very heavy cropping to the sides of the frame. These screenshots are taken directly from the blu-rays:

https://screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/2468
https://screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/2469
https://screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/2470

ZkinandBonez said:

So I finally figured out how to get the 4K77 version of ANH (I’ve been using the GOUT version for ages), and I’ve never before noticed that this little spot between the cantina entrance and the Dewback has been added in post.

The strangest thing is that in the shot were they enter the cantina there’s no effect added (of course that wouldn’t have been possible in the 70’s anyway as the camera moves), and even thought he angle is a bit different it features be the same few steps and domed building in the background (though the antennae-thing is not present in the first shot). So why was this section added in later at all?

It’s explained in the Rinzler “making of” book

“They never got shot a good establishing point of view of the cantina” Ellenshaw explains “The only time they did, Alec Guinness and Mark Hamill were coming down the side, but of course it’s impossible to have their point of view with them in the shot (…) So an assistant editor came rushing over one day, with a piece of negative in his hand and said 'Here, George wants to know if you can paint out those people.”

They used footage from the scene where Obi-Wan and Luke are leaving the cantina (“you’ll have to sell your ship”). They way it was originally filmed, they left the cantina from the rear entrance and emerge walking down the steps next to the Dewback. In the final film they cut out the beginning of the scene to make it look like they left the cantina from the main entrance. Here’s a shot from the original where they are at the bottom of the steps.

ZkinandBonez said:

SilverWook said:

Are you sure it’s not simply that the sun has moved in the time between when the two shots were filmed?

And I’ve never noticed the small Bantha(?) to the left of the Dewback before!

It’s hard to see unless you’re looking at it on a bigger screen or zoom in, but the steps and the building are clearly a painted element added in post.

And yes, that furry thing with skinny legs has weirded me out for a while now. I don’t even know if it has an EU name. I don’t think most people notice it as it kinda blends in with the scenery.

It’s a Jerba.

I always remember, as a kid, seeing that promo shot of Carrie sitting on it and always thought it was Parsley the Lion from the kids program “The Herbs” 😉

benduwan said:

at D+ is empire of dreams available.
is this in real hd or upscaled?

Parts are upscale , parts in HD. This is the new version that was done a while back for HDTV. They asked Lucasfilm if they could have the footage they used in HD and they refused, so those parts had to be upscaled. Most of the “talking head” footage is HD though.

STAR WARS 1977 miniature effects

Lorne Peterson and David Jones talk about the miniature effects work done by Industrial Light and Magic for Star Wars. Extended segment from the Sense of Scale documentary. Photos: Chris Casady, ILM, Lucasfilm.

https://youtu.be/7skyMcMtgCE

Checking the audio on the OT Blu-Rays, the 7.1 mix is nothing more than the crappy 2011 6.1 mix with the original rear centre channel duplicated to make it 7.1. And that channel may as well not have been there anyway because it contains about 6 effects throughout the films and complete silence in between.

Ripped ROTJ to my drive ready for me to start work on it. The frozen grain is horrendous. Also the DNR has been applied way to heavy in some shots resulting in a completely unnaturally smooth image. But in some shots, there are large blobs of noise/ grain in the dark areas. For example, just check Vader’s body as he walks down the ramp at the beginning of ROTJ

THX-Malkoff said:

adywan said:

Just got the 4k box set delivered. My god is this release seriously f**ked up. Why the hell is the HDR so damn dark, especially when you compare it to the Blu-Ray?

Can we discuss that statement? Recently I checked the release on LG UHD 49” led tv, and original trilogy (especially ESB and ROTJ) looked as dark as deep black hole, even in vivid HDR mode (other presets were even worst and darker). at the same time and same TV adywan’s esb revisited looked great and old blu-rays looked fine in terms of brightness. My PC monitor is HD, I checked UHD transfers on Media Player Classic and it looked ok, not dark. Is there something wrong with HDR on my TV?

Bluto said:

Out of interest, how do the new Blu-rays included in the box-set fare on your TV?

My TV is an LG too. But other UHD HDR films i have don’t seem to suffer with being overly dark and dull like the Star Was films. Even on Disney+ the HDR on films other than SW seem fine. Netflix HDR is fine too

The Blu-Rays look great though. Colourful and not dark.

Just got the 4k box set delivered. My god is this release seriously f**ked up. Why the hell is the HDR so damn dark, especially when you compare it to the Blu-Ray? But that’s not the thing thats really pissing me off with this release. No, it’s the special features that they class as “legacy features”. Who the hell was given the task of compiling these? An idiot? For a start features like TPM’s " The Beginning" , instead of using the 16:9 anamorphic master, they present this as 4:3 letterbox. So a small bloody picture surrounded by huge black bars all around the TV screen . And its a jaggedy mess . The version on the original DVD is better quality. (view the pictures full size because you can’t really see the difference in the shrunk preview here).

