Originally posted by: Guy Caballero Hey zombie, in your opinion what is the source of the theatrical version of Apocalypse Now on the new set? I can't tell. It looks pretty excellent to me.
The transfer is not all that great, especially in two particular night scenes but otherwise its decent. Judging by the somewhat muted colours and the many scracthes and flaws in the print itself i would say its either a good-quality print or a deteriorating IP. Redux looks jaw-droppingly gorgeous though due to the fact that its from a newly-sourced Technicolour print from the O-neg. The colours! Too bad Redux sucks. I never noticed how good Redux looked until i got the new DVD set--watched the TE, thought it looked okay, then watched Redux and was blown away. Imagine Star Wars looking like this?? My god. And the exciting thing is that it can--Lucas even has the pristine Technicolour seperation masters still. A newly scanned DI of this would be the best source for a new copy of the original film, even better than the O-neg since it wouldn't require any re-timing effort nor any time-consuming O-neg restoration to reconifigure it.
You know i have always felt that TPM was very harshly treated, but even with all the hype, with all the expectations, it still is a bit dissapointing. It wasn't at all like i thought it would be but i still mostly liked it but thats more because I'm a star Wars nut and would give the films so much leeway. And i don't think you can count all the above factors into the masssive wide dissapointment over the first two prequels. TPM was much more innocent and kid-friendly but people would have loved it if it was engaging and well made--the same way people loved Fellowship of the Ring and Harry Potter, which are very similar in tone and premise. ESB also is the COMPLETE opposite to what a sequel to ANH was expected to be but most fans feel this is even superior to the original, so its not about expectations. The truth is that it was poorly directed, badly written, awkwardly edited and overall not engaging or compelling, except for in the category of visual FX, which was purely due to the budget and technology. The experience of watching the films was dazzling because of the jam-packed frames and the sheer overwhelment of FX--in fact if you read Eberts actual review this is all that he talks about. But once that wears off and you actually look at the content theres not much there. Not that its terrible--that status goes to AOTC--but it certainly is justified in its designation as "dissapointing." And sure, many kids liked TPM--but kids don't have high standards. They also love Power Rangers The Movie, and Bad Boys 2. The true test of a great film is if adults can enjoy it as much as kids. The Lion King is a prime example of this, and any typical Pixard film, all of which i don't think any adult would classify as "dissapointing" or "just okay" the way most fans do for the PT.
Really i think we are spoiled when it comes to Star Wars because the first two were as good as any films possibly could be. ROTJ on its own is pretty lame in most places but it rides on the coat-tails of ESB so most go along with it, even if its "imperfect." The PT however not only is much worse than ROTJ but it can't be carried on the strength of movies before it. Really, is it any surprise that only half of a series is actually "good" and only 1/4 is actually "great"? Most series only have the first one or two films actually be worthwhile. Star Trek has about half the films being crappy, and of the ones that are worthwhile only two or three are actually "good." Most people feel the same way about Terminator, Aliens, Matrix and many other such franchises. Its simply inevitable. Its a law of averages. Not every film can be a hit. Maybe you enjoy the series overall but certainly theres no point in living in denial that some entries are lousy. I love the Star Wars series but as more time goes on and I view them with more and more objectivity now that the SW hoopla has died down i can see that the reason i loved the PT so much was because it was exciting to have more star wars films--i love the world so much that i even read some of the EU books, many of which are among the worst literature i have read. I think most people love the sequels so much because they simply lower their standards when it comes to Star Wars. Many people who love the PT as much as i love the OT also like movies that i would classify as "crappy" as well and its only fuelled my belief that most people are fucking morons when it comes to film. Its no wonder why Jerry Bruckheimer makes $200 million every time he releases a film but most people have never even heard of Wong Kar Wai and would find his films "dumb" and "boring" if they ever saw one.
Skot thanks for being the voice of reason. And cable...just relax man. Its not worth getting this riled up about.
The truth is that report is reasonable but completely unverifiable, so we just have to treat it with what it is: an unconvirmed, unanomously sourced, unsurprising rumor. Nothing earth shattering. And its something many here suspect. But Raul, at the same time i don't think you can expect us to seriously just accept such a report. But thanks for sharing whatever information you have. We'll take it with the appropriate grain of salt. Now lets let this argument die.
I'm actually concerned for future version of the much, much, much superior Theatrical Cut of Apocalypse Now, since the original negative has been altered for Redux. I guess they could just look at the records and re-construct it for a new O-neg scan but I'm afraid they'll be too lazy and just use an IP or regular print for future releases.
And Go-mer, ignorance is bliss as they say. The truth hurts sometimes but living in denial just lets things get worse. If you want to change the world for the better then you have to realise that it sucks and then strive to improve it. Its called the progression of civilisation and its why humanity is the most advanced species in the known universe.
