doubleofive

Tyrphanax said:

Gaffer Tape said:

SpenceEdit said:

Either way, anyone who says they aren't buying the BD set because of the changes is going to miss out. Look at all those special features. The deleted scenes are enough for me. Can't wait!

 I honestly don't feel like I'm very much missing out.  I'd certainly never buy a release just for its bonus features.  Again, it's sending the wrong message.  We have to send George the message that we're not going to put up with this crap, and the only way to do that is to not buy the damn things.  If people are fed up with the changes but still buy them for the additional content, all Lucasfilm sees is, "Oh, it sold well.  We can keep doing what we're doing."  So I understand the desire to "be legit" for fan projects and to finally have access to the deleted scenes.  But my opinion on that, is that if it's really that necessary, buy them off of eBay.  Then you'll still legitimately own the thing, but you won't be lining the bearded one's coffers and making him think that people actually support these ridiculous changes.

SpenceEdit said:

I'm already pre-emptively hiding from this, but are any of these changes really THAT bad? As far as the Nooo! goes, it kind of ties the prequels in nicely to the OT, the Krayt dragon call is incredibly minor, and Adywan made the cantina aliens blink, so why can't the Ewoks? Is any of this as awful as Greedo shooting first? Jabba's Palace dance number? For the first time, I feel like I actually get why he is making these changes. And the CGI TPM Yoda is a huge improvement. That puppet looked like Kermit and Miss Piggy's ugly middle child.

Don't get me wrong, I would generally rather watch the Original Versions. but I find the special editions sort of cool in that Lucas is changing all six movies to gradually make them work together as a cohesive whole. If you look at them that way, they've almost become an interesting fanedit of themselves.

I'm going to go hide behind my ray shield now...

Drunken Jedi Master said:

doubleofive, thanks for the quick response! How do I find these? Please forgive my ignorance, I haven't really nosed around the other forums yet.

Drunken Jedi Master said:

I just joined this site after a few days of lurking as a guest...

I am at a complete loss when it comes to the NoNoooo! addition. I can live, reluctantly, with all the other changes, as cringe inducing as they may be, but to alter the climax is, IMO, unforgivable. I am happy to find a site where many other share the same opinion.

Lurking around, I have noticed all the different versions of fan edits and I have to say I am mostly relieved that there are better ways to see the unmolested OT than the GOUT. My question is, which version would be considered superior and what is the best way to go about getting them?

 

Thanks in advance and I'm glad to be here.

R2D2 said:

There is different kind of information on changes depending which site/forum you go to. I am concentrating on the stuff that I couldn't detect in my 1080p versions.

www.starwars-union.de (german site) reports stuff like:

- Blue Filter on Hoth got reduced

- Obi Wan Ghost on Hoth can be seen a lot clearer now

- Lightsabers got fixed and are now shiny red and blue, with white cores

- Leia Hologram is more blue

http://www.thedigitalbits.com/reacted to the official confirm from Lucasfilm on the "Noooo".

On a positive note, it sounds like the A/V quality of these discs is excellent on the whole (at least according to the guys in Europe and China who have apparently gotten their hands on factory-leaked discs. ... As expected, numerous (though not all) picture and sound defects in these films have apparently been corrected. But while it's three steps forward in quality, it may be two and a half back for more changes.

 thedigitalbits.com

 How can this release be of excellent A/V quality if the video is not a bit different than the 2004 hd master? I am talking about the crushed blacks, oversaturation, contrast-boost, color-timing issues, lightsaber colors.

Numerous picture defects have been corrected? No! We got two half-hearted lightsaber shots (not scenes!) fixed.

Three steps forward in quality? Where exactly?

This thing is 95% the 2004 hd master. 3% difference for less compression artefacts in a/v, 2% difference for content changes.

20th Century Mark said:

"People who alter or destroy works of art and our cultural heritage for profit or as an exercise of power are barbarians, and if the laws of the United States continue to condone this behavior, history will surely classify us as a barbaric society."

Bester said:

We have a new Jabba the Hutt that’s so much better than the old one I had to work with. I mean, that one wouldn’t act! It was just a big old rubber thing. But now I’ve got one that’s very articulate. It’s speech is fantastic - the lip-sync is great. The tongue is great, the eye movement - everything!

