hairy_hen

I don't think Tarkin is Vader's boss.  Lucas seems to have done a strange re-interpretation of his own movies lately, whereby he thinks that Vader is forced to play a sort of pathetic subordinate role, but that comes from viewing it through the lens of the prequels where he's supposedly been 'degraded' and can't live up to his potential.  In the intention of the original films I don't see it that way at all—far from 'taking orders' from Tarkin, they're both important enough so as to be on approximately equal footing.

Just listen when Tarkin tells him to stop strangling the guy: I'm sure I'm not imagining the indifferent shrug in Vader's voice when he agrees.  That's not the tone of someone obeying a superior, it's acquiescence to the request of a colleague.  It makes no difference whether he lived or died; he just had to be taught a lesson.  Notice too that Tarkin didn't intercede until it seemed that things were starting to go too far: if he were really completely in charge, he wouldn't have let it go on as long as he did.

Well, I decided that I'll be doing the LFE channel over again essentially from scratch, so that's the thing I've been the most concerned about recently.  I'm using the in-theatre recording as a rough guide, but it's still entirely subject to my creative judgement.  The recording isn't a very reliable source, since it's filled with acoustic oddities and the fidelity isn't at all what I'd like, but it's enough to give a general idea what it should sound like, at least for the stronger parts.

This time I'm taking more care to ensure that the LFE is timed exactly right.  Before I tended to get a little lazy about it when the synch discrepancies were small enough not to be noticed easily, but since I'm having another go it might as well be improved in that sense.  I'm also re-evaluating some of my decisions about which source to use for each particular bass effect.  The '97 mix is getting used even more often this time, since despite only having a lossy source the tonal quality of its bass is usually much more pleasing to my ear: the '93, though usually closer to the original, tends to be a bit thick and boomy when amplified, and the '04 is often toneless and dull.

I'm also making even more effort to ensure that the bass blends with the main channels.  This can mean adjusting the timing to match, even after they've already been synched, and in some places I've split certain bass effects apart into segments and adjusted their volume levels individually (crossfading them back together to avoid jump-cuts).  The reason for this is that sometimes getting a good average level will result in peaks that go too high, since the SE bass can correspond to additions that weren't in the original (and also I think they went a little nuts and pumped the bass too far where it wasn't needed, while neglecting the parts that do need a strong response.)  Just for the heck of it, I also silenced all the gaps where the LFE isn't used in order to completely eliminate any noise in those parts, although that wouldn't really be noticeable anyway since the channel has an upper limit of 120 hz.

I have the LFE channels from the Bluray mixes, which theoretically would provide an improvement in sound quality in the places they're usable, but to be honest I haven't actually worked with them yet since I noticed that all the loudest bass is pushed up to the point of clipping.  The peaks aren't chopped too horribly, so I doubt anyone would really notice, but I can't bring myself to put something like that in there, "lossless" or not.  I can still use them in all the parts that aren't clipped, but it's annoying enough that I have not as of yet had the patience to do anything with them aside from converting to 16-bit.

Real life tends to kill my motivation lately, but I'd really like to get the new 70mm track done in the next couple weeks if possible.  As I've said before, on the whole it will differ only subtly from the existing version, since I think I got it mostly right to begin with, but I'm pleased with what I've been able to do so far.

Let me just pop in and say that I'm really glad efforts are being made to replicate the missing frames in the Greedo scene, because as the guy doing the 5.1 audio, I will not ever be convinced to alter the mix to accommodate the flaws of the SE.  These things are designed for GOUT-synch and that's final.  ;)

Although delays are frustrating for sure, in a way I'm actually sort of glad to hear that it will take a bit longer, because that gives me more time to work on the revised 70mm mix.  This time I want to go all out and make it resemble the real thing as much as possible, so now I can perfect it some more and still have it ready in time to be included on this project.

I haven't been able to check out all the videos yet, but from the screenshots it looks like the latest version of the subtitles is definitely on the right track with its slightly narrower and more rounded look.  I was able to view the most recent clip of the duel, and while previously I felt that the colours were problematic and made the different sources stand out from each other too much, they're looking much more seamless and better quality this time around.  Excellent work on that!

Interesting . . .

Sort of makes me wonder if the 1993 mix of ESB could actually be an exact reflection of a possible 'revised' 70mm version.  It is said to have been taken from a 4-track master with non-limited dynamic range, and since it matches up with the 35mm edit of the film it seems possible that this is where that might have come from.  This 4-track master cannot be an earlier version of the 35mm mix itself, because there are a few minor differences from that, most noticeably the missing snowspeeder crash sound, and also a few changes in blaster and explosion levels during the battle.

