yotsuya

I’ve been working to achieve color restorations of the various versions of the OT and SE available and I think I finally have decided on what the final format should be. I am still working on the color corrections/regrades so I have no completion estimates and at the moment I don’t have many screen shots to share, but I hope to fix that before very long. I have been greatly influenced by Mike Verta’s and DrDre’s work, but I am taking my own approach to this.

First off, this is to fix the colors on the blu-rays, not to reverse the often questionable edits. I’ve never really been able to sit down and judge A New Hope because of the horrible color choices they made for the 2004 DVD edition and never fixed after that.

I truth what I have settled on might be considered a hybrid as for the OT I would like to preserve the 2011 blu-ray audio but stick to most of the DVD video (except where needed - like Han/Greedo - to match the audio). For The Phantom Menace it will strictly be the blu-ray, but for Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith I have not decided. I have not decided on the exact format, but at the moment I’m leaning toward a similar compression as the original blu-ray discs but with only English audio (I detest audio dubbing except as a novelty) and the original subtitles tracks and then use the extra space for some bonus features.

Disc 1
The Phantom Menace
Bonus features - deleted scenes, Original theatrical cut (480p widescreen DVD quality with DTS audio), trailers

Disc 2
Attack of the Clones
Bonus features - deleted scenes, trailers

Disc 3
Revenge of the Sith
Bonus features - deleted scenes, trailers

Disc 4
A New Hope
Bonus features - deleted scenes, Original 1977 theatrical cut, 1981 rerelease cut, 1997 SE cut (all three in 480p widescreen DVD quality with multiple audio tracks), trailers
(basicly the main feature will take up 35 GB leaving 15 for whatever else. The 77 and 81 versions will be GOUT sourced and the 1997 SE will be GKAR & TB sourced - neither source lending itself to much more than DVD quality anyway, but I’ll be using the higher compression blu-ray compatible format instead of mpeg2)

Disc 5
The Empire Strikes Back
Bonus features - deleted scenes, original 1980 theatrical cut, 1997 SE cut (both 480p widescreen DVD quality), trailers

Disc 6
Return of the Jedi
Bonus features - deleted scenes, original 1983 theatrical cut, 1997 SE cut (both 480p widescreen DVD quality), trailers

Disc 7
just leaving this blank for now, but including it in my plan.

Where possible I want the deleted scenes to be 720p, color corrected, cleaned up, with a few seconds of the proceeding and following scenes to give an idea of placement. Ones with temporary animation probably won’t be included. I intend to include the the most notable trailers and I intend to create a new trailer for the first 6 films using the color corrected film.

One of the goals is to establish some consistency over the films. Such things as skin tones (not just human), light sabers, droid colors, etc. should not vary any more from film to film than they do within a film.

To arrive at the color correction for the blu-rays, I am first color correcting the GOUT. Some of DrDre’s work indicated that might not be as far off some believed. I am not including the 35 mm film scans in this project, though I will be attempting to color correct them at the same time. Then I am color correcting the TV broadcasts of the 97 SE trilogy and TPM. I have only really worked on A New Hope and the results have been enlightening. Comparing these two and the variation of color from scene to scene will help in color correcting the DVD/blu-ray version. My goal is to find some key matching scene and do a fairly global color correction of each version that brings those key scenes into close alignment. That will preserve the scene to scene unique color grading of each. I have not fully examined the DVD/blu-ray of The Empires Strikes Back or Return of the Jedi, but I do not expect they will have nearly as many issues at A New Hope. So far I have identified about 50 things that need to be fixed in A New Hope that the scan and subsequent work on it created color anomalies that were not there in the original theatrical version or the 97 SE. A few of note some red that literally glow, explosions that are muted, the display showing the approaching Death Star, the display on the Death Star showing the approach to Yavin, several sections that are over contrasted, and a strong magenta tone that pops out frequently. A New Hope will have a lot of restoration work as well as color correction to bring out the image as the previous two versions show it.

