In the listing at the end of the tribute video it displays(3rd from top left):
Star Wars :PG
1977
It has been a long time since I have seen Star Wars being advertised in this manner!
The last time may have been for the VHS/laserdisc release in 1994.
This is interesting:
If you go to the end of Fox's 75thanniv. promotion:
...you get this:
Looks like the 1997 edition.
Sluggo said:
danny_boy said:
I have to agree with Sluggo and Boost
Sluggo and the Boost strike again!
Besides back in 1997-1998,was not everyone drooling over those phantom menace trailer snippets like they were the second coming?
This is an excellent point. It is easy to make even the worst projects look good when you are only showing a minutes of highlights carefully edited together. Beware the trailer!
Hehe
You should watch the end of this clip:
http://www.starwars.com/video/view/000230.html
Lucas says:
"Things that have come out exactly the way I want them to come out have not been very successful"
I have to agree with Sluggo and Boost
The OT was a product of it's time(77-83).But for that time period it was far in advance of anything else(Look how Star wars overshadowed rivals such as Close Encounters , Superman and Alien -which are three other classics in their own right)
They may look cool,but those trailers are only 3-4 minutes long.They are not a film.
The action is very "Matrix meets Attack of the clones (in the Genosian arena)".
Besides back in 1997-1998,was not everyone drooling over those phantom menace trailer snippets like they were the second coming?
http://www.starwars.com/video/view/000385.html
On edit-Having just watched the TPM trailer for the first time in years---I think it is much cooler than any of those game trailers.
Actually I just did an interesting little experiment.And I may have to eat my own words about not watching the prequels.
I have an Optoma 533st DLP 1080p/24/60 short throw projector.It can beam an image 3metres wide from a distance of just 1.5-2m!!.
I also have a Blu ray player.
I configured my system to show an image 2.7 m in width and 2 m in height on my bedroom wall(which is white).Believe me...for home viewing it is awsomely big! I also stood barely 1.5 meters away from the screen; which is probably a lot closer than I should be(but it was just an experiment)
I also selected a native resolution rather than 16:9(which made the image fill out the entire w/h off the screen).
I popped in my 2005 ROTS DVD(which is upscaled on my sony 300 Blu ray player. I watched it from the point of where the Jedi get wiped out by the clones all the way to the end of the film.
Straight after I stuck my 2004 SW:ANH DVD and watched it up to where Luke and Owen meet C3P0 ect...and I stopped there.
And you know what the story continuity/Imagery/Evolution and look of the characters and scenery actually worked!!!(IMHO ofcourse!!)
The sheer size of the image gave a lot of scale to the CGI heavy ROTS.
Scale I did not appreciate when I saw it in the cinema 5 years ago(I was seated quite far back on that occasion).It is also scale which quite frankly cannot be observed my 21 " widescreen TV ------ ROTS just looks like plain shit on that!
Even though the aesthetic of much of the scenery in ROTS has a shiny clean veneer to it(coruscant,utapao and even Mustafar) the image size really helped me aknowledge the detail on say for example CGI Yoda's face--- which gave it alot more believability.And all of this in nothing more than upscaled 560i.No doubt it will look even more amazing in full 1080/24p.
And here is the kicker----watching ANH immedietly afterwards was a revelation.The Gritty look of the opening scene in the rebel blocade runner combined with it's razor sharp editing actually worked quite beautifully with the pristine look of the same blocade runner seen in ROTS a few minutes before.Also seeing the beefed up Prowse Vader compared to the anorexic Hayden Vader only minutes apart actually is quite convincing.Again this all My opinion.I could go on.
IMHO It's a no brainer.
4-5-6 irrespective of whether you have seen them before or not at all.
Forget about the prequels.
If it ever happens
A 1080p/24 transfer of the OUT will look better than what anyone saw in the theatres in 1977,78,79,81,82.
Due to these losses, and further losses throughout the film processing and duplication operation, the final projection print has a resolution more closely represented by 1K pixels. This obviously depends
on the number of intermediate stages undergone and the quality of the processes used, but represents a true situation for the average release print film.