So . . . could it be?  Was the snowspeeder sound actually missing from later 70mm theatrical prints, and this error got carried over to the 1993 version?  Whether true or not it's still an unintentional mistake, of course, but it's a possibility worth considering.

Awesome!  I'd better make sure the soundtrack is finished in time to go along with it.  ;)

As msycamore pointed out, the Lucasfilm marketing division has a vested interest in making it seem as though their latest revisions represent a vast improvement over what the film used to be.  George himself is convinced that everything he changes is somehow automatically made better, because he is delusionally incapable of understanding how magnificent the film already was to begin with, so naturally his company will advertise this kind of propaganda without regard to objective fact.  Their biased pronouncements cannot be treated as infallible authority.

Hoffman's observations are entirely valid, because aside from slightly lesser fidelity due to generation loss, nothing about hearing the 70mm mix on a theatrical print will be different in any way than listening to the printmaster.  The enormously powerful dynamics are all there, and completely unequalled by the remix since that was run through a peak limiter.  I'm sure they do think they managed to improve the sound quality, but I find that a dubious claim at best.  I have the 1997 mix in 5.1 as captured from laserdisc by Darth Editous, and when I play it back to back, level-matched, with the 1993 version (which as I said was taken mainly from the 70mm printmaster), there's just no comparison.  The EQ of the reissue makes it sound tinny and small, while the original is robust and strong.  And just to clarify, this has absolutely nothing to do with AC3 compression versus lossless PCM, because it strikes me the same way even on the GOUT dvd.

There's a lot of subjectivity to this kind of thing, obviously, but I really think that in the course of making their "improvements", what they really managed to do was rob the audio track of some of the very qualities that made it sound so good in the first place.  This is completely consistent with the kind of mentality that would drive them to make hackneyed CGI inserts that do not match up at all with the surrounding footage, or any of the other ludicrously awful things that have been foisted on the films of late.

Who to believe, let me see: Steve Hoffman, one of the most respected names in the audio world . . . or Rick McCallum, Lucasfilm sycophant extraordinaire?

This is even a question?

Let's clear up some facts here.  Contrary to what some seem to believe, Star Wars actually had an incredibly powerful sound in its original form.  Whenever anyone disparages it in that way, their comments only apply to the 35mm versions of the soundtrack.  Due to technological limitations, the frequency response and dynamic range of the stereo and mono mixes was indeed quite limited, and since the vast majority of theatres had prints featuring these tracks, it's not surprising that the SE mix would be received positively in comparison.  But that's not what I'm talking about: I refer specifically to the six-channel mix that was designed for use on 70mm prints.  Only a few of these were ever produced, played in high-end theatres in major cities, but it was by far the best-sounding version of the film ever made.

I shall air a comment from Mike Minkler, who worked on the audio:

http://www.mixonline.com/recording/interviews/audio_mike_minkler/index.html

The entire concept of including separate tracks for bass content in fact originated with the 70mm version of Star Wars.  It was the first movie that ever had such a mix, and people fortunate enough to have seen it this way speak fondly of the Star Destroyer's opening flyby in particular.  Sure, there were still limitations involved, since most theatres wouldn't have installed dedicated subwoofers until later that year, and the rear channel was monaural since stereo surrounds were not yet included in the 70mm format.  We're not talking about the kind of enormous, ubiquitous bass found in recent films like The Dark Knight, obviously—but it was definitely there, and it was definitely strong.  To say otherwise is to just demonstrably false.

Unfortunately, none of this played any part in the creation of the SE, because most of that mix was taken from a 4-track master and then dynamically limited, robbing it of much of its power.  The bass content was created over again from scratch (the 4-track master didn't have it), often to a decidedly lesser effect.  The beginning in particular suffers, as the Star Destroyer's bass is only barely audible and could not be called "thunderous" (to use Minkler's term) by any stretch of the imagination.  Other parts of the SE do have more punch, but most of these correspond to places where the movie was changed and new elements added.

One need only listen to the 1993 laserdisc track, which was sourced from the 70mm printmaster, to hear the enormously powerful dynamic range of the original.  Compared to that, the SE is a tinny, shrunken, and overly-hissy shadow of what the film's real sound is supposed to be.  Why they didn't base it on the 70mm version is something I can't for the life of me understand, but I can only surmise that everyone at Lucasfilm somehow forgot that it even existed.  But then, seeing how allergic to quality they've become, perhaps it's not surprising that they would think something so obviously inferior was really an improvement.