 

LOL!!!!   XoD

The '97 Jabba was a big CG turdfest.

American Cinematographer said:

Remarkably, Williams and Letteri tackled the five Jabba shots at the end of 1994, prior to the ILM software group's development of the Caricature animation program. Caricature had enabled animators on Dragonheartto work with fully shaded models in real time, resulting in excellent lip-synch animation. For the Star Wars Special Edition, however, Williams was still working with the less-facile technology used on Jurassic Park andCasper. "Spaz just hand-animated all of the lip-synch because that's his style," Letteri marvels. "[Sound designer] Ben [Burtt] did the voice track first. After George approved it, Steve animated to it using Jurassic Parktechnology. He animated the mouth as if it were a hard, almost horn-like material, but with a little more flexibility."

While Williams modeled and animated Jabba, Letteri was responsible for the scene's look and lighting design. "We tend to work like a director and cinematographer," Letteri says. "My job was a bit different than that of a traditional director of photography in that I had to figure out what the inside of Jabba's mouth and his tongue looked like, and how much drool there should be on his chin. I used the original Jabba's textures for reference; the CG model was constructed differently, so we had a Viewpaint artist paint it by hand. I also did a fair amount of repainting myself, and I adapted the shaders I had designed for Jurassic's T-Rex for Jabba's skin and surface textures. I also used some new eye techniques I'd designed for Casper to give Jabba eyes like a cat's or a serpent's. That varied from the original, but I wanted something a little more organic than those glass eyes. George just said, 'Go for it!' He liked the eyes."

haraldo23 said:

Come on, dude...


... use some paragraphs.

I'm going to post this, I typed it from the original article.

Cinefex March 1996, pg 66 said:

LUCAS:
One of the main impetuses in going ahead with the Star Wars stories at this point - aside from getting past the frustration of having four, five and six out there and not having one, two and three - is that now we’ve reached the point, technologically, where I can do so many things I could never do before. Suddenly, its like having a whole new paint set - and that’s fun.

And I’m going back and doing a special edition of Star Wars for the same reason. I’m having more fun doing that than almost anything - because its like getting a second chance. I was very frustrated with the way a lot of things in the film came out. I was embarrassed by some of the things in Star Wars - and I was embarrassed at the time I did it. I just didn’t have a way of doing it better. Being able to go back now and fix it, I can say: “Well, that was all a mistake. I didn’t mean for it to be like that. That’s the way it came out in one take. With one more take, I can really make it great.”

We have a new Jabba the Hutt that’s so much better than the old one I had to work with. I mean, that one wouldn’t act! It was just a big old rubber thing. But now I’ve got one that’s very articulate. It’s speech is fantastic - the lip-sync is great. The tongue is great, the eye movement - everything! And he walks, too. So it’s like this great thing. Suddenly, all of the constraints are lifted. It’s like you’ve been plowing fields in hundred-degree sun, with a seventy-pound backpack and lead balls chained to your ankles, and someone comes along and puts you in an air-conditioned tractor, and says, “Look, it goes real fast and you can do everything with it.” And you say: “This is great! This is fun!” You want to plow fields all day long, it’s so much fun. That’s basically what’s going on now. We’re doing the new films, and its like: “Gosh, I can have Yoda walk. I could never have Yoda walk before. And you know, I don’t have to stage scenes around R2 and 3PO anymore. I can actually make them more facile. And other characters - I can create characters that don’t have to be people in suits.” That’s where the real thrill of it all comes. That’s what’s bringing me back to doing it, in a way - just the fun of it.

On your special edition, do you expect any backlash from fan who might resent your tampering with a classic?

I don’t know. It’s my classic. On the one hand I’m doing this, while on the other I’m on the Artists Rights Board, a foundation that’s trying to protect films from being changed - which I feel very strongly about, because with the technology we have today, anybody can go back and do this kind of thing. I can sort of see the future, and I want to protect films as they are and as they should be. I don’t want to see them colorized, I don’t want to see their formats changed, I don’t want to see them reedited, and I don’t want to see what I’m able to do now, which is add more characters and do all kinds of things that nobody even contemplated before.

