msycamore

LexX said:

It was like that originally, also the original movie poster has Jedis återkomst. Isn't jedins plural? Because Jedin paluu means jedi in singular so I guess they just translated the Finnish title into Swedish (also Swedish in Finland can be quite different from Swedish in Sweden).

Ah, ok. That's weird. No, "Jedins" isn't plural. I don't know, Jedins is a made up word anyway. In English the word Jedi can be both plural and singular but in Swedish it has to be Jedins or the longer "Jedi-riddarens" (= Jedi Knight) to sound natural.

I notice that your Finnish cover on Jedi have the Swedish title as well, but it is spelled wrong, was the original cover it is based on like that? The correct Swedish title is "JEDINS ÅTERKOMST".

You could also ship the discs in those plastic bags for CD's and DVD's.

SilverWook said:

Looks very good considering what you have to work with. :)

msycamore, I hope to get the discs out the door this weekend. Been trying to find DVD cases where the discs are less likely to bounce around loose in transit. I've had discs get mangled just in domestic mail let alone international! 

Those screen-caps are unfiltered, straight from erri_wan's avi, so the final output will look much better.

Nice to hear, we don't want those beauties scratched. :)

SilverWook said:

In the meantime I stumbled across a recent THX reference...

http://www.out.com/slideshows/?slideshow_title=The-Gayest-Robots&theID=12#Top

You can probably guess what other famous Lucas robot made that list. ;)

Nice gay-list. ;)

Me too, Bloodnose. Just to have a watchable copy of the original Director's Cut, will be awesome. :)

One unfortunate thing with the Italian TV-cut is that the entire opening flashback have completely crushed black levels, but the same scenes later in the film looks a lot better, a few examples:

(these are unfiltered, the final video will look better)

In fact, the entire film is very inconsistent in its contrast/brightness/colors. I don't know, it almost looks like it was cobbled together from several different sources. Sometimes the whites are green/yellow and sometimes the film has a very blue tint. But I really don't wanna mess with the colors on this, I've tried to bring out some details in the opening, but there's nothing there to bring out unfortunately, you just get a washed out gray instead. You could of course use re-edited LD-footage and splice that in as it is in letterbox but then this becomes something entirely different. I don't think it's worth it to be honest, maybe with a better Italian source. So I'll leave everything as it is if that's ok with everyone.

The video is rendered with Leo's nice filter suggestions which makes it more watchable, just encoding left and this one is done.

Molly said:

So it's like the French version that called him Chiquetabac (Chewtobacco) ?

Sorry, I forgot to give you an answer.

No, it's not clever like the French name. His Swedish full-name was "Tuggbak". What is "bak" supposed to be then? Well, the Swedish word bak is the word for rear, back, backside, behind, baking and batch. So it looks like the Swedish translator were just going by an English-Swedish wordbook when translating this film, at least it looks like it in many situations. He probably heard his name as -back instead of -bacca, so he used the Swedish word for back which is bak.

"Chewass" could have been something. :)

Anyway, this '77 Swedish translation have since been updated, nowadays he is Chewbacca in Sweden as well. But the old translation of this film is not completely garbage, IMO it's better sometimes than the new one. But to simply have the old translation preserved, is really cool to a Swedish guy like me. So thank you for that, Puggo!

Nice vivid colors on that one, looking very film-like in quality. :)

doubleofive said:

I'm still not 100% sure what you want me to say, so I put this:

The elements were recomposited due to the wipe to this scene, also changing the timing making this shot longer.

(1997 Change)*

Feel free to write me out a caption if that's still not it, or direct me to how to correct the image. 

Ah, sorrry. Hadn't noticed you had updated the accompanying notes. As it is three differences to the original film in that shot, wipe, recomposite, timing/lenght you could always split it up in three screen-caps instead of two, like it is now you don't have a clear image of the original composite of the scene in there due to the different lenght of the scene, just a thought.

Also, are we sure that shot was recomped necessarily due to creating the new wipe, have they not created a new wipe over original elements before in other shots? Maybe you're on to something, maybe we could check all the other wipes to effect sequences and see if they also were recomped, for example in comparison 15, 57 and 88. Are those original composites? Maybe hard to tell.

doubleofive said:

Tried to tweak the description again for the Sunsset. Again, please feel free to write up new captions. 

To me it definitely looks like the wide-shot was recomposited in '97, so a screen-cap of the '97 incarnation of the scene is much needed there IMO. In the close up of the suns however, it is impossible to tell if anything was done, that one was just me speculating aloud.

Keep up the good job, 005! :)

Thank you for a good read, Zombie, very nice article. Love those photos of the Derann print, beautiful!

Thanks for the help, d_j! :)

Maybe I should take this to the "how to section" but I'll try it here first.

Maybe a stupid question, but how the heck do you treat a video with several different aspect ratios in Avisynth? is it even possible to set various resize/crop/addborder-commands for different parts of the video within the same script? Please help out a newbie!

adywan said:

3) Also, there has been some debate over what colour the Death Star interiors should be. Most fan preservations try to get it grey; Adywan was famously a stickler to get totally neutral colours.

 

I also think that most people haven't even tried to alter the colors of the interiors, just preserv what was already there, which was washed out LD transfers, if we're talking the original cuts, that is. What version of the film is your AVCHD, adywan? Is it a fan-edit?