To bring a little bit of true life into this, while grading Pinocchio for digital projection [working at 1280x1024 resolution as time was so short we had to cut corners!] the director & main actor, Roberto Benigni, was surprised to find his 'frown lines' visible in the digital projected final when they were not in the film print. As a result we had to 'soften' the focus [blur it!] on the digital final [and I wont tell you how we did this but is wasn't via digital technology – ok, I will tell you; we smeared light engineering oil
on the projection room glass; I kid you not!].
http://www.lightillusion.com/zippdf/di-guide.pdf
This is a cool article:
One obvious reason is that Texas Instruments has deep pockets to promote its system, plus the backing of propeller-head George Lucas, who dreams of making movies entirely on computers and essentially wants to show them on theater-sized monitors.
Start the revolution without digital
Roger Ebert /
http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/19991212/COMMENTARY/212010335/1023&template=printart
OK Fred Meyers worked for Lucasfilm so you would expect him to peddle the line of digital being better than film....but this guy knows what he is talking about!
Hi-def video’s extreme depth of field led the filmmakers to alter their blocking methods, as well as their approach to focusing on multiple actors in a shot. "We knew going in that our cameras had a greater depth of field, 2 to 2 1/2 times greater than 35mm film," Meyers says. "We shot much of the principal material around T2 or T2.8, and that looked flat from your fingertips to infinity. But there are certain focus pulls in three-shots or two-shots that viewers have come to expect aesthetically, particularly in anamorphic shows. So even though you can have a two-shot or an over-the-shoulder in HD where you can hold both actors in focus, we sometimes found ourselves cheating focus on the set to sell the scenes the way audiences might expect them to traditionally play. Whereas the approach to that would be clear and simple with film – go for the person who’s talking, go for the eyes, that sort of thing – we fought a little bit more about how to deal with those splits."
<SNIP>
Meyers dismisses the notion that Episode II looks better digitally projected than it does on film simply because it originated digitally. "I have some concerns about those comments, especially when you consider that so much of Episode I was digital to start with," he says. "Even though it originated mostly on film, Episode I has plenty of digital matte paintings and digital characters. When we did our digital-acquisition tests, we did side-by-side [comparisons] with anamorphic, Super 35, VistaVision and digital and took them all out to film. Shooting digitally, we got a good-looking picture that in many cases was better than many of the film formats. The decision to shoot digitally had nothing to do with digital exhibition, other than that we could be digital from start to finish.
@Zombie
It looks like there are pro's and cons.
At the time of TPM's release there was alot of press regarding the quality of digital projections as compared to film.
This article from July 3rd 1999 says this:
''I saw it(TPM) the old-fashioned way(on film), and this(digital projection) just blows it away,'' said Mr. Rybacki, who is a video technician from Norwood, N.J.
<SNIP>
Gordon Radley, the president of Lucasfilm Ltd., said the decision to unveil digital projection to the public came after Mr. Lucas decided the digital projectors were as good as existing film projectors in many ways -- and far superior in others. At a side-by-side screening of film and digital versions of ''The Phantom Menace'' for movie business executives and journalists in Los Angeles in mid-June, he said, half of the audience could not guess which was which.
After having watched a digital projection of TPM this fan said:
(7/16/99)
The DLP image was bright, and the colors were very rich. There were no reel-change punches and splices, and there was no projector flutter. It looked damn, damn fine. Damn.
There are problems to overcome, though. Even from the middle of the theater, you could see the pixels. Pixels showed up with lettering and titles and credits, and the starfields twinkled slightly like they do on laserdisc. There were strange anomalies in still moments where what looked like waves of slight color variation swept over solid areas. I would say if the resolution can be doubled, or maybe even improved by half, the picture will look extremely sharp.
http://www.reviewsontheside.com/reviews/star_wars_episode_i.html
@Zombie
This is a pretty cool discussion and I know where you are coming from mate.
I agree that a 2K scan of the 35 mm o-neg would not be as good as a 4k scan of the same 35mm o-neg.
But every official study i have seen claims that the all important release prints are less than 1 k:
http://www.efilm.com/publish/2008/05/19/4K%20plus.pdf
I think this explains why Lucas went for 1080p for the prequels.
A digital release at 1080p is better than a 4th gen 35mm release print(which is what the original trilogy was).
Gotta agree with Harmy
What was on the o-neg of star wars in 1977 is not what people saw on the release IP's in 1977!
