msycamore

Baronlando said:

Lucas isn't always clear when he talks, he may have meant some kind of intermediate IN or IP that yielded foreign subtitled prints in that part of the world, not that actual theater prints were used in 1997. I don't think they would have been able to integrate that back then.

Yeah, its impossible to say what he is really talking about there but IP's or IN's in European countries sounds like an likely scenario where they had no other options, no way they ended up using release prints. 

EDIT: He doesn't even say that he went there to retrieve prints, his words was "I had to go to Poland and Czechoslovakia. Putting things together."

And despite him saying that the separations was worthless, other reports states they did actually use them to restore various sections of the film. And while color registration issues may have been a huge obstacle back in the early nineties, digital tools have made it possible to overcome potential color misalignment issues.

xxtelecine 7xx said:

I think you guy are looking for something like this,

Then you would think incorrectly. We are aware of that even twelve year old kids can do lightsaber effects on their home computers these days.

pablumatic said:

Nocturnaloner said:

Given the reactions to the rumors here, I wonder if there's any possible storyline that could be suggested that wouldn't get a bad reaction.

 I could only ever truly support a progression of the story. Not a retread. Sith in the shadows causing trouble is fine. I can imagine some bad guy always trying to use the dark side of the Force. Its the continued existence of the Empire which gets me.

I guess to make a sequel to the original movies you had to basically nullify Return of the Jedi, but its just a weak way to make a sequel happen. No creative new threat. We even saw TIE Fighters, not TIE Interceptors in the sneak peak trailer which to me was saying "Return of the Jedi didn't happen, folks!".

Oh well.

If only that was the case... I could blow a cop in order to get a proper sequel to The Empire Strikes Back. Han Solo is still frozen in carbonite as far as I'm concerned. Unfortunately the bitter truth is that the new movie will have grampa Solo in it.

That's awesome, especially when it really must be tempting doing so.

EDIT: One thing's for sure, your son is going to see one of the best (if not the best) prints ever seen of Star Wars. I want to say - the guy don't know how lucky he is. ;)

Beautiful work! And you also answered my question in that video but only in a half-way. Was thinking more of... do you hunt for possible detail in the Special Edition prints in those shots intentionally degraded for the original film? Some of the shots in the desert between wipe and skeleton just have to be dupe material, the same with certain shots in the falcon on their ways to Alderaan.

Anyway, it's great that some can finally get to see that this shot always was dirty and grainy right at the source. We discussed this shot a few years ago here and some people obviously shook their heads at me when I tried to describe it: http://originaltrilogy.com/forum/topic.cfm/Best-source-for-the-Mos-Eisley-speeder-pass-by-shot/topic/13924/page/3/

Tservo posted a great interview with Edlund of how the shot came to be...

How do feel about George Lucas going back to the old Star Wars movies and replacing some of your old special effects with new computerized improvements?

When I went to the premiere of the Special Edition at the Fox Village Theatre, George was there. I told George: "I've heard you changed a lot of things and there's all these rumors about reshooting the opening shot... It's your movie and you can do with it what you want. It's not like someone coming around 40-50 years later, colorizing Shirley Temple." and he said: "You know Richard, there's that shot of the landspeeder..." and he didn't have to say anything else, because there's this one shot that's such a stinker in Star Wars and I can't stand it. Gary Kurtz shot this plate of the landspeeder taking off in the desert and you could see the tires under it. We had to get rid of the tires. This is pre-digital and I tried to rotoscope the tires underneath it and tweak the animation of the rotoscope so it didn't vibrate. Then I very carefully repositioned the sand area adjacent to where the tires were supposed to be and put that in the area. I almost had it perfect. If I'd done two or three more takes it would have been perfect, but George had sent it to Disney and had them rotoscope it. They tried doing a color match but didn't quite get the match; it was a little on the pink side, but that's what wound up in the movie. I'd nudge anybody who I'd see the movie with at that point, so they look away from the screen.

I personallly find the entrance shot much worse (but only artistically of course)

Ronster said:

Okay But I think there is more of the frame visible in the SE also. unless it is my scaling is way out. I trust your judgement though. I thought it was worth flagging up. Not exactly the same frame either the images.

