msycamore

none said:

I think there's a different term then moire. (not sure what it is called)  We're not dealing with two overlapping patterns, just the dot display which creates the pattern.

Yeah, that's why I said some sort of moire pattern, even though moire is just that - what you described, because I'm not sure what the term is either. :)

none said:

Take the image below and go into the post editor and grab a corner and scale the images and you'll see how possibly the larger waves of the holograms may have come about.

Yeah, those kind of waves is one thing, but those I'm talking about and those I think Harmy meant, are the thick lines and they looks to me like they are something entirely different and part of the composites. Good examples of the clearly defined horizontal lines of the emperor in this '92 Pan & Scan transfer:

The Vader holo in the walker also have these lines, and I'm pretty sure this is how they were made and not something created out of resizing and contrast, the holograms of the officers in ESB appears to have only vertical ones though. Maybe fine detail like this isn't visible on some prints due to the contrast that builds up in the internegative and print stages and on some video transfers due to DNR or poor vertical or horizontal detail. The only logical explanation I can think of. Maybe Lucas himself could chime in on this?

SilverWook said:

The line between makeup and SFX can be hazy sometimes.

Yeah, There was actually some controversy around this very thing back in the '80's where the make-up artists union, I think, sued Universal for the credit Bottin was given in The Thing, not sure what the work of his was credited as or if they had to change it on later videoreleases etc. but it was probably Special Make-up or something like that.

Now when I think about it, was there even a Oscar category for best make-up back then?

I definitely can't agree about Hamill being a terrible actor, I do think his acting in the first film was subpar in a few scenes, but it was the great chemistry between Ford, Fisher and Hamill that made it work so well. Personally I think The Empire Strikes Back is proof enough of his acting ability, not every actor can pull off the kind of work he did in that film, I don't think Ford could've done it, he basically have no human to act against in that film, but somehow he managed to pull it off beautifully, a quite underrated performance IMO. I think this is also the case of Lucas vs Kershner as a director.

A little off topic, but is there any truth to the story about Mark Hamill actually falling in love with Carrie Fisher during the filming of Star Wars? I do recall reading that in some interview with him. I can't blame him though.

Even though I don't agree with all the points, I think this post of 1Shouta is an excellent example of how incredibly screwed up this so called epic saga of six episodes Lucas have tried in so amateurish ways to make a cohesive whole of. Isn't it now a newcomer to the series is supposed to finally be able to sit back and be blown away by his complete saga in the "correct" order with all his latest "improvements." No, Lucas have failed in epic proportions, and he couldn't and still cannot find his way out of this mess himself. I find it refreshing to hear this view by someone from the younger generation that sees it now "the ways it was always meant to be". Nice to see it's working. ;) Was it only Kaminski's book that made you see the light?

I can understand your annoyance 1Shouta, and your desire to have a less fragmented series of films. Part of that is probably because you love the good parts of it so much. I learned to accept this myself when we never got a real continuation of ESB, Jedi is basically my prequel, I was extremely disappointed by that film and have actually still to this day only seen The Phantom Menace of the new films, only short snippets of the others. I'm sure there were those that were disappointed by ESB as well. Some people back then, including my own father to just give an example, expected a sort of self contained story like the first film, sort of in the similar vein of the later Indiana Jones series.

These films will unfortunately never be a story-consistent series of films to some of us, no matter what stupid things Lucas tries with them nowadays. It's a mess. Much of it as you know was basically made up as he went along. You just have to accept it or just watch and enjoy the films you do like (in the case of SW it is rather difficult though with the suppression of the originals going on).

Darth Mallwalker said:

 

Puggo and I had a good laugh at this one ;) ;) ;)
I say twelve, while he insists it's three.

Shirley one of them is correct ... from a certain point of view!?

I think Puggo also should insists it's six. ;)

I find it interesting that the SE of ESB stayed as a six-reel film with it's added content even though the original were pushing the limit already.

SW & ESB was actually on 6 reels. One reel is around 20 minutes.

zombie84 said:

To be honest in all likelihood that was erased by mistake, whether human or computer.

Yeah, I think this quote from "Jaws expert" Jim Beller suggests it was erased by mistake:

"For those who asked if the boat in the background during the quick scene of Brody trying to tie the "little brown eel" rope is still there. No, it's not anymore. The boat was the ferry going (or leaving) Oak Bluffs and was seen in the background in all other past versions of the film. They digitally took it out I guess. Although......
They missed another scene where you see the ferry in the background. That scene is still there, untouched with digital fixing."

A great article on the restoration: http://magazine.creativecow.net/article/restoring-jaws

This is what I was referring to in my earlier post, from that article:

In addition to the bigger challenges of color and brightness shifts, Dunn also dealt with a host of more minor issues. "There were some shots where there is production equipment in part of the shot," he says. "No one would notice, but we did. We got permission first from the production company and then removed it digitally or positioned it out." In one case Dunn recalls, he could see the shadow of a boom mic in the water off the boat. "It's safe to say that people who work in post have seen a lot of these things," he says. "Enough that we tend to catch them. But they tend to be subtle. A glint in the water might be mistaken for dirt, and you have to be careful about that."

