msycamore

It wasn't Nolan's remark though.

doubleofive said:

True, but I think recomping the sun, adding clouds, and removing the mountains is OK (continuity wins in my book). Sometimes I have to remember that we're probably the only people who have gotten down and dirty like this with the films.

Yeah, but this is one of, if not the most iconic scene in the whole film, you would think that just the change to nighttime would make people take notice.

Edit: If the alteration was ok or not, wasn't really my point.

see you auntie said:

Baronlando said:

Apparently Lucas and Christopher Nolan were on a panel last night about important film milestones at the DGA, followed by a screening of Star Wars. Wonder if the issue came up, or if they just showed the CGI version at an event about historical milestones without a trace of irony.

 

http://www.pajiba.com/film_reviews/george-lucas-and-christopher-nolan-remember-star-wars-episode-iv-a-new-hope-review.php

Some info and typical Lucas revisionism:

the Director’s Guild of America held a screening of Lucas’s A New Hope (yes, for all of you wondering, it was the 2004 director’s cut) with a special, hour-long Q&A with Lucas and Christopher Nolan.

Lucas, as he told Nolan, originally envisioned one film: a bad guy is confronted by his son and earns redemption in the third act. Then, when the script reached 250 pages and Lucas was confronted by a modest budget (initially $8 million dollars which grew to $14), he figured he’d spin the three-act story into three separate films, just like the old Flash Gordon serials. 

"Re-watching a film that has defined much of my life — as I am a geek thanks to Batman and Star Wars — through the eyes of a more seasoned moviegoer, I started to notice a few flaws on this masterpiece. Yet, unlike Lucas, I don’t want to shun them or push them away. There’s something endearing about the awkwardness of some of the lines of dialogue (“Ben Kenobi? I don’t think he exists anymore.”) and to Hamill’s over the top, spoiled brat routine in the first act. Sure, it’s hitting the nose on the head when Luke angerly kicks the sand at his feet on Tatooine but then Lucas gives us a perfect moment: Luke, looking at the sunset, the Williams score swelling, and coming to the realization that he is just a small part of the universe. That scene, after nearly thirty-five years since it was shot and, to my knowledge, never digitally altered, still gave me goose bumps and noticing those goose bumps put tears in my eyes. I wanted to tell George Lucas that this is cinephilia, enjoying both the perfect and the imperfect, like one of Shakespeare’s muses (I can never remember which sonnet that is…). Don’t worry about changing it. I respect that, as an artist, you want to strive for a certain vision, for the impossibility of perfection. Yet, it’s easier to love something that feels real and natural, beauty that may even have a wrinkle or two."

It is comments like this one that makes me a little sad, and it sort of proves that Lucas has succeeded. Not everyone is as obsessive as we're on this board, but this is still a huge fan of the film that cannot see any difference between the 2004 transfer and original in this classic shot.

My tears would have been of a different sort.

Great news!!

The Aluminum Falcon said:

Out of curiosity, which does everyone think has the best looking DVNR-free transfer of all:

• The PAL Laserdiscs (the ones that Lee and Moth3r transfered)
• The Japanese Special Collection
• The Special Widescreen Edition (including Darth Mallwalker's Smear-Free Find)?

 

I'm just curious. By reading this thread, it seems the consensus that the JSC looks best, so I just want to make sure I'm right.

 Those PAL Laserdiscs are not DVNR-free.

There seems to be no end to how childish and psycothic this man is regarding this issue...

erri_wan said:

msycamore and Silver, I didn't send a PM but an email sorry if I wasn't more specific.

As for the Department of Biological Flow... yes ok. I suppose it's exactly the same thing. At first I left that but you know, when you watch something too many times it's easy to loose some common sense.

I corrected it and emailed the second version of the subtitles.

Oh, haven't checked my mail for some time.

Nice to hear you're done with them! Will check them out as soon as possible. Thanks!

Thanks hairy for posting your MO behind the LFE for Star Wars, I find it really interesting. This really shows what great care you took when doing this. I have already said this and I will say it again, you restored half the experience of this film for me when doing this reconstruction, and for that I'm forever grateful. Thank You!!

SilverWook said:

I didn't get a PM from you, erri_wan? 

Me neither.

To me it just looks like you can go with the original English line spoken:

"A visual record is being taken and filed with the Department of Biological Flow."

