hairy_hen

Would it be possible (/easy) to just integrate the dialog changes, hairy_hen?

This is actually the hardest part, for two reasons.  The first is that the only source for the alternate lines is the mono mix itself; and given that it is, well, mono, it has everything else mixed in with it as well.  Getting relatively clean copies of the dialog out of that might be possible—the Spectral Repair tool in iZotope RX 3 is really amazing, though this isn't really what it was designed for and it would be tedious and difficult at best.

The second reason is that the only mix of the film with the dialog confined entirely to the center channel is the DVD/Bluray version.  Obviously when it comes to upmixing stereo tracks as I have done, there will be crosstalk between channels, and thus removing dialog to replace it with something else doesn't work.  But when I investigated a while ago, I discovered that even the discrete 5.1 of the 1997 mix has some overlap of the dialog into the L and R channels, which means it was that way on the original 4-track master it was sourced from.  Thus in either method clean replacement of the dialog is pretty much out of the question without resorting to the terrible later remix for those sections, or trying to somehow remake them from scratch.

Because of this, any such thing would have to focus primarily on including sound effects from the mono mix, rather than dialog.

The stereo foreign music and effects track has most of the changes.

What track is this?

That's exactly what I said: they'll do it if they think there's money in it.  My concern is that they will deem it as having a negligible impact on their profits, and therefore not worth bothering with.

Does anyone really think that ticket sales for the new movies will be affected in any way by whether the original versions are available in stores?  Or that the amount of toys sold will be influenced by this?  Children buying toys today do not know or care whether Han shot first or not.  It makes no difference to them; therefore it makes no difference to Disney.  An official release could happen, but it would take a lot of persuading by people on the inside who have sufficient clout and can make a convincing case for it.  They're not going to do it on their own, because that's not the reason they bought the Star Wars brand.

I think Ghostbusters 2 is great.  Far from being a cheap knockoff of the original, it is well written and takes the story in an interesting and unexpected direction.  There's a lot to love about it: the funny parts are just as funny as the first film (possibly even more so), the scary parts are scarier, and the theme of stealing the baby gives it a dramatic weight the first movie lacked.  Add to that a significant increase in the quality of both special effects and audio mixing compared to the first movie, and it adds up to be a compelling and highly watchable film in its own right.

I've enjoyed Ghostbusters 2 for many years, and still do.  I had no idea other people didn't feel the same way until I looked it up online a few years ago and found a plethora of negativity directed towards it, which baffles me greatly.  I suspect that the increased focus of the script on realistic character interactions and dramatic storytelling is, for many, irreconcilably at odds with the tone of the first movie, which never took itself seriously for a minute.  This is perhaps understandable, but ultimately missing the point.

All of this is dependent upon the futile assumption that Disney actually gives a crap.

They don't.

The only reason they would ever release the original versions is if it made financial sense: that is, if someone were able to persuade them they stood to make a lot of money by doing so.  Given that anything they put out will make lots of money simply by having the name 'Star Wars' on it, regardless of whether or not it's any good, the likelihood of them bothering becomes vanishingly small.

They have no stake whatsoever in whether people like a particular version or not, because as far as they're concerned, they don't have to bother to do anything at all to make a profit at this point.  The work has already been done, from their point of view.  Clearly, alienating a percentage of longtime fans isn't something they're concerned about, given the way they annihilated all the post-RotJ stories that have ever been published in the past two decades.  They cater to the mainstream who don't know or don't care about such things, and that's all.

It saddens me to see people continually getting their hopes up about all this, only to have them repeatedly and inevitably dashed.  At this point, fan preservation efforts are the best we'll be able to watch for the forseeable future; and given the level of quality that has been achieved recently, it's not hard to be content with that.  The only reason to care about official releases anymore is for the sake of people who don't know about such things, and for posterity.

You know what the funniest part of all is?

