msycamore

timdiggerm said:

Surely the first question suggests a potential answer to the second?

 So, what's your answer to it then?

timdiggerm said:

Honestly though, at this point, I've read enough about people color correcting things that I am tired of it. He's probably doing a great job, and that's great, but I am no longer excited about such things.

What you're excited about, is the least of our concerns.

Impressive work, NeverarGreat! Fascinating what repairing that can be done on this ugly video master!

BTW, that burning homestead transitional shot should not be pink shifted, no matter what you think. Trust me, it should not ever be compared with the original shot to begin with anyway.

Why do you base your work on dubious photos and why don't you get any support around here? Are they scared?

Indeed, I'll echo what others have already said, thanks for sharing!

So if A New Hope was released at the right time, was Star Wars actually released at the wrong time?

The Matrix was just an anime starring Keanu Reeves, the "bullet-time" was influential yes, but as a film it's nowhere near as influential as Star Wars '77.

That's an awesome avatar, Frink! :)

danny_boy said:

I am not trying to justify anything.

I want to see that hi-def OUT release as much as anyone.

But until that happens(if it ever does) I am more than content to watch it on VHS!(I can understand if a lot of people are not happy with this proposition)

Yeah, it's fine that you are more than content with your '82 Star Wars VHS even if the original film never gets released on a current video format, but that doesn't mean that maybe other Star Wars fans have been obsessed with pixels and picture quality for the last 17 years. It's 2014 now, the last time these films were released on video from a new telecine master was 21 years ago. You know, there's a reason this site was born. Your trolling is not even subtle. I wonder, will your children (if you have any or planning) also be content with that VHS of yours?

danny_boy said:

We also did that at ILM for the transfers of Star Wars and Jedi that I worked on, where they had prints up in the Stag Theater across the hall to use for comparison. At any moment, we could stop and say, "whoa, is that supposed to be green?" and then check the print.

Vidiot, Aug 7, 2013

http://forums.stevehoffman.tv/threads/true-original-star-wars-trilogy-blu-rays-coming-in-2014-or-2015-from-disney.324294/page-6

That's pretty damn hilarious, it makes the 2004 color timing even worse, I thought they just threw the old timing out the window from the get-go... but, they actually referenced a print and came up with that candy colored mess! I guess what the idiot is describing there is the green colored lightsaber Luke is wielding aboard the Falcon. :) I know that there is common for some people that are color blind where the blue color can be confused with green, there are many instances in that timing when objects that should be green are blue and vice versa but this just cements the fact that the 2004 timing is one of the worst color timings I've seen applied to a major motion picture in the history of home video. Please just don't let him near a potential original trilogy release.

And yes, obviously those Senator screening photos cannot be trusted (but even those are more accurate than the 2004 timing). In any case, there's really no mystery about how the original Star Wars looked, there's tons of reference material out there, I own both fine LPP and IB technicolor print reference material and I know that many others on this forum do as well. Even private cinema screenings have been arranged just to see how it actually looks projected. And I can assure you that there's nothing really surprising about its colors, except for its beauty.

I think Disney should run George Lucas through DVNR, make him blurry and less detailed.

danny_boy said:

Simple solution.

Watch it lo-fi(VHS,Beta,V2000, laserdisc)!

It forces you to focus on the characters and the storytelling and nothing-else.

Effects and sets are obscured by the relatively low quality picture that you have no choice but  to follow the story.

Maybe Star Wars fans have been too obsessed with Pixels and picture quality in the last 17 years(at least since the advent of DVD-1997) that it forbids them from just enjoying the film itself.

I know that the counter aurgument is that the picture quality is so bad(for NTSC VHS in particular) that it is too much of a distraction to enjoy the flick.

Or is that because we are so used to being spoiled in the high -definition era?

I am fortunate enough to  own a 4K Sony 1000 projector.

I can watch the likes of Oblivion,Elisium,Looper,Pacific Rim,Man Of Steel and Star Trek Into Darkness on this projector  upscaled to 4K, enjoying every last ounce of pixel information/detail that these flicks have to offer.

