msycamore

Agree, the less that's done, the better.

Thanks -1! There's quite a lot of compression artifacts on those but they may be a step above the 16mm frames on the first page.

Just to clear up an minor issue, if anyone was wondering. There was some speculation and confusion (mostly on my part) regarding the original theatrical timings of the subs some time back when Verta's sample frame of the line "I've been looking forward to this for a long time." was mysteriously present one frame ahead of all other sources out there, but he told me some time ago that the probable reason the subs ended up a frame earlier was a result of his registration tool that combines sources, it was probably just offset by a frame during that test shot of his.

Interesting discussion, seems like there are many conflicting stories around this. Your take on it seems logical.

filmmaker George Lucas:

his evil alter ego George Lucus:

Sorry to hear that, ator. I'm unable to seed this myself as I lost the files in a HD-crash a few months ago. So I can only recommend getting it from usenet or waiting for me to upload the 2nd version.

An improved one should be ready for upload quite soon, but I cannot say exactly when at the moment.

Did check out the Theatrical Audio Resources - article on your site zombie, and you might want to make a few minor corrections on it.

"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. The '85 re-mix have actually a wider stereo separation.

"But there are more obvious examples, probably the most noteable of which is that Aunt Beru is voiced by a completely different person (neither the stereo nor mono version is actress Shelah Fraser)"

Is this correct? As I recall, ADR was done with Shelagh Fraser for the film.

"The 1993 mix has been theorized to be based off the 70mm stems, since it is missing a few sound effects (such as the crashing snowspeeder) that appear on the stereo mix (as the 70mm would have been readied first, it is thought that these effects were only added for the later mixes). There are no surmised differences between the other mixes of the films, however."

The '93 remaster was done by going back to the four-track master mix, THX Technical Supervisor Dave Schnuelle's own words on it;

For The Empire Strikes Back the best material was the four-track master mix. It was supplemented with “boom” from a sound effects master running along in synchronization, in the same manner as Star Wars. What you must realize is that the perceived low-frequency capability of conventional optical sound tracks is very limited, and what most people remember is the 70mm version. Since the existing Dolby Stereo print masters had to be limited for optical, that means that they sound bass shy much of the time, so this addition should be considered to be really a purist one, getting it to sound more like itself.

Why the sound effect went missing for one of the crashing snowspeeders is unknown. David Morgan's in-theatre recording of the 70mm version tell us that this sound effect was heard in the 70mm mix as well. If you exclude the low frequency and much greater dynamic range of the 70mm versions, the 35mm and 70mm mixes is overall quite similar in terms of content, see here: http://originaltrilogy.com/forum/topic.cfm/70mm-6-Track-Dolby-Stereo-mix-differences/topic/14058/

I also noticed that you list the 1425-85 ESB LD as containing a 1985 Stereo Remix, nothing indicates this to be the case, it seems very much like the original 35mm Dolby Stereo mix was used, the difference is that it was encoded with digital sound in addition to the analog track.

I must say that I'm not entirely sure about the first three, but they surely look suspect when comparing against multiple sources.

In scene order:

^ the saurin's shirt to the left in the bar seems more brownish-red than the original green. But I must admit that I only make that statement now when we know some scenes were tweaked so I don't know.

^ the same thing here, more brownish than green. Mirrored footage or vice versa from the other example posted on the last page.

^ see the shoulder on the one close to the camera, again a more red-brown color, but the overall timing may be the reason for what we are seeing in these three examples. We may need to track down some on-set photos or behind the scenes pics of their costumes if we want to be really sure.

The only one that I'm entirely sure about:

Both were given a red shirt here. This one particularly was a much needed change, fans around the world have clamored that something needed to be done to their shirts for years.

They look perfect already, it's actually hard to believe it was pink faded when seeing the fantastic colors on those.

Looking at those examples of yours again, the Technidisc is nicer looking, it's subtle but there is a difference alright.

Thanks for the filter suggestions and testing you're doing Spaced Ranger, I very much looking forward to see what you can come up with in terms of the color correction. About the degraining, the results are quite impressive I guess, but I'm not a fan of it, not sure if that is something Puggo would like to do for his encode, personally I'm fine with the dirt and grain, especially on a print like this one, but that's me. There is always some loss of detail with this kind of filtering and I can see that there is at least one sort of artifact seen on the kids nose in that example.

Thank you so much for going through the trouble D_M. The colors seems to be pretty much identical, the Technidisc seems to have a little less cyan in the highlights and the reds are a little less pink but just a minimal difference.

Taking a look at those screenshots AF posted of his Mitsubishi pressing again, you can see that the framing/cropping at least are identical to our pressings. I guess the SWE - Pioneer (Japan) is the only one left to investigate.

