Originally posted by: JediRandy If only the "Twilight Zone" theme was playing as I read that.
I think X-Files would be better; or maybe the Benny Hill Show theme.
_Mike
@bactaOT: The differing "core" of the frame-right laserbolt is a strong piece of evidence that it's a different print, inasmuch as if it was "sharper" (to reveal more grain) the core probably wouldn't be softer, as it is. But nonetheless, this is only one frame out of hundreds I came across which were far grainier than my pre-93 laserdisc. I just scrubbed through the film and saw tons. Bottom line at this stage, is that my pre-93 laserdisc is cleaner, overall, than yesterday's 2006 DVD.
They are not conspiracies, JediRandy; they are lies and deceit exposed. I have personally seen the source files Lucasfilm claims don't exist to produce restored OT discs. The denial of their existence is a lie; as is the idea that financial and talent resources aren't available for a proper restoration. (I'm one of dozens of people who offered to donate state-of-the-art post-production services and facilites completely gratis to see it done.) The idea that the imagery in the 2004 DVD is superior is as laughable as any side-by-side comparison can demonstrate, only a few hundred of which are documented on my site. The revisionist nature of the entire history is well-documented, and disputed by no shortage of people involved in the creation of Star Wars.
None of us know exactly why this has always happened; probably never will. Probably financial, in some way that doesn't make sense to us, shy of some lynch-pin piece of data. But the evidence for a "conspiracy," if you want to be so X-Files about it, is overwhelming. In the end, there are just too many of us, with too much material and expertise, too many inside contacts, and too many privileged sources to make the idea of a deliberately substandard release anything less than fact. In fact, even Lucasfilm is aware the images are substandard: they're deliberately posting compares on the StarWars.com site to show you how shitty the OT DVD's you just bought are.
Frankly, I don't care why Lucasfilm takes the position they do; I already have my own Star Wars vastly superior to anything they've put out. But in the interest of preservation, accuracy, and love for the trilogy, I'm not going to turn a blind eye to the deficiencies which are patently obvious in these transfers. I'm not going to pretend it's okay for Luke's lightsaber in ANH to be green, or Obi Wan's to be purple, or all the glows eaten off the laserbolts. I'm not going to pretend it's okay that the audio in the surrounds are fipped left-to-right. I'm not going to pretend it's okay that the 2006 DVD is grainier than a pre-93 laserdisc transfer I've had sitting on my hard drive for years. I'm not going to believe the source files for a proper restoration don't exist when I've seen them with my own eyes.
If you honestly can't conceive of any of the myriad reasons - financial, artistic, or personal - for why all of this has gone down, then I don't know what to tell you. It isn't particularly hard, nor uncommon a set of potential motivations. As far as conspiracy theories go, it's about as boring as it gets.
_Mike
P.S. Vigo: see my "mixed bag" comment earlier about the inconsistent nature of grain presence in the transfer. It seems I need to keep restating my position for those of you who can't read entire posts: There is a lot of evidence for deliberate image-quality reduction in the 2006 DVD. It's not a fact; it's an informed opinion. I can't teach you guys how to have an eye for the stuff I'm seeing - I can post compares, but a lot of it just comes from more than a decade of doing this stuff all day. You just learn to recognize stuff that's digital from stuff that's organic. I'll try and think of some really illustrative ways of showing the difference, but I'm not sure what the point is. The images are unnecessarily substandard, and that's a fact.
Mentor, you are incorrect. All DVD's are authored from NTSC or PAL resolution masters. The source of those masters are higher-resolution images in various formats, downconverted, but their initial higher resolution does not necessarily increase the perceived grain at the end of the downconversion. In fact, it often helps smooth the images when the source is ultra high-res. I often get cleaner results downconverting from 4k film scans than from 2k. When I have a lot of bluescreen work to do, I usually insist on 4k scans, and it nearly always helps. In this case, the pre-93 laserdisc is unquestionably a touch softer than the 2006 transfer, but not by a significant enough margin to justify the extra grain; not by a long shot.