After having made such a fuss about only the 35mm stereo mix being the original version, and saying so in the description of the upload . . . the only audio track that video contains is the 70mm version.

*facepalm*

Epic Fail on so many levels . . .

I'm keeping them as close to how they were composed as I can, within the limits of what can be done while maintaining synch to the picture.  I'm making an effort to avoid rough/jarring edits if at all possible.

I've already managed to get the probe droid launch and imperial fleet cues synched up—given the extreme changes in timing from the final film for those scenes, editing them to match up while still sounding musical was no easy task, I can tell you.  But they came out better than I expected, so I'm happy.  I just realized that ABC's tracks seem to be running at too slow a speed compared to the film itself, so I'll have to account for that in order to keep everything lined up.

Edit: looks like the speed issue is more complicated than I thought, so it's gonna have to be corrected manually for each cue.  Dang . . . well then, Elastic Audio, here I come.

The real story of the Clone Wars is what Timothy Zahn laid out as the backstory for the Thrawn trilogy: that the Old Republic fleet fought against an army of insane clones who were trying to take over the galaxy about 35 years before the events of the first movie.  Mysterious, unnamed 'clonemasters' were responsible for growing the endless hordes of insane duplicates, and Palpatine was also involved to some extent, using it to his advantage to consolidate his political power.

However, the Clone Wars ended 15 years before he declared himself Emperor, so they were not directly tied to the fall of the Old Republic: the chaos they left in their wake set the stage for him to take over in the following years.

It probably won't happen, but I would dearly love for this story to be told in written form someday.  The way I see it, this is what happened prior to the original films in their unaltered form; while the Lucas version of events is what happened prior to the SE's.  These are two distinctly different universes and have nothing to do with each other in any way.  In this original universe, neither Boba Fett nor the stormtroopers are clones of anyone else.

I have given thought to putting something like this together, but it would be quite difficult to pull off convincingly.  I don't think it's possible to integrate all of the changes in the mono mix into the six-track—there are too many ways in which the mono version was remixed differently for that to actually work.  Also, there are many additions for which there is probably no clean source that doesn't have other things mixed in with it, so they can't be separated out well enough.  But a hybrid, which sounds like the 70 for the most part but has some mono changes here and there, would certainly be possible.

Really, there are two different methods that could be used for something like this.  One is to keep it completely in upmixed stereo form the way it is now, just leaving in the '93 sound effects that came from the mono as well as splicing in bits from other sources.  The other would be to use the '97 mix (which has many mono mix effects in it already) in discrete 5.1 as the main source, deleting the SE changes that don't belong.  The latter method would be considerably more difficult in some ways, but possibly easier in others.  Currently, I am unable to decide which would yield better results (with 'better' being a highly subjective term in this case, since we're no longer preserving original mixes but instead delving into the realm of personal preference), so I've never made any attempt to start such a project.

I only like some of the changes in the mono version.  For example, C-3PO's extra line about the tractor beam is one I don't mind (I grew up listening to the '85 mix, which has this line in it), but "close the blast doors" annoys me every time I hear it.  In one of the above methods, it would stay in; but in the other, it certainly would not.  Maybe I should just do them both, to make things even more confusing.  ;)

Undoubtedly, but it might make the group's desired anonymity somewhat difficult.

You know what?  I wasn't going to do this, but since I have the most recent version of ABC's score restoration, I'm going to assemble a GOUT-synched isolated score from that, starting right now.

The sound quality of his latest effort is better than what's on the existing edited version, so it will be worthwhile.  Assuming I don't run into any unexpected difficulty, it shouldn't take long to complete.

35mm stereo mix is now finished, aside from final quality check.

Well, the negative doesn't have any soundtrack attached to it.  The mix would have been recorded onto reels of multitrack tape running in synch with the picture (not the actual negative but a copy, to reduce physical wear and tear), which were then put through further processing and duped onto printmasters for each film format the movie was due to be released in.  The 4-track most likely exists as audio only, without any actual film being attached to it.