Check that pipe on the left....

Zoomed out?

The cropping just happens to be poor in the GOUT on that particular reel, cropped way too much. There are of course a lot of reframed shots in the Special Editions but this is not one of them. That LD-master cannot really be used if you're going to measure the "correct" framing in ESB as it have its own variable cropping.

There are a lot of instances of not so obvious reframings in the Special Editions that often happened when they went back to the original negative - Ben and Luke watching Mos Eisley in the distance recieved a tighter framing. Other such examples are where the detention block corridor was altered, the framing was once again made a little tighter, and in other instances it was opened up a bit - Docking Bay 94 shootout. But most differences in framings are so subtle that you can only really spot the differences if you compare with original prints.

When reading Rinzler's Making of ESB again I'm once again reminded of that 99% of the final frames in that book was taken from the 2004/11 video master when it only happened occasionally in his first Making of. :( The alterations are of a more subtle nature in ESB which might explain it but still a disturbing consequence of Lucas tinkering which not even the making of the films can escape. Anyway, this little segment caught my attention regarding the reframed cockpit shots in 1997 and 2004:

While Cokliss did what he could in the hangar, the actors’ back-to-back scenes in the cockpit, over several days, slowly but surely wore them down. “It is detailed, effects-related, and time-consuming work in cramped conditions and, to the observer, is unspectacular,” Arnold writes. This was true despite the fact that Kurtz had asked the art and construction departments to build the cockpit larger than the one used in Star Wars (when Lucas found out, he was less than thrilled—the cramped set of the first film had been designed to simulate the reality of jet fighter and rocketship cockpits, which are just barely big enough for their pilots).

“That cockpit was probably the single worst set we had as far as the actors were concerned,” Kurtz says. “It was very close quarters to start with and a lot had to go on in there. And some of the action as written was very difficult to actually perform in the confines of the cockpit. It’s also very difficult for the actors to work in a situation where they can’t see what’s going on. You have 25 people out there looking at them, but they’re supposed to be looking at asteroids or ships. On the bluescreen stage, I think all the actors felt more like robots.”

When compared, I personally find the cockpit reframings in ESB aesthetically pleasing for the most part and I can see why Lucas did it but it's not the way Kershner and Suschitzky composed the shots. Anyway, let's take a look at this shot in ESB which appear just after Vader have cut Luke's hand:

Original (GOUT)

2004 DVD

One of the small differences is that the light in the left corner of the shot is lit right from the first frame of the shot in the DVD version whereas it doesn't get lit up until the fifth frame (I think) in the original film. Don't ask me how that happened and how I found out, but it's a testament to how fundamentally screwed up the photography is in those abominations. Check it out for yourself.

Was recently performing IVTC on the ROTJ JSC LD for a friend and stumbled upon this:

I'm posting the adjacent frame so you guys can see it's not anything unusual with how the LD-transfer is framed. The GOUT print is quite severely cropped here and the SE seems to be specifically reframed because of this issue. I'm not so familiar with Jedi as with the other two films so I guess those with release prints and in the know how when it comes to this movie needs to verify.

A similar case appear in this shot...

Wazzles said:

mverta said:

It would take more time, more people, more money than I've ever heard done to a commercial release... I mean, there's no way around it. Even with original elements, the hardest shots are shit-tons of work. I dunno... we have no reason not to stay hopeful and positive, but also no reason not to hedge our bets.

What about other restorations of films from the 70's like Jaws or The Godfather? Both of those were relatively worn to shit and they have some great restorations.

Those films doesn't contain optical effect sequences about every minute. A better alternative for comparison would've been Close Encounters of the Third Kind or Superman. The word "restoration" also means many different things to different people. The way I understand it, Verta isn't trying to restore what was seen in the cinema in '77, he's trying to go beyond that, most digital restorations do that all the time but where those have access to the negatives etc, he is working with release prints. The one major difference is that studios doesn't and often cannot approach the material in the way Verta does in this case. He also have the passion and time.