I think they did a fantastic job with this restoration, the blu-ray looks excellent IMO, I was a little worried about the color timing being off with all the bad attempts to make old films look more modern, like we often see these days, but it looks perfect. Now if only Star Wars could be treated in the same way.

The Aluminum Falcon said:

Unfortunate yet minor. Any chance that the restoration company thought it was a blemish or just simply did it without Spielberg's knowledge or consent?

Yeah, it's nothing to be upset about, it's tastefully done like the well of the souls-reflection, for you who don't know it was basically just a tiny white spot on the horizon in a few shots. I recall reading in some article that they made a few corrections and cleanups of some visible production equipments and other flaws, so I guess this thing was included in that category. But who knows, an automatic process might pick it up as a speck of dirt.

I found a cap of it:

One of those blink and you miss it. ;)

A ferry that was seen in the background in the scene when Brody is trying to tie the knot on the Orca have apparently been digitally removed on the new Jaws restoration.

In '97 they updated the cast credit roll with the voice work by James Earl Jones in addition to his earlier credit in Star Wars and for some reason they also removed Lord from Darth Vader.

top: GOUT bottom: 2004 DVD

Originally, James Earl Jones didn't get a credit until Return of the Jedi, I think '83 was also the first time they got Denis Lawson's name spelled correctly (he's still credited as Dennis in the Special Editions). Oddly enough they never did add a credit for James Earl Jones in the SE of ESB. A different font was also used for the titles for all three films.

"The Special Edition cuts to Luke's fighter a frame before the original does." (1997 Change)*

^ The 2004 transfer actually lost two frames around the reel change here, I checked my '97 transfer and those frames are present there. 1 frame omitted at the end of reel 2 and 1 frame omitted at the beginning of reel 3. Reel 3 begins with the matte-shot. (The 2004 transfer also lost one solid black frame at the end of reel 4) Why these got omitted on such a modern transfer, I don't understand.

"This shot begins one frame earlier in the Special Edition." (1997 Change)*

^ The reason for them not being in sync on the splitscreen you watched, is that this recomped shot below is 1 frame shorter than the original.

You sir, are a f***ing hero!! :) What an amazing body of work, I'm stunned.

Harmy said:

I don't know which version it is. I downloaded the Reivax version, which by all appearances picture-wise is the Reivax version but it only has French audio.

Weird...

Harmy said:

I'd definitely be very interested in those DVDs msycamore, especially then if they were 23.976 as opposed to 29.976 fps and if they had the DTS audio synced to them. Which releases did you use for the main bulk of the video?

The main bulk is the "TB-broadcasts", I actually did the ANH way back by using the "Reivax" but later found out that the TB has a slight edge on it. Both are missing frames at different points but it was fixed by using Gkar and Flunk, the same goes for ESB. 

Many prefer "Flunk" for its sharpness, slightly better detail and more open image, but it was unfortunately messed with, a contrast boost was done on it in an attempt to make it look better. As many of you know, the first half of the '97 video transfer is a disaster in terms of gamma/contrast and pink/blue hues, but around the time in or when we leave Mos Eisley that problem was essentially gone, (the blue reappears sometimes in the Death Star scenes though) so the contrast boost of the Flunk transfer makes damage to the later half of the film. The color conversion error also makes it a lesser choice IMO.

I would like to get these out there as I'm sure some people would appreciate them, it's just that I'm not an audio guy and I have my hands full of other things at the moment. :( Hopefully someone will be able to help out with the audio, I also have the '97 LD trailers and extras if there is desire for such things. I didn't do Jedi though as I'm not a big fan of it. Maybe someone else have.

Harmy said:

Well, the version I have doesn't.

So what version is it that you have? Russ is correct about it having an alternate english audio track.

I actually have both ANH and Empire SE with the aspect ratio corrected, converted to NTSC sitting on my HD waiting to get a good audio track synced up to them - a combination of all broadcast sources out there was done in order to get rid of all encoding errors and to restore all the missing frames between versions. If there's interest and someone is willing to help me out with getting the theatrical mixes to sync up with my work I can upload these if there's interest, I have unfortunately not the time to work on this myself at the moment as I'm very busy with other things. Let me know if you're able to help out with this.

Harmy said:

Yes, it certainly did help :-) As to the changes, I'm glad for every one we manage to discover. I didn't quite rendering because of it. I just found a glitch in the render and as I'll  therefore have to re-render, I decided I might as well fix a few more things I noticed when watching the encode and fix the sleeves as well :-)

 Good to hear. Hope you manage to solve your technical issues.

Harmy said:

I only fixed those four seen in that picture, as I compared the others with the IB scan and they looked pretty much the same as there (you'll notice that even these aren't as green as in GOUT, again, I fixed them to look like on the IB print).