As a point of interest, the 4-track was also the main source for the 1997 Special Edition mix.  If you listen to any part of the movie that hasn't been re-edited or had additional sound effects piled on top of it, you can hear that it is extremely similar to the 35mm stereo and 70mm versions.  Because of this, it makes for a much better listening experience than the DVD or Bluray (which are outright terrible).

I don't know exactly what else Harmy has left to do on the visual side, but I'm in the process of finalizing what I deem to be the best possible version of Empire's 35mm stereo mix.

I'd never spent much time listening to it until recently (the video tape I watched as a kid was the '93 version), but I've definitely developed an appreciation for it.  The difference in quality between it and the '93 mix is less pronounced by far than it is for the first movie, and it certainly makes for a worthy choice of soundtrack to watch the movie with.  I still have a few things to straighten out in terms of achieving GOUT-synch, since the early laserdiscs were missing so many frames at reel changes, and the audio is prone to changing speed in these areas, making for noticeable jump cuts and loss of synch.  But it's close to being done.

Also, the new 5.1 mix is virtually complete, requiring only final listening tests to ensure quality before I render it out.  Various timing issues with the LFE channel from the previous version have been corrected, meaning that the bass is now much more tightly locked to the soundtrack as a whole.  Everything is just more polished this time, and I'm really looking forward to seeing it paired with the improved visuals of this new edition.  ;)

As I said above, they worked on the 4-track master first.

That is the original mix.

Both the 35mm stereo and 70mm 6-track versions were then largely copied from it, with some changes in presentation made to each, mainly for technical reasons.  The metaphor of twins is an apt one in this case, since they were completed within a very short time of each other.  The only reason they weren't done simultaneously is that it wasn't physically possible to print more than one mix at a time with the equipment the mixers had available.

If you really want to hear the actual, true first mix of the film, you'd need to go to LFL and pull out the 4-track master tape and listen to that.  This would be the only way to hear the 'most original' copy of their work, if overly specific definitions are to be used.  It would sound very similar to the stereo mix except with discrete channels and an unrestricted dynamic range.  (But no bass.)  The stereo version is a compromise derived from this master, made in order to accommodate the limitations of a delivery format which could not contain the full mix in its entirety.

Rumor has it that some 35mm prints were actually made in 4-track magnetic format.  This would yield a sound closer to the source, but it still wouldn't have been as powerful as the 70mm, owing to the slower speed of the film going through the projector (in analog sound, slower speed equals lesser fidelity), and the lack of dedicated bass tracks.

In the end, arguing over strict originality is silly, because no released version is completely identical to what was first put on tape.  It becomes a question of which do you value more: the fact that one printmaster was finalized a day or two before the next, or that one of the mixes retains the superior sound quality and power of the source and is further optimized for that purpose?  The fact is that both the 35mm stereo and 70mm 6-track versions were heard in theatres on the film's opening day of May 25, 1977.  Both were sourced from the same master copy.  Neither is entirely the same as the version they were derived from.  Both mixes provide a great aural experience for the film, depending what kind of sound system you have and what its capabilities are.  How much more 'original' could you possibly get?  

(The mono mix doesn't really apply to this discussion, since it was remixed entirely from scratch and didn't appear in theatres until a month later.  Sam Shaw, who is credited as the film's Supervising Sound Editor, didn't even work on that version.  The multitude of changes make it the earliest example of revisionism in the film's long history of being altered.  Nonetheless it was part of the theatrical run and the only mix heard by many people at the time, so it 'partially' counts.)

