I think I agree. It would have been very open ended in both directions if they had remained unnumbered. The original film still would have had a new crawl for the individual title.
Can someone do this to the briefing room Wedge and the entire Jabba scene in ANH.
What turned me off was the Death of Chewy and the Yuuzhan Vong. That was my jump the shark moment and I stopped reading. The only thing I read after that was Millennium Falcon.
The one thing that no one seems to have mentioned yet is that in 1985 Lucasfilm struck a fresh interpositive of each film. For ANH, this is identical to the theatrical 1981 release. And except for the opening crawl/flyover, it is identical to the 1977 wide release and the international releases. Some previous English Language releases (primarily US, UK, and Japan) have 3 FX shots that are different. So if you compare the 1993/5/2006 version to previous releases you will see a difference in those three shots, but if you compare them to the Silver Screen Edition or 4k77 you will not. TESB and ROTJ are identical to all prior releases. The audio mix was updated, but according to sources here, only ANH had any edits and TESB and ROTJ are indistinguisable. The 2006 DVD releases of this version are unchanged except for in ANH the original 1977 crawl/flyover replaces the 1981 version. So they have the same picture and audio.
Rebels ends with Ahsoka and Sabine going off to find Ezra. Sabine in The Mandalorian makes sense as she is a Mandalorian. She previously wielded the black saber. So she is connected. And Ahsoka is connected in the past to Yoda and the Jedi. Between Luke and Ahsoka, Ahsoka knows more about the Jedi, Yoda, and his species than Luke does. So the best person to answer Din Djarin’s questions is Ahsoka. What I’d like to see is a short arc, 2 or 3 episodes, that cause these characters paths to cross in a way that works for Din Djarin’s story. It would be great to start a live action spin off of Ahsoka and Sabine searching for Ezra, or even an animated series. But it needs to fit in and feel logical. And if Bo Katan and/or Sabine are in the series, it would be nice for them to take their helmets off and hear a reason why they can and Din Djarin can’t. More Mandalorian lore would be great. I really see including Ahsoka as a way to enhance this series and widen the galaxy rather than something that shrinks it. There is so much to the Star Wars universe that has never been touched on that this series has been covering and crossing paths with Ahsoka and Sabine on their path gives lots of chances to expand the universe.
It wasn’t very consistent before though, it’s much more pale in SW compared to ESB. Probably because of the visual effects change. Then the prequels that feature it are different again.
Yeah… I remember seeing the first previews for TLJ and thinking Rian must’ve like the 1977 effect.
Personally the SW/TLJ is my favorite. I thought it was over saturated in TFA.
TFA is over saturated, the whole movie.
Yeah, the idea that it’s impossible to restore the original versions is patently absurd. Movies where the negative no longer exists in any form have been restored to excellent levels of quality. There’s plenty of source material to use.
This. And there should be a decent chunk of the negative remaining that’s not faded. The badly faded sections are effects shots that were composited onto Color Reversal Intermediate (CRI) stock. It allowed for positive-to-positive printing to reduce generational grain, but was very unstable. This is why for '97, many (all?) of the effects shots were digitally recomposited from their individual elements. All shots without effects should be fine, aside from that one shot that got dissolved during a cleaning test.
There are several routes available to restore the faded sections. The individual elements can be digitally recomposited again at 4K, though purists wouldn’t like this as it removes the theatrical grain/alignment/patina. To restore the original look of the film, interpositives would be the next step. If they’re too worn from overuse, then it’s on to separation masters, which aren’t ideal because they add grain, but the result would still look better than a theatrical print. If the separation masters have differential shrinkage, this is correctable digitally (and even to a certain degree optically, as was done painstakingly with Spartacus in '91).
If it isn’t in completely unusable condition, it may even be possible to scan the faded CRI stock and add the colour back fron a different source. Restorations often use multiple sources/methods depending on condition, what is ideal for a shot, and how it looks next to other shots.
The separation masters are B&W film with finer grain than color stock so they would not add additional grain compared to other sources. From what Lucas said, not a single duplicate negative had been struck from those. So the sources for the original version of the film are the o-neg, the separation masters, the tech IB prints, the interpositives (the last one known to have been made was in 1985, the others are probably more worn and wouldn’t be as good). For composited shots, you could go back a generation but then you have to recomposite the shot. So there are lots of sources for Disney and Lucasfilm to do a proper restoration of the original version of the film that would meet or exceed the best sources for many older films.