They may look fantastic but IMHO all the above are just average movies---great style....but little substance---I re-iterate---in my opinion!

So yeah.....I get more of a kick watching my beat up ol' 1982 1st release(library rental) VHS video tape of Star Wars than watching  any of the above movies in 4K.

I understand your view and I agree to some extent but I don't think Star Wars fans have been obsessed with picture quality in the last 17 years, more like being denied it. The story is what's most important yes, but film is very much a visual medium and a form of visual storytelling, especially in the case of a film like Star Wars. Your signature proudly says;

I saw Star Wars in 1977. Many, many, many times. For 3 years it was just Star Wars...period. I saw it in good theaters, cheap theaters and drive-ins with those clunky metal speakers you hang on your window. The screen and sound quality never subtracted from the excitement. I can watch the original cut right now, over 30 years later, on some beat up VHS tape and enjoy it. It's the story that makes this movie. Nothing? else.

^ If that's all that makes that movie work then why bother when you can just as well pick up the script or the novel of the film and read it instead? I can personally enjoy Star Wars in crude form, we have basically been forced to enjoy it that way since it left the theater but picture and audio quality is definitely important. And it really goes without saying that it's fucking ridiculous that not a decent modern video release exist of these iconic classics either in Special Edition or in Original form. Stop trying to justify the silly George Lucas syndrome.

I have sent you a PM Spaced Ranger.

Btw, did you ever finish syncing the audio to the 16mm clip I sent you?

Regarding Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, they have shown the episode From All of Us to All of You from the TV-series The Wonderful World of Disney from 1958 on Swedish TV every Christmas since 1960, the TV-special includes shorter clips from features such as:

Santa's Workshop

Cinderella

Lady and the Tramp

Peter Pan

Pinocchio

and Snow White, where it's the sequence with "The Silly Song." This special has seen several updates in terms of content through the years but due to the huge Christmas tradition this program has become here in Sweden (still around three million viewers every year, and I guess everyone with a TV was watching it back in the day when we only had one or two channels) it has largely been left alone since '82. A couple of the features in it has the original swedish dubs intact that has never been released on home video.

The dub on Snow White is unfortunately not the original swedish one, so I guess this TV-master can be dated back to '82 or '83 when the film received a new dub for the theatrical re-release here in Sweden. But I guess the color timing and animation work could be of interest as it predates the butchering on homevideo, am I right? Maybe this TV-special has seen a homevideo release?

An interesting sidenote, Walt Disney officially said that the then only 14 year old Tatjana Angelini who gave her voice to Snow White in the original 1938 swedish dub was his favorite voice of all incarnations of Snow White, even favoring her voice over the original American Adriana Caselotti's dub! I don't know if I agree but he was apparently pretty invested and hands-on with all dubbing work for their films back in the day. But I guess things like that doesn't matter any longer with the companys obsession nowadays with redubbing every track and remixing them to 5.1 or 7.1. As I know there are a few swedes around here, someone has posted a few clips on youtube with the original swedish dub, taken from a 70's print (unfortunately, only the audio is from the print):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nR7l6P8qXr0

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hra5T0Zwy5E

I'm not sure which other flash frames AntcuFaalb was talking about, there may be more of them but most of the times they were done in-camera/on-set rather than in post like in Moth3r's example. So I guess you could mention only this flash frame unless there are more of them.

SilverWook said:

Welcome back, msycamore! I was getting worried...

Ha ha thanks! Sorry, been too busy. :( It's nice to know that people take notice of members absence around here though. ;) I saw the THX thread, I've sent a PM to spaced ranger...

I examined it against the SE and your observation is indeed correct, a result of the recomposite work done for the '97 SE. Kind of odd though as in this case it's the flash frames that are off in timing compared to the original rather than the laser bolts. I guess the entire opening shootout in the corridor was recomposited to get rid of grain... and then in 2004 someone brilliant enough, grain reduced the digital recomposites...

coltonlolz said:

myscamore, the correct titling for TESB in Swedish is "Det Imperiet Slår Tillbaka", literally The Empire Strikes Back.

Who is that "myscamore"? And is "That Empire Strikes Back" any good?