I will be taking a few pieces from Schorman’s 1080p DVD version, specifically for at least one scene in A New Hope and Return of the Jedi respectively. Possibly some other places.

This is a fun topic. I signed the petition long before I joined.

ATMachine said:

Actually, Luke and Leia were respectively 20 and 16 in the shooting script for the 1977 film. So they weren’t the same age, and thus not twins.

However, nobody said anything about them not being related – in fact, the instances of brother/sister incest in both Wagner’s Die Walkure and the Arthurian mythos involve half-siblings born at different times. But that might be a little more than you wanted to know.

I don’t believe the shooting script gave their ages. The previous draft of the script gave her age as 16, but not the shooting draft. Promotional materials list Luke as 20 and Leia as young.

ATMachine said:

^ That was for reasons of plot security on set, rather than that detail not being decided by shooting time. The scripts also don’t mention Luke having his hand cut off and replaced with a prosthesis. (Earlier drafts call for special insert pages at those particular points.)

Yes, with the amount of secrecy involved, I can believe that it was planned but deliberately left out of the screenplay. Same with the Leia reveal in ROTJ.

One thing I have noticed from reading the earlier drafts of the original movie, is that things tended to carry over, even if they went to different characters. So a lot of the details change, but a lot of the core elements remain. Twins was one of the recurring ideas so I can see GL toying back and forth with the idea. But aren’t Luke and Leia supposed to be the same age? I know Hammill and Fisher aren’t the same age, but the characters were supposed to be even back in 1977. How set GL was on the idea I couldn’t say, but I think he left the story open to that option.

From design ideas for Jabba, I think it is clear that Jabba was designed for that scene with him in ANH. I can’t say if that design came from 1977 or from 1983, but I think it is clear Lucas was still thinking about the cut Jabba scene when they were designing the way he’d look.

Think of it this way, the original negative is the master negative for creating all interpositives and presentation prints. It includes all composited effects, scene changes, and titles. For Star Wars/A New Hope, a 3 color separation master was also created which supposedly would let them create a duplicate of the original negative. For the SE, they went back to the camera negatives, the raw footage, to recomposite most (but not all) of the shots. I’m not sure to what extent they did this with the composited effects shots (which were all done in VistaVision so the final composite would not have increased film grain over non-effects shots) or whether they kept the original composited elements. In some cases the stars are obviously different, but in others they aren’t. The snow speeder sequences in TESB were all redone to correct a flaw with the way it was originally composited (that allowed the background to show through the darker areas of the image).

I often watch TCM in HD (720p) and a lot of the movies they show are from original prints with the cigarette burns intact. One was a restoration where the only complete version was 16 mm so the shots missing from the 35 mm copy were fuzzy. But at 720p, the scans of the original prints looks pretty good. The older technicolor prints often have some obvious misalignment, but a properly calibrated scan and subsequent filtering can separate and realigns the colors (Mike did this in a couple of shots - one scene he found several levels of misalignment and corrected them all because he couldn’t be sure of which were due to Technicolor and which were through some accident of production). Citizen Kane only exists as a high quality presentation print (the negative was lost long ago). For many old movies, the print is all we have and some of them are damaged. But I am often amazed at the quality. And some of the modern restorations are just incredible. About the only way to see the original 1977 Star Wars better than Mike is doing would be a full restoration of that 3 color separation. It has the same problem that a lot of old, pre-color negative technicolor films have, the negatives have shrunk unevenly. A problem in 1996 when GL wanted to use them to restore the faded negative, but not a problem today with digital technology that can realign the colors (this has been used in countless films, such as Gone With The Wind and a lot of early color negative films that were distributed in Technicolor that have the yellow too faded on the negative so they use that piece of the technicolor color separation). The restored ones are so much clearer, but even the unrestored ones scanned form original prints are pretty clear. And even Mike has commented that no all prints are created alike. He has seen one high quality one and one lower quality one (according to his comments). He’s also gone beyond just archiving and cleaning up the technicolor print to using algorithms to see through the grain and recover details, such as on the infamously low quality shot of Luke’s landspeeder passing through Mos Eisley.