My feelings on the project are complicated.
On the one hand, it is clear that he has spent a vast amount of time and money to bring together a large collection of sources for a restoration, and he clearly believes that the results have been worth it. I appreciate and applaud the enthusiasm.
On the other hand, the results he touts in his videos of doubling the detail in the final result simply aren’t apparent to me. The resultant image has less grain, but the way he has described his detail recruitment algorithm makes it clear that there’s not much benefit in stacking sources and the majority of the detail may be coming from temporal super resolution instead. The issue is that he describes his algorithm as using a weighted average in determining a pixel’s value across multiple stacked prints. However, if an image is blurry and low-detail from several generations of printing, it will be blurry in the average of these values as well. Worse, if you have a single high quality print stacked with several lower-quality prints, a weighted value would result in the lower-quality image. The only appreciable gain would be in removing the grain, which is what we see from his process.
I made a comment to this effect and even started an entire thread discussing a potential solution:
https://originaltrilogy.com/topic/Info-The-Ultimate-Super-Resolution-Technique/id/52162
I would really like to do a test to see if this would actually work.
They way he described it was that he was removing grain that was the result of additional generations. So yes, the grain is reduced/removed, but if he did it right, it would be the o-neg level of grain which was made worse with each generation. The Tech-IB prints don’t have a lot of generations, a color separation and a dye print, but it would remove anything made worse from those. By also applying the frame before and frame after, you could remove even more grain. Several of the shots in ANH look really bad because it is normal 35 mm shots with several generations of FX processing over it. I think his goal was to try to remove that error. From watching his videos, he tried to correct several things in his project that were the result of compositing. Not sure I agree with that for a preservation, but that is what I would hope to seen in a modern restoration of those shots.
My understanding is that the problem with the color separation master is that that films have shrunk at different rates. In the early 90’s that meant they were useless. It is 2020 and I can’t even count the number of old technicolor films that have been restored from such non-aligned masters by doing it digitally. So an excellent restoration could be made from them today.
The negative was badly faded in the early 90’s. If storage conditions have been improved and it has been cared for, there is no reason to assume it has faded more. And we don’t seem to be in a position to know if a new color separation master was made to archive the negative so that even if the original deteriorated, they would have a copy as it was then. The new D+ scan (which appears to be 8 years old at this point) shows as much color as any of the older telecines made from interpositives of the o-neg. So whatever the state, it is good enough to get a really good scan. So whatever they have done since the early 90’s, the film is in pretty good shape.
I am definitely interested. The colors were so muddy.
I’m picky with colors. I don’t tolerate odd colors very well. I just can’t enjoy watching anything that way. I have found issue with most of the color corrections for 4k77 and 4k83 and also with harmy’s Despecialized. I tend to favor my color correction of the GOUT, but that might be surpassed by the D+ semidespecialized (D+77, D+80 and D+83, which isn’t out yet).
It would be useful for comparison and the blue tint isn’t all that hard to correct for.
Got a chance to watch the new 4K Dolby Vision version of Lawrence of Arabia, and my goodness did it remind me what a proper film restoration is supposed to look like with the latest tech. It was bright and grainy and the colors looked more like old film stock than some of the HD clips from an earlier release I found on Youtube. I pulled up Empire Strikes Back by comparison that looked dull and waxy by comparison. (Of course LOA was shot on 65mm vs 35mm for SW, but I don’t think most of what I was seeing was due to that).
I even watched King Creole, a B&W film staring Elvis Presley from the 50’s, in 4K Dolby Vision and that looked better these 4K versions of the Original Trilogy. (forgive some sections that were restored from a late generation print, but otherwise the vast majority was sourced from the original negative).
I seriously am more and more disappointed and confused about how these movies continue to look like absolute shit when compared to other classic films.
Because, except of 2003 when the scanned it for DVD and HD broadcast, they haven’t actually scanned it for release since. The 2011 BR was just the 2003 HD scan. The 2006 extra disc was just a quick transfer of the 93 Definitive Collection LD master. And this was the scanned master for a supposed 3D conversion from several years back. So we have never really had a quality release of these films. I don’t suppose we ever will. What we need is a proper restoration for all these films.