Heilemann said:

I do take issue with the knee jerk portion of the fanbase, which manages to turn any and all conversation into Lucas bashing. I find that unproductive and profoundly ignorant.

I'm personally interested in the examination of the material itself; in the fanedit community and the historians, who actually contribute something to the conversation. That adds value, rather than noise and cynicism (that was why I embarked on Kitbashed in the first place).

It's very interesting to me to evaluate this new material and how it changes our perception of how the movies were made, or who the people working on them were at the time. It's completely uninteresting to me to have another swing at the Lucas/Kurtz piñata, and oh isn't it strange how the movies became worse after Empire etc.

It is interesting to me why the quality of the storytelling and the tone of the movies changed; and those reasons are rarely as simple "Lucas is stupid/greedy/megalomaniacal/etc! Oh, how everything was better with Kurtz around."

I see it as film history, and I don't see the worth it hammering on the same nail over and over. Especially without a few beers around.

Well said, and I see where you're coming from, and I agree with you for the most part. It's just that not everyone has that intention when bringing up stuff like this. Most of it speaks for itself anyway. The Kurtz/Lucas fallout I brought up a few pages back comes from a genuine interest on my part to understand how things actually turned out. From Kazanjian's words you get the impression Kurtz was going to be replaced no matter if he let ESB go over budget or not. Other info even seems to suggest he was lightly involved on the pre-production of ROTJ. I just find this interesting, that's all. And I personally think it's worth discussing as he was a big part of the "Star Wars family" for many years.

At the same time, there's no mystery why there's a huge dissatisfaction and bitterness directed towards Lucas among a large group of the fanbase today. Things haven't exactly been sugarsweet for the fans of the classic trilogy for the last 20 years. I'm not saying that there's need for beating that old dead horse over and over again because of it, but the reality is that it might unfortunately be here to stay because of Lucas himself.

The making of books and the deleted scenes etc, are truly great stuff but at the same time it makes the absence of the actual films treated with the same respect even more silly.

SilverWook said:

Problem is, we've been teased with the possibility of seeing this footage since the days of Laserdisc. (Definitive Collection, not!) And when we finally got to see some on DVD, then find out there's more, one gets the sense they're holding back, and trickling this stuff out ever since. I don't know of any other franchise that keeps dangling that tasty carrot in front of fans, then yanks it back once we get a bite.

This stuff should have been on the Blu Ray set. Nobody would have minded if it mandated an extra disc to hold it all. Not everybody owns a Apple device, believe it or not.

The original films should also have been on the Blu Ray set but this is Star Wars, what can you expect. I'm pretty sure most of this stuff was "found" around the time they prepared the 2004 DVD set (some of this in shorter form appeared on that bonus disc.) There's definitely more stuff from where that's coming from. They know exactly what they're doing and it works perfectly. It's a franchise with such a loyal fanbase, where the creator can basically spit his fans in the face for almost 20 years and they still buy his products. The carrots on future sets may be Casting Auditions, From SW to Jedi, The lost Making of ESB (some of it appear in this material), the 1980 John Williams doc (some of it appear in this material) and on and on, that well will not be dried up anytime soon.

NeverarGreat said:

There's still some blue remaining, but this is still much improved over the original.

Not to discourage you, but the above screenshots gives you an example of how much color information that was eaten up by the "Lowry restoration" in this sequence, the blue artifacting in the '04 transfer is one thing and these '97SE screenshots are too cyan/blue so they looks a bit off but you can clearly see how screwed up the "fire" in the picture was, the same thing can be seen on explosions in the trench run as well. Just thought I would point that out to you in case you had forgotten how it looked. Might be impossible to restore though.

TServo2049 said:

Wow, you can make out the TV scanlines on Leia! I remember when some people thought that level of detail was only visible in the SE recomposite, but nope...

I recall they were visible in the GOUT so it isn't actually that surprising. But the samples does indeed look great.

TServo2049 said:

I hope this will also eventually answer the scanline/dot-matrix questions for Empire...