What all of us saw in the cinemas in either 77',78',79',81,82' or 97' was nothing more than 500-800 lpph(not that much more than Standard definition)
This report performed tests:
http://www.etconsult.com/papers/Technical%20Issues%20in%20Cinema%20Resolution.pdf
and this was there verdict:
Film theoretically has very good resolution capabilities. What is delivered to the theatre is another story. If we believe the ITU tests, then images captured at almost 2400 lines per picture height on the camera negative deliver significantly degraded on screen resolution through the projection system – in the range of 500 – 800 lines per picture height. 500 lines corresponds to about 9 line pairs per degree from 2 screen heights.
Chinawash wrote:
But if you want to capture Star Wars the way it was seen in theaters in 1977, it's likely to be somewhere between 2K and 4K quality. Unless you saw it in 70mm, in which case it was probably above 4K quality.
I saw SW in 81' and 83' on the big screen and it looked fantastic.....compared to my 1982 rental tape!!
And that is the problem.Old school Cinema only had to compete with crappy 70's /80's TV's and video systems.But now the playing field has been redefined.
A 1080p/24 presentation would be better(but not necessarily superior) than a late 70's/early 80's deluxe(or technicolour )3rd/4th generation InterPositive release print.
This study confirms it:
To create an equivalence to the release prints tested by ITU, if the pixels on screen are “1 to 1” with resolution, current 1280 x 1024 projectors are adequate. Oversampled displays will substantially reduce pixelization, driving towards 2K x 1K display requirements to satisfy an equivalence to 500 to 800 lines per picture height.
In fact, everything talking about 4K belies the fact that most of the theater installations around the world are basically going at 2K. I mean the only commercial 4K digital cinema projector that I am aware of is the Sony 4K projector. But the bulk of theatrical installations around the world are the Texas Instruments DLP. And its maximum resolution is 2048x1080. I mean, let's face it. The difference between 1920 and 2048 is 6%. Believe me, you cannot see a 6% difference. Six percent is irrelevant.
http://magazine.creativecow.net/article/the-truth-about-2k-4k-the-future-of-pixels
Some would say the advantages of 4K is a myth:
So 4K is not these 8 mega pixel or 9 mega pixel or 10 mega pixel CMOS images for the Bayer pattern where they add up all the pixels in a row and say hey, we got 4K. The great perpetrators of that mythology have been RED and Dalsa. That's why I call these “marketing pixels." It's intentional obfuscation. Because they really do nothing to improve image quality. They may improve sales volume. But they don't do anything to quality.
But somehow the world has accepted that that's 4K. It's purely semantic. It's like saying, “I don't like my weight in pounds so I converted to kilos. It sounds better!” You'd be amazed at how many non-technical people I meet, often producers and directors, but sometimes even cinematographers get fooled by that stuff.
<SNIP>
So if you had true 4K resolution in your local theater, everybody would have to sitting in the first 6 rows. Otherwise they wouldn't see any extra detail. Their eyes wouldn't LET them see it. You know this intuitively from passing by these beautiful new monitors at trade shows. You find yourself getting absolutely as close as possible to see the detail, and to see if there are any visible artifacts. At normal viewing distances, you can't.
So the whole 2K 4K thing is a little bit of a red herring.
Creative Cow: What do you think about IMAX as a filmgoer?
John Galt: I don't like the frame rate. I saw Gorillas in the Mist and the gorilla were flying across the forest floor. Every frame they seemed to travel like 3 feet. [laughs]. It's really annoying. I mean I loved Showscan: 70mm running at 60 fps. In terms of a sense of reality, I think it was far superior to IMAX.
That's why I subscribe to Jim Cameron's argument, which is we would get much better image quality by doubling the frame rate than by adding more pixel resolution.
http://magazine.creativecow.net/article/the-truth-about-2k-4k-the-future-of-pixels
Lucasfilm technical director Mike Blanchard says, "Almost all of the resolution that’s lost is through the printing process. It’s really funny about technology and the film business right now. People get caught up in these numbers games that are flat-out ridiculous. They say, ‘Film is 4k,’ but it’s not 4k. It’s 4k on the camera negative, but no one has ever seen a camera negative projected. Countless studies have shown that what is shown in U.S. theaters [via the interpositive/internegative photochemical printing process] is between 700 and 800 lines of resolution when you get to the release print. We get that easily.
http://mixonline.com/sound4picture/film_tv/audio_star_wars_episode_2/
After having performed tests ,James Cameron believes that 1080* 1920p is better than a 35mm(IP):
James Cameron
"The amount of data available from a 35mm negative is much less than the amount of data available from an HD frame."