I have my 1990 NTSC VHS and I just picked up the 1990 version on LD. I can see potential problems since the LD splits the movie into 3 pieces. But a lot of good LD’s found quiet spots to break or repeated the audio enough to overlap.
Star Trek is about the human condition in an ideal world, Star Wars is about the human condition when things go to s**t.
For my personal edits, I am planning on using Schorman’s HDTV for AOTC and ROTS. I do plan on restoring the wipe when Threepio and Obi-wan are leaving Mustufar off the blu-ray to produce what is basically the theatrical version. But those seem to have more life and better colors than later releases. I’m enamored with CG Yoda, so my go to version of TPM has to include that I have made my own edit which is the theatrical cut using the original DTS audio tracks, but using the BR with CG Yoda. I found an HD cut of the theatrical podrace to get the first shots of that sequence and I creatively edited one of the clips in the extended air-speeder sequence on Coruscant to cover the missing shot so it is all HD. A little noise and grain hid the worst of the DNR, but that one shot of Qui-gon can’t be so easily fixed. It depends on which cut you are after. Three shots from the original theatrical version of TMP only exist in SD so with upscaling I haven’t been able to get them to look even watchable at higher than 720p. But if you just want to put something on, HDTV version is proabably the best looking. Though ZigZig’s recent release of his LD preservation rivals it in some ways for color.
It is the same model, same cockpit set, and same full sized prop. We can assume that in the year between TESB and ROTJ that someone went back to Bespin to get it. The new official canon is that Lando and Luke went back after they found out Han was delivered to Jabba. Luke looked for his saber, but retrieved his X-wing.
Alternatively it would be pretty easy to have a different X-wing painted to match the original.
Don’t the astronomy guys have software to do this? Poita did something for me a long time ago from the 81 crawl using astronomy stoftware to find and enhance the stars. That has to align them first. And astronomy has to deal with atmospheric disturbances that distort small parts of the image.
I have to say he does good work, but the man is ignorant as to why Lucas edited out some of these shots. He keeps saying there is no reason and even after he cleans them up, I can see the reason and it isn’t what he thinks it is. For instance, the Wolfman was replaced not becasue of the quality of the shot, but because of the mask itself that Lucas hated. And the composite shot outside Yavin base just looks horrible because the matte painting looks so fake when you get to higher resolutions. We all still love the original, but Mike doesn’t seem to understand what drove Lucas to make the changes he made. It was not the quality of the shots, it was the composition and the flaws in production that had been under his skin.
Nice to hear from him after so long, but kind of depressing that nothing is going to come of this.
This is a project I’ll have to keep an eye on. I had not realized that they have screwed up the audio mixed on so many things. Disney really needs someone who knows what they are doing with these home video releases. I’m going to have to find that 1990 audio and listen for myself. I do have my old VHS still, but playing it is not so easy.
Having recently compared them, I actually like the colors of this better too (not to blow my own horn 😉) but I think it would be much easier and a more worthy effort to recolor 4K83 than to clean this.
Being the expert on despecialized and what that takes, do you think 4K83 has enough color depth to replace the SE parts?
Has anyone done a dirt/stabilization of this? It has great colors compared to 4K83 but I’m not good at cleaning things up.
I’m more interested in a scan of JSC than Faces.
There is already an excellent version of JSC. I have it and it is nearly as good as this version of TPM. It is also a much older LD release by about 15 years. The DSC and Faces release hasn’t seen a lot of love because it is mostly a repeat of what go released in 2006. But I think that has some flaws that a high quality LD preservation might fix.
althor1138 has done great work and has done so many versions except the DC, Faces, and TPM.
Yes, I have those two SD copies (TB and ORF) and I’m going to see if this added to those can improve it. In particular the three shots that don’t exist in HD (until we hopefully get a film scan). This version is glorious is so many ways.
And I hope that you might be tempted to do the one LD version that does not exist in this quality - the Definitive Collection/Faces. True we have the GOUT discs, but I have some concerns that some of the GOUT issues might be reduced with a proprer pulldown reversal and such an LD preservation might offer some improvements.
To be blunt, this is the same thing they did with the GOUT. They took what they had lying around and put no effort into it.