msycamore

Arnie.d said:

Sorry, I never saw your question before. I don't know what caused the smearing. I never noticed the smearing. Are you able to post some examples?

It's cool, it's me who are sorry as I feel like an asshole pointing out something that is wrong when all the things you guys have done is being nice to the community. Your V8 DVD is still the king of LD transfers IMO. At first I fell in love with the clean picture until I saw what was wrong. Examples are coming...

^ That's great! I think you misunderstood my post. This thread is great, we have derailed the other one for far too long already.

You_Too said:

I've been comparing the 97 SE versions to help dark_jedi with an eventual future project, and I can tell you that the Flunk version is not the best.

Interesting, how did he take it? I recall he went berserk when I explained the shortcomings of that transfer.

Yes, Chewie did a DVD of Arnie.d's raw X9 capture as I recall. I don't want to piss on his/their effort and Mallwalker's huge undertaking of uploading these, as I'm very grateful but the truth is that those captures doesn't accurately represent how those LD-transfers look, something clearly went wrong in the capture chain, they aren't smear-free at all, the colors are bleeding and there's a chroma shift that's nowhere to be seen on the actual LD's. Arnie d's V8 DVD is actually superior to his lossless X9-capture but even that is its own beast, examine for yourself. I think it's very unfortunate when the hardware and good will was there but I never got any answers to this when I asked in the thread, It's hard to put forth without sounding like an ungrateful bastard.

In a similar way, my Technidisc DVD doesn't accurately represent the actual LD either, when going back and looking at some of the screenshots that's been posted from my disc I actually have a hard time understand I could release such crap, the last two thirds of the disc is basically unwatchable IMO. Lobster faces everywhere, the LD is red tinted yes, but it got greatly magnified by whatever settings I went with. I blame it on being rushed, bad quality control and a little bit of deliberate creative decisions involved. ;)

^ Something to ponder when you're comparing sources you don't own yourself.

Planned to upload my source file and m2v file to usenet today, but it will unfortunately have to wait, had a power loss when I was about to prepare the files over night. I've since seen there has been one thread started for this purpose, and I wondered, is my work actually needed now? I can still upload it of course if there is desire for it, I just want to know if it's really worth my effort?

The Aluminum Falcon said:

Hmm. Guess I'm wrong then. Sorry about that guys.

You're not wrong, you're of another opinion.

marvins said:

Hi, does anyone have this French Jedi Poster in Hi-Res, with or without text?

Thanks

I actually think I do, will need to check...

doubleKO said:

*nudges msycamore*

What the...! Who woke me up from my eternal slumber? ;) I had actually completely forgotten about this. Sorry about that, you already have the link.

For everybody else who are interested, give me a PM, I feel uncomfortable posting them all here. All you guys who are working on covers I believe will find some of these very useful. I basically limited it and assembled what was most important to me so there's no Jedi posters in there, but if you are looking for a certain one I can check if I have it and any foreign versions as well. Hope they come in handy, let the creativity flow! :)

It's cool frank678, I wasn't happy about my results on that saber shot either. The thing is that you are quite limited when working in YUV colorspace, and going from YV12 to RGB back to YV12 again is a lossy process, so I prefer to avoid it. It's one thing to color correct a single image in Photoshop for example but when working with video in YUV colorspace it gets a little more tricky.

Personally I don't think you should obsess too much over these timing issues, we know our Star Wars and how it should look but when you're starting to bring yourself into the "exact" shades of hues, color temperatures, saturation and contrast you will never find the 100% real answer, it looked slightly different in various theaters even in '77, there's even minor differences found between IB Tech prints. I understand your frustration, but just take a look at Puggo's 16mm prints and look past some of the fading in there, that's pure Star Wars... at least to me.

Chewie, I actually color corrected it quite a bit, I'm sorry if I fooled you, it was done mainly as a test for myself to see if this source could look decent enough. The actual LD timing doesn't differ compared to the other pressings I've seen.

Memorex, I will try to post some comparisons, the different framing wasn't really what interested me per se, I had hoped it would not lack the huge amount of frames this telecine is infamous for. And I'm sorry to disappoint but it looks rather similar :( why the slightly different framings I don't know. Sorry if I gave you any false hopes. Fortunately we have lots of other beautiful projects going on around here.

^ I take it you weren't happy with my tweak? Yes, I've found a satisfying balance by setting the black and white points more accurately.

On an unrelated note I recently found a mint copy of JSC ESB cheap, what was interesting is that it have slightly different framing/cropping compared to Arnie.d's X9-capture on some reels, you have to wonder how many damn pressings did they actually do of all these films. I intend to preserve it at some point, here's a color corrected sample: http://www.sendspace.com/file/nljqnk

Not a bad compliment, Harmy. That's really nice. :)

7FN said:

Really hope you like how they sound, but bare in mind they are from LPs so you will still get the occasional anomaly here and there. I'm very pleased with how they turned out though, and look forward to hearing what people think, once the discussions on semantics is finished ;)

I've only had the time to listen to the score of ESB so far, and the quality is absolutely superb, extremely nice result and actually a great improvement from your last one which I thought was really good already. It's almost too good as you're hearing many of the limitations of the source more clearly as well. The album master for ESB had a quite weak and slightly distorted sound to it in the highs and the CD counterpart is even worse in this regard. But the result of this is so beautiful it's almost hard to believe it's LP sourced, surprised by how damn clean it is.

I actually often prefer the original film mixes that was mostly used for the Arista set but this is very impressive. One things for sure, I'll never need to play my own copy of the LP anymore. Looking forward to take a listen to the improvements made to your SW. I went with your 24/96 btw I only had your previous one in regular 16/44.1. Thank you 7FN! much appreciated!

