An SVHS copy might rival the LD. I only care about the opening crawl/flyover as I believe this is the same master source used for the GOUT.
Well, one of them isn’t a different take, just a different mix and it was repeated in the SE mix (at least the 2011 BR). That is when Luke and co arrive in Mos Eisley and confront the Stormtroopers. The Stormtrooper lines are spaced differently. The the two very noticable ones are when Threepio and R2 are hiding after the Cantina and the Stormtroopers come knocking but find it locked. That is a completely different take and might be a different person. Then after Leia escapes, the officer who calls Tarkin in the Briefing room uses his name and the take is different. I’ve heard a variety of lines are different, but I’ve never been able to hear the difference.
When assembling the 5.1 audio for RotJ Despecialized v2.5, I noticed that the 1993 version for that film actually does contain two sound effects that are not present in the 1983 stereo mix.
The first is at the very beginning of the Dagobah scene, before it cuts to the interior of Yoda’s house: in the original mix, there is one sound of thunder in the distance, while the 1993 version has two.
The other added effect is at the end of the film, as the Millennium Falcon flies away from the exploding Death Star: in the original mix, the sound of the ship is heard in the front channels only, moving from center to right as it goes off-screen. The 1993 version has exactly the same front channel content, but adds the sound of the ship zooming into the rear channels as well.
I’m not sure exactly when these additional effects were introduced. Unlike the other two films, RotJ’s 1993 mix is not copied from an original master mix but was made from the separate stem recordings, so it is possible that these were present in the sound effects stems and not a deliberate change. Why then they would not be present in the 35mm stereo mix is unclear. Either they were added to the stems at the last minute and did not make it in time to be included in that version, or else they were present but deliberately muted. They might be in the 70mm version of Jedi, but since there is no copy of that available, there is no way to know.
More significant than either of these are some of the different mixing choices between the '83 and '93 versions. The '83 has the music consistently more prominent throughout most of the movie, especially when Han is unfrozen from carbonite and when Luke defeats Vader; although the '93 does have it louder in a few places, notably the Rancor scene and the Emperor’s arrival. There is some panned dialog in a couple spots in the original, but all dialog is completely centered in the remix. Finally, during the scene on Endor where Luke tells Leia how they are related, the sound of birds chirping is much more noticeable in the '93 remix. In the '83 stereo, it is present but quite subdued. Again, there is no way to know how it is in the 70mm version, although I expect that the 70mm resembles the 35mm more than the '93.
My version uses the 1993 for its dynamic range but I did insert the 35mm for Vader’s defeat, since the music sounds so much more glorious in that version. The unfreezing scene is still the '93, but increased in level during that section to make the music stand out more.
Good to know. That helps a lot. Sounds like for both TESB and ROTJ, there is the original theatrical and the 1993 mixes (plus the mono for TESB). I take it the 1985 mix for both films matches one of the other mixes and is extraneous.
There is no way that the Mono Mix is just a different take. That’s a whole new woman. Considering the rest of the audio errors the mix corrects, I bet they decided the original voice was just a bit off-sounding for her and decided to redub her entirely.
That makes me wonder something else… Considering the sheer amount of new ADR in the Mono Mix, is it at all possible that there was another recording session that took place after release?
There are some pitch differences, but the voice is the same. Since you bought it up, I even double checked it with her real voice (She was a principle in A Family At War which is out on DVD and some of the episodes are currently up on YouTube) and it is all the same person. The unique tones of her voice match in all three. And it isn’t just my ear, but several reports on the ADR sessions conducted by Ben Burtt confirm that it was Shelagh Fraser doing an American accent. Her American vs. British accents are very similar to Hugh Laurie’s.
As I said in my original post, I’ve spent a lot of time researching the ANH sound mixes. I knew a lot before I started digging into the details shared here on OT and now I know perhaps more than I want to. But TESB and ROTJ haven’t been through the same level of tinkering and don’t have nearly as many points of difference. It seems more than I thought, but still not very much. It looks like there are 3 or 4 edits of TESB, but only one for ROTJ. Before the SE that is.