To be fair, some parts of the 1997 mix do sound pretty good.  Certainly it's a million times better than the garbage remix we got in 2004.  But on the whole, the 70mm version is so far ahead of it that there's really no comparison.

Thanks to HH, it turns out that's easy to do!  But I'm sure Rick might be right about other things.

Keep in mind, of course, that my version is only a recreation, not the real thing.  But I do think most of it is very close to what it was.  ;)

The SE mix, better than the 70mm?  Don't make me laugh.  The '97 mix is very dynamically shrunken compared to the 70mm version, and often sounds tinny and weak in general.  It's not nearly as bad as the 2004 version, of course, because it's still recognisable, but it's really not that good a lot of the time.

Steve Hoffman, who got to see a good condition 70mm print a few years ago, agrees with me.  http://www.stevehoffman.tv/forums/archive/index.php/t-141011.html

I tend to find it pretty difficult to describe in concrete terms exactly what's wrong with the 2004 mix, because it's so impossibly screwed up and unrecognisable that I don't even know where to begin.  It's like the sound effects are all muddled and mushed together somehow, and there's no breathing room to distinguish them from anything else.  To me it sounds as though they utterly killed the high frequencies, probably as a way of overcompensating for tape hiss, and boosted the low end to an absurd level.  If you play the original mix through an EQ with the bass all the way up and the treble all the way down, it starts to resemble the remix.  (Note that I'm not talking about the really low bass found in an LFE channel, I mean the higher bass registers in the main channels.)

TServo is quite correct in calling it 'unfocused', because there's really no balance between the different elements.  Listen to the hallway shootout in particular, and try to find the 'rhythm' of the laser battle.  Guess what: it isn't there.  In the original, the different types of laser sounds coming from the rebels and the stormtroopers have a sort of back and forth going on, reflecting the camera angle and the position of the characters onscreen.  In a way you can hear the 'story' of what's happening from which sound effects are dominant at each particular moment.  In the remix, the rhythm is gone and the 'story' of it is indistinguishable.  Background tracks for characters firing their blasters from farther away are mixed at exactly the same level as those in the foreground (ie, far too loud), meaning that everything becomes jumbled and indistinguishable.

The shrunken dynamics and muffled EQ are particularly obvious in the explosion of the wall when the stormtroopers appear.  When Vader enters the rebel ship, that awesome rumbling wind sound in the original is just completely gone.

During the flyby, numerous laser and explosion sounds were added that don't correspond to anything seen onscreen, again interrupting the rhythm, and the original sound effects are mistreated.  Some of the lasers are actually out of synch, occurring over a second earlier than they should, and their corresponding visible blasts are silent.  Other sounds, such as the impacts from the blockade runner scoring hits on the Star Destroyer, are simply missing altogether.  The music isn't really at a bad level here, but it is often shrill and harsh and definitely does not integrate with the rest of the mix.

These kinds of problems recur throughout the movie, making the entire thing an unsalvageable waste, but the beginning suffers from the most extravagant screw-ups.  Elsewhere, the music is often muted to a low level, but is selectively brought up and down in a very obvious way, often corresponding to changes in camera angle.  I haven't heard the Bluray mix, but from looking at the waveform of the LFE channel and from comments others have made, I'd be prepared to bet that it's almost identical to the dvd except for a few tweaks.  It really is a shame that the vast majority of the public can only hear Star Wars by means of this colossal sonic failure, and that most of them won't even know anything's wrong.  It is analogous to the visual problems of the 2004 transfer: superficially it might seem great at first, but take a closer look and all the absurd flaws become painfully obvious.  Sure, the mix is loud, and it's in 5.1 EX, so uneducated home theatre snobs will drool over it while turning their noses at the originals for being in an older format, but should we all eat crap just because a trillion flies can't be wrong?

Anyway—I'm finally going to have more time, so I can get back to work on the new 70mm track.  I won't make an exact estimate on when it'll be finished, but I'll try to get through it as soon as I can.  As I've said before, the improvements over the existing version are subtle, but worthwhile.  I'm still considering the possibility of an alternate version, which would retain a few '93 additions and add some mono mix elements, and possibly a couple of minor surround effects from the '97 SE.

Aside from Stinky's pubic contribution, adding dirt and hair is a definite NO in my book.

A small amount of grain, maybe . . . but only in sections that have had more grain removed than in others, if there are any.  (Such as special effects shots, perhaps.)

Excellent work, again!