On the left, a pre-93 laserdisc image. On the right, the 2006 "1993-laserdisc-master" DVD. The image is grainier. This either means that the '93 laserdiscs were sourced from a different, and grainier print than the pre-'93 laserdiscs, which would mean they went through the re-issuing and quality actually went down in some respects, or this image has been artificially grained-up. There are some other differences in the images to suggest a different print, as well, so it's not 100% clear. The comment "mixed bag" is especially appropriate to describe the 2006 DVD, which is why I said I'd bet money, and not that I was definitively sure. Having done grain matching on more than 100 projects in the last 10 years, I see a good amount of evidence for post-added grain, which has a look you can recognize if you're familiar enough with it. Ditto the digital gate-weave added to the recreated crawl - it's very distinctive, and easily recognizable. This is a compelling compare; judge for yourself.
That being said...
JediRandy: When you're aware of my credentials and restoration expertise, I'll gladly welcome your input, sans personal attacks. But not before.
The opening crawl is bullshit - spotted the fake gate-weave right away. What's even worse is that if you have any ability at all, you can do a completely convincing, organic looking gate weave; I've had to do that a bunch for other projects. It just screams digital post gag.
Also, I'm willing to put some serious money on the fact that grain has been added to ANH, at least. Again, maybe it's from 12 years of doing this stuff every day, but there's a look to post-added grain that I noticed in a bunch of scenes.
There are two truths: 1) The materials exist to make a fully restored OT DVD, scanned already. 2) Lucas does not want the OT to supplant the SE. The images are being deliberately served up to look worse, from the unnecessary sourcing of laserdisc masters when better materials exist, to the non-anamorphic transfer, etc. They're even running a "campaign" on StarWars.com showcasing the differences between the 1977 and 2004 versions of the films, so that fans can see just how much better the 2004's are. It's a curious move to deliberately devalue a product you just released, isn't it?
These incessant historical revisions are insulting, and those who defend them should know better. No matter *what* Lucas originally intended for the sequences, they aren't even remotely balanced, internally. The original theatrical release of Star Wars had tons of internal timing issues, none of which have been corrected, ever. Rolling an entire shot in one direction doesn't solve its internal inconsistencies. I have spent more than 2 years meticulously correcting every frame of ANH, and I can promise you that almost no two shots back-to-back are balanced anywhere near modern standards (or 70's standards, most likely). Once a sequence has been internally balanced, then you can make overall decisions about how you want to time the scene, colorwise, but not before. This has never been done.
And the green lightsaber thing is laughable. But no more so than any of the other myriad unforgivable color issues with the 2004 DVD's, like the supersaturated reds or completely absent laser bolt glows, or Obi Wan's purple saber, etc., etc., etc. There comes a point at which this stuff needs to stop being considered opinion and acknowledged as the sub-par, unprofessional hack job it is. The issues with the 2004 DVD's are Post-Production 101-type issues that I would've fired most interns for, and sure as hell wouldn't see from one of my guys unless it was supposed to be a joke. The 2004 DVD's are by every definition a technical embarrasment, and as amateur a low-standard as we'll likely ever see for a film of this significance. Given the historical importance of this film, the materials available, the technology at hand, and the talent willing, this is the worst DVD release in history. Period.
No, they utilized a more (currently) traditional multiple-render-pass process to have individual control over key lights, ambient lights, fill, reflection, highlights, occlusion, etc. This gives the compositors more control over the final look. The other side of the issue is that it also makes knowing what it would "really" look like a bit more complex to get to, since you have almost limitless control to push things easily past what would be physically plausible, given that the environments - digital or not - give off and bounce light of varying quality. That's why you need talented compositors, who have an eye for that sort of thing. The next generation of rendering software basically gives you a real-world result, which of course you can alter, but at least you have a baseline that you can trust, and the brain instantly recognizes all the myriad subtle physical properties of light as being "correct". It's sort of complicated, but the bottom line is that it works.