(Pictures are taken on my phone direct from the TV)

The TPM deleted scenes seem to be 16:9 anamorphic ( only checked 2 so far)

I then checked the ROTJ bonus features. First one i checked was the "revenge " teaser. Correct ratio but still DVD quality. Then onto the Revenge release trailer. WTF? Morons at work once again. Some idiot forgot to encode this with the 16:9 flag, so now its presented in 4:3 with all its squashed glory

And that’s just the features i have checked so far

I was really hoping that these bonus features ported over from the old DVDs would be slightly better quality due to compression. I never expected them to be worse. Waste of bloody money. I only purchased the UHD box set for the features and EP 9, as i will never watch the prequels. I wish i’d gone with my original plan and cancelled the box set when i ordered months ago and waited for the individual episodes to be released on UHD over here.

EDIT: Just checked “Anatomy of a Dewback” & ROTS’s “Within a Minute” features and both are 4:3 , jaggedy mess letterbox, the same as “The Beginning” . But ROTS’s “The journey” is 16:9 anamorphic but still suffers with the interlacing jaggedy mess issues

EDIT #2: Ripped the TPM bonus disc to the hard drive to see if it was an issue with my Sony UHD Bluray player but, no, the problems lie within the way they have been encoded. Even deinterlacing/ pulldown removal, the jaggies are still present. One interesting thing i didn’t spot before though is that it has the complete Theatrical version of the Pod Race in 1080p. I don’t remember this being available before

I noticed that the on the uhd discs for ANH & ROTJ they have hardcoded subs for the alien language parts, while the foreign language versions have these sections without hardcoded subs , via seemless branching. Going to be a pain in the ass for editors wanting to use them as a source. I don’t know if the blu-rays are the same though.

Well, the world really has gone to sh*t hasn’t it…

This will be my last update for a while. I’ll explain the reasons why further on.
So ANH:R has been coming along nicely. Apart from about 12 FX shots, I’ve now completed up to the escape from the Death Star. That’s 1hr 30mins of the film completed. But , as usual, something had to put a spanner in the works…

A few weeks ago, my wife lost her job. It came completely out of the blue. As the sole bread winner of the family this was going to hit us hard. But we were optimistic of her finding a new job in no time. Plenty of interviews lined up. And then the coronavirus pandemic hit our country. Every single interview cancelled within a week. Recruitment halted and places started ton close down. And then the lockdown happens. within a few weeks our life had turned upside down. But we are not the only ones as almost everyone is suffering through this crisis and there are people a lot worse off than we are.

Trying to get financial help off the government is proving to be very difficult. They have said it is unlikely we would qualify for Universal Credit, but we are still awaiting on the decision. So we are having to make a lot of financial changes to our lives until this pandemic blows over and things can hopefully return to normal and places start recruiting again. So, at the moment, we are surviving on her final wage packet. Things like TV services, internet, phones etc have all got to go until normality returns. But a huge reduction has to be our electric consumption. Just got our latest bill and that was over £160 solely for electric. So i have no other choice but to halt work on Revisited because i HAVE to stop using this computer completely to drastically reduce our consumption. When it on at least 14 hours a day it really does eat up the electric.

So it’s highly likely there won’t be any updates from me for a while.
I was going to schedule some screenshots to be posted over the next few weeks but i thought, what the hell. Forget screenshots, why not post a video showing these shots in action instead. those that can remember the very first video i ever posted when i began working on Revisited will get the homage to that with the disco soundtrack. Hopefully they won’t block this video.
Oh, and for those that noticed the 8 minute preview had been removed from Vimeo, well it seems that they are clamping down on there too now. This doesn’t mean that the project is dead. Just that a request to remove it was placed.

I hope everyone can understand why i have to stop work on Revisited for now.

Hope you enjoy the video

Stay safe everyone. And see you all on the other side…

https://youtu.be/VFp1WuYKWtI

The colour grading side of things continues as i work through the film. That was an early shot just after i did the first stages of grading. This is how the shot looks now, and that will probably still get some tweaking before the films release

Dazman said:

It would seem like the new transfers are “zoomed in” form 2:35:1 to 2:39:1, resulting in some lost scenery on all the edges of the picture (according to Force.net: https://boards.theforce.net/threads/the-eventual-release-of-the-prequel-trilogy-on-4k-blu-ray.50048066/page-6).

I can’t confirm since I have no Disney+ but if it’s true, could the 4K83 maybe be a better main source to work with after all?

Damned it seems there’s always something f:ing up the official releases.

It would help if they had used the same frame for both and not one a few frames later in a shot that the camera is zooming in. fitting to the 2:39:1 ratio does not mean having to zoom in, cutting off the edges. Its a few pixels less top and bottom and, for the most part, the new transfers are less cropped than the 2011 blu-rays

DominicCobb said:

Bluto said:

oojason said:

https://twitter.com/StarWarsVisComp/status/1242646906846826500 (with more comments in the link):-

‘Confirmed by @thedigitalbits that if you buy the Blu-ray-only set you get 11SE on Blu-ray, but if you buy the UHD / Blu-ray combo set you get the 19SE on Blu-ray. Because that’s not confusing to consumers.’
 