Yeah, those four were the only ones I really was certain about. Nice to see those warm yellow hues restored in those examples of yours, that original timing is certainly what makes the greens on their shirts more subdued compared to how they appear in the GOUT for example. Great job!

Looks like it, damn I need to buy that film, suddenly got the urge to watch it again, one of Speilbergs best. Has there been any good videorelease of Duel?

1990osu said:

So it was a creative decision by Lucas and co. 

I find your lack of faith disturbing. ;)

Seems my latest find caused a little ruckus, hope my findings have at large been more of help to your project than a pain, Harmy. I rarely follow this thread so sorry if it's been already mentioned, was just curious if the Special Collection LD footage I sent Laserschwert proved to be of any help? Keep up the good work Harmy! Those Mos Eisley screenshots looks great.

Moth3r said:

msycamore said:

...

"In 1985, Ben Burtt supervised a stereo remix for home video, taking into account the acoustics of television audio (as this was the pre-home theatre days it has the least dynamic range of any mix)."

Comparing it against the original Dolby Stereo tracks available, the dynamic range is pretty equal...

It was Belbucus who said, referring to the '85 mix:

From a glance at the waveform it appears to be the least dynamic of all...

It would be fairly easy to check peak vs RMS levels for both mixes in an audio editor to confirm if he was right.

Oh, I see. Well, he should know what he's talking about. Haven't actually checked and compared it in a audio editor myself, was just going by my ears so I might be wrong here, it's possible the wider stereo separation fooled me to think it was just as dynamic as the regular stereo. There's also many different sources of the '85 re-mix out there to complicate matters and we also have Schorman's recently found and preserved original stereo in digital.

Yes, agree and thanks for the suggestion. I actually didn't notice the poor black level until I posted them. The last pic came out looking worst of the bunch with this setting, the fading probably differ from reel to reel, so that is something that ultimately needs to be dealt with for a color correction on the whole film.

Her shirt should actually be yellow compared to the many white shirts in the film, you can see that the yellows take a little hit with this setting elsewhere or they aren't simply there any longer. The wall behind THX and the holo when chased, should also be more of a deep blue. Other than that it's close considering what we work with and only beeing one setting. Your practical research did wonders on the lost scene and that's what's most important to me, very impressive results. :)

Btw, do you have a link to that review you quoted, I'm curious to read it.

Baronlando said:

In other news, the JAWS disc is everything Star Wars isn't.

Yeah, that's the way you treat a classic, a fantastic release and restoration.

Harmy said:

So, new issue: Has it ever been decided what's up with the scanlines being different on different releases? I'm mainly talking about Leia's hologram in SW. Now, in GOUT, there are some vague horizontal scanlines, but the are also some hardly recognisable vertical scanlines (heavy sharpening can reveal them). Now in this video from the Technidisc LD posted by msycamore, there are very clear horizontal scanlines. In the SE recomped hologram there are only vertical scanlines, so you could conclude that the horizontal scanlines were simply dropped in the SE and only the vertical ones remained, which were pretty vague before and that's why you can't really see them in those low-res LD transfers. And that's all nice and peachy, except that in MV's IB Print references, there's no trace of horizontal scanlines but there are very clear vertical scanlines. What's up with that? Could the low-res scanning process of the LDs have actually created the horizontal scanlines from the slightly tilted vertical ones?

Thinking about this again, maybe it is a possibility like you said that the scanlines we are seeing on the Leia hologram on various old video releases is just a moiré pattern of some sort: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moir%C3%A9_pattern but it doesn't look like it to me, they are so clearly defined for being just that, but it's damn weird they are only visible on some versions. Hmm... just when I thought everything was clear regarding this you had to bring this up again. ;)

Great and easy to use plugin... here's the results with that setting of yours on the rest of the footage.

I must say the results are quite good for being an overall setting applied. The scene you did color correct looks of course much better than most of these examples, I guess a setting for each reel needs to be find in order to get satisfactory results.

Superb job on the lost scene Spaced Ranger! :)

That's f***ing awesome! Will test your settings on the rest of the footage Puggo sent me and see if it gives us equally as good results there. Thank you! :)

Another one of those digitally moved rank badges in ESB.

Top: GOUT Bottom: 2004 DVD

"But sir, the Hoth system is supposed to be devoid of human forms."

Like all the others it is a 2004 change. If you want to be nitpicky, contrary to what the official site-description says, they're actually moving the badges to the wrong side of the uniform when doing this, as their costumes aren't symmetrical. ;) Not that visible in a shot like this though.

Another 2004 digital recomposite.

Top: GOUT Bottom: 2004 DVD

Comes right after the 33rd change on your list.

msycamore said:

You have this one mislabeled as an '97 update, it is a 2004 change.

Forgot to mention that even if they still used the original matte shot in the '97 SE, it's still an '97 alteration as the shot was shortened by about 70 frames with the re-editing that took place.

That's great. What you're doing is very much appreciated.