Vader's communication screen does have a dot-matrix pattern, the "only horizontal scanline version" was proven false. It was just an illusion caused by some poorly made LD transfers. The dot-matrix is visible in both the JSC and GOUT.

Heilemann said:

What makes you think I'm not working for Apple?

Sorry, it was a bad joke. I sincerely like you Heilemann. :) But I must say your comments on the last few pages starts sounding like someone not particularly happy with this fan-base...

Heilemann said:

Yeah, it was. I'm a little surprised they chose to show this off. I would have chosen the first on-camera lightsaber glow test footage, which is fantastic (and almost worth the price of admission on its own).

My personal favorites aside from that, is Lucas interviewed by Alan Arnold in 1979. So passionate.

Heilemann said:

And they're fairly high resolution too.

Heilemann said:

Note: The book works perfectly in the iBooks reader for the just released Mavericks version of OS X.

So, you do work for LucasFilm, how much do they pay?

dave88 said:

The page for your first version is still there. It's just marked "dead" so it only comes up if "active torrents only" is unchecked. I'm relatively new to the myspleen tracker, but I would guess it automatically goes "dead" after not being seeded for a given time(?) Rather than an arbitrary decision by a mod or something like that.

Yeah, not easy for you to know but the torrent of mine that was deleted was a '97SE upload.

CatBus said:

As for the audio changes, all three distinctly different theatrical soundtracks for Star Wars are well-preserved and you can listen to the alternate versions yourself.

I don't know if I would dare go as far as to say the 70mm six-track mix of Star Wars has been well-preserved (by Lucasfilm maybe). h_h's work is truly magnificent and I absolutely love it but you have to remember that it's still only a well made approximation of that mix, lots of guess work involved, especially in terms of the LFE-channel. I get what you mean but it's just that I see the words "preservation" and "restoration" tossed around so often around these parts...

CatBus said:

As for the other movies, ESB of course had two totally different cuts, and we've only seen/heard the 35mm one on home video or preservations, and just a list of changes for the 70mm one from people's memories.

There actually exist more than just a list of changes from people's memories. 8mm film sequences and even an 1980 in-theatre audio recording has surfaced. You should definitely check it out if you haven't, great stuff: http://www.wideanglecloseup.com/starwarsaudio.html

BuddhaMaster said:

So if there is no seeder for neither msycamore's Technidisc nor PuggoGrande, how is one supposed to become a future project supporter or admirer?

Ha-ha, a future supporter or admirer. I suggest you get my new upload instead, don't know if I'll be using MySpleen as my last upload there got deleted without any notice.

Chewtobacca said:

I had thought the second version abandoned.

Yeah, I'm sorry to say it but I ran out of steam, with a better capture...  I only made a recalibrated and aspect ratio corrected version.

csd79 said:

Msycamore, are you using G-force's de-rainbow script on your new version?

No, I ultimately didn't. Sorry... I hate the rainbowing as much as you guys and at first I was amazed how incredibly effective the script was compared to others I've tested, I was carefully going to apply it where it didn't cause any visible artifacts but after a close comparison with the unfiltered I saw too many nasty side effects - whenever there's movement there was a loss of detail, smearing and discoloration. There was also desaturation that happened at almost every scene/shot change where the first few frames got affected. So IMO it wasn't worth it.

There's no way around it other than making a better capture, I hate introducing new artifacts just to get rid of another. It did get rid of most of it but at the same time it sucked the life out of the picture. You will find that the recalibrated version I'm going to upload is not as nasty looking when it comes to the chroma noise anyway. The poor setting of the first encode exaggerated the flaws in the capture pretty much.

Btw, is there a synced version of schorman's Technidisc audio rip out there? AC-3 doesn't matter, would like to use his ripped audio instead.

Spaced Ranger said:

The next version (so goes my theory) was with the home-video releases. Lucas himself would remove the SEN-talking-to-children shots and re-order the THX-caught sequence. This would be Lucas' second re-edit [3rd version, 1983].

Yes, I've had those thoughts as well but at this point I really don't know what to believe. The thing that would make most sense is of course that they simply used an '78 Interpositive for the home video debut. But with Lucas everything is possible I guess. We need to get ahold of a '78 release print.

