towne32

joefavs said:

 it's been years since I actually needed to get tickets for an opening more than a few hours in advance (I think the last time was The Dark Knight back in '08), but I don't want to take any chances with this one. 

Not a movie, but a couple years ago I pre-ordered tickets to the Doctor Who 50th which showed in a few theaters. Sold out in a couple of minutes. Other than that, not sure that I ever did.

I think I signed up for an alert from Fandango about TFA, but the site does nothing to confirm that the request was sent, so who knows. If I don't see it on opening night, but later that weekend, that's fine. I'll just live without internet for a couple days.

willp2003 said:

Hi, 

Is there a MKV for ROTJ though? 

 Nope, but you can make one with MKVmerge.

Or just use tsmuxer and imgburn to get it into native BD format.

team_negative1 said:

As mentioned earlier, there are 2 full prints and 2 reels:

==================================

http://originaltrilogy.com/forum/topic.cfm/Team-Negative1-Return-of-the-Jedi-1983-35mm-Theatrical-Version-Release-Details-and-Updates/post/781557/#TopicPost781557

Team Negative1

I just re-read this. Yes, I know that you have the whole film (*2.33). I was wondering if the preview would be the whole film. 

I like this new Team Negative 1 updates thread. 

TV's Frink said:

My favorite part was when someone told me to scan his shorts.  

Fang Zei said:

The only saving grace of this, I suppose, is that the new SE can have its own distinct look and we can still possibly also get a restoration of the OOT looking exactly as it should.

 Yeah. Can you imagine how long it would take after a botched OOT release to get then to do it right? At least there would be HD material for the folks here to tear apart, I suppose.

TV's Frink said:

The lightsaber colors in ESB are really bad.

 True. Vader's was switching from red to pink to magenta with each shot. IIRC, they at least improved RoTJ's lightsabers between 2004 and 2011.

^

I agree that the cleanup was well done. And I like the 97SE colors for the most part. 

The optical effects cleanup was mostly so that the film could be restored from the negatives, but I think they look fine and don't care at all about the frame-by-frame accuracy of them (aside from syncing to GOUT, of course). I actually really like the things that were recomposited from original elements and/or had their transparency issues and matte lines/boxes fixed. Those things belong in preservations, sure, but I definitely see the changes as improvements. Not really a fan of the added blur effects in some cases. 

Tough to choose between least bad SE for the first two films. For ANH, Jabba gets slightly less terrible as time goes on, as does the Greedo shot and the green lightsaber. But the soundtrack sucks in 04 and there are the rocks in 11. Plus, the color. 

ESB really only has the falling scream issue in 97. Changes after that were minor, but for the worse. I actually just watched the 2004 version. The SE is much more intact and watchable than ANH/Jedi. The cloud city CGI looks bad in a couple shots, though.

Jedi had relatively few changes, but Jedi Rocks and the Sarlacc beak were really awful. In this case, I think every change post-1997 made it worse. So, 1997 was easily the least awful.

archimedes said:

Here's the Joker/Mob scene using the full colors. It took me about 3 hours to make.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0BzW_1KdMAxHBZXMwMW5PYmtVLVk

 Can you set the link to public please? :)

John Doom said:

Thank you, I always appreciate this kind of loosy replies. I wonder if you actually read what I wrote. What do YOU know, then? Tell me, tell me :D

 It's all just opinions anyway. Not sure why your qualifications have been called into question. Should you probably upload a CV? :)

I think most of your points make sense. There are others who are nervous about how the OT cast will be used. It seemed like there actually used to be more people with that perspective (surely outnumbered by those who are fearful for not enough OT cast screentime, though), but I think those folks mostly quieted down after seeing how much focus was on the new cast in the teasers. 