I don’t doubt your dad’s memory, just that he may not have been privy to everything. That fist pan and scan LD release in the US may have used the master he created for video tape. We’d have to compare them. My old tapes were water damaged and got thrown out so I don’t have any way to compare them myself. Bit there are preservations out there of both tape and LD releases. All the various LD audio tracks were wonderfully archived and shared by Schorman with notations as to weather the original was analog or digital.

You should really inform Schorman that his 1983 Japanese LD’s don’t really exist and his 1985/6 US LD’s must have been made later.

What they probably did was use the existing master. I lost count of how many early DVD’s were made from the LD master tapes. No reason to expect that was a new thing. Knowing a bit about corporate mentality, there would also be no reason to tell the engineers.

Most of Star Wars is taken from other sources. I like the idea of a bunch of old films providing inspiration. I think we might get a more OT feel. On the other hand, I wish they were doing more to make it unique. Each trilogy should have a different feel.

For home viewing I prefer 5.1. I don’t see the point in more channels unless you are in a large theater. At least the 5.1 version of the 2011 sound mix is on the DVD copy in the BR/DVD trilogy sets. I found that out when I bought the Navajo dubbed DVD so I bought the rest.

Not bad. I like it.

Palpatine is hit by lightning that is reflected back by Mace’s saber. I think that might have something to do with it rather than something inherant to the lightning. Also, other than Ian being not a thin in the PT as he was in ROTJ, the ROTS makeup is pretty close to the ROTJ makeup, just done differently. It is just very hard to see anything other than his face in ROTJ, but there are occasional glimpses under the hood, enough to be sure the freaky forehead is there in ROTJ.

JayArgonaut said:

For the benefit of the rest of us who are unaware, what was incorrect?

Star Wars/A New Hope was never released with just a stereo soundtrack. They used the Dolby Stereo mix which is a 4 channel matrixed surround encoded into 2 channels. I have done a test of the earliest LD archives tracks and have been able to extract the 4 channels from it. I held this misconception until just a few months ago. It seems that Lucasfilm gave them the 6 track audio and CBS/Fox did their own surround mix of it for the 1985 release. He was no longer there when they did the DE, but I would guess that the process was probably the same. I love the description of the transfer process and that they did the surround encoding of the 1985 version form the 6 track audio (it kind of explains why the 1985 ANH audio is identical to the 1977 except for the one line that was added where the 1993 audio has many pieces taken from the mono-mix but omits that line, not to mention the different dynamic of the 3 different audio versions).

He makes a distinction between the recordable video disc format and LaserDiscs. I have no doubt the early recordable video discs were made of glass.

He also seems unaware that the the earliest LD releases were before ROTJ came out and that all of the OT was released with the original theatrical stereo tracks (meaning Dolby Stereo encoded surround sound) had been released before he ever started there.

I usually take all such interviews at face value that they are providing terrific first hand knowledge of their experience, but when they speak of their second hand information they may not be the best source.

ray_afraid said:

I’ve seen plenty of old movies in perfect HD and the make-ups stand strong.
But, I don’t think the drop in modern quality is due from the old masters dying with their secrets, I was just confirming Wooks suspicions on that subject.
It’s important to remember that not all old old-age make-ups were successful, nor are all modern attempts failures.

Back to the Future 2 proves that point. They had three different makeup artists do the old age makeup and they had differing degrees of success.

I trust he knows what the appropriate level of grain is for a master o-neg scan and has matched that rather than preserve the level of grain in the print. Grain is fine, but preserving grain buildup has never made sense to me.

I noticed a few incorrect pieces of information, but most of it was new and gold.

Density said:

Honestly, it’s quite possible (and incredible, when you think about it) that the entirety of the first Star Wars takes place over the course of just three days.