Harmy said:

So, new issue: Has it ever been decided what's up with the scanlines being different on different releases?

Those damn scanlines again... it's a very good question Harmy. I recall seeing them on some 35mm sources but it's interesting that you say that there are no traces whatsoever of such elements on the IB print. My theory was that the low-res quality of the LD transfers tended to exaggerate the effects of them, just see the examples I posted a few pages back with the binocular shot in ESB. But with your statement I now don't know what's going on, how does it appear on Puggo's 16mm transfers? It's a little mystery alright, in ESB the SE broadcasts clearly displays the scanlines on the Emperor for example and I believe Puggo mentioned they are visible on his 16mm transfer as well, so this cannot just be resolution related. Maybe -1 can provide a short video sample from their prints?

doubleofive said:

Are those the only shots we've noticed so far?

No, I noticed a few more in the cantina since I posted those three, I can post the rest of them if you're interested.

These ESB samples are looking very nice, great job of the color timer, I think this was also just a first pass on it, am I right -1? Keep up the good work! :)

none said:

This could be an example of EU clarification.  One costume, two characters.  http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Saurin

Yeah, that could've been an explanation for it but there are more glimpses of this alien race in the cantina where both are in the same shot and got their green shirts colored red. See the "Sorry about the mess" scene for one example, I'm more amazed they actually bothered doing it at all in such quick glimpses these characters appear in, it's inconsistently done and doesn't follow any logic, but at this time I guess we've become used to this when it comes to his "enhancements" of the films.

What's so bizarre about this one IMO is that it's a thing only discovered by accident or sheer coincidence, a thing like this can or should normally never be spotted if you're not an obsessed "Saurin freak" that is, so why go through all the trouble. One things for sure, Lucas really have his priorities on what needs ILM's attention. :)

none said:

different line of questioning:

I stumbled upon it by accident when matching the aspect ratio of my Technidisc LD against the 2004 transfer.

How close of an alignment between the two are you getting with this? Are you trying to do the whole movie or just pieces? Asking as a DIF comparison is on my to do list, but haven't organized enough to find two versions which align in a semi-meaningful way to return an understandable result.

I got it fairly close, as close as you can get it really with all the warping. I only needed to do this correction on some segments in that transfer, see here: http://originaltrilogy.com/forum/topic.cfm/STAR-WARS-Special-Widescreen-Edition-Technidisc/post/584419/#TopicPost584419

It actually doesn't align precisely in that sense you might think, it's still different in framing/cropping compared to the '04 transfer, but sometimes it align pretty damn well, especially compared to GOUT which distortion is quite severe sometimes. So what is this planned DIF comparison of yours exactly? Maybe the Technidisc laser could be of some help to you.

Brooks said:

Sorry, don't mean to go off topic, but this is a question that's been bothering me for a while.  It's always been apparent that Lucas owns the rights to Empire and Jedi having funded them himself rather than going through the studios, but doesn't Fox have a say in Star Wars itself?  Does Lucasfilm have exclusive control of it as well?

Zombie did an informative article on the issue here: http://secrethistoryofstarwars.com/buyingstarwars.html 

Lucasfilm (madman) didn't acquire the full rights to the first film until sometime after '97.

This might be one of the most bizarre and subtle changes encountered yet, don't know what's most disturbing, Lucas changing it or me actually discovering the change. ;) I stumbled upon it by accident when matching the aspect ratio of my Technidisc LD against the 2004 transfer. Anyway, it appears that the reptilian creature seen in Mos Eisley got some color tweaks in some scenes when it was time for the 2004 transfer. Probably in an attempt of Lucas to bring some variation to their costumes, see the original green in their costumes changed to red.

Top: GOUT Bottom: 2004 DVD

Am I really correct about this being an actual deliberate change with all the color differences in the DVD and the not always accurate pallette in the GOUT? Yes, it looks like it, I've compared with all known sources and it looks like this was a deliberate change done for the 2004 DVD. Sometimes when this alien is seen in the cantina, or when Luke have just sold his speeder for example, no color tweaks were done. Not sure if there's more glimpses of them where a color tweak was done as I didn't check every Mos Eisley scene.

Great job Mallwalker, appreciated! Seems I got a few numbers wrong in the comparison I did. This is great info, especially in regards to audio syncing. If only you had the other ESB SWE's as well. Wonder how usual it was with these many frames discarded as there is on these pre-THX LD's on other film transfers at the time, about 5 frames here and there I think was acceptable but when it's heading towards as much as 30 frames missing around some reel changes, it's definitely not acceptable.

I always knew Rick Baker was involved with Star Wars but wasn't really aware that also Rob Bottin worked on the Cantina sequence in the film, or I might have just forgotten about it as it has been mentioned in some articles over the years. For those of you who don't know, he's actually the tallest player in the Cantina band, he was just a teenager when his buddy Rick Baker gave him his start on STAR WARS.