April (EXACT DATES UNKNOWN)
LARS HOMESTEAD - KITCHEN INTERIOR
One day was spent filming the scene of Shelagh Fraser as Beru talking to Own in their Kitchen, and an additional scene, later cut from the final theatrical cut, of Beru using a milk dispenser. Fraser’s voice would be dubbed for the film’s release by an unknown actress (who would then be re-dubbed herself, for unknown reasons, for the STAR WARS TV version in 1982, before having her voice returned for the 1997 SPECIAL EDITION re-release).
This information is very incorrect. This community has the 77 stereo from early home releases, the 77 mono, the 85 stereo, and the 93 stereo, the 97 mix, the 04 mix, the 11 mix, as well as an in theater audio recording of the 77 70 mm surround mix. The 77 mono is the only one where Beru’s voice is different and it is only a different take, not a different actress. The prevailing opinion is that the dubbing was with Shelagh Fraser. So it was not redubbed in 82. Both versions are from 1977 and only the mono version out of all the audio mixes has the different take of Beru, as well as quite a number of other lines, though I can only easily identify 2 other lines that are different enough to be noticeable.
Which take do you prefer?
I like the one in the mono mix. I don’t really have an opinion about the acting job. They both are good, but the sound is better in the mono. It fits more smoothly into the mix and sound more natural. So that is really what makes the difference to me. Especially when Luke and Owen’s lines sound so natural.
April (EXACT DATES UNKNOWN)
LARS HOMESTEAD - KITCHEN INTERIOR
One day was spent filming the scene of Shelagh Fraser as Beru talking to Own in their Kitchen, and an additional scene, later cut from the final theatrical cut, of Beru using a milk dispenser. Fraser’s voice would be dubbed for the film’s release by an unknown actress (who would then be re-dubbed herself, for unknown reasons, for the STAR WARS TV version in 1982, before having her voice returned for the 1997 SPECIAL EDITION re-release).
This information is very incorrect. This community has the 77 stereo from early home releases, the 77 mono, the 85 stereo, and the 93 stereo, the 97 mix, the 04 mix, the 11 mix, as well as an in theater audio recording of the 77 70 mm surround mix. The 77 mono is the only one where Beru’s voice is different and it is only a different take, not a different actress. The prevailing opinion is that the dubbing was with Shelagh Fraser. So it was not redubbed in 82. Both versions are from 1977 and only the mono version out of all the audio mixes has the different take of Beru, as well as quite a number of other lines, though I can only easily identify 2 other lines that are different enough to be noticeable.
To be honest, neither the Stereo Beru or the Mono Beru sound all that natural to me. Mono Beru felt like she stressed the wrong syllables sometimes.
I wasn’t speaking of performance, only sound mixing. The stereo Beru is noticeably dubbed. The mono Beru seems as well dubbed as Owen and seems to fit nicer in the mix. The stereo Beru has always stood out to me as being way too obviously dubbed and that bugs the hell out of me.
Do Empire and Jedi have separation masters as well?
Not to my knowledge. And from the state of the transfers, I don’t think they need them.
@yotsuya
Several of those questions about TFA are answered in the book. That is, if you care you know the answers to them, but you probably don’t.Stuff like the relationship between the New Republic and the Resistance and why Han and Chewie found the Falcon so fast is explained in the movie as well. Also a line or two isn’t enough to please everyone. Some people needs things to be fleshed out a little more.
A slightly different opening crawl, a different selection of scenes (some of the stuff was filmed but cut… the BR does not have even a fraction of the deleted scenes and doesn’t have any of the good ones) and just a tiny bit more logical thought and this movie could have been error free and great. But that isn’t Abrams style. And no one should have to read the book to understand the movie. There is nothing in the movie about the republic having rotating capitals, nothing about it having a tiny fleet. Some of this can be inferred, but mostly it just doesn’t make sense. Abrams gave us the characters, the environment, but he failed to deliver the scope. His Star Wars is small. Lucas’s Star Wars is epic in scale. He has the First Order destroy one system and makes it sound like they destroyed the Republic. In Lucas’s Star Wars, Coruscant could be wiped out and the fleet would still exist, the regional governments would still exist. And the entire section of Rey and Finn escaping on the Falcon is full of holes. How did they evade the Star Destroyer? Were they not tracking their ships on the surface? The Falcon should have been chased out of the atmosphere and jumped to hyperspace and then the hyperdrive fails and dumps them someplace for Han and Chewy to find (that could have been done in the current running time). As it stands they fly into space and Han and Chewy pick them up instead of the New Order. What were Han and Chewy doing at Jakku and why didn’t the Star Destroyer bother them? So many inconsistencies in once scene that it give me a headache. And then when the Starkiller fires, that just makes no sense. The Death Star at least was near its target. No mention of why Starkiller can just shoot and the system gets destroyed. No logic how Han and Finn could see it happening (the single most fantastic, unscientific, and unrealistic event in all 8 movies). Abrams gets and A for set design and characters, but an F for story.