Day 1: Vader captures Leia and her ship, 3PO and R2 land on Tatooine with the plans, get captured by the Jawas that evening.

Day 2: Owen buys 3PO and R2, we’re introduced to Luke, watch him clean the droids, see the Leia hologram, Binary Sunset, etc. Ends with R2 running away.

Day 3: Luke searches for R2 first thing in the morning with 3PO, gets attacked by sand people and meets Obi-Wan. Goes to Obi-Wan’s hut, learns about the force, gets lied to about his father. Owen and Beru get killed, Luke finds out, goes to Mos Eisley with Obi-Wan. They meet Han and Chewie, set course for Alderaan.

We know for certain THAT much took place over three days at least. The question is how long it takes them to get to the Death Star by hyperspace. It certainly feels to the viewer–or at least it always did to me–like they arrive at the Death Star on the same day Alderaan gets blown up which was the same day they took off. And the state the place is in when they get there seems to support that. Obi-Wan “feels” the disturbance in the force at the time it happens too.

Anyway, they get to the Death Star, rescue Leia and Ben dies - that clearly all happens on the same day, and then you would think since the Death Star is about to destroy the rebel base and there is no time to evacuate apparently that time is of the essence. So it seems like the whole battle takes place later that same day, or it always felt that way to me. Though again, because they get to Yavin via hyperspace we aren’t 100% sure how long it took them to get there.

At any rate, it does make it seem a bit strange that Luke got such an emotional attachment to Obi-Wan after only truly knowing him for a few days and only thinking of him as a bizarre old hermit before then.

This was hotly debated in the WEG RPG. The first edition had the travel time from Tatooine to Alderaan in days. They revised it to hours.

But, one reason that Luke is so sad to lose Ben (and this is pointed out in the film) is that Ben knew his father and Luke is hungry to learn about his father. His uncle never talked much about him, but Ben seemed to be willing to. So in Ben he finds this connection to his father and then loses him. That is a pretty good reason to be sad.

The travel time from Alderaan to Yavin doesn’t really matter. The Falcon and Death Star travel it in similar times with the Falcon arriving enough ahead that the rebels are able to analyze the data and find the weakness they needed and prepare to launch an attack. Considering that Rogue One has the secret mission leave from Yavin and Leia is attacked at Tatooine, It is not hard to imagine that all 3 planets are in the same area. But that really all depends on how far a ship can travel in hyperspace in an hour. If you can cross the galaxy in a day, then the planets can be quite far apart, but would still be the same general area (same quadrant).

In TESB the issue is different. The Falcon’s hyperdrive is out and they have to take the long way. That changes any trip from hours or days into weeks at the least. And that is just to get to a neighboring system. From a storytelling perspective, the time is irrelevant. It is enough time for you to believe that Han and Leia are in love and that Yoda has trained Luke to be a quasi-Jedi (the way I look at it is that Yoda trained him in the skills he needed, but Luke hadn’t passed the tests to confirm he had learned the most important lessons - that he came back from confronting Vader proved he had taken in Yoda’s training). It really is however long you as the viewer thinks it needs to be to accomplish those two things. For me, that is about 2-3 months. The story skips to the arrival at Bespin and Luke’s vision so how long it took is never addressed. I think with Lucas’ idea that 3 years happen between ANH and TESB and 1 year between TESB and ROTJ that a longer time for the events in TESB fits better, but that is me.

I think Palpatine considers the lightsaber an inferior weapon. But it is also a good weapon to defend against other light sabers and to keep the extent of your powers hidden. Palpatine gets Anakin to act and then he has no need to hide because Anakin is his servant from that point on.

There is less an excuse for Yoda. Other than him being a teacher and former active Jedi. He probably used to use one on a regular basis. It made sense in ATOC, but his tactics, while cool to see from an action point of view, don’t exactly match his personality. I think they did that because he is supposed to be the best with a lightsaber and the character was CG. I think they could have done something that looked more effortless. The way they have Darth Vader fight in Rebels is more what I think they should have done. But, on the other hand, I can see where that tactic would have been appropriate when he was a young Jedi. We have seen that a Jedi’s tactics can change over time.