The Hollywood Reporter:
"Film purists argue the opposite. "
James Cameron:
" They're wrong. You can take an HD image and blow it up by double before you start to see the same amount of granularity you have with a 35mm negative. George Lucas did some tests that I flew up to see, and it corresponded to what we'd found. I'd say the Sony HD 900 series cameras are generating an image that's about equivalent to a 65mm original negative".
http://www.encyclopedia-titanica.org/discus/messages/5672/28537.html?1026494882
Here is a nice clip of a super 8mm 1977 9 minute reel of star wars:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GbUDUT3T_EA
Its cool to see,but you can see how badly the film has faded.
@Markdav
I think Zombie speculated that they spliced that new scroll onto an already existing 1977 print.
I would hazard a guess that the "senator" print was done only for the UK re-release -which I saw in 1981(SW was shown back to back with ESB in the early summer of that year-my personal introduction to SW!)
For the 81' and 82' releases in the states they probably created new IN's and then spiced that scroll in.
Having said that-there is that fan who said that the print he saw in 82' was already pink and faded-so maybe that was a print from 77' with the new 81' scroll spliced in!
Whatever deluxe prints that are out there:
Chances are that they have long since faded.
Judging by what this fan saw in 1982;the prints had already started to go pink even then!
The 1982 reissue had a trailer for the next film, which was initially titled Revenge of the Jedi. Now that was cool. I still remember the 18 frame segment of the never- used sandstorm scene. I saw this at the Bellevue Theater, in Upper Montclair. I also saw it at the old Jerry Lewis Cinema in Union. It was here that I noted that the print was pink. I couldn't believe a film of this recent vintage had already started to fade. This gave me my first hint at just how bad DeLuxe labs were. By the way, the Bellevue has been cut into a multi screen and the Jerry Lewis Cinema has been wiped off the face of the earth. Is there no respect left for the movie palaces of our youth?
http://www.cinemaretro.com/index.php?/archives/83-Star-Wars-at-30-Years-Old-A-Lifes-Journey.html.
It is backed up by this other fan:
The worst was Deluxe Color. They turn pink the quickest. I ran a three year old Deluxe print of "Star Wars" in 1980. There was very little color other than pink.
ttp://cinematreasures.org/polls/167_0_6_0_C/
On edit:
Just realized that this may be an explantion for why the original 1982 VHS rental tape(which I have) is faded(and the tape always looked that way).
Maybe the the 1982 VHS rental tape transfer was from an already faded deluxe print!?
back in 1983 I recorded a british broadcast(ITV) of SW and the colours were much more vibrant than the 1982 20th century fox rental tape.
Maybe ITV used one of those technicolour prints for their transfer.
Tom Kiefaber is on facebook.
Anyone here who is a member up for asking him where that collector's print came from?!
Go to this link and play video:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/december/27/newsid_2544000/2544239.stm
P.S
It is a long shot but maybe the print used for this showing at the london dominion is exactly the same one that was used at the senator in baltimore 2 months back!
It could depend on the context of how you view the films.
Personally I think SW is a better film because it could stand alone.
Empire's strength relies on the fact that it is intrinsically the middle part of a 3 part story.If you view ESB this way then it probably is stonger than SW.
Gotta pitch in on this one!
I was 9 when Jedi came out and also loved it
It is easy to forget the emotional impact of one scene in particular
That is luke forcing vader backwards after he shouts "NEVER!"
That little segment was incredibly powerful because for the best part of 2 and a half movies and 5-6 cinematic years(77'-83') Vader kicked ass.
We have probably all seen ROTJ a zillion times that that particular sequence no longer has any(or the same ) resonance that it once had.
And whilst it does not have quite the same power the same applies to the battle between the ewoks and the stormtroopers.
For the first time in 3 movies the troops were getting beat well and truly.
And that was Jedi's power.
A power that we have become desensitized to over the passage of time.
But hey that is my personal opinion!
Wonderwhat Lucas means when he said this:
We’ve been working on them for quite a while,” Mr. Lucas said, “but still, there are pipelines. Unfortunately, the recent releases get priority over what we call the classic versions of things.”
Is this a tacit admission that the Originals might get a release after all.....even more interesting...Lucas says "Unfortunetely"....does Lucas secretly deep down know that he is still ultimately living off the legacy of the 77-83 films?