The need for a black R2 was a byproduct of issues with primitive bluescreen techniques of the time. Because of the nature of the automotive paint used on him (at the time, a dry, pearl application of candy blue topcoat over purple basecoat, which is extremely dark in the flash (all but dead-on angles)) it isn't possible to simply color him in those shots. You would have to digitally replicate the complex paint and track an R2 head to the original to derive new photographically accurate dome panels which could then be transferred onto the original. During my work creating renders of R2 for the Star Wars Complete Visual Dictionary, I was sent to the Ranch to study a few of the original R2's and was able to perfect my CG R2 - including a physically-accurate digital simulation of the paint, rendered in a next-generation software engine which correctly reproduces the electromagnetic wave propogation of light.
The long short of this, of course, is that the Legacy Edition was able to benefit, and features as accurate a coloring of the dome panels in ANH as you could possibly hope for, shy of refilming the sequence. At some point, I'll post screenshots...
Any college freshman in film school can spot the insanely bloated and unnecessary establishing shots in not only Ep.III, but Ep. II as well. And it's not just limited to establishing shots. The editing on Sith is about as "amateur night" as it gets. People who feel otherwise, literally don't understand the basics of the craft of editing, which while having evolved over decades, still retains the same basic principles it has for more than 100 years of filmmaking. It's not just the unforgivably bad direction, poorly developed story, and laughable dialogue; the film fails on such basic technical levels I can't believe it was produced by veteran professionals. Actually, it wasn't.
Just a little informal poll, but I'm curious about how old those of you who "loved" Superman Returns (or even thought it was good) are? It's not a loaded question, it's a straight one. What was the first movie you saw in a theater?
I think what the poster is referring to are increased posts/members of a certain sensibility which is definitely TFN. If you can't tell the difference, I'm not going to explain it to you, but it's not as simple as OT vs. PT I can tell you that. I wouldn't say this place has "become TFN" but it's on the road, no question. Which for me, means a countdown has started.
ROTJ Disc 2, Track 5 (Battle of Endor I) could be a college music theory semester by itself. And another semester on orchestration. I've transcribed most of ROTJ over the years, and this 12-minute piece alone has more raw ability in it than the entire PT, and more than just about every blockbuster of the last 5 years I can think of put together. ESB and definitely ANH, too, were scores on levels you basically don't hear anymore. Ditto most of his work from his "Golden Period."
Enzo is correct. Further, JW didn't want to do anymore Star Wars. He would've gotten out of it if he could, like he did Potter, but he really couldn't - for himself and for the franchise. But I was talking to his engineer shortly before they left for London and he was saying JW was not looking forward to it.
Think of the Emperor as Hitler; the worst dude in the universe.
Think of Anakin as Hero Jewish Soldier. It's not a great parallel, but you get a sense for what kind of bitter enemies we're talking about, Sith vs. Jedi, Good guys vs. Bad guys. And Anakin's got a wife who he loves more than the universe who's dying of cancer. Now...
Clueless doldrums that the Jedi/Jews are, they regularly take meetings with Hitler, who has somehow managed to conceal his identity as leader of the Nazis. In fact, irony of ironies, he's a surrogate father and mentor to Anakin.
One day, Hitler reveals himself to Anakin, whom he thinks - what with all his fighting skills and whatnot - would make a great Nazi. Plus, he reasons, Anakin has been told all his life he's special and powerful, and since Nazis are the ultimate power, it's really in his best interest to join them. It's a good sell, but still, confronted with an absolutely soul-crushing betrayal and world-shattering realization (his lifelong surrogate father is Hitler, genocidal murderer of his people) Anakin decides to kill him. Makes sense so far. But Hitler has an ace up his sleeve: He's got the cure to Padme's cancer, and if Anakin becomes a Nazi, he'll give it to him. And here's where things start to go south.