As for Orange and Teal. Meh, I generally think the only thing stranger than how common that grading is today, is the backlash towards it that's largely confined to this forum. Though I'm sure I wouldn't notice it as much if it weren't constantly brought to my attention, I do think it would be nice if the industry moved on from it. Still, I don't really care, with the exception of re-grading films that previously had no such grading. Clearly, TFA is slightly more complicated because they're going to great lengths to give it an OT feel, which O+T is not (mostly).

That said, I don't see much to worry about anyway. There are a couple shots with iffy/wonky teal-ish grading. And there are plenty that look fine. I don't really think it's terrible to have ship interiors look a bit on the blue side. One of those shots is quite clearly deep red and teal. One shot's orange component is essentially just BB8. And there was one member flipping out that a 'campfire' scene was orange and blue. Those are probably the exact colors a campfire scene should be. 

Anyway, I'm not concerned. If they have serious missteps I am sure that people here will re-grade the thing. In fact, I am sure people will here will re-grade it regardless of how it turns out. 

team_negative1 said:

As mentioned earlier, there are 2 full prints and 2 reels:

==================================

http://originaltrilogy.com/forum/topic.cfm/Team-Negative1-Return-of-the-Jedi-1983-35mm-Theatrical-Version-Release-Details-and-Updates/post/781557/#TopicPost781557

Team Negative1

 Oh, right. So when you said preview, did you mean the preview discussed earlier for internal use only? Was becoming hopeful to watch a rough preview of VI sometime before VII came out. :P

As for the cooperation with other OT members, I wonder if this is what Harmy mentioned as not doing redundant work and/or things he can't yet discuss. Perhaps your two projects will converge more than previously thought?

Kurosawa10 said:

DrDre said:

Looks quite good indeed! I will be sharing the script soon.

 Great. I'm looking forward to it.

Edit:

I have a question though. You have probably answered it previously in the thread, and in that case I must have missed it.

Will you be trying to stabilize the image and de-shake it? Maybe implement g-force's stabilization script?

 If I recall, isn't g-force's script dependent on additional filtering? (denoising? I forget...). Maybe it would affect the results?

If Premiere is going to be used to add the subtitles (last I checked, it might have been the plan) and encode an end-user version, some gateweave removal can be done at that stage. Though, it's picky and in my experience is just better using on individual shots that are particularly problematic. It would be nice to at the very least fix the intro and crawl in this regard. 

rpvee said:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5PoHPTC_Bmo

Interview clips from D23 about TFA. But the OT clips used, while definitely not HD (and in fact are quite grainy), are definitely not the SE's from what I could tell from a quick watch.  Interesting...

 Yeah, that is interesting. OOT ceremony and hologram. Can't tell anything about the resolution from my phone, but the hologram shot has some clear damage, so it's nothing that's been newly restored (and I doubt they would supply Variety with something like that anyway). Can anyone tell if it's obviously from the GOUT? (seems it's not)

schorman13 said:

There has to be an HD version of this broadcast.  I hope it surfaces at some point.

 Makes me wonder if there could be HD versions of the 1997 SE OT captures floating around somewhere.

John Doom said:

Hal 9000 said:

Who is and isn't planning on seeing the trailer once it's released?

I'm avoiding unofficial plot spoilers, but I'm going to watch the trailer to see if the movie will be worth to watch. I know movies and trailers are usually different, but this way I was able to stay away from a lot of bad ones :D

 Yeah, but do you think you'll avoid *this* movie based on a trailer? I would assume that a Star Wars fan who would do that is already strongly leaning towards not seeing it.

DrDre said:

The new samples posted by -1 look terrific, so the color correction on the old video sample is outdated anyway. It mostly serves as an example what can be done with a faded source, and a limited number of reference frames.

 Yes. And Team is still working on the Reel 3 color correction. Given that it's the best color of any footage they've posted (Jedi aside, perhaps), the fact that it will be further corrected is exciting if it's done right, worrisome otherwise. Needs more of a delicate touch, rather than the complete overhaul some clips require.

Lasz said:

Wow, that's looking exeptionally well. :)

Will you guys ever consider creating a 50 gig/BD50 version? Because all that grain, lovely though it looks, must eat up a TON of space...