If you would only restore the films to what was on the prints in '77 (my personal preference), I'm pretty sure most of those who now beg and clamouring for the original films being restored would whine about how grainy, dirty and soft some of it looks. Personally I would fucking love it but I know I'm in minority. People nowadays are so used to stable and grain free images they would have a hard time accept how this film looked back then. Seeing Star Wars at 4k directly from the negative might be interesting and fun and also makes a multitude of corrections absolutely necessary but the actual film was never intended to be seen that way. Every little flaw in the original photography gets magnified to the max.

Just take the iconic binary sunset sequence - it bounced around all over the place in its instability. Back then I recall being completely blown away by that shot, about two years ago when I had the luck seeing it projected again I immediately took notice of the unstability of that shot due to the compositing. In the theater it's perfectly acceptable, especially it was back then but nowadays when everyone have their high-res home cinema it simply won't fly, hence stabilization, degraining and on and on... unfortunately studios most of the time take shortcuts to make old films presentable to a modern audience. As we can see from Mike's video samples, he approaches every shot differently because they demand it.

I am curious, Mike, how do you treat the sequences in the film that are dupe elements right at the source to begin with, do you hunt for possible detail in the Special Edition prints where they went back to the neg for those shots?

Yeah, the story is they discovered there was problems with the separation masters back in the early nineties. Lucas talked briefly about it at the end of this Nolan interview: http://www.dga.org/Events/2011/04-april-2011/George-Lucas-on-Star-Wars.aspx

George Lucas - "We discovered there was no print. We did a three strip in order to preserve it. They had... Fox had never bothered to strike a print of it, fifty thousand dollars, so they never looked at it. I went to retrieve it from the salt mines, the cyan was completely out of sync with everything else. There was nothing you could do about it, it was worthless."

The Wall Street Journal article on the 1997 Special Edition mention it as well: http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB854660380658056000

Shortly after production, the finished negative was supposedly preserved on a pair of YCM protective masters; the term refers to a three-strip process in which a record of each basic color component--yellow, cyan and magenta--is deposited separately in stable silver, rather than unstable dye, on black-and-white film stock that may last for more than a century (or may not; like every other archival medium, including optical disks, the YCM process has its quirks and instabilities).

But the preservation effort was botched, mostly by a failure to clean the negative before copying it, and the studio never bothered to inspect the final results. Far from constituting a single studio's sin, such neglect of corporate assets was endemic to Hollywood at the time, and remains widespread today.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g9S76vtk4Ro

TServo2049 said:

I forget, are the disappearing ships only on the "cloudless" composite

Yes, as the alternate version of this shot begin with that first row of ships already way above the horizon it's not present. I recall it uses the same ship elements, just different timing.

TV's Frink said:

Hang on, how many original trilogy Lukes are there?  I can only think of one.

In the 2006 Bonus Feature there are sometimes many Lukes due to the DVNR process it went trough. ;)

The pre-THX one might be free from DVNR but as far as I know that one used an atrociously bad master. I assume the one seen in this post...  http://originaltrilogy.com/forum/topic.cfm/Preserving-French-Original-Trilogy-ANH-V10-released-ESB-in-progress/post/577965/#TopicPost577965

...is the one you're referring to?

Yeah, the first row of ships actually disappear entirely on the fifth frame of this shot, looks like you kept that flaw intact even though that's one thing that most people would find tempting to smooth over if they had the chance.
One of those little quirks in the original compositing I discovered when I found out about the alternative version of this shot.

Corrected or not, in motion neither would make a noticable difference anyway.

Neomic said:

The difference between Star Wars and Blade Runner is that there are three movies with the former. The Blade Runner set was originally pretty expensive, especially when you consider some of the special editions that were also released.

Now try that with three movies that have 3-5 versions of each. The seemless branching would be extremely complicated and result in horrible compression on Blu-ray or 4K. It would be a compression artifacts nightmare, because instead of there just being additional scenes or alternate footage, the entire movies are different from the way each were were color timed and mastered. So you would literally need 3-5 streams of the same 2 hour movie on each of the discs. Plus all of the audio tracks everyone wants?