What exactly does it mean for the negative to be disassembled?
The first thing they did for the Special Edition was clean up the original negative shot by shot and frame by frame. This process was started in 1994. The technology to do this digitally didn’t exist yet, as it would by 2004, so they were still doing this photochemically. Because the o-neg was made up of four different kinds of film stocks (one for the shots that would’ve come straight from the camera, another for the vfx shots, etc), it had to be disassembled in order to clean and chemically treat each shot with the tender love and care it needed. I’m not sure if this necessitated separating each and every shot (for example, the scene where Luke has dinner with Owen and Beru was presumably all shot on the same film stock, so maybe they were able to clean/bath that scene without disassembling it).
While they were doing this, they also redid the optical wipes. This would have involved separating the end of each scene from the beginning of the next.
The negative has been conformed to the SE since 1997. George decided to cut the changes directly into the negative because, as far as he was concerned, the SE was the official version of the movie now.
We recently got confirmation from the relevant person at Fox that the pieces of the negative replaced for the SE were indeed put into storage and not discarded. It’s worth noting, though, that many of the vfx shots had deteriorated by '97 because of the chemical properties of the specific film stock they were finished on. As a result, even the shots that weren’t completely redone with cgi still had to be replaced. Because the only alternative was going to a grainier second-generation source like an IP or sep, George instead had ILM go back to what I presume were the VistaVision originals (which I guess hadn’t faded as badly?) and recomposite those shots digitally.
I think I remember reading on zombie’s website that the negative need not be disassembled to reconstruct the unaltered version. Because a modern restoration would be done digitally anyway, they would simply need to take a scan of the o-neg as it is now, scan in the pieces that got replaced, and rebuild everything in the digital realm.
Well, first off, you obviously don’t know how they make wipes. Wipes are effects shots. What is in the original composited negative is not the original camera negative elements and it affects the entirety of the shot before and after. To redo a wipe you go back to the original camera negative and recomposite the wipe and then splice in the composited negative element.
Also, Star Wars had a 3 color separation master made. Each color is separated onto B&W stock which does not fade. The problem in 1994 is that this separation master had suffered from inconsistent shrinkage. There is no known optical method of restoring this. Fast forward to today and this is the single best source to do a 4k restoration of the original 77 cut of the film. Digitally this is a piece of cake to reassemble and align. It has been done on innumerable films already. So worrying about finding all the pieces, the wipes, etc, is really pointless when all you have to do is find this 3 color separation master and go from there. It isn’t faded. It will have the original color timing. It is the ideal source to do any restoration of the film. Even if they wanted to do a 4k version of the SE, this is where they should start as it would take a lot less work than the original negative. My understanding of the process is that the B&W film has a finer grain so it maintains the image quality of the original negative when used to make an optical print. Using digital restoration on it should provide the best possible copy of the original film and to restore the 97/04/11 SE, the 97 elements just need to be scanned (which probably have not faded at all) or regenerated from the digital masters (and in either case they would need to be upscaled and cleaned of any digital artifacts. So all the fresh wipes, all the freshly composited effects shots should be on more stable stock and be easy to scan.
Well, it depends on what you mean by original. Very few of the lines of dialog in the final movie were recorded on set. In the case Beru, all her lines were dubbed. There is the 77 stereo and the 77 mono versions of Beru. The 77 stereo just sounds bad, but it has been the version used in every audio edit of the film except the 77 mono. The 77 mono currently exists in fan circles in two forms. A UK airing of Star Wars utilized the 77 mono mix and most of the restoration/preservation efforts have included that audio track. More recently, a 35mm print with the English mono audio mix has been found and so we now have two different copies. My initial listen indicates that the UK airing is better quality.