At any rate, the really remarkable thing about all this is that we've been able to preserve or approximate a great deal of the work that was done on the film back then, allowing it to be seen and heard at a quality level that was unthinkable even a few years ago.  Recognizing that the goal of somehow achieving a perfect, 100% authentic most original ever version is an ephemeral one at best, given its history, being able to sit back and watch the movie without being frustrated by shortcomings in presentation is a pretty great feeling.  Let's not lose sight of the fact that this is ultimately the reason why we're here in the first place.  ;)

The 35mm stereo mix was most likely the first to be completed, since it contains the least number of sound effects compared to other versions, and may have required the most testing in order to ensure its technical compatibility.  However, it and the 70mm six-track would have been created at virtually the same time, since the actual original mix was not the stereo version itself, but a four-track master from which both the stereo and 70mm mixes were derived.

The stereo would have been created by downmixing the four-track into a matrixed LtRt, with peak limiting applied to fit it into the reduced headroom of the optical format, and the panning width reduced somewhat to avoid excessive crosstalk between channels when upmixed again during playback.  The 70mm version contained the four discrete channels but with unrestricted dynamic range, and with the addition of bass content in the other two channels generated by a subharmonic synthesizer in order to bolster the impact of explosions and spaceship flybys.  A very small number of additional sound effects (four, by my count) were added to the 70mm that are not present in the 35mm stereo, but for all intents and purposes they are virtually the same mix, simply optimized for different presentation formats.  Listening to either will serve you well, depending what kind of sound system you have.

The Bluray master is 1080p in number of pixels, but somewhat closer to 720p in actual visible detail.  Therefore, downscaling it to 720p results in little to no loss of detail in presentation.

Note however that the Bluray is still significantly sharper than these 35mm print scans, due to generation loss.

The inescapable logic here is that 720p is entirely adequate as a final distribution format for this project as well, and that anything higher would simply result in larger file sizes without actual increase in quality.  Obviously, all the work would be done at much higher resolution than this to maintain quality throughout the restoration process, but as the final step of making an actual product for distribution, it is doubtful that converting to 720p will result in any significant loss of visible information.  The benefit of manageable file sizes for download certainly also points to this as an attractive option.

To make an analogy with audio, we typically record music at 24-bit resolution and mix at 32-bit floating point so that the digital processing is done with maximum accuracy.  But for final distribution, reducing to 16-bit as the very last step allows for the earlier quality to be retained with minimal loss of perceived detail (with the caveat that proper dither must be applied in order for the conversion to be audibly transparent).

I really don't think there is a new scan at all.  I think it is just the same 2004 master, but taken from a copy that has something closer to the correct colors, before they got screwed up.  This non-crappy version was then upconverted to 4k and further work done on it for the 3D release that didn't happen.

Maybe they'll do something with it in the future, maybe they won't.  At this point it's impossible to say.  But one thing's for sure: any hypothetical release of the unaltered versions is entirely unrelated to this.

From the appearance of the lightsabers and their associated flashes, I think this is still essentially the 2004 master, but a 'non-screwed-up' version of it: what the scan looked like before its color and contrast were later ruined.  It could have been upscaled to higher resolution to do additional work more recently.

Or, it could be a new scan initially made for 3D re-release, with the '04 changes put back into it.  Either way, the quality will surely be better than anything currently available, so if it gets a Bluray release, it will make a good source for improved Despecialized Editions later on (in combination with Team -1 scans of the original shots).  I'm not convinced there's really more to be excited about than that, though I suppose there's a vague possibility of them making a branching version that follows the original edit by taking out the most obvious changes.

Hmm . . .

Layers of film grain have been intentionally added to the special effects to simulate how they would have appeared originally.  This is due to the multiple levels of optical compositing and duplication required to print the effects onto film: the special effects shots always appeared softer and more grainy than the rest because of this.  Note that this is true of any movie made before the use of CGI came to dominate the visual effects industry, not just the SW films.

The Special Editions eliminated much of this by recombining the separate effects layers digitally, but the Despecialized Editions seek to recreate the appearace of the movies as they were first released, and this includes the emulation of certain film characteristics inherent to the physical processes used to make them.

