zombie84

TV's Frink said:

zombie84 said:

In a world where one of the characters in the series is a sack of organs from a former soldier hooked up to a robot, I think Boba Fett and Darth Maul are both strongly implied by the films' treatment to be dead but simultaneously contradicted by the internal logic of the series' technology as not having to stay that way.

Apologies but I'm still confused.  Are you saying we can assume Fett didn't bite the sand in ROTJ?  Is this an EU thing?

In the comics since the 1980s Boba Fett escaped the sarlac in ROTJ and went on to have many more adventures.

In a world where one of the characters in the series is a sack of organs from a former soldier hooked up to a robot, I think Boba Fett and Darth Maul are both strongly implied by the films' treatment to be dead but simultaneously contradicted by the internal logic of the series' technology as not having to stay that way.

Maul's brother was featured in an earlier episode I think so there might be a bit of character background existing. I thought that was reaching but this is a bit much. Still, they brought back Boba Fett three decades ago and most people don't seem to mind that very much.

I just watched a 1984 VHS tape of ANH that I bought a year or two ago. The film looked suprisingly great, very nice and vivid colours, but the tape broke at one point and got chewed up. Managed to fix it pretty easily but that one part will have noise over it forever now. Just goes to show that every time you watch these, they die a little more.

Are you talking about the BG in the shot of Han? If so, that's Alec Guiness, the shot is used from the end of the "go strap yourselves in" moment and repurposed there.

red5-626 said:

Master Sifo-Dyas said:

DuracellEnergizer said:

 

red5-626 said:

First off I need to say I am not a PT hater. The PT is inferior to the OT but it  could have been worse than it is. Yes that’s possible I had nightmares about TPM being worse. I had nightmares from 1999 to 2002 that the backstreet boys where going to sing I want  it that way in huttese. And that Anakin would be played by the  Titanic’s  Leonardo DiCaprio. So it  could have been worse.

Leo DiCaprio would have been worse than Hayden Christensen!? Ach du lieber!!

 

I as well used to be afraid of DiCaprio spieling Anakin back then. Today I just wish my fears would have become true... -_-

 Well I personally hate the movie Titanic and I hate Leonardo DiCaprio. Sense I was force to sit through Titanic I have never seen any other movie with Leonardo DiCaprio. Well I did see inception but almost did not, because of him.

That's too bad, he's become one of the most interesting young stars of the modern era and he certainly is a good actor.

Maybe they will one day backup the film. I know they have funding issues, and that's a big reason that prevents them from doing a lot of things. The upper-echelon people there have a lot of films in much, much more dire need than Star Wars. Probably a lot of them say, "isn't that film on Blu ray? Why are we worrying about this when these other priceless films are rotting?"

That's one reason why sites like this and savestarwars.com are useful. A few of the librarians and preservationists there are star wars fans, and they used the pages I had written there about the state of the deteriorating O-neg as proof to their supervisors that Star Wars was a priority. That was this year. As a result of those pages existing and that info being researched and made public, the status of the films was changed so that they were better preserved as a priority.

So, maybe in the future they may back these up. In the past, it wasn't seen as a priority when balanced against their budget. Now, that is starting to change. That's why I take what we do seriously. We can make a difference, and we have.

Aha! I knew there were more recomps in the trench run!

I'm sure there is more than that too. It's just so damn hard to spot. Good eye there.

I think the BD set broke the record for most Blu rays sales gross in its first weekend, no? Whatever number of units that translates to, clearly it's more than all but maybe the top couple of titles.

Its the copyright ones.

Fun fact: apparently, they were moved to storage and their status was changed to protected in order to save them because of savestarwars.com. The people at LoC are SW fans and are trying to do their best with what they have to work with, it seems.

You'd have something else, but it wouldn't be Star Wars.

I'm not interested in something else. The Last Starfighter and Star Trek:TMP are decent films, but I don't own either and I certainly wouldn't be on a forum discussing them. I'm here because we got Star Wars, with every single frame that we saw in 1977. 

Even to this day there still hasn't been anything close to Star Wars. Nothing with such scope and humour and imagination in a sci-fi world that incorporates fantasy. 2009's Star Trek and Last Starfighter--the latter of which clearly would never have been made if it were not for SW--are the closest. But they don't come close!

canofhumdingers said:

Can't post it yet (it will actually probably wind up as a nice article on savestarwars.com), but there IS more info to come. And maybe even something positive/hopeful...

It'll likely be late next week at the earliest though.

Yeah the stuff you are passing on is making me re-think a few plans I had, but I wonder if I can really post a lot of it right now. Or ever. One thing I've always struggled with in savestarwars.com is by highlighting certain efforts or information I bring more risk of them being found out by Lucasfilm or risk Lucasfilm becoming more aggressive in removing all original materials. There are so many things I wish I could post about that few will ever know.

TV's Frink said:

Workprint currently uploading.  Reviewers can expect links this afternoon.

Yus.

Some of that has to do with fading and the fact that they are not colour corrected just the raw photography, keep in mind.