The biggest audio additions from the 1993 re-mix are the asteroid whooshing sounds, the re-done security camera things exploding in the cell block, and more gunfire in that scene as well. The garbage chute scene had more motors and stuff added and i think the sound of the Dai Noga hiding right before the walls start to close. I think the "here they come" sequence had a lot of extra sounds and sweeting done to it as well. Someone made a list with all the additions and theres about a dozen more minor ones but those stand out as the major additions.
Yes, Star Wars was almost unanimously praised. True, there were some bad reviews--not EVERY SINGLE PERSON loved it--but a good 90% gave it favourable reviews and most of those were highly favourable.
ESB on the other hand was very divided. Some loved it, some liked it, many did not. It still was overall favoured by it was very divided. ROTJ on the other hand was viciously criticised--there were still plenty who liked it, but the amount of backlash was almost as bad as the PT. I had to look up all the original reviews for a project I'm working on and ending up reading about 20 or so reviews for each from both major and minor newspapers. But ANH did not get bad reviews, in the general sense. It was one of the most praised film of the decade. Godfather and American Graffiti got a few negative reviews too, but like Star Wars 90% of them were absolutely glowing.
I think you are reading too much into the semantics. "Your highness" can also be used as a general term to denote supreme authority. Luke's use of it acknowledges Palpatine as the supreme authority of the galactic civilization yet he uses it in the context of defiance--what he is really saying is "you may be the supreme ruler of this world but i will not bow down to you."
Go Mer i think his original point was not that people are accepting of non-anamorphic, but that people are completely ignorant to what the term anamorphic actually means.
And yes, the OOT will one day be anamorphic. Quite possibly even next year, though i would be equally unsurprised if they waited until the end of the HD line before pulling it out. LFL has conceived a brilliant sales strategy. Can you imagine if a restored, anamorphic OOT was released in 2004, and then the OT-SE-SE in 2006? Who would buy the SE? Not a whole lot. But people bought it in 2004 because it was the only Star Wars on DVD. The same strategy will follow with HD. PT first, because otherwise the OT sales would blow it away. Then OT-SE, otherwise the OOT sales would blow it away. Then the OOT. If they play their cards right you can get people to buy all three versions.
Indy doesn't have multiple versions of it to milk. And technically the DVD is a an SE of sorts since its had some rotoscoping and fixing done to it, but the results are so subtle that there really wouldnt be a market for an "original theatrical edition" release. Lucasfilm I don't think owns the Indy franchise the way they do SW either, i think Paramount has the ultimate say, or am i wrong about this?
If we ban them though they will just spread it to other forums, and there may not be people there to correct them. Better to enlighten their ignorance here than to let them infect others. But damn do i understand what you are saying--I've realised how little some people actually know.
Originally posted by: Gaffer Tape What's the point of putting a TV show from the '60s in hi-def? Is that even possible? And why would you even want it? It just doesn't make any sense to me. The two seem incongruous. What's next? THE DICK VAN DYKE SHOW IN HI-DEF EXTREME EDITION!!!!
Considering that most of those shows would have been shot on 16mm, which it appears is the case with ST, there indeed is quite a reason to make HD transfers of it.
As for the original point of this thread: you know, i can kind of understand the complaining. The point of the new FX, etc was to bring the show into the new millennium, to make it compete with modern shows--and it really requires quite a lot of changes to do that, more than is being done to the new revisions IMO, and i think a lot of the suggestions are quite valid. But this brings me to a new point: the original show can't possibly be made "modern." No matter how much CG, no matter how many changes--it still has cardboard sets, incredibly cheesy acting, bee-hive hairdoos, tons of 1960's culture artifacts and a general vintage ambiance. At a certain point you have to accept that the series was made in the 60's and the only way to make it look like it was shot today is to actually re-make it. Its a lost cause. The original Star Trek was never "timeless"--its an incredibly dated show, as much as Lost In Space or Time Tunnel. Just let it be what it is.
On the other hand its great to get the original series in HD in its original unaltered form.
This is cool just for a curiosity. Obviously Super 8 footage looks like shit--about the same as a VHS, if not less, and considering these are almost 30 years old, they look more like an Nth generation VHS dub. The screenshots on the website don't disagree with that either. However, in spite of all this, this is a wonderful thing to have, purely for curiosity's sake. Good job, boba feta, transfering film usually isn't easy.
The official disk blows away the Editdroid disk. Its many, many times sharper and has tons more colour fidelity. The only thing it has over the ED version thats bad is the grain, but even the ED looks cleaner simply because the detail gets smudged away. The GOUT is abnormally grainey but this versus the ED versions, the GOUT wins without a second thought. A closer comparison is perhaps Moth3r's version, which is practically identical to the GOUT (which is more or less the same sharpness, though less vibrant, but also less grainy as well).