Cheers,

Lasz

 I would be interested in that.

DrDre said:

assuming the Mike Verta frame is a good reference.

 If you haven't yet, read this page of Mike's thread: http://originaltrilogy.com/FORUM/topic.cfm/StarWarsLegacy-com-The-Official-Thread/topic/1418/page/39/

yoda-sama said:

Interesting, "4 star wars SE" might that be a scan of the '97 SE?  Granted I'm mostly just following your RotJ efforts right now, so I might not be the most informed person, but I didn't realize your project included SE preservations (again, if I read it right).

 Yep, they've shown a few glimpses of the 97SE before. Mostly in comparisons of the opening shot.

team_negative1 said:

Still assembling a new preview version of Jedi. We have a new work drive, you can see we are using 2 of the versions here:

 The whole film? If so, that's very exciting.

edit: Also, is the preview going to be the best of both prints, or just the first one available? 

Only took a quick look at it, but looked quite impressive. Much better than the previous Reel 1 preview (which was probably largely an encoding issue). Nice of you to include the uncompressed sample this time, too.

Cleanup and stabilization were impressive. Color is in great shape as a starting point. Though it's unclear how much you'll get out of it, it certainly beats a purely red/pink film. Contrast and brightness look much better than some previous examples, though some shots (Cantina, mostly) will need work of course. 

Is this how the grain will look in the final release?

Again, very nice work. I've been curious about this reel for a while, due to the density of what would become Specialized shots in it. 

Always enjoy the updates, but I'm wondering if you shouldn't just keep them in this thread. I see updates in Harmy's and TN1's and think that it will be something related to their projects. And then usually see the same cross-posts here. Or the posts here might have slightly different links and I'll just assume I've seen them already.

Makes sense that you wanted to show Harmy and Team Negative themselves, but obviously they've yet to participate in the conversations. Generally, I've noticed that people with projects are not super enthusiastic about color correction discussion, especially for projects where there is no current color correction ongoing. As Catbus and others have recently pointed out, it's a tricky game and you can't please everyone. The critique can essentially be endless.

nightstalkerpoet said:

Doing my best to get you something usable. I grabbed the Google Play version - sadly, it appears their releases are just Youtube videos (viewing on the play store points to youtube in the source code - followed the code and ended up watching on a standard youtube page). 

 You should be able to rip it then, right? I've managed to snag paid youtube videos before, though their protection may have evolved. Or just concerned about YT's bitrate/encoding?

I suspect there will be a new SE released at some point, as that's what RMW's 4k "restoration" most likely was/is. Even with only four months to go, I still wouldn't be surprised to hear about the big theater chains like AMC doing all day 3D marathons on December 17th and having it turn out to be the debut of the new SE.

I think it has been established that at least some of what was shown was a 97SE restoration. No way of knowing whether they plan on releasing the 97SE (seems unlikely), or De/Respecialize it into pre/post 1997 versions. Or, if they were going for an ultimate BD set, if it was transferred in parallel with a pre-1997 version (unrealistically optimistic, but not impossible).

Should a hypothetical "ultimate" bd set ever happen, complete with the new SE, I doubt they'd bother including the '11 or '04 versions. It would be highly redundant in the face of the new version which would probably replicate most of those changes anyway. 

It would really only be the cost of the discs holding them back on this one. It would be trivial to include the 2011 with branching to 2004. Depends how impressive they would want to make the hypothetical ultimate set, which we have no reason to think they will make anyway.

Rumor is that the most notorious '97 change, Greedo shooting first, has actually been switched back to its original 1977 form in the 4k SE, giving it a kind of "final cut" status.

I have no faith at all in this rumor. The single person who said this said it would be the case for the previous digital release, and then said "oops I mean it's a later release probably" (paraphrased). They had access to a release that's highly under wraps and had no idea what they were watching? Probably just a fan edit or lie.