Blade Runner had 5 cuts on three discs, and they were able to narrow it down because three of the cuts were derived from the same masters, making the branching on those versions much easier because instead of having simultaneous streams of the same movie, they just had the video portions that were necessary for each cut. Star Wars is different because every one of the new cuts of the movie are totally different masters with different colors, as I mentioned before.

So you would have, at most, two cuts of the same movie per disc, and even that would be pushing it for the compression of an action-packed two-hour flick. That means each cut of the movie would be on it's own disc, more than likely. That would result in like a 15-disc set for three movies.

Not happening. Ever.

The most you're gonna get is the OUT and whatever the new edition is, whether it's a recomp of the 2011 edition or a new 2015 edition.

I think there's a lot of hyperbole regarding how many discs that are required, a 15-disc set?

A Blade Runner-esque set could easily look like this:

Star Wars

Disc 1) Original Cut / '81 rerelease

Disc 2) '97 Special Edition

The Empire Strikes Back

Disc 1) 35mm Cut / 70mm Cut

Disc 2) '97 Special Edition

Return of the Jedi

Disc 1) Original Cut

Disc 2) '97 Special Edition

Couldn't find anything in Rinzler's making of other than a few production notes and pictures with a blurb describing what we already knew. No mention of which effects house. 

Rinzler's Making of SW p.257 - "The seeker ball was made in the ILM model shop in two hours, and shot against bluescreen. But because all anamorphic shots had been filmed with the 35mm production camera and not the Vistavision, the “Jedi Lesson scene” had to be sent to an outside effects house to be completed."

TServo2049 said:

I have heard the SE might have been a little rushed because stuff kept getting added to the workload...

The original Star Wars in 1977 was being produced in a rushed state... I think it's more a lack of genuine care. We saw the culmination of it in the DVD and BD versions. The end result is simply unprofessional.

The point I was trying to make on the last page is that the poor rotoscoping is what makes me unsure what the hell the procedure actually was. Using the original elements shouldn't produce those poor results, even if the ones doing the work aren't professionals.

As you can see the blade in Ben's hut doesn't even appear as a three dimensional object in the SE, it's just flat where the original animation was perfectly fine. Something that stood out to me even the first time I saw it. Even if the intent might have been to redo those shots with all original flaws intact, they failed miserably.

althor1138 said:

The R7G also had 30% YNR strength from the player I believe. The 5xaverage is quite beneficial normally I believe. The R7G denoiser does tend to bring forth a digitized look and as always a loss of detail. I will probably not do a 5xaverage with the LD-Decode versions because the filesizes are huge and decoding takes a seriously long time.  For example 1 side of a CAV disc is about 50GB in RF data. You decode that to rawvideo with RGB48 colorspace and the filesize is about the same or bigger and the decoding takes something like 5 hours. Anyway, the LD-Decode method introduces far less noise since digitization takes place way earlier in the chain and it never strays back into the analog domain. 

Well I think your R7G capture is superb but switching between the samples you posted I almost see the kind of difference I saw between your HF9G and R7G. :) Was checking out that thread over at lddb and the samples he posted are really impressive. Amazing what can be done really.

althor1138 said:

The R7G is still not working. I'm maybe going to let it collect dust for awhile since I just got a cld-s315 that works great and since I'm tapping the RF it doesn't matter how crappy the player is since you are nabbing the signal right after it leaves the optical pickup. I will probably buy a cheap oscilloscope and try to do a full service adjustment on it but that's going to have to wait until I have some money. The LD-D screenshots were captured with the cld-s315 btw :).

EDIT: Speaking of pal is there anybody that can confirm these are the same as the coffret trilogie that Antcufaalb recommended to me here?

Oh, I somehow missed that you had bought a PAL player, that's great.

VideoCollector's site is nice for visual info on various SW releases: http://swonvideo.com/ Looks like the ones with french subs displays a V.O on the bottom left corner of the case. The coffret trilogie did go through DVNR like the Faces set but I guess it's the best set the PAL-system can offer.

TServo2049 said:

Some of the work those other companies did could have been wipes/dissolves.

And I think some of the lasers were also done by Peter Kuran, who would later form his own company, which was given a lot of the lightsaber animation work in Jedi. I have a Cinefantastique issue with an interview of him, let me check that sometime.