Looking really nice, d_j!

SilverWook said:

One last transfer to complete things, (the U.S. disc on the LD-V4400) and I should finally be finished this weekend. I don't really like the way the 704 transfers look, but the more we have to work with the better.

I confess I'm burning out a bit from watching the movie so many times in a row, and really want to get back to preserving some other discs in my collection. (Not to mention the S-VHS tapes I have left to do!) Might start a thread about another preservation idea tonight 

Nice, SilverWook! The more the merrier! I can understand you're getting tired of seeing the same footage over and over again, hopefully it will be worth it in the end. Thanks for the effort you've put into making the best possible captures of these. Much appreciated! You deserve a break.

I'll give you a PM.

SilverWook said:

I also looked at the DC DVD again, and I think using everything from the WB/Kinney logo all the way through the opening credits is a good idea. The Buck Rogers clip looks way better, and the "Tragedy on Saturn" title card is actually readable before the fade out.

Yeah, I've also noticed that, that segment and its title card is pretty blown out. And I agree, degraded DC-footage is probably the way to go, we will just have to fix the windowboxed Buck Rogers clip to match the pillarboxed original.

Also, I got a little sidetracked and have been occupied by another project lately, sorry about that. But I'll focus on this entirely now, and get the Italian TV-cut done.

The restored cut scene of Jabba alone is amazing to behold! thank you so much for making such a beautiful job on this doc! :)

dark_jedi said:

Thanks msycamore for the review, I can't wait to see them myself.

Well, it was not much of a review ;) but Empire is the best I've seen any SW-bootleg look, a fantastic reference-source to have of the 35mm-cut. Amazing!

Just for the sake of it, here's the shield generator shot as seen on Video Collector's "Theater Performance-Empire bootleg" which is from a 35mm print.

Hey, doubleofive, I noticed that you still haven't updated comparison pic 60 on SW. Just thought I would remind you.

As have already been said, the new opening crawl and its subsequent Stardestroyer flyover is the only visual difference between the versions, a recomposite of the original elements, besides the different starfield, which was a starfield that was used in many shots of Empire the year before.

Puggo - Jar Jar's Yoda said:

When suggesting that the colors in the 97 version were improvements over the original, remember that you're comparing 1997 video against older video versions.  There has never been a decent video transfer of the original FILM using today's video technology. To me, the 97 version isn't an improvement on the original, it is just a better quality copy of the original, with some unfortunate changes.  In fact, watching the 1997 version in the theater was the closest I ever saw to what I saw in 1977 in the theaters, because everything I saw between 1978 and 1996 had degraded.

The ideal version would be a modern high quality copy of the original film, which in my opinion would look better than every version out there today, including the 1997 SE and every fan version.

Exactly, the reason the 1997 SE looked good in the cinema was because they didn't alter the original color pallette of the films for the most part.

The 1997 SE - video telecine is another thing though, don't know how the sequels fared, but the first film had many technical problems when it got released on video.

Thanks to Video Collector's "Theater Performance"-disc, I've updated the Return of the Jedi script on the first page. Which is now ridiculously big in size.

The most significant changes besides the timings and positioning are the line "This bounty hunter is my kind of scum, fearless and inventive." It was not broken up on the theatrical prints as on later video releases. I earlier suspected this when dark_jedi's early pan & scan LD had it presented this way, but on two lines instead due to being in fullscreen. But now we know.

The other thing that's different is that there was extra spacing between the ellipsis and the acual lines on "You may have been a good smuggler ..." and "... but now you’re Bantha fodder." just like how I now wrote them. ;)

Thank you, Fritz for making this possible. :)

I'll update the first page later with screen-caps of all the lines and their corresponding GOUT frame counts so other can make easy use of my work if they want to.

Thank you so much for the Theater Performance discs, Video Collector/Fritz!! Received them yesterday. :) Haven't gone through them completely yet. Mostly studied the parts with the alien subs in Jedi, as I'm working on the subtitle-script for dark_jedi's project. It proved to be quite a lot of differences in terms of timings and positioning of the subs to what I earlier had in my script. Very nice to have as a reference for the Jedi-subs.

Even though I live in PAL-land, I'm not used to see these films with PAL-speedup, so the audio sounded really weird to me, but I must say that I was actually surprised of how good the picture quality of Empire was in, very nice! :) It's tinted red in some scenes as you've already seen and green in other places, but you guys will like this one, I know I did. Thank you so much for sharing these gems!

LeeThorogood said:

I am just watching Empire now to check I am 100% happy with it, and I can confirm the TIEs in the asteroid field have blue lasers. :(

Ah, okay. Thanks for checking. It's weird, I wonder what really caused all these minor color problems with some of the optical effects in the '93/'95-telecine.

When they recomped the matte, it was probably necessary to recomp the laser as well.

Edit: and making the recomped laser an exact match to the original in terms of timing, wasn't one of their priorities I guess. ;)

The picture of the hologram on page 257, is just a 1977 promo still.

dark_jedi said:

That lights on the Special Collection don't change.

Yeah, it seems that color glitch in the garage is only on the '93 NTSC-master. It's not like that on my PAL VHS, I'm just curious if these LD's comes from a different master than the VHS tapes.