The melted bars thing really baffles me.  Presumably that was an actual on-set explosion and not a special effect added in post-production, right?  So why did somebody take it upon themselves to think it was not good enough?  Is this a case of "Reality Is Unrealistic"?  (as they say on TVTropes)  Somebody thought what was actually photographed didn't measure up to their conception of what it ought to look like, even though that's what it actually did look like?  And for just a couple of frames nobody would notice on their own?  What the heck is that about?

I don't think that will work.  Inverting one of the channels will cause everything centrally panned to cancel out, not just the dialogue, so a lot of sound effects will go missing and an accurate comparison becomes impossible.  Trying to combine different mixes this way will cause a strange warbling and distortion effect since the synch, imaging, and EQ will not match up exactly, making the whole thing unlistenable.

Unfortunately I haven't had much time to work on this recently, so nothing new to relate, but I hope to get back to it soon.

Just for fun, however, I put together a little comparison between the original mix and the 2004 version.  I've often gone on at length about how the remix is a pile of unlistenable rubbish, so for anyone who's interested, you'll be able to hear them side by side and understand what I'm talking about.

I used the beginning of the movie since to me it is the most objectionable part of the whole thing.  The original has an open sound with strong dynamics, while the remix is flat and dull with little tonal variation, and seems almost muffled enough to have been recorded through a blanket.  See if you can tell which is which.  ;)

Star Destroyer flyby: http://www.megaupload.com/?d=FAP7N1BE

Stormtrooper shootout: http://www.megaupload.com/?d=5JR2NWAN

These images look quite good so far.  It seems like you've really locked in on exactly what sort of manipulation was done to the colours and contrast, and undone it as precisely as could be hoped for with general settings.  Of course, many shots would still need individual correction, due to things like desaturated laser blasts and intentional colour changes—for example, the red on the blockade runner was a dark shade of maroon in the original version, while even with the correction it still shows up as bright red due to the 2004 change.

Looking forward to seeing what else you can accomplish with this.  Is there a way to replicate these settings with AviSynth?  I'd be very interested in that.

Subs look nice, and darkening Vader in the hallway is quite good.  Can't believe I never noticed that before, but the 2004 version looks utterly ridiculous.  It's completely out of character with the photography, and unrealistic for it to appear that way given the lighting.  The brightened corridor in Echo Base during Han and Leia's argument about him leaving seems like the same kind of thing, though that one I did notice a long time ago.

The 'plastic' look of the 2004 transfer is a subtle yet irritating problem that may not be fixable.  The main issue is that during the cleanup process they took it upon themselves to artificially sharpen parts of the image for some reason (Lowry himself boasts of this in an interview), resulting in imagery that could not possibly have been photographed in such a manner.  Smoke and haze no longer obscure background lights and detail, depth of field is shot to hell, and many things just look somehow wrong and unnatural in ways that are difficult to explain.  Add in the messed up colour timing and wildly fluctuating saturation levels, along with the crushed blacks, and the result is so far removed from what the movie is supposed to look like that even the most earnest and dedicated attempts can only repair some of the damage.  We put up with it for the sake of having a clean and detailed image, as opposed to the jaggies, smearing, and softness of the GOUT, but it's quite sad that every look at the 2004 reveals some new flaw that we just haven't found a way to describe yet.  I'm not very knowledgeable of photography or video at all, but the fact that the so-called "professionals" who made them can't see the problems is completely absurd.

Actually, I'd be interested in having new copies of the '97 mixes in AC3 5.1, as the files I have contain occasional brief dropouts.  Good to hear there are plans for doing that.

I have compared the samples of the '85 mix somewhat, but not yet in great detail.  The only thing that's very noticeable among them is the difference in mastering levels.  The Technidisc audio averages about 3 db lower than the 1993 mix most of the time, but it is the loudest of the lot; the other pressings are even lower than that.  I did notice that it runs a bit fast compared to the '93, and that it loses synch with it after only a short time—during an individual scene it would hardly be noticeable, but by the end of a laserdisc side it's more than an entire frame in advance.  I have not yet checked to see whether that is true of the other '85 copies.

In theory the higher level of the Technidisc gives it a lower noise floor, but to be honest I really couldn't make out any significant differences in sound quality between them.  The waveforms show minor dynamic variations, but any differences seem to be virtually inaudible, at least to me (and my admittedly less-than-perfect audio equipment).  If one of the others displayed less discrepancy in playback speed then it would probably be easier to synch to the GOUT, but any version is pretty much guaranteed not to match up without a lot of editing.

One thing to watch out for is that even though the flash frames are no longer pink or purple, the reflected light on the walls of various explosions and so forth usually still is.  In the original the reflections were the same colour as the flashes, and in the SE they are still the same shade as each other, just the wrong shade.  But the Despecialized version now has a strange effect whereby the flashes and reflected light are entirely different colours, which makes them stand out oven more and call greater attention to the incorrectness of certain parts of the colour.

