doubleofive

It was 2004.

There are a lot of elements to Revisited that are not “canonical”. Ady’s goal is to make a version of the Special Edition he’s happy with, not fix Canon.

You guys get an early link to RETURN OF THE JEDI VISUAL COMPARISONS V2.0!

https://www.starwarsviscomp.com/visual-comparisons-v2-0/

This version has 100 more images than the last one, though most of them are not new discoveries just that I gave myself the freedom to use multiple images per shot and changed how I dealt with replaced shots.

I have classified 238 shots into one of the following categories:

Recomposite - The shot was recomposited from the original elements for an SE
Modification - The shot was “enhanced” in some way for an SE
Addition - The shot was created fully for an SE
Removal - The shot was removed entirely from an SE
Trim - The shot was re-edited for an SE
Wipe - The wipe was recreated for an SE
Credits Change - A typo or grammatical error in the credits was corrected

Hope you enjoy! I noticed a lot of tiny details I’d missed previously. My new favorite “how did this pass QC” change is Obi-Wan’s Ghost. Check it out, it’s bonkers.

I cannot believe we’re having the Flipper Debate again over a decade later. 😄 Ady removed the flipper arm after coming to the same conclusion the original crew must have, that it just begs the question of how he held a gun in the first place. But instead of following the original crew’s “just throw any arm on the floor”, Adywan made it the good Doctor’s. There’s no reason for him to change that.

We also see Leia at the end of TROS. I don’t think they “scrapped” anything about Force Ghosts. Having Hayden yelling at Kylo that he shouldn’t be evil is a dumb idea and needed to be removed, if that was the plan. And the turning point of TROS is literally a ghost telling Rey to not be stupid.

Original#Fan1 said:

Lucas the Barbarian said:

Original#Fan1 said:

YES! they did have a high quality version that was out on dvd and vhs i had the dvd versions with both original and the new digitally made versions on each disc in the early 2000s and subsiquently then I lost them in storage place oh boy was I angry and now i cant get them back. Does anyone have any copies of those original digital home releases out here?

Are you sure it wasn’t a bootleg? Unless you’re talking about the 2004 Special Editions which have even more changes than the 1997 versions. Because there WERE bootleg DVDs of the 1997 SE’s that existed before Lucasfilm released them officially. The actual 1997 versions were never officially released on DVD.

You know you mos.likely correct cause I did buy them for myself in the 2000s at a Best Buy home electronics store here in America but the dvds did have both versions of the trilogy on each dvd though. Sure wish I had the dvds these days it would surely help in deciding which version I liked best even though I didnt really like the add with digital versions as long as I came with TESB original version on it My Favorite of the original theatrical trilogy version.

You’re talking about the Limited Edition 2006 DVD release. If you look hard enough you can find copies of them for sale for a decent price. Last weekend, I found Empire at a used video store in my area for $3!

Harmy said:

Here’s a new live stream I did today 😃
https://youtu.be/IrMjUjey384?t=120

Guest starring me for a few minutes!

Every example of a matte painting in “Creating the Worlds of Star Wars: 365 Days” is from the SE. I’m sure that was a publisher overriding the author’s wishes.

That’s a mistake more than revisionism, though I’m not sure how it happened. The rest of the images I’ve seen (so far) are labeled as being SE.

The text of the book however, wowee.

captainsolo said:

That’s why I still don’t have all three JSC or Faces lds. The price gouging is nuts on all SW. Just recently I realized there was a fancier version of the 97SE letterbox vhs set with some nice swag. I thought hmm I wonder what those go for. $75+ nope.

The swag is so good though. I now have two of the medals that come with the sets, and I took the staples out of the “Art of the Special Edition” booklet (which is the exact content as the appendices of the “Art of” books) last night and got good scans of every page.

And I got 5 frames of Jabba’s ass, which is perfect.

The original plan was to have a lot more makeup on him (almost a mutant), and to NOT have him show up as a ghost. His actual age didn’t matter.

More proof that they redid the 2004 changes. Thanks Ady!

The CG Saber:

Last night I got through Reel 4 (Sarlacc Battle). I’m much more free with the count, so several shots have 3 images associated. I noticed that about half of the Rancor recomposites done in 2004 actually start the live action plate 2 frames earlier or later than the original edit. The Rancor movement and the edit is exactly the same, but it’s technically over different footage of Luke or the guard.

Thanks to a discussion I had with Terrence Masson (one of the Senior Technical Directors for the SE, who oversaw the Sarlacc Battle), I’ve been able to identify more recomposites and now can tell the first shot in the Star Wars Saga with a CG lightsaber (it’s during Luke’s “Force Kick”). If there was a recomposite in the battle, any blaster fire or lightsaber in that shot was recreated in CG instead of finding the original elements, though I still feel like some shots where they just added the beak to a fully live action shot with effects don’t have any recompositing, just inserted the beak into the original final. It’s only if a film element like a skiff or Boba Fett or a matte painting was recomposited.

