I was digging through T-bon'e Star Wars Universe and was just reading his review of the 2004 DVDs. He never mentions the bad colors (he believed they were deliberate changes), but I did find this part very interesting:
Right before the DVDs were released, I received a message from a friend who’s in the industry asking if I’ve seen the bad rendering of R2-D2 in Episode V. I really didn’t have any idea what he meant but he sent me a few pictures to compare the shots. I did and to be frank, I don’t really see anything all that upsetting. He seemed to be really upset about the big eye in particular.
Here's what he had to say:
What we are seeing here, is what appears to be a horrible re-rendering job of R2-D2. What I mean by this, is that they took the actual R2-D2 from the scene (that didn't have any 'blue' in it because it would have disappeared into the blue screen effects work) and placed CGI rendered 'blue pieces' over the originals to change the color of him from black to blue. What has incompetently occurred here is two serious flaws.
The first is the obvious poor rendering of R2's 'EYE' (the view port in the head that Kenny Baker could see out of) that is the square-ish panel on the front with a rounded lens in the center of it. What you will see, is how this horribly rendered replacement view port recreates R2's lens in an absolutely ridiculous and flawed way. Instead of being the right size, it is roughly 35% smaller and has the extra space around the lens made up with blue coloring. Just do a quick comparison between R2 in ANY other shot in the saga and you will see how HORRIBLE this looks and how poorly executed this change was.
Secondly, you will also notice in the same shot, that the side blue panels on R2 now also have an overlay of 'blue' to cover the original 'black' panels. These are just below the 'eye' and go around his head. The problem here is that by the end of the shot, R2 is moving his head back and forth, but the blue overlays move at a different speed to the rest of his head! So instead of a quick fine tuning that the effects element and rendering could have had, they sloppily just threw this overlay on, and didn't make any effort to perfect this effects shot.
In general, this is a horrible rendering job, and another embarrassment that no filmmaker should ever let get out. This DVD set was rushed, and the flaws of the rush are evident; especially the incompetent and inconsistent sound mix on A New Hope including the reversed music channels in the surrounds.
After looking at it for a while, I do see what he means but since my eye wasn’t looking for it, I didn’t notice it. The dark inset part of the eye is a bit small. Click on the image to the right for a nice comparison of all three versions of the shot in question. The top shot is from the new DVD set, the bottom left is from the original release (note the black panels on R2), and the bottom right is the 1997 Special Edition version. Looking at them all together it does seem they went a little overboard with the blue for the DVD release. Personally, I still don’t think this shot looks that bad but my friend was pretty adamant that it didn’t look so hot so I’d be remiss not to mention it. I mean, this is really nit picky stuff, after all. He’s a good guy and very professional so I’m sure his complaint is valid. I think he’s an R2-D2 fan so of course he’s a little biased. The set may have been rushed but it's OK for a set to hold us over until...whenever.
Here is the comparison:
I think I've noticed the drift before and this shot has R2's panels way more blue than the others, but CG panels when the 1997 version looks just fine? What do you think? Are they CG panels or just a product of the higher resolution?
And to bring it back to the revelency of the thread, how should Ady handle this?