7FN said:

Really wish they'd release the definitive Star Wars soundtrack collection in normal and high-res versions (like The Lord of the Rings Complete Editions) mixed by the exceptional team that did The Anthology. That would be a dream come true :)

Agree, we can only hope these scores will be treated as the masterpieces they are someday. In the meantime this fantastic LP preservation set will satisfy my needs. :)

hairy_hen said:

As for the earlier shot appearing on the 80's video master, which also doesn't have the burn damage seen on most other versions, it had to have come from an earlier source than was used for every other release.

Yeah, but the weird thing about that is that all early theatrical '77 prints have them, so where in the chain those appeared is anyone's guess, Internegatives? I have little knowledge in this field.

hairy_hen said:

This kind of thing also goes along with what Mike Verta was saying about the '77 crawl on his sources having a lot of instability, while the version seen on the GOUT (which to me looks pretty damn authentic) weaves differently and much less.  It's possible that the GOUT version was recreated with CGI, but given the general lack of effort associated with that release, it seems more likely that it's actually real, because to have recreated it so closely would have required an authentic source to base it on, and simply scanning it and pasting it in would have been much easier.

Yeah, me and none discussed this possible scenario of a crawl re-composite here: http://originaltrilogy.com/forum/topic.cfm/The-GOUT-crawl/post/582538/#TopicPost582538 none sent Mr. Edlund a mail about this but no reply as of yet I think.

EDIT:

hairy_hen said:

My first thought was that these recomposites were done at the same time they made the mono mix, but if the bootleg sources with mono audio have the early versions, then that wouldn't seem to be the case. Perhaps they were done when the film's release was extended in 1978, which would allow ample time for them to have noticed the minor flaws and decided to correct them.

^ My thought as well, and I strongly believe that to be the case as all these early versions are in fact the Dolby Stereo prints. Moth3r's is a fold-down of the stereo and for Grande, Puggo took the mono mix from the Swedish 16mm print, and AntcuFaalb's 'PS77-78?' is a Stereo print as well.

So we might perhaps start to refer to these versions as the Stereo and Mono versions.

Mavimao said:

Perhaps they just took an early 77 IP (simply because it was the highest quality they could find for making NTSC masters) and then the person in charge of prepping the video master wasn't told about any of the other changes - like the X and Y wing takeoff - and just spliced in the new crawl and revised credits.

Yeah, a likely scenario.

none said:

Catnap and Puggo Grande (until proven otherwise) appear to be the same, a 16mm capture.  [and there's also the theory that they are the same print, captured years apart]

I see, didn't know that. At least now there seems to be a connection between the composite and credit variation. The only question mark now is why the cloudy composite reappeared on the NTSC video master.

It seems pretty logic that they took the opportunity to revise this composite at the same time they revised the credits as it is located on the same last reel. Maybe a possibility of more subtle fixes in the Death Star battle as well.

Mavimao, see here: http://originaltrilogy.com/forum/topic.cfm/Credits-Leaders-Thread/topic/12960/

Yeah, it does make a lot more sense, and is what I originally thought could be the case. It's kinda cool the early composite was carried over to the NTSC video telecine.

None, noticed that your list in the first post is missing the Catnap telecine, it does contain the early credit roll despite what I mentioned earlier.

Wait a minute, I screwed up and misinformed you, Catnap bootleg does have the rare credit roll. So it does make more sense now.

Harmy said:

The more common one. The same as on the GOUT.

Ah ok, thanks. These variations doesn't seem to follow any logical pattern, at one point I thought this composite could be related to the revised credit roll as it being located on the last reel.

'77 print with cloudy composite and rare credit roll

'77 print with cloudless composite and more common credit roll

'77 print with cloudy composite and common credit roll  EDIT: (this combo not found on any print as of yet, excluding the home video master)

if we now find a '77 source with cloudless composite and rare credit roll my head will explode. ;)

Harmy said:

Sorry, to disappoint you but the IB Print, which is definitely from '77 has the cloudless version.

Not disappointed, just surprised. :) Thanks for shooting down my theory. Interesting... do you happen to know which credit roll is on that IB print?

Sorry that I still keep talking about this sequence, but it fascinates me. ;) Here's the two versions of this shot for an easy comparison:

X-Wing takeoff: http://www.sendspace.com/file/p1g9to

X-Wing takeoff 2: http://www.sendspace.com/file/c0u4f3

I'm leaning towards the cloudless composite being another '81 re-release modification, as so far every '77 version contains the cloudy composite, if this is the case it also reinforces the theory that the two different credit rolls existed already in '77. So, why did they bother re-composite this shot? Well, I think it might be down to the first few frames missing the clouds, in high resolution on a big screen, the optical clouds suddenly appearing on the fourth frame might be quite noticable and distracting, especially when you are the filmmaker. When I now have pointed it out I may have ruined it for some of you. ;) But take a look at the clips and compare for yourself.

Now, why did the '77 shot reappear on the NTSC '80's home-video master? I guess it just slipped by being such a minor difference, the source of that video master is still a little mystery though as it doesn't contain the print damage on the blockade runner like the release prints did. Would be interesting to know which composite is included on the various PAL video releases.

Asaki said:

If you mean the shot of R2 in the canyon, I didn't know they "fixed" that in the SEs. 

They didn't, and it's in no need of fixing either as it is part of the original photography, it's the way it was filmed, it's supposed to give you an unsettling feeling, it's sort of a point of view shot from the Jawas ala slasher films. But it is also shot that way so that we experience it from Artoo's point of view as well when the rocks are falling from the cliff etc. It's simple but brilliantly shot.

Maybe that 100% divine timing you seek doesn't exist.