Some fan edits have sought to fix this. Andywan’s Revisited replaced the 77 stereo version with the 77 mono version. I have a draft mix that I use for my color correction tests where I did the same thing.
The 77 stero version of Beru’s lines sounds badly edited. The 77 mono version of her lines sounds much better. Far more polished and what you expect from an Oscar award winning sound mix. For the 2011 blu-ray, they went back to all the original elements and still chose the 77 stereo takes and edits instead of the 77 mono takes and edits. I was very disappointed.
The 77 mono mix has several other significant changes. It has the Threepio tractor beam line (which reappeared in the 85 mix and then was absent in the 93 mix, but was back for the SE and has since remained), it has a different pacing when Luke, Ben and the droids confront the stormtroopers (which they added back later for the SE), a different take of the line when the stormtroopser are searching Mos Eisley and knock on the door Threepio and R2 are hiding behind, a different take of the line when it is reported to Tarkin that the Princess has escaped. It has lots of other differences, but most of the others have made their way into later edits. Most of the small things found their way into the 93 edit. Pretty much everything except the alternate dialog has been included in the blu-ray. I think the blu-ray uses all the 1977 stereo dialog and includes all the 1977 mono effects sounds (plus all the SE changes). Ben Burt claimed that some of the differences were because of the quality of the original recordings, but I don’t buy it.
I read a friend’s review of Trolls this morning and I was inspired. I thought of all the dark parts of the movie and how I could edit them into something dark and sinister to counter the sugary sweet product that is the final film. Alas, I have no spare time to craft such a thing. Should anyone else be so inspired, I would love to give my input and to see the final result. And with that title, we could blame JJ Abrams for any logical gaps in the story.
Of all the movies, only Star Wars and Jedi had real endings.
TPM does as well.
It’s a cliffhanger ending. And ESB was by no means wrapped up at the end. In fact, one criticism people had back in 1980, (who were no doubt unfamiliar with the old movie serial structure Lucas was emulating) was that it was only “half” a movie.
It was the escape from Hoth and the training of Luke. Han was captured while Leia, Chewy, Threepio, and the Falcon escaped. Han’s capture and Luke’s defeat and everyone’s escape is an ending. Not a happy ending, but an ending. Lando and Chewy left to find Han. And everyone who saw it should have known that there would be another one. I did and I was 10. TFA has several huge plot holes and is lacking in exposition (which there usually is too much of) and it has an ending that it goes beyond. Every other installment has an ending that we pick up years later (TESB to ROTJ is the shortest at Lucas’s timeline of 1 year). TLJ will pick up moments after TFA. New is good, but some aspects of the formula should be kept. Abrams failed to do that and failed to craft an logical story that fit with the others. All of Lucas’s failings in the PT, Abrams addressed and did better. But he failed at all the things that Lucas was good at, such as writing the overall story and having a satisfying ending. I still like the Ending to TESB to this day. It was satisfying even with the threads left hanging. I do not find TFA’s ending satisfying.
basically putting off resolving the story for the next writer and director rather than having an individual story installment
The film is about finding Luke and that is exactly what happened. The film isn’t about Luke speaking though I would have greatly preferred that he did speak.
My problem with the ending is that we have 6 movies in the saga that all have similar endings. The story wraps up - loose ends are left dangling in many cases when it is not the final trilogy installment. In TFA, it ends with what is very much a beginning with a hell of a lot of lose ends brought up in the last scene (is Luke going to train Rey, is he her father, is he going to come back to the Resistance and help out, is he going to say anything…) The movie was not about Luke, it was about the map to Luke. They found it and the movie should have ended when the Falcon left to find him. That would fit with the 6 other movies. This passes the buck. If Luke was supposed to be found, the scene should have been longer and Luke should have agreed to come back like the opening Crawl said Leia wanted. The last scene postoned the true resolution of the story until the next movie. Abrams made a typical for him decision and as always, it was the wrong one. The man can’t write a decent ending. He’s never managed it yet.