Tortured and conflicted, Anakin decides to go tell his Jewish Army friends what he's learned. Now, Padme - principled and strong woman that she is - would probably rather die than have Anakin become a Nazi, but Anakin's so blinded by love he can't think about the shit that will hit the fan when he tells the Jewish people, and his Jewish wife, that he decided to become a Nazi. So Anakin rushes to join his army buddies who have gone to arrest Hitler, and what does he find? A bunch more of his friends are dead on the floor and a fellow officer in mortal combat with Hitler. Anakin REALLY, REALLY wants that cure for cancer, so he takes his buddy's gun away and Hitler throws his buddy out the window. Ok, well now he's done it: He is the ultimate traitor - to himself, his cause, his people and his wife. But at least he'll have the cure for cancer.
And then Hitler drops it: He was bullshitting. There is no cure for cancer. Maybe, he suggests, if Anakin wants to work on it with him, they can come up with one. That's literally what he says.
NOW...
You think about this for a second: You're Anakin. You're a Jew. You've fought for Jews all your life, in fact, you've been groomed as King of the Jews or whatever since you were a boy. You just betrayed every last thing you've ever stood for, every person you've ever cared about, and debased yourself as a traitorous piece of shit, FOR NOTHING. NOTHING. There's no cure for the cancer, and now Padme won't want you anyway, 'cuase you're a traitorous piece of shit. Hell, even if you could lie about it, you'd spend the rest of your life tortured with guilt.
You know what would make sense? Anakin goes Bakersfield Chimp and kills Hitler and himself. That I'd buy. That would make sense. I mean, dude has nothing left. But instead, this is what you're expected to believe:
Upon learning that - after a lifetime of deceit and lies at the hands of his surrogate father, Hitler - he, Hero Jewish Soldier has just betrayed his people, his wife and himself for a cancer cure that was just ANOTHER lie, Anakin... decides to join the Nazi party, pledges himself to Adolf Hitler, becomes a one-man Super-SS assassin and immediately sets to slaughtering Jewish women and children, literally.
Now, if you don't recognize this - the entire core of the prequel story - as being quite possibly the most ridiculous, stupid, utterly unrelatable, morally impossible and psychologically clueless idea ever proffered in the history of storytelling, you are, no offense, a moron.
What's that? It was Anakin's powerlust that made him switch? NO IT WASN'T. Didn't you see the movie? "I will do whatever you ask, just help me save Padme's life. I CAN'T LIVE WITHOUT HER." It's not about powerlust, it's about saving Padme. And the Emperor says, point blank, that he can't. END OF STORY.
I don't blame you, though. That whole idea of Anakin being power hungry was served up sort of half-assed during most of the prequels, too, I guess in case you didn't buy the love thing. Like that Jesus/Virgin Birth bullshit that May-Or-May-Not-Be-Because-He's-The-Emperor's-Son-or-"Darth Plagueis's kid-or-The-Chosen-One-or-Concieved-by-The-Force-or-any-of-a-bunch-of-other-random-ideas-served-up-vaguely-because-we- have-no-real-focus-or-idea-but-you'll-praise-as-clever-anyway. That ambiguous lack of focus is all over the films.
Could an Anakin character have been written such that if he can't have Padme, at least he'd have power? Sure, but that would be for some other film, because it sure as shit isn't the character written for this series.
DRAMA 101: all movies are about people. Movies about aliens are movies about people. Movies about talking cars are movies about people. Movies about mutants, are movies about people. Anakin the person, doesn't make any sense. It's that simple. His motivations are completely unrelatable. His character arc is impossibly ridiculous, and the entire prequel arc is built on it. The core is rotten.