You can see screen-caps of it on the bootleg comparison page, none created in his Theater Performance thread.

zombie84 said:

People interested in this topic can check out an improved version of my initial page here, with a lot of extra-GOUT source comparisons.

http://www.savestarwars.com/goutcorrect.html

 

You need to know that the screen-caps of Moth3r's widescreen bootleg you have in that article is not the actual source that was recently posted on usenet, what you have there is the regular color corrected xvid by Moth3r, the source look vastly different.

Nice, thanks for posting!

Is there a different take on some of Donald Pleasence's dialogue in that one, or is it my imagination?

corellian77, check "Reload Avisynth" or "use lossless intermediate file" under Settings 3. It should help.

schorman13 said:

As I've said before, this is not my final version.  In fact I did this about three years ago.  Also, Dolby Stereo is the name for the original theatrical system that was used in 1977.  If that mix is indeed the theatrical stereo, then it would be Dolby Stereo.  Dolby Surround is the name for Dolby's home version. 

Well, sorry. I shouldn't even have commented on such a irrelevant thing. And yes, I'm fully aware of what theatrical Dolby Stereo is, hence my silly little comment, as the theatrical Dolby Stereo mix will be played on your home equipment, it will certainly be a Dolby Surround encoded track. ;)

Try http://www.sendspace.com/

Hope you don't mind, Nerfherder.

Here's what he PM'd me:

I have a capture I did myself of the UK laserdisc (on the Tartan label), using a stand-alone Panasonic DVD-recorder. Unfortunately I should have captured each side of the LD to a seperate disc to max out the quality, but it really doesn't look too bad at all to be honest. Pretty sharp picture and the grain is even visible without causing loads of blocking.

Looking at the screen caps of the US LD in the first few pages of your THX thread it looks like there's quite a bit of edge enhancement & halo-ing, which aren't present on the UK laserdisc.

I'm sure he will pop in and join the discussion himself later.

Very interesting that the same weird editing choices are on that one as well... my head hurts... then these editing choices maybe originated in US for TV or what?

LexX said:

ray_afraid said:

schorman13 said:

 

Hell. Yes. LOVE it!

Me too. Only thing I'd change in this particular one is "theatrical" crawl, since ANH was also "theatrical", only later one. IMO it would be better as Star Wars or then 1977 and 1981. Of course the 1981 isn't on V3 but just saying. :) Btw that looks pretty funny with all those tracks, haha. Not many films has that much.

If I am allowed to nitpick a little, the 1977 Dolby Stereo should also be listed as a Dolby Surround track, if you haven't encoded it in plain 2.0 stereo that is.

Example: 1977 Dolby Stereo - Dolby 2.0 Surround, this is what I call nitpicking! ;)

Just wanted you guys to know that, Nerfherder kindly offered to send me his capture of the UK LD of THX 1138, so now we have all three letterbox transfers to work with! according to him, the UK transfer should have less haloing and edge enhancement than the US transfer, so it could prove to be very useful! Thank you, you scruffy looking Nerfherder! ;)

Still haven't solved that damn chroma subsampling issue on the Italian video. :( Leo, I'm counting on you! ;)

Nerfherder said:

Is it just me, or is there evidence of halo-ing and a little video colour-shift (smearing to the right) going on with the engines of the Tantive IV at the very beginning of the GOUT? I noticed this when I first got the DVDs, and it's only evident on the section containing the original crawl that was spliced in...

- John

I have also noticed that, other than that I think the crawl segment looks very nice with the video standards we're used to when it comes to SW. If they only had transfered the entire source it came from...

LeeThorogood said:

@myscamore which LD transfer would you suggest I use? The only non THX transfer I am aware of is the Dark Jedi/Sega JSC preservation and I was under the impression this is not a very good transfer?

That's a good question. ;) You would of course need raw captures, if something like that should even be attempted. I just thought I'd throw it out there, as the main problem with the GOUT isn't the colors IMO.

But I fully support your attempts and I like what I'm seeing. I guess I started to fantasise what something like this could do to the other transfers, that's all.

Nice results! IMO and this is just my opinion as there's as much opinions when it comes to color-timing as there is colors, you should go a little warmer. Star Wars IMO had a very warm color palette.

The sunset:

The colors in the wide shot look way off and unnatural to my eyes, the lower sun is too pink and the sand have a sickly green/yellow tint.

The shot of Luke is incredibly close to how it looked in FOX-promotional material for the SE before it went looking like night in the '97 video release. It's been a while since the '97 SE played in cinemas but I clearly remember that I reacted when I first saw the SE on video and thought it looked weird and couldn't remember it looked that way in the cinema. Anyway, it looks beautiful, the photo of the Technicolor screening have more pink in it though.

A little more red in the close up of the suns and it would look much better.