I checked these editing points in the Italian TV version again and found something interesting...

Home Video version: from the medical examinations scene there's a dissolve to a corridor shot where he's taken away by a cop and from there it fades to black and THX is being monitored & researched.

Italian TV broadcast: from the medical examinations scene there's actually an awkward cut (part of the dissolve is still there!) to the same corridor shot where he's taken away and from there it cuts to trial.

A real botch job, that cut and the remains of that dissolve does at least tell us that this isn't the original editing. So why even make a cut here instead of keeping it as is? Obviously there must have been another scene before the corridor shot which the dissolve was used for. Will be interesting to see if it is exactly the same way in the 16mm print. It just keeps getting weirder...

Spaced Ranger said:

@ SilverWook

I'm guessing that you've watched both the U.S. laserdisc and the 16mm enough times to definitively know their differences.
Are the newer WB logo and the removed SEN cuts/shots (5) when talking with the children, the only editorial changes between the 2 versions?

SilverWook said:

I think msycamore mentioned some scenes in the 16mm are in a different order similar to the mysterious Italian recording? (THX's trial, the visit from LUH in the white void, and THX being manipulated by the unseen technicians.) The individual scenes themselves are not cut differently, AFAIK.

The logo and the SEN extended scenes are the only ones I'm sure about.

As I have not yet seen your 16mm print version besides those clips Puggo sent me, I'm only going by what you told us back in 2011:

http://originaltrilogy.com/forum/topic.cfm/THX-1138-preservations-Italian-Cut-available-see-1st-post/post/476322/#TopicPost476322

"I just looked at the DV tape of that crappy 16mm transfer I did a while back. (As I needed some blank space at the end for capturing some clips for another project.) The scene with the cops tasering THX while he's naked with LUH comes before the trial and medical exam scenes, as it does in the Italian cut. (And no obvious signs of splices.) Can't believe I didn't notice that before."

I went into details on the editing differences here: http://originaltrilogy.com/forum/topic.cfm/THX-1138-preservations-Italian-Cut-available-see-1st-post/post/588049/#TopicPost588049

Scene order in Italian and German TV-broadcast and SilverWook's English 16mm print:

Drug evasion arrest --> LUH visits THX --> Medical examinations --> Trial & "pain prods" (electro-shock batons) scene --> THX is being monitored & researched --> THX put in prison

Scene order in English home video versions and 2004 Cut:

Drug evasion arrest --> Trial & "pain prods" (electro-shock batons) scene --> THX gets medical examinations --> THX is being monitored & researched --> LUH visits THX --> THX put in prison

I'm very curious to see if the 16mm print does contain the same weird anomaly I described happens between "LUH's visit" and the "Medical examinations" in the Italian broadcast.

As said before, TV-edit origin or not, WHY SHUFFLE AROUND THESE SCENES?!!

dave88 said:

I noticed you really pushed the bitrate with this :thumbsup:. There's barely even any room for audio. After viewing multiple times comparing different audio with it, I think I'll fill that meager space with (1) Belbucus Mono @160 and (2) Schorman13's Digital '77 stereo @320. (that might push it, but it should be OK huh?)

edit: nope, it won't even fit on the disc. I ended up just using Belbucus Mono @320 I'm warming up to it as my favorite way to watch SW.

Yeah, I encoded it with a quite high video bitrate as I thought the noisy transfer demanded it, IIRC the audio was at 256kbps. So, watch out if you're going higher than that.

dave88 said:

The only thing that really jumps out at me is the ending credits look a little crappy?

If you try this and the color is a tad "loud" that's what the knobs on your TV are for :)

Love it, thanks again man

You're welcome. Lack of a good comb filter is the reason for most of its shortcomings, and it didn't exactly help that I screwed up on the contrast and saturation settings. A corrected and much improved version has already been done, the credits look better on it. I've just not gotten around uploading it yet, will try to do that sometime later this week.

Darth Nyriox said:

Can anyone re-upload the AVP cover art for this? The original host is long gone....

Sorry, I can't. Lost the stuff in a HDD crash.