Add on top of that sub-college-student-film acting by otherwise great actors, 6 hours of Siggraph CGI demo reel shots, most of which look assy, and an endless series of fart jokes, unfunny slapstick and bad accents that make you want to pierce your own eardrums and you're starting to get the picture. Christ, even John Williams didn't get to do the one thing that might've put .0001% heart into this hollow, souless, idiotic waste of time.
There's just not one redeeming quality to these films, other than they're finally over.
I could write a tome breaking down, quantitatively, all the basic errors these films are comprised of. So could tons of other people. Hell, even the casting of Hayden Christensen was a mistake, and that happened before they'd shot one second of film. David Prowse was a 6'7" world-champion bodybuilder. He eats Hayden's weight in food for breakfast. Think that's nitpicking? Think again: have you ever met somebody whose physical size didn't have a direct impact on their personality? Think about short people and the Napoleon Complex, or check Peter Mayhew on "growing up big". People's physical stature has a direct impact on their personality, their social circle, their relationships, everything. The man we see as Darth Vader in the OT, physically strong, arrogant, intelligent... this is NOT the actor, nor the character built in the prequels. Not even REMOTELY the same guy. You know, they described Vader in the OT as the best starpilot in the galaxy, which means he was a fighter jock. Psychologically speaking, real fighter jocks fill a pretty narrow bracket, which happens to be compatible with the dude Vader is presented as in the OT, by the way. Again, not even remotely so in the Anakin character. (No, flying a ship real good isn't actually what makes a fighter jock a fighter jock.)
What's that? Vader "grew" or something? Or his suit was "upgraded", blah blah blah? Well there you have it: if it's not in the films, if it doesn't make any sense, you'll just fill in the gaps, won't you? You'll just make up some arbitrary reason to explain away things that aren't there, and could've been. Or maybe you're young enough, raised on such utter crap storytelling, you can't tell the difference. In the end you see what you want to see, and who can blame you? Nobody in the universe ACTUALLY wants to see little buck-and-a-quarter Hayden Christensen looking like Mini-Me in a fan-made Darth Vader costume stumbling around like Frankenstein, utterly destroying the most iconic film villian of all time. Uh, to quote: "Noooooo!"
If you have any questions about Scientology, I recommend you dropping into the "headquarters" building in Los Angeles for 3 minutes sometime. That oughta clear things right up for you.
I have no idea what you're talking about. I never suggested "dismissing" either approach. Nor did I say that effects have no merit or value. And you say that taking my idea of limiting effects shots to the extreme would mean no effects at all, which is silly. Yes, you're right, which is why I said limit, and not remove. What's the point of taking a reasoned argument to the extreme? I don't support such an extreme. My philosophy doesn't suggest that if limiting is good, removing is better. That's idiotic. I'm not sure what the point is of arguing with points I deliberately didn't make.
In any case, to clarify: story first, then effects as needed. The effects must not detract, merely enhance the story. It has been proven conclusively that the upper limit for any production seems to be around 300 for CG effects shots to remain absolutely top-grade. Beyond that, the quality slips and they effects become less convincing, and detract from the story.
Whether you like Spielberg or not, he is a great storyteller. He also sets himself VERY rigid shot counts on his films - surprisingly low shot counts, actually - and the work in his film is always absolutely consistent. It also helps that he won't final a shot until it's right.
Originally posted by: Tiptup I doubt you're a very visual person if you're attacking them at that point.