I can imagine it won’t clearly marked as such on the packaging either…
 

That’s very disappointing news. And a crazy decision from Disney! There is now no incentive for customers to buy the new Blu-Ray set, given it is the same as the previously released (and rereleased not long ago) 2011 versions.

For those in the same boat as me who don’t have any 4K equipment, the UHD set seems far too expensive as a means of getting the new Blu-Rays.

What a festering pile of pants.

I mean… why would anyone want the new Blu-rays?

Because they are a better transfer than the crap 2011 versions

Use TSMuxer to demux all the tracks in the DE M2ts. Remove the original file from TSMuxer then load the demuxed video and remux it to a M2ts. But DON’T include any of the audio tracks, subtitle tracks etc. just video. Vegas can’t import Ac3 so you will need to convert whichever audio track you want to use to a compatible format (WAV is best for vegas). If you want stereo then fine, but if you want multitrack audio then you will need to convert the original demuxed audio file to separate wavs using something like EAC3to first. The 97 reconstruction file, well it all depends on how you converted it to mp4. But again you need to keep the audio track separate from the video track.

Tantive3+1 said:

Should Luke’s lightsaber be blue to match what’s shown in the ST?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rO0HmnEWp2E&feature=youtu.be
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=youtu.be&v=0tywKaUtNIg

Luke’s saber is green in the ST

Now seeing the listings for the special features on Amazon, it’s even worse than i feared. So most of the special features for the PT & OT will be in Standard def and it’s all what we have already got before. When Disney digitised the archive they uncovered a lot of great stuff, showing snippets on reels at celebration etc. But this is what they are giving us?

Yeh, something doesn’t seem right about those covers. Why would they use the exact same front cover artwork as the Blu-Rays released late last year? Are the Blu-rays just going to be the same 2011 versions , while the 4k will have the new scans? When you take a look at the purchase options for the older digital versions, you can see that the special features for each film (conversations & discoveries features)are the same as what is listed for the features on each of the new discs. And making of a dewback is the feature for ep4 on the digital downloads too.

If that is the real list of the special features then i’m cancelling my pre-order of the saga set. And why the hell have they got “-Conversations: The Star Wars That Almost Was & -Discoveries from Inside: Holograms & Bloopers” on the Episode 3 bonus disc when those two features are Ep4 features? Disney have digitised everything in the archive and this is what we are going to get? Crap that we already have? And what’s the betting that the “making of” collection is just the crap laserdisc masters they used for the 2011 blu-ray set instead of newly scanned versions in HD? But i do find it strange that they have details for every disc apart from episode 9. Surely any release to the retailers would be for the full set and not just part.

Just a quickie…

One of the new changes being done for the HD version of ANH:R is the new Death Star laser tunnel matte. Tweaked to match it closer to what when we see it in Rogue One.

liamnotneeson said:

1. I’m sure you’ll respond with some quip about how I’m not a really fan or part of the community or whatever but I’ve never heard debates about whether or not Leia should have been Luke’s sister.

https://originaltrilogy.com/topic/Anyone-else-totally-disregard-Leia-being-Lukes-sister/id/7763

Here’s one with a transparent background

Voss Caltrez said:

Snoke was being puppeted by Palpatine or was he just a pawn? What if Snoke had convinced Kylo to kill Rey in TLJ? Then what? Made no sense.

He wants her dead at the beginning of TROS and tells Kylo to kill her, so it makes perfect sense.

Merry Christmas everyone. Here is a 13 minute clip from the HD version of ANH:Revisited. The audio was taken from the original SD version of ANH:R, so this won’t be how the final version will sound. But the video side of things is 100% complete. See how many changes you can spot 😃

https://vimeo.com/381337540

Valheru_84 said:

In saying all that, I didn’t want TROS and the DT to fail simply out of spite but at this point in events maybe it needs to fail spectacularly in order for future movies to do a complete reassess and present something truly deserving of the fandom, the world and Star Wars itself in respect to George and Lucasfilm’s 40+ year legacy. If you simply accept whatever is thrown your way then how can you expect them to ever aspire to greater things? For Star Wars to truly be great again in the current age, they need to exceed or at least be as good as the original and best Star Wars.

And there is the problem with the fandom as it stands now. The arrogance that one sides opinion is superior to the others. How about all of us that truly enjoy the new films and find them to be great additions to the saga? Why is it that, because we don’t agree with your take on it, we are just simply accepting whatever is thrown our way? Sorry, but that is pure bullshit. If that was the case i would be praising the prequels, which i don’t and never will. But i’m not arrogant enough to think that just because i think they are trash, that those that truly like them are wrong for liking them. Star Wars means different things to different people.

The prequels almost killed my love for star wars. After ROTS i was almost done with Star Wars and anything future Star Wars related. The new saga gave me back my love for the franchise. We feel that the ST IS deserving of the fandom. The problem is that the fanbase has been fractured for so long now there will never be anything that will please everyone. You have the fans that refuse to like anything that isn’t directly from George, you have the EU crowd that hate everything Disney since it became Legends, you have those that are purely OT fans and hate anything post 1983 etc etc etc.