According to Jon Berg (from a Cinefantastique Volume 6 # 4 / Volume 7 # 1 interview):
 
"Someone who should be mentioned is Rob Bottin. He was Rick Baker's assistant and certainly contributed to the Cantina sequence. There was really a neat alien that Rick sculpted. It had a big exposed brain with a teriffic wise old man character on its face. Because of another commitment, Rick was not able to complete it, so Rob came in. Rick did half of it, then Rob did the other half and made a mold of it. In the picture it's in the background and a little out of focus."
 
In addition to Baker and Bottin, masks were sculpted by Doug Beswick, Laine Liska, Phil Tippett and Jon Berg.
 
Rick Baker was working on The Incredible Melting Man at the time, and worked mainly as a supervisor to the crew he put together. "Since we only had six weeks and a limited budget, we could not do anything outstanding or complicated. Old masks that had been sitting on my shelf for years were thrown in the day they were shot as filler for the background. Much to my dismay, they ended up, being very much in the foreground. One in particular was a crummy werewolf mask that i made as a mass-production item."
 
Baker also added a mechanism to the Stuart Freeborn created mask for Greedo. This mechanism allowed the mouth and ears to move.

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

^ around 3:40, there's a funny anecdote from him working on Star Wars.

It seems Bottin retired from the business some years ago. His legendary work in John Carpenter's The Thing is IMO to this day still one of the most impressive achievments in the history of makeup and special effects, in this age of CGI I'll truly miss true artists like him.

This is a little bit like Christmas in the middle of the summer. :)

russs15 said:

I was trying to do a potted history of where we were to where we are now. To do it properly would need a book writing.....

What was a mystery is now taken for granted and dozens of people have got us to this place.

Agree russ, this forum is a fantastic resource for info about the history of these films, many things regarding these films have been uncovered by fellow SW-freaks on these boards over the years. If you have a question, there's almost always someone who have an answer.

You might want to check these two out:

http://originaltrilogy.com/forum/topic.cfm/Complete-Comparison-of-Special-Edition-Visual-Changes/post/538921/#TopicPost538921

^ at the end of that post.

http://originaltrilogy.com/forum/topic.cfm/Complete-Comparison-of-Special-Edition-Visual-Changes/post/540149/#TopicPost540149

I'm not so familiar with the 2004 re-mix and I haven't heard the 2011 re-mix to tell if these are true or not.

russs15 said:

I do stand partly corrected. The work done by g-force was used on V1 to V3 but DJ then did an awful lot of extra work on top of that. It is that work I was referring to.

So we are both correct from a  certain point of view......

Yeah, I'm definitely not saying DJ didn't do a lot of hard work, all the audio syncing alone is a phenomenal undertaking. I just see g-force's contributions forgotten in many conversations regarding these, that's all.

russs15 said:

DJ improved the flawed GOUT and basically brought everything together in one release.

g-force improved the flawed GOUT and DJ basically brought everything together in one release. (People sometimes forget that DJ's three DVD versions were using three different stages of g-force's great image stabilization scripts.)

russs15 said:

All we need now is video proof that Luke did throw the grappling hook twice after the first throw missed and the rest of the old arguments will stop (mostly)

John Williams score is actually enough proof that such a scene was never in the final film.

AntcuFaalb said:

I planned to do the median first, then IVTC. Which approach is better? I don't mind putting the time in if it's better to IVTC each of the five first...

I think I did the IVTC before the median on my Technidisc LD, I don't think it matters if you do it before or after the IVTC, as long as the frames line up and no other filtering have taken place before the median. g-force, might confirm if I'm right about this.

AntcuFaalb said:

What is the correct size? Someone mentioned in an earlier post that all I need to do is double the width. Is this correct? If so, please explain further, as I'd like to know!

If you're planning to make a 16:9 DVD out of it, just add borders at the top and bottom of the frame, like this;

Spline36Resize(720,296).Crop(8,0,-8,-0,align=true).AddBorders(8,92,8,92)

Comparisons need to be done against the 2004 transfer resized to 704x480 to get it right, this was just some quick guesswork and demonstration from me. The picture is quite skewed so it will be a little tough. The reason for resizing the 2004 transfer before trying to match it, is that it doesn't take nominal analogue blanking into account: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominal_analogue_blanking Chewtobacca, gave me this very useful tip when I was working on correcting my LD transfers.

I don't know, you might also want to do some more cropping to get rid of that curved border at the left side if it bothers you. Someone else might chime in if there's an easier and better way of doing the resizing correctly.

That's great Jonno! looking forward to it. :)