What I’m doing, I think, is what a lot of painters do, and some writers do - which is to go back and repaint or rewrite. Go into any artist’s studio and you’ll find lots of paintings on the wall that look completely finished and completely fine. And the artist will say, “Well, I’m leaving them there because I’m not happy with them.” If I had been an artist and a painter, and I had done Star Wars, I would have probably left it on the wall, because I wasn’t happy with it, even at the time. Everybody else was saying: “This is great! Didn’t it turn out great?” And I would say: “No, I had to compromise. It didn’t turn out the way I wanted. It fell short of what I wanted it to be.” And they would say: “What are you talking about? You must be nuts!”

Well, now they’re going to find out what I was talking about. Finally they’re going to see what it was that bugged me so much - because now I can have it be exactly the way I wanted it to be. Well, maybe not a hundred percent. But it went from being what, in my mind, was maybe sixty or seventy percent of what I wanted, up to now being about ninety-three or ninety-four percent of what I wanted it to be.

In another ten years, you can go back and get that last six percent.

Yeah, I can redo the whole thing all over again. But truly, there’s something very satisfying about having a thing not be right and always wanting to fix it, and then finally getting the chance to do it.

Now that you’ve done this with Star Wars, are you going to be able to resist the temptation to fix the other two?

I am fixing the other two. I’m doing all three of them.

Bester said:

Jabba's new door gives me a weird feeling of motion sickness.  The angle looks all wrong.  I'd love to know if the internal shots match the new external shot.

The new angle is the fact that you cannot get Academy Award winning movies in their Academy Award winning forms. Fox releases a 75 DVD boxed set of some of their best movies, organized by decade, and one of the 70s movies is the 2004 version of Star Wars.

Awards not applicable to the Blu-rays

msycamore said:

So Lucas have got that scene revised three times now? :) I wonder if he will finally get this scene right for the fifth attempt when they get their 3D release. It seems to be a complicated scene to get absolutely right.

Daren Dochterman answered the poll and liked the Page. Nice!

I'm piecing together more comparisons using uploads from YouTube, etc.





The door is new, constructed of elements from the original frame. The droids have been recomposited from their original live action plate into this new one.

And unless they changed the view from the inside, this creates a huge continuity error as the door is over twice as big on the outside now and the curvature and height of the door has been changed.

Another finding:



1997/2004/2011

It looks like Han has been shooting twice for almost 15 years. In 2004 they modified his body jump and moved both blasts up several frames so that Han starts earlier. If this 2011 capture is correct, they now cut to Greedo getting shot before the second blast happens, but the frames up to that point are identical from the 2004.

I'm sure us considering it a win is the only reason why they just didn't cut it out completely.

Check this out:



If the frames on the right are the only frames in the 2011 version, they fixed the Han shooting twice that was introduced into the 2004 version, but they are identical.

adywan said:

I've got to say that the unfreezing effect looks fake as hell in pictures and even worse in motion in 1080p. It's like they gave a school child a new plugin for after effects and said, "here, play with this. See what you can do". I'm really glad i never deleted my HDTV versions of these films, like i nearly did.

I used the shots I had to start some comparisons:

Asaki said:

I know this is the Original Trilogy forums, but I found a clip of CGI Yoda from the Phantom Menace BluRay:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3KH1GOFUCHk

Unless it's just the same clip from the Ep3 bonus features, every other clip of that on YouTube was much shorter.

bkev said:

Gary Whitta posted a snapshot, and R2 after being shot in ROTJ has all these doodads pop out of him. image here

Bingowings said:

There have been actual clips put up of the Ewok eyes and the Jabba gate so has there been a confirmed film featuring the dreaded no! Noooooooooooooo!, (the famous one seems to be a fan mock up).

http://chainsawsuit.com/2011/08/31/star-wars-is-for-toddlers-now/

We have Gary Whitta, writer of "Book of Eli" on our side:

http://twitter.com/garywhitta

timdiggerm said:

none said:

that's a good time to start rolling out Doubleofive's SE comparisons

To be fair, most people don't  care about redone wipes. At what point does the meticulousness overwhelm and become a turnoff?