It may take a bit of getting used to if you aren't accustomed to seeing it, but I find it refreshing to watch the movies this way since it 'feels' more authentic: it's a subtle way of undoing the damage the SE's have caused, and of further differentiating these versions from them.

Funnily enough, I actually feel like some parts (namely, the digital recomposites that have been left in) could stand to have some additional grain added to them.  ;)

That DVD shot of the uniforms looks ridiculous.

As for the new 'lost in the snow' scene, I think he pretty much nailed it this time.  The workprint was too washed out and dulled down, since as he said before, the 2004 transfer is monochromatic and smears a huge amount of blue over everything, so when you desaturate that part of the image, the whole thing becomes flat.  This time, it can plainly be seen that the colour and contrast of the characters has had much more life breathed into it, allowing them to stand out against the background.  It now looks more 'real', if that makes sense; and the new colours form an ideal compromise between the 1993 and 1997 versions.  I heartily approve!

Harmy, I'm curious as to how you managed to deal with the characters and backgrounds separately, so they didn't affect each other.  How was this accomplished?

That does make sense, of course.  I can only go by what I see, which is that the purple looks strange and out of place; and by the fact that the GOUT is a highly flawed transfer, which I do not trust even when its inconsistencies are evened out.  It can be easily inferred that the source from which it was made did not contain an accurate record of the original colour timing—one only need look at the arrival on Bespin scene to know that, since the various film prints show this scene being very orange, while the GOUT has absolutely no trace of this orange tint.  It may well have come from an earlier generation source than what ended up on the film prints, and so is lacking certain post-production choices that were made later.  There is also the possibility that the colours may have been deliberately altered in 1993: this was the case for the sunset scene in the first movie, after all.

Now, without a reliable a colour reference as you had for the first movie, it is of course very difficult to say for sure what the 'real' colours ought to be.  But since the GOUT is problematic, and other sources sometimes disagree with it, I do think some leeway of interpretation is called for, in the places where following it too closely yields a strange-looking result.  Purple Hoth just looks weird.  But it's only a small change I'm suggesting for this . . .

I also recognize that all this has to be done within the context of the 2004 transfer, which is itself highly flawed and may not be fully receptive to manipulation without contorting into a strange appearance itself.  I'm pretty amazed that it came out looking as good as it did, actually.  

Anyway, most of this is subtle stuff—by and large it's looking fantastic.  ;)

I think you'll have to pull the red saturation down by a greater amount than that, since the faded film from which the GOUT was derived was already starting to become red-shifted at the time it was scanned.

Also, judging the whole movie by one level of red throughout isn't necessarily reliable, because it is likely to be inconsistent as to which shots are more faded and red-shifted, and which ones are not.

Puggo Grande isn't a totally accurate source either for a variety of reasons (it pushes blue entirely too much throughout the movie, for one thing), but even taking this into account, certain aspects of the original colour timing seem to be retained.  Having just watched some it, I would say that the scenes of Luke lost in the snow should have their blue levels saturated a little bit more—not much, but a little—and the red dialed back somewhat.  A subtle shift in each of these should combine to make the purple tint go away, and the scene come closer to what its original appearance probably was.

It does seem to me that the only shots in which Hoth's snow should have any significant blue saturation are the ones where Luke is lost, since it is intended to be colder and darker during this time.  The amount of it ought to be less than Puggo Grande (and way, way less than the SE), but a bit more so than it currently is.  By no means should this be taken to mean that each shot should be totally consistent with each other, as I'm quite certain that the original prints were nearly as variable on this matter as on the Death Star interior in the first movie.

Since I've always been extremely aware of the way things sound all my life, I instantly noticed the change in timbre of R2's beeping the first time I watched RotJ.  It confused me then, and I still don't understand it now.  The ones from the first two films sound better.

Part of it does seem to be the somehow more 'childish' tone, and the increased speed.  I suspect it also has something to do with the electronic means used to process it.  Different equipment may have been used for the third film, and possibly also different choices in EQ.