I think his review is probably one of the fairer ones. Basically his conclusion is that the picture looks passable on a regualr CRT display but to anyone with decent hardware it looks like shit, that the whole first disk is already owned by anyone buying this and that its a shame that this may be all we are getting for the OOT according to LFL. What the hell is "pessimistic" or "negative mindset" about that? Its simply the facts.
Originally posted by: Go-Mer-Tonic Are you saying that he could have released the DVD with more fixes and changes than he had already gotten to by that point?
No, I'm saying that he could have simply released the movies as they were by that point, and then waited for 2007 to do a big fixed-up thing. We would have likely gotten the 1997 SE anyway, his "definitive" version at the time (i guess only until the next release...and then again until the release after that...). Anyway, I'm pretty happy with the way things turned out though, with the exception of this whole OOT business. Personally the smartest thing to do would have been to release the OT in 2001 with the first prequel DVD, just as a bare-bones disk, because thats pretty much all people wanted at the time, and multi-disk special editions weren't as standard as they are now. Hell, if he released a two-disk DVD with the 97 SE on one disk and the 1993 LD on the second like he did now i think people would have loved it simply because the standards in 2001 were so much more forgiving; and then in 2007 released a massive box set with many disks and features and all his changes, and because people by that point would be craving special editions the set would be a giant seller with even more casual fans, whereas the upcoming 2007 will only be bought by the most die hards of die hards. But i guess hindsight is 20/20. Or probably more accurately the LFL marketing team found a way to sell us the same thing four different times in four years.
It was a stupid plan to wait until 2006/2007 to release the films on DVD. I mean by then DVD is on its downward slope and HD is already out. Luckily they realised what a stupid mistake that plan was in 2001 and got with the rest of the world. Its not like Lucas sits at a computer and personally makes these things. Hell, look at how great the TPM DVD set turned out, and he was working on AOTC at the time. People just give him a rundown of things that will be included in the set, Lucas say yay or nay and then six months later takes a day off to film interviews for it and then takes a look at the work-in-progress to make sure he's happy with the product. There's no reason why a good product couldn't be made before 2007. If he plans on being super-involved in every detail in this massive box set then it better be worth the wait, and somehow i doubt that since the main thing people want is simply the movies themselves in high quality.
I like the new Ewok ending. Except the appearance of Naboo, Tatooine and Cloud City though. The original yub nub is still cool, but the new Ewok song i think is appropriate for the SE and one of the few changes that actually adds to the film in a positive way i think.
Cable i think he was being sarcastic. He was saying that LFL would not want to 100% please the fans because then the fans would stop buying product. If we got an HD remastered OOT today then there would be no need for us to invest in Lucasfilm releases ever again. He was criticising Lucasfilm, not bashing fans. And what he said happens to be true. A satisfied fan is not what a cash-cow-based business like LFL would want.
Of course the EOD makers did their own transfers but those transfers still are done on behalf of LFL, and belong to LFL. I mean they were allowed full access to the original negatives, thats not exactly a priviledge thats easily given. All the material they scanned was likely done in house by LFL archive technitions. I had also heard that LFL had transfered all of the original negatives to the computer in 1997, but i'm not sure if this is true.
"first and only time ON DVD". They went out of their way to put that last part in there. Such a legal way of writing: "on dvd." So as to still be accurate when they release it in HD in a few years. I guess this rules out the current possibility of seeing the OOT remastered in the 2007 box set, although not definitively by any means; i can totally see them including it and then explaining "at the time the previous statement was made, we had no plans, but after seeing the success of the 2006 release we decided to go ahead..."
I'm pretty sure that the grain is there simply because the LD could not reveal such fine detail. From what I've seen in the LD transfers, the poorer a transfer, the cleaner the image looks, and the better and more detailed a transfer the grainier the image looks (ie Moth3r). It doesn't surprise me that the transfer taken from the master tapes is also the dirtiest looking.
Would this then indicate that they basically went and re-scanned the original crawl? Why wouldn't they just use the EOD scan? Makes one wonder what else they have in that Ranch, just waiting to be used for another release...
Also, based on the caps I've seen, it looks like the opening stardestroyer fly-by is pretty much the exact same shot taken from the 2004 SE. The detail, colour and image characteristics match perfectly. I am guessing that this is because the starfield on the 1993 LD fly-by is the re-created one and thus would not match the original crawl, so they just spliced the original crawl to the 2004 fly-by, which would also match in quality and image characteristics, perhaps downgrading their quality so as not to completely stand out (they certainly look better than any other shot on the disk from what I've seen, and are free of the ugly grain that this release is notorious for--the look of the Tattooine moon for me is a dead give away).
You are likely not imagining things--its a by-product of the DVNR applied to the 1993 Laserdisk, which eradicated fine detail and led to ghosting in some shots.