It’s a lot of fun to just focus on one movie (since it’s the only one “complete” by TN1). I’m reading the Rinzler book and just absorbing as much as I can about RotJ.

Another thing I’m doing is sequences that have have been completely re-edited get an entry for each shot that isn’t in the edit and each shot that has been added. You can see this in Jedi Rocks. They’re not going to get a one-on-top-of-the-other “this shot replaces this shot” unless it’s something like Fett flirting with the dancers, where the edit is the same but the shots are actually replaced.

I also counted frames, so now during the Celebration you’ll know exactly how many frames of Leia hugging Luke were cut (a lot).

Well, I started by dragging 4K83 and 19SE into the same timeline. Then I went to the extended sections I knew about and made cuts to shift them to be on the same frame later, then kept going back to find where the frames had been shifted. This wasn’t the best idea to start with, but it didn’t take long and I was excited. I did move Jedi Rocks into its own sequence so I could move things around without messing with the rest of the movie.

Then I dragged GOUT, 97SE, 04SE, and 11SE into the same giant timeline and tried to get them to line up using the same methods. Again, mistake. Eventually I remembered that Premiere can now do Scene Edit Detection, so I used that (which took an hour or so per version) to let me at least SEE where the frames were off. It was 97SE that was the culprit, as GKAR’s preservation has 4-5 missing frames at some reel breaks. Which I learned by…

Separating the film into reels. Which I should have done to each version immediately. So now I have 13 Premiere sequences (15 if you count the main sequence and Jedi Rocks’ subsequence), each much more manageable. I’m not planning on outputting a video to replace WG, it’s much easier for me to scrub through the main 4K83/19SE, find a frame I like, turn all all of the other versions one by one to see if they’re noticeably different in any of them, then turning them off. I have a base layer of “NOT IN”, and a “1983/1997” overlay, so I just take the screenshot from inside Premiere and move on. It’s much easier than WG, where I’d have to take all the shots in VLC, then bring them into Photoshop and remember why I took the shot and crop it and overlay it. I’m baking in the overlay so that the next time Red Letter Media uses one of my images in their video, I get credit. 😉

For organization, I’m separating each change into its reel and using that Google Sheets spreadsheet of every shot in the film, the one by… checks notes you (thanks!), which I numbered and am using a four digit code in the file name so that they’re sorted in the right order (example: SW6-0001-Fox 2019).

It’s 11SE where the Fox logo comes late, not 19SE. All of the other versions have the logo fully faded in before 11SE starts, then they all fade out and LFL starts fading in. 11SE Fox logo finishes fading out and LFL pops on screen not having time for its fade. The fanfare is noticeably off sync to the Fox logo in 11SE.

The ROTJ 11SE has the Fox logo bumped back in the timeline, so far that instead of it fading and LFL fading up, LFL pops on screen to keep its place on the timeline.

I’m not even sure how that happens.

doubleofive said:

I feel like a n00b just posting on an old thread about something I should already have, but I’m pretty sure the 97SE I have for VisComp isn’t Dark Jedi’s upscale. Can someone help me in getting these?

I think I’ll just stick with GKAR, thanks!

I feel like a n00b just posting on an old thread about something I should already have, but I’m pretty sure the 97SE I have for VisComp isn’t Dark Jedi’s upscale. Can someone help me in getting these?

I started work on Version 2.0 of Return of the Jedi! I have GOUT, 4K83, 19SE, 11SE, 04SE, and 97SE frame synchronized in Premiere Pro, a much better setup than just having the WookieeGroomer splitscreen I made the originals with.

I started with Jedi Rocks, which I’ve already released as a preview to how 2.0 will look.

4K83 (1080p) and 19SE Blu-ray are the base sources now, and they come out in Full HD PNG files. I’m very pleased with the things I’ve already discovered and my new way of tracking and logging changes shot by shot!

Put together a gallery of shots that just aren’t in the current versions:

https://starwarsviscomp.com/2021/02/27/the-lost-art-of-star-wars/

I also bought a few URLs:

www.starwarsviscomp.com goes to the site
www.releasetheoriginaltrilogy.com goes to my “What We Want” article
www.starwars77.com forwards to the WIRED article

jarbear said:

This is really great, I can’t believe I missed your post about the drive. I was more than happy to chip in.

I look forward to your edits.

All of Adywan’s update posts are also shared on the Wordpress in my signature, so people can keep up!

It was williarob, not poita, my bad.

It’s over on the 4K77 forums.

Mike O said:

Is the leaked X-Box version just the N64 game re-skinned?

Pretty much, yeah. It was going to be like Halo Anniversary, where you could switch back and forth between graphics on the fly.