Exactly. I wanted it to be well-written and well-structured story, and it ended up being a complete mess.
Well, you aren’t the only one with that opinion. I was dreading it from the moment I found out Abrams was involved. He would have been my last choice. But he makes blockbusters so it kind of made sense. Except his is as inept at story telling as he is brilliant at characters. I went in with an open mind and the first time I saw it a few things bothered me and more and more of the movie bothers me all the time. It has some huge plot holes, huge information gaps, and a sucky ending (basically putting off resolving the story for the next writer and director rather than having an individual story installment). I have read up on Rian Johnson and I am hopeful that he can do what Abrams failed to do - craft a spectacular story.
This popped up on Twitter and Facebook today. No big surprises.
I definitely would be interested in seeing your version. Just the clip was promising. I love how you used Anakin’s Theme in the last scene with Obi-wan before he turns.
A thought though… something I noticed a while back. His turn wasn’t abrupt and wasn’t just because of the need to save Padme. Palpatine has been his friend since he arrived on Coruscant and after he saves Palptine from Mace Windu, Palpatine uses the force on him to complete the conversion. You can hear it when Palpatine speaks - a subtle effect added to his dialog. I noticed it a few other places where the force is being used. So I think his slaughter in the Jedi Temple is very important because it is the act that solidifies his turn.
When you consider the crawl, that technically makes it a new version of the film. You have the 77 release and its 3 soundtracks, the 81 rerelease with the new crawl/flyover and the same soundtracks, the 85 home video release with a new soundtrack, the 1993 home video release with a new soundtrack, and the 2006 release with a restored 77 crawl/flyover. It fits with GL’s penchant for tinkering. It should have included the 77 stereo soundtrack. But we have fixed that with our fan release of the GOUT.
These two examples of the same frame really show why I have issues with Mike Verta’s color choices. Both droids seem dull in the top one, but both gleam like metallic surfaces really do in bright lights in the lower one. And it doesn’t seem to be an artifact of the poor condition of of the tape as I get the same gleam when I correct to Mike’s 1 fps sample clips. Mike seems convinced that R2 should be very dark instead of letting the film tell him the color. In all the correction passes I have made on the GOUT, JSC, 97 SE broadcast, and BR, I have never gotten a dark R2 like this. The colors in the video tape are much closer to what I keep getting - a deep cobalt blue. Having been to the Star Wars Costume Exhibit at the Denver Art Museum where they had an original ANH R2 and several pieces to examine close up, the original R2 is not that dark and looks more like the lower photo (I have no idea how many Kenny Baker R2’s were made for ANH or which one was in this shot or which one is on tour with the exhibit).
I’ve always felt that there is something not quite right with Mike Verta’s colors. I think he may have over corrected for the perceived green tint - something the color on the blu-ray has in the reverse. It is hard to see the colors in the bootleg with the heavy fading and the yellow tones, but even so it seems much closer. I really look forward to seeing the color corrected scans, but to be honest, I trust DrDre’s eye for color more than anyone else. His last go at color correction was spot on and his samples scan have been stellar for the tech colors.
Into Darkness was just such a fucking abysmal, vapid, soulless, derivative cash-grab it was genuinely offensive.
Which is why I have the “Seeds of Wrath” fan edit of Into Darkness. It’s not perfect by any stretch, but somewhat better.
Did you find a way to fix them casting Cumberbatch as Khan? I like the guy, but he is not Khan and never will be.
Into Darkness was just such a fucking abysmal, vapid, soulless, derivative cash-grab it was genuinely offensive.
Which is why I have the “Seeds of Wrath” fan edit of Into Darkness. It’s not perfect by any stretch, but somewhat better.
Did you find a way to fix them casting Cumberbatch as Khan? I like the guy, but he is not Khan and never will be.
a whole string of gaffs
I’ve seen this mistake several times lately, which is to say I’m not calling you out specifically. Anyway…
While the word did intitially indicate something verbal, the usage has grown to include other kinds of blunders. My usage is in keeping with the current Webster Dictionary definition which makes no mention of anything verbal and instead indicates that it applies to blunders and mistakes - exactly how I would characterize what JJ Abrams body of work is full of.