Again... just my opinion, what you've accomplished so far is really nice. Keep it up! :)

ChainsawAsh said:

ESB:

- The hotline recordings are really cool, nice addition!
- Picture looks fantastic, as expected
- All audio tracks sync perfectly
- The chapter issue I mentioned with Star Wars is also present in Empire
- The cave scene issue from your V1 set (never got V2, so I don't know how well it was fixed for that) is simply not there at all, it looks just as good as the rest of the film

ROTJ:

- Same chapter issue
- All audio mixes sync just fine
- Picture seems a wee bit bright, but I'm thinking that's just the GOUT and I'm not remembering correctly (Jedi is the one I watch least of the trilogy, so I don't have the same frame of reference I have for the other two).
- Again, subtitles are perfect!

I also figured you'd like to know that I checked out the subtitles for Star Wars and Jedi on my old, standard-def 20" Toshiba CRT, and no letters or punctuation are lost in the overscan, it's all there and looks great.

I blush... :) IMO they aren't but I am really satisfied with them, the true original ones have actually much tighter spacing, but I had to compromise in order to get the position and the overall look of the letters as close as possible, something that was impossible if I did the spacing between letters more accurate as the font I used isn't entirely identical. It's nice to hear that they also seem to be CRT-friendly.

I think the Empire hotline recordings are a nice fitting extra you have included, d_j. :)

I agree, I like the GOUT menu's less is more approach with the vintage poster theme, the '04 menu's look like a damn video game, but I guess they suit their content. But in the end I don't think the menu's are that important.

Moth3r made a nice re-edit of the GOUT menu for his "Pwnage" but I don't know how much work there is involved doing it. If you decide to do it at another time d_j, the font Trajan Pro is the one used on the official one.

ChainsawAsh said:

Alright, well, I've received the discs in the mail.  Preliminary report (I've only skimmed a bit of SW):

- Image quality is simply awesome compared to the letterboxed GOUT.  The MKV sample is a very good indicator of the overall quality of this release.
- Subtitles are perfect!
- Chapters start slightly too early each time.  It's like the chapter stops are timed for the PAL GOUT instead of the NTSC, so while they start just fine, by the end they start about 10 seconds too early.
- There's a little bit of a blue tint to the stars in some scenes, but it's hardly noticeable, and it's nowhere near as bad as the ROTJ GOUT.
- I really wish that choosing an audio option either took you back to the main menu, or started the movie, but that's a nitpick
- I've spot-checked every audio mix at each chapter stop, and they all seem to sync perfectly

Further updates as I have them.  I will say this, though - from everything I've seen so far, this by far the definitive GOUT enhancement project, and possibly the definitive representation of the OOT on DVD.

 Nice to hear your initial thoughts on this set.

hairy_hen said:

I completely agree with msycamore's assessment of the dialogue levels in the originals vs. the remix.  Virtually every line is at the exact same level in the SE, even when it doesn't suit the position of the characters onscreen; while the older versions put a lot of effort into creating a realistic sound field with varying levels as appropriate for each shot.  On top of that, you have utterly stupid things like Chewie letting a huge roar just as he is about the strangle Lando, completely drowning out part of Leia's dialogue in the SE, while neither original mix sounded this way at all.  It's the kind of sloppy, misguided foolishness that comes from re-doing something that was already pretty much perfect to begin with, long after the reasons for why it was done a certain way the first time have been forgotten.

Thanks for describing it a lot better than I did with my crude english. :)

Personally I would be more happy to see someone take a stab at the pre-THX LD transfers instead, but every attempt to get the films colortiming closer to its original state is always welcomed. :)

I'm glad to see that my sub-script coming to good use, don't feel restricted by it though, it's not perfect IMO, I would be happy to see someone improve upon it.

As this is mainly a color correction project, I suggest that you keep these glitches in mind: http://originaltrilogy.com/forum/topic.cfm/Star-Wars-Trilogy-Original-Theatrical-Versions-2006-DVD-Flaw-List/post/462787/#TopicPost462787

Maybe you could splice in footage from other sources in those scenes.  

The close up of the twin suns should also be red in color and not blue/purple as you can see in this post for example: http://originaltrilogy.com/forum/topic.cfm/Star-Wars-Colortiming-Cinematography-was-What-changes-was-done-to-STAR-WARS-in-93/post/428819/#TopicPost428819

That is something I'm 100% sure of as I've obsessively studied that close up on many transfers out there, and that close up is only blue/purple in the '93 telecine.

I'm looking forward to see what you can accomplish, good luck with this project.