Yeah, Peter Kuran was one of the animators working under Adam Beckett. Beckett was essentially the one responsible for the work but he had of course a team of animators under him. Anyway, I found an old interview where Beckett mention Barry Nolan at Van der Veer Photo Effects being responsible for the lightsaber effects just like you said. So that's at least two companies responsible for the optical lightsaber work on the first film.

Haven't checked what work Ray Mercer & Company, Modern Film Effects and Master Film Effects did on the film. It's likely they did wipes and dissolves like you say. Mercer, Van Der Veer and Modern effects all did work on ESB too.

Impressive result. The software decode seems very promising. A clear improvement! There is obviously less video noise and dot crawl in the R7G screenshots due to the steps it went through (3d comb & 5x average) but it also looks like the noise reduction did more harm than good.

So does your R7G work again? Sorry to hear the SWE LD was just another ISR LD. They are not completely useless though, they contain a lot of frames which the JSC LD lack so they can be used for patching holes in the JSC print to some extent if that is desirable.

TServo2049 said:

Also I have read elsewhere that Barry Nolan at Van der Veer Photo Effects did the glows. But maybe that was only some scenes?

Interesting. They are credited all right. It sure makes sense that there was several guys being responsible for the lighsaber effects in the original film when some of those effects looking quite different from each other.

Besides Van der Veer Photo Effects and DePatie-Freleng Enterprises there are three other companies listed under additional optical effects:

Ray Mercer & Company
Modern Film Effects
Master Film Effects

No idea what their work encompasses. Maybe time to take a look in Rinzler's making of again.

Adam Beckett was the guy who did all the laser bolts in the film, he also did the animation work on Artoo when he's captured by the Jawas but he was an in-house special effects guy.

TServo2049 said:

I forget, was that glow on the ceiling beam in the original shot there on the whole shot, or was it an "environmental" glow that was double exposed in only during that impact animation?

The ceiling beam only got "painted" in the Special Edition redo, and only during two impact animations IIRC. Are you suggesting the shots were optically recomposited instead of digitally? Sorry, not sure if I understood your question.

DuracellEnergizer said:

That I'll believe even if I never see it!

 Ha-ha, well played. :)

TServo2049 said:

The white blade was a consequence of contrast/gamma boosting on the video transfers. From what I've seen of theatrical prints, it was light blue in every shot.

I assume the greenish white in the 97SE recomposites was either due to the color correction being botched, or possibly the glow elements having faded and not being able to be fully corrected back to the original color.

We discussed this at lenght in http://originaltrilogy.com/forum/topic.cfm/Complete-Comparison-of-Special-Edition-Visual-Changes/topic/11927/page/12/  a few years ago. To be honest I'm still not sure what the hell they did back then, the compositing is so technically inept in the Special Edition I can't really tell if they used original elements or just re-rotoscoped them from scratch. (it clearly was the ILM B-team handling it) The reason I find it hard to tell is that all the quirks and shortcomings of the original compositing are still there but with new ones added on top. Apparently it was so poorly redone that most people, who don't remember or are newcoming fans, still to this day think they're seeing the original lightsabers when they're watching the SE of the first film.

Also, the only lightsaber shots that were remade for the 1997 SE was the one in Ben's hut and those aboard the falcon and they were far from an improvement. They eliminated the dupe grain and that was all. The cantina saber and the duel was remade in the DVD version in 2004 with Ben suddenly wielding a Mace Windu saber in certain shots.

Just a few examples, one is a faded original, the other a "state of the art".

Original compositing

1997 Special Edition

Original compositing

1997 Special Edition (Ouch, that's gotta hurt)

Original compositing

1997 Special Edition

^ Instead of repositioning the original crude animation (it's clear it was meant to be positioned where the laser hit the blade) the animators decides to repaint the original effect - paint where there before was ship interior.

I guess it's possible the crude animations seen aboard the falcon are separate elements and that they were done by that ILM guy who did the laser bolts, I don't recall his name at the moment (ashamed) but I doubt it.