I also am watching this in VLC on a Mac, so it's difficult to freeze-frame it accurately, but eventually I was able to find the exact frame numbers to be removed: 150,206 and 150,207.

Assuming there hasn't been some sort of error, that should correct the synch issue.  Unfortunately, as Laserschwert pointed out, PAL-sourced audio tracks may now lose synch at this spot, and would be delayed from the video by a corresponding amount.  The delay likely won't be as much of a problem as being ahead of the picture, since sound travels slower than light and we're already used to experiencing that in real life, but nonetheless solving one problem does create another in this case.  However, since PAL audio would have to be slowed down to synch with 23.976 fps video anyway, this provides an opportunity to correct for the synch error as an additional step at the same time as the conversion process.

In any event, being able to use the same audio tracks for multiple video projects simplifies the matter greatly, rather than having to make additional versions.

It occurs to me that I don't have a GOUT-synched copy of the 1980 stereo mix, so now that the synch issue has been decided, I guess I'll just go ahead and make one myself.  Thank goodness for schorman13's laserdisc audio archive!

Okay, there's actually a more significant problem than anything about corners or even colors, and this is gonna have to be decided before anything else can really get done.

Jorel81 PM'd me to let me know there was an audio synch error at the end of the movie—I checked it closely and he's totally right; beginning at 01:44:18 (approximately frame 150,210 or thereabouts) the audio is no longer in synch with the video, but is consistently too early.  According to this post, the NTSC version of the GOUT is missing two frames compared to the PAL version.  I can't see the pictures in the post anymore, but I remember that it is the last two frames of the shot where Luke jumps off the platform to follow Vader—this is a reel change, if I remember correctly.  Because the audio is synched to the NTSC, but the video is being made with reference to the PAL, this means the two are no longer aligned for the last 20 minutes of the film.  All the sound is happening in advance of the picture, which is unnatural and obviously incorrect.

This PAL vs NTSC time discrepancy also showed up in RotJ, but there it was more noticeable because it affected a much longer section of the movie, creating obvious lip synch errors in dialogue scenes.  Since there isn't as much talking at the end of ESB, perhaps it's not surprising this error has so far passed unnoticed.  I actually do recall somewhat noticing this previously, and now that I've investigated the matter more thoroughly, I'm never going to be able to unsee it.  This has to be fixed before any release can take place . . . but the question is, how do we fix it?

This is actually a conversation I've had with dark_jedi concerning future releases of RotJ, and since he uses my audio tracks on his versions as well, he should also weigh in for this.  The easiest thing to do would be simply to chop out the extra frames to make the video match the NTSC version of the GOUT.  This way, any audio track that has been synched to the NTSC can simply be dropped in and will work without any additional labor being required.  However, the two frames are a legitimate part of the film, and the NTSC is technically 'wrong' to have dropped them, so if you want to get 'purist' about it, they should be left in . . .

Keep in mind that it is common for frames to be dropped at reel changes on both theatrical prints and home video telecines, which is why the reels are chosen to begin and end in places where this would be unobtrusive.  Without a comparison between them, you'd probably never notice that one was slightly shorter than the other.  If Harmy wants to keep the frames, then all the audio tracks he plans on including will go out of synch if they were made with reference to the NTSC, and will require realignment to fix this issue (which will then make them incompatible with other video releases).  Editing the video is by far the easiest solution.  I can edit some of the audio to match the PAL video instead if need be, but for reasons of compatibility and the potential confusion this could cause, it may not be the best choice to do so.

What, you think Vader would feel like he had to tell all the peons that he was gonna be on the Death Star with the Emperor instead of hanging around on the Executor?  Why would he bother to do that?  Admiral Piett had the situation in hand as far as he was concerned.  I don't see any reason why the second in command of one unimportant Star Destroyer would need to know there was a conversion to the dark side going on at the same time as the battle . . .