That said, there are still some flashes in the opening corridor shootout that haven't had their colours fixed.

There are no digital copies of the '77 stereo mix on laserdisc.  Belbucus' analogue capture was made with very high quality equipment, so it's probably the best it's ever going to sound short of an official transfer from the master tape.

As for conversion to 48 khz, if this is not done well, much of the advantage of using digital audio will be negated.  While resampling can never retain the same quality level as the original file, the degree of degradation can be vastly reduced with a high quality algorithm.  The iZotope processor (which I have) may well be one of the best ever made.  Very few others can come close—even the ProTools resampler isn't quite as good as that.

If new tracks are going to replace the captures from before, then they deserve to be heard at their best.  If need be, I may be able to help out with this.  ;)

His mouth has always moved as though saying the line, but no pre-1997 mix ever had it.  I never noticed the movement until the SE made it obvious that he was speaking at that point.

Why they chose to include the line or not is unknown, but there's no mistake.

Glad you liked it.  ;)

Turns out I'm going to have to do at least one edit over again, as it didn't actually work as well as I thought.  I suppose I got a little overconfident, forgetting why I'd done it a certain way the first time, but there are some things that just won't work under any circumstances.  Though the improved imaging of the '85 mix allows me to disguise the inserts more easily, other issues like changes in EQ or tape hiss level can still prevent an edit from being seamless, so I have to be really careful about that.  The '85 actually has a lower hiss level than the '93, surprisingly, so obviously it won't do to hear a sudden jump in noise during a switch.

A note of interest: I found another sound effect that was added to the 70mm version that is not present in the 35mm stereo mix.  Just before Han shoots at the garbage monster after they've left the pit (just after Ben has deactivated the tractor beam), the creature makes a high-pitched noise, which is absent from the stereo version.  I'd never paid it much notice before, but when I finally noticed its absence, at first I wondered if it was another '93 addition—but it's definitely there in the theatre recording.

This would seem to cast further doubt and confusion on whether those two surround effects really originated in '93 or were present originally.  Just when I'd made up my mind, things become unclear again.  Blast . . .

I've posted elsewhere that I'm quite certain no remixing was done to ESB or RotJ in 1985.  Everything about them sounds exactly the same as far as I can tell, based on the samples I've heard.

There may have been a bit of remastering done at some point, as some versions show a bit of peak limiting or slightly more range compared to others, but nothing substantial.  I wouldn't even have known it was there without looking at the waveforms.

Changes in mastering level don't make a difference in the scheme of things, since raising or lowering your playback volume will compensate for any discrepancy.  No two laserdisc releases seem to have their tracks recorded at the same level; whether analogue or digital, they're all different from each other in that respect.

Frankly, I'd much rather read about what he's doing for the project over at his site than any of this ridiculous sour grapes bickering.

Sounds great!  It's good all the tracks will be fixed.

I've completed all the main channel edits for SW except the opening flyby, so there's just that and the LFE channel left to be done.

One edit is actually going to be unchanged from the previous version.  For some reason I find the explosion before 3PO gets in the escape pod to sound tinny in the '85 mix, while the '77 stereo track seems a bit more robust, so I'm leaving that one the same as before.

If the audio were delayed compared to the video, it would be less noticeable.  But since the sounds are actually heard in advance of the image, it stands out as unnatural.  It may not slap you around the head and say "THIS AR RONGZOR!!!!!11!" but I surely can see the discrepancy, and not just with voices either.  RotJ does have a bunch of bad lip synch with ADR, but this is a separate issue.

I'm definitely going to try to correct it.

I listened to the recording pretty closely, and those were the only differences I could spot.  Everything else about it sounds exactly the same as the 35mm version in terms of content.

Pretty surprising to me that the error in the cave scene was actually there originally.  That and the laser sound during the battle are things that were fixed for the 35mm, because they seem to be actual mistakes.  However, I don't know why the TIE fighter engine sound would have been removed.

The snowspeeder crash sound effect is definitely there, which makes its absence in the 1993 mix all the more confusing.  I guess they forgot to put it into the 4-track master, but remembered by the time the theatrical stereo went out; but then in '93 they didn't notice that it was gone.

Am I the only one who thinks the 70mm version of the end scene actually plays better, in a way?  It sounds odd to me on one level because I'm so used to how they changed it, but at the same time the line about finding Jabba the Hutt is unnecessary.  Hmm . . .