TServo2049 said:

What about the IB Technicolor print that the LoC had but returned to its owner because they couldn't make a good-looking copy of it? I'm assuming the owner was a private collector? (Could it have been the same print that was shown at the Baltimore screening?)

It was a private one. Probably Fox didn't have any in their vault material, but the restorationists at LoC knew of a private print they could borrow, which didn't work out. Film preservation is based in large part on the private community, so it's unspokenly tolerated and maybe even encouraged.

It wasn't the one that was screened at Baltimore (the source told me this). There are a few I.B. prints out there, I know of at least three but there is probably much more, as the source also seemed to be under the impression that the entire British run was in Technicolor. But the problem is that Technicolor prints can't easily be preserved. If you have millions of dollars and weeks to work on it, then yes you can do it, but in terms of sort of quick-and-dirty transfer it's not that simple.

None, I know you had a few correspondences with this Steve Leggit, so maybe he told you something I don't know about.

This is what my inside source told me:

-SW was selected in 1989

-When they asked for a print, Lucas dragged his heels, talking about restoration needed (probably around 1992, 1993, when they were about to begin work on the SE)

-By the time he gave them a print, it was the 1997

According to the LoC librarian Zoran Sinobad, they didn't accept this, as it was in conflict with the legislation. This echoes what Steve Leggit also said.

So, it seems they never had it.

Furthermore, the condition of the copies outside the NFR, in the copyright depository, is not in good condition. ANH has some scratches but otherwise seems fine, but ESB has severe colour fading. There is no info on ROTJ. There is also a 1979 print of SW with subtitles for the deaf, with no info on that either.

http://savestarwars.com/lucas-nfr.html

Thanks, canofhumdingers and None for help and info.

The "camera shake" is just gate weave, either from making the optical or just from the telecine. Since the spot is black, that means it doesn't come from a negative source (those show as white), so I would guess that transfers with that come from the same IP or the same print from the IP.

^^

Only the 1997 SE was corrected to match the Technicolor print. The 1997 SE looked great, and much different than the 2004 one, which does not resemble it for the most part.

With the Blu-ray, there is about 307 identified so far, in a movie that is 124 minutes long. That's about 2.5 changes per minute, or an alteration every 25 seconds of the film!

(of course, not in actuality, just in terms of mathematics--what's interesting is when you look at the spreadsheet of changes I made you can see these huge surges of changes in certain sections and the different levels they peak at, Mos Eisely and the trench run especially since those have huge surges into level 4..it would be interesting to graph actually).

Baronlando said:

About the idea that finding an IP with no subtitles is somehow the best, "first gen" source or something...I don't get it. I thought the whole point of having the subtitles on their own hi-con roll was so that it just runs "alongside" the negative when it gets printed. Otherwise wouldn't every foreign movie ever just be one long dupey effect shot? That doesn't sound right.

Maybe. I don't know about you, but just about every foreign film I've ever seen subbed in 35mm looks rougher than a domestic film...could this be why? Otherwise, you mean to tell me that every time they sub a movie they have to print a new batch of subtitles right off the negative? After exporting this way to Italy, Germany, France, Sweden, Romania, Poland, Russia, China and Japan the negative would be falling apart. You would make a blank interpositive instead and then just reprint that with a subtitle optical to produce a unique internegative for each country to make prints off of. At least, that is what I presume.

And maybe that's what this print was for? A blank one used initially for foreign versions but then later used for video? This still doesn't explain where every single other home video print came from, which are also blank.

Maybe it's just a matter of multiple IPs being made over the years, and this one was in the worst condition, hence why it was sealed away and forgotten. Previous transfers used other blank prints, either IPs or derivative copies, that were in better condition for one reason or another.

It would seem the Fox team in 1993 made one of two mistakes if we take seriously the idea that this print was indeed unusually rough.

1) For whatever reasons, the oldest surviving IP was worse off than subsequent IPs and prints. Maybe due to bad film stock, or high dirt at the time it was printed, or high dirt accumulated through use. The mistake Fox made was assuming the earliest print would be the cleanest, when in fact it had the most "miles" on it. Maybe this is why it was retired to a vault and forgotten.

2) They simply made a mistake and this isn't any "original" IP, but some later-generation copy. Fox again assumes that this must be the best, because they believe it first-generation when in fact it isn't.

In either case, once they start the transfer they are surprised at how bad it is. Maybe they start to doubt the authenticity of it, but whatever, it's a print, we have DVNR machines now, and let's just go through with it. It might look bad if after all that searching they realized that the better material was the ones they had sitting around from earlier transfers all along.

I guess we'll never know. There are endless theories to be proposed here.

I would say they don't care either. I guess it's hard to blame them.

I have seriously considered taking a stop-watch to the films though. I always say "10 minutes" or so is about the amount (from 1997 at least), and this is probably in the ballpark, but it's always good to have real figures.

If you count all the re-comps and wipes, it is probably about ten to twenty minutes per film, which I guess would be roughly 10% since they all run just over 2 hours.

At what point do you stop counting something as a colour difference and start counting it as a change? I don't even know if you could colour time that shot so that it looks like that...

Yikes is all I say.

I guess the tally goes to 278 changes from 1997 to 2004...