I disagree in part.

Someone had to train Darth Maul. That kind of makes it implicit that Palpatine would have a lightsaber and know how to use it. Him having it while he might be a target for Jedi makes perfect sense. It is for defense if attacked. He proves in both battles that he prefers to use the raw power of the dark side.

Yoda trains younglings in the early use of the lightsaber. That means he was once an expert in its use. His method of fighting fits with his size, though not with his age. But I think when you consider what he might have been in his younger days, everything makes sense. What we are seeing in ATOC and ROTS are his last battles, first with his former apprentice and then with the most powerful Sith any Jedi has encounterd for 1000 years. I’m not saying the battles themselves were the best choice, but both characters having lightsabers and being expert in their use fits with their backstory. Even in the OT it makes sense. Palpatine has eliminated the Jedi and has Vader to hunt down any strays they learn of. Yoda is in excile and has more to teach Luke than saber skills. Neither of them has need of their lightsabers at that point.

They still did that on occasion in the 90’s. I have a couple of old tapes like that.

Nice colors. Not too bad a transfer.

I’d like to some PT aliens. Some OT aliens would be good, too. There are several characters I’d like to see in flashback, but they need to add to the story if they were to appear in the main story. I can’t think of any reason to do that.

I’d love to revisit any of planets. There were a bunch we only glimpsed. Coruscant needs to be addtessed, but I don’t much care if we see it.

Unless you have access to some pretty good filtering software, turning the mono mix into stereo would be very hard if not impossible. You have to have a way to filter each individual sound and musical instrument and then rechannel it form the single mono channel to match the left/right placement in the stereo mix. I’ve thought about this and the easiest way I’ve settled on is to take the best match Dolby Stereo mix and split out the channels and replace the center channel with a filtered version the mono mix where it differs and then clean the other tracks to make sure no cross over sounds from the stereo mix interfere with the new mono mix sourced center channel. That may prove nearly impossible, but it sounds easier to me than filtering the mono mix.

A New Hope works musically as a stand alone or the first in the series. Making it the 4th installment and with certain things lacking, such as the Imperial March, it could do with a revisit. I think most of it is fine as it is, but it could use a few changes and some additions to bring it more in line with the rest of the saga. That is one thing I am looking at for my fan edit (a semi-specialized and revisited edit). The other movies don’t need much done to the soundtrack, but A New Hope doesn’t quite fit. Though I plant to stick with Williams music exclusively.

Williarob said:

Here is my latest attempt, using only the 35mm version…

https://mega.nz/#!45gFWYCB!0xcOeCA2UrWoH9tVvlXhoTqEmDrS3wB7fVNcObf02MU

I only have two critical comments. The starfield is too clean. you need to introduce some grain to it so it matches the rest of the elements. The other is the blue glow is missing around the engines and in other places over the starfield. That is a hard one. Outside of that it looks fantastic.

Darth Lucas said:

After:

This one looks most like the LD versions. I know it seem a bit too blue, but this clip in the LD verions does as well.

NeverarGreat said:

After gathering a bunch of references, it looks as if the earliest examples of the film have a greenish tint to them. I actually had to reduce the green of the bootleg to balance the colors somewhat:

Your collection is missing the LD sources of the 81 crawl/flyover. They do have a more blue cast so Darth Lucas correction above that seemed a little too blue is probably closer than it seemed. Many of these are too yellow. I think matching the colors for the crawl and making sure the star destroyer is grey enough and let the planet be imperfect. Trying to match this version to either the 1977 or the 1997 versions may lead to incorrect results. The only thing I have planned to use those version for is to align the blockade runner and star destroyer in my remaster. Hopefully I can get to that next month (maybe even next week).