I've been a visual effects supervisor in LA for the last 12 years; most recently commissioned to do work for the upcoming Star Wars Complete Visual Dictionary. These credentials don't mean much, except in that I am intimately familiar with exactly how and what went into the shots for those films, and have plenty of friends who worked on them. They are not masterpieces, they are the result of grossly overworked and overloaded crews producing the best work they can under insane circumstances. As a result, you get extremely spotty work. Some of it is brilliant, lots of it is average, and some of it atrocious. The problem is not CG or practical effects, per se. The problem is when you supplant storytelling for gimmicks, which only gets worse when your gimmicks aren't even consistent. Rather than have 2000 visual effects shots, which will NEVER be of equal quality, films will be best served by returning to 200 - 300 shot count limits, where they can control the quality better. The quality fluctuations take the viewer out of the experience. It ruins the suspension of disbelief. Younger filmgoers actually say things like, "it had good effects". When I started in this business, that would've been considered an insult of the highest order. We don't want you looking at the effects - you're not supposed to see them. You're supposed to be drawn into the story. A couple of decades ago, with less sophisticated audiences, you could get away with a lot more practical effects and models. Now, more than any time in history, effects have the chance to be as "invisible" as one can imagine, when we can literally fool 99% of the people... when we're doing our best work. But the problem is that with the bar set that high, the substandard effects reek like a fart in an elevator and destroy the flow. So the solution is to reduce the shot count. And that is totally possible, because the other thing that has come with all the advantages in technique is a love-affair with over-using them. The fact that some filmgoers are so accustomed to spotty work that they are willing to forgive it is generous, but totally unnecessary.
And if you don't think that letting boring-ass crowd simulations run is part of the reason the LotR stuff is so painful, I've got news for you. WAY too many shots in those films where the filmmakers are admiring what they can do, instead of what's necessary. The Star Wars prequels are a billion times more guilty of this. Do you have any idea how many utterly unnecessary ship flybys are in the prequels? Tons. Each one a pace-robber, and a defocusing agent for the drama. Again, the problem isn't the tool, the problem is the way it is overused, at the expense of that which is of primary importance. Especially when its overuse compromises the very quality it offers in the first place.
The way the storytelling craft is plummeting, they're going to need more and more tricks to get people in the theaters. Louder, bigger, brighter, in 3D... this is the kind of stuff you have to keep raising the bar on when nobody gives a crap about the story you're telling. This is why little independent movies on shoestring budgets come along and blow big studio films out of the water - they don't have the money for shiny objects; they have to survive on their storytelling. And when they do, they pwn. You can't get around having a story people are drawn into and characters they connect with. But that is a billion times harder to do than turning the volume up, putting everybody in cardboard dork glasses and saying, "How about THAT!" with a big, "repurposed" shit-eating grin on your face.
And Peter Jackson can go pound sand as far as I'm concerned. King Kong was 3 seconds of kick-ass monkey eyes and 1,900 "so-so to piss-poor" CG shots. Ditto all those freakin' LotR movies that might as well be surgical anesthetic. I am still stunned that people have had their expectations lowered so much that they actually enjoy watching a digital crowd simulation run for 6 minutes. What's even more sad is that movies are such an important part of our entertainment that people will increasingly watch with their expectations and nostalgia, forgive this stuff or refuse to see it because their eyes and ears and hearts couldn't possibly justify the $10.
The Han Shot First revision is the single greatest example of failure to understand basic drama in the SE. That's why I adopted it as Legacy's monniker.
You can debate whether Han was in imminent danger or not (seems pretty clear to 99.9% of the populace though) but this is actually not the most significant aspect of the scene, dramatically speaking.
By having Han shoot first, you firmly establish for the audience that he is indeed a shady character on some level. He hangs around in hives of scum and villiany, and shoots people - justified or not. It's like in the old Westerns when guys would blow away each other over card games and think nothing of it. It just lets the audience know that with this guy, ANYTHING could happen. And our heroes (Luke, the droids, Obi-Wan) are hooked up with this guy. Are they going to be safe? Can this guy be trusted? It's an important tension and drama builder.
It also sets up Han Solo's all-important character arc - he goes from self-serving, ruthless smuggler only interested in money, to finding his "heart" and coming back to help Luke in the end. It's only because you're so firmly established in who he is, that his return at the end is a surprise.
These are time-honored, basic principles in dramatic storytelling, and that's all there is to it. By changing the dynamic, you remove the dangerous aspect of the character, and destroy his character arc. Drama 101.