I don't know but it's doubtful the original elements have even survived for recompositing. For Star Wars the lightsaber effects were outsourced to a company named DePatie-Freleng Enterprises or more specifically they were done by an animator named Nelson Shin, who also did the animation work on The Pink Panther. An interesting interview with the fellow:

http://edition.cnn.com/2007/WORLD/asiapcf/10/18/talkasia.nelsonshin/index.html

AR: Nelson, it's not just cartoons is it? Apparently you also came up with the idea of the light saber for Star Wars? Exactly how?

NS: At that time, I was working for a company in the States, and my manager called me in one day asking if I could work on the effects of the live action for the film. So what we did was they brought in the Star Wars clip causing effects, and asked me if I could draw the light saber with the animation. I first got to learn about a device called the rotoscope, in which you put the film in the camera, shed the light on it, and then it shows on the animation table. Then, you trace the live action drawing parts. People from Lucas Film came to pick it up.

I explained to them since the light saber is light, and the light should look a little shaky like fluorescent tube. I suggested that when printing with optical printer, one frame should be inserted so that one could be printed much lighter than the other. By that way, it would look like a fluorescent tube or laser. I also asked them to pass on the information that when adding the sound, a degauser, which is used in deleting tapes, should be placed on the top. Then, this device would make sound, because it has magnetic field like light streaming.

So that's how the light saber came to life. In fact, I did not need one month, but finished it in a week. My company was very surprised because I finished it within one week. When people from the Lucas Films picked it up, they put me into the director's chair. They showed the product from behind with over the shoulder on the small screen, and it was excellent. I did not expect such effects at all. The team had followed my advice on adding sound, and on using an exacto knife to cut the paper to give a very sharp look of light.

They asked my opinion about it. Since my vocabulary was not good at that time, I said, oh, it's ok. I should have said, oh, it was really great. They said it was more than ok. At that moment, I felt that I should learn how to express my feeling with more excitement. Lucas film sent some people 3-4 times to scout me with generous offers. But at that time because Star Wars was just released and I didn't realize it would expand into a very long series. I refused their offers because I was not sure about moving into a new field.

I'm sorry Nelson, a couple of computer nerds up in Marin County have since replaced your work.

DuracellEnergizer said:

msycamore said:

barhar said:

How about some spoilers, guys?

Carrie Fisher (Leia) is playing the twin sister of Mark Hamill (Luke).

I won't believe it 'til I see it. 

Also, it turns out that Lando's long lost brother, who is played by Eddie Murphy, has an adoptive son who is played by Jeffrey Combs.

barhar said:

How about some spoilers, guys?

Carrie Fisher (Leia) is playing the twin sister of Mark Hamill (Luke).

TServo2049 said:

Did those Stormtrooper shots have lasers in them?

Yes, a couple of frames later.

TServo2049 said:

They are splice marks (different kind of splicing), I'm just curious why they're BLACK. That means the splices were done on a positive generation?

I suppose so. Dirt built into the composites often show up as black in the film as well.

TServo2049 said:

If the negative was A/B, that would mean the yellow blobs are printed in, but that doesn't make sense. For one thing, it would mean the cement was actually light bluish-gray, which seems odd. More importantly, it wouldn't explain why different sources made at different times have different marks. They wouldn't be ungluing and regluing the negative multiple times, if the splices are printed in from negative then only the shots which were replacements would have different splice marks. The more I think about it, the more confused I get...

Perhaps what we're seeing on other prints like the Technidisc SWE for example might just be repairing of a worn out print, different from what we're seeing on the JSC print. I think the glue blobs at the end of shots in the JSC print have to stem from the fact that Star Wars is an A-B cut negative but I still can't wrap my head around why that IP ended up looking as it does.

For those who don't know how an A-B cut negative might be laid out and how it works:

Excuse the poor quality of the image. Anyway, the way it works is that you put all the odd numbered shots on one roll with a black opaque leader between each shot and the even numbered shots on the other, again with black spacing in between. When roll A is printed to the positive there will be no exposure where the black spacing is and where it ends the exposure from roll B starts.

As for those black marks you wondered about earlier, TServo, they do indeed appear elsewhere in the film. One classic example is right before the death star chasm shootout, as they appear inside the intended framing.

Probably a result from the optical process.