zombie84

Well, I would also advise in favour of efficiency if the issues with the print are that bad. I mean, the Yoda scene posted was in good shape, but this is not typical for the rest of the print, apparently. Having a really good Yoda scene isn't of much use. I would just hate to see people spend 18 months hand-correcting a more useful section (like, say, the original wampa scene) only to have the results be only marginally better, or in some ways not even as good as, the GOUT. If there is a homemade telecine machine that is a bit sensitive to print imperfections, maybe efforts should be made towards getting a better source in the first place rather than wasting everyone's time. I just would hate for this to be X0 Project 2.0. That would be quite disappointing.

My understanding is that it is only certain sections that are damaged, no? If a full-film transfer is out of the question, wouldn't a salvage job of certain reels be viable? Because the previous clip demonstrated that at least parts of the film look great.

Harmy said:

 It's also that in some scenes the SE is too bright and it's tricky to darken it because of the crushed blacks and overblown whites.

 Yeah, that was one thing Adywan ran into when making the ESB Reconstruction. Scenes like some of the Dagobah ones are way too bright, but you can't really bring the levels down without destroying the image so you have to sort of live with what is there. Brightening the image seems to be pretty easy, and luckily this is the more common fix the SE requires.

See Adywan's post.

Apparently there was a UK company that released full-length LPP scope prints of ESB in the 1990s, but I believe they are bootleg releases since Lucasfilm claims there was never an official full-length release of the film.

This actually makes me want to write to Marcia again. Maybe she will be game for another interview if she knows that lots of people are interested in her work. I haven't spoken with her in a while now.

Oh yeah, the SE colours have been completely screwed with. But of course, in terms of the "look" having a bluish cast over the image the way the SE does is much more accurate than the GOUT, which is basically black and white. Luke with the wampa and lost in the blizzard/rescued by Han is the most bluish sequence in the whole film, it's a pretty intense, dense blue, and the SE gets this much better than a lot of other sources, while the GOUT on its own has almost no colour and is in this respect useless. For most of the other interiors, it's sort of in between the two; neither are accurate, the GOUT lacks all blue, but the SE gave the whole image a strong blue/teal tint whereas the original only had a milder tint.

The GOUT doesn't really give you anything like the theatrical colours, so applying the GOUT histograms to the SE is basically purposeless unless you are going to correct them massively from there, although it looks more attractive than the SE on its own. It's a good improvement on the SE, but in some ways it's equally artificial. I think you would have to tweak it all by eye in order to get it to look good; ROTJ on the raw GOUT seems to have suffered the least so those test pics generally hold up though.

For sure, I am continually amazed how far reaching the stupid thing has gone over the years. It's been a slow trickle, but it's now getting me featured in Wired magazine and university courses and mainstream books. It feels like the whole image of Lucas and Star Wars is starting to shift. Maybe one day in decades to come we'll look back on this time and Secret History will be this interesting but obsolete artifact from an era where it was necessary for redress things that are then more commonly accepted.

Anchorhead, your photo reminds me of Blade Runner.

Personally, I love NYC. I've been there a few times for work and even coming from a "big city" like Toronto, I'm always in awe of it. Of course, to me, it seems cleaner than here, but then I wasn't around for those scuzzy days in the 70s and 80s when it was a bit of a shit hole.  But as far as North American cities go, there's no place like NYC. Wouldn't want to live there, not by any means, but a terrific place to visit. I haven't worked there since 2007 or so, but I miss it.

Hey, I wrote that article. :)

There are like a million sites picking up this piece now, my original article has gotten like 2000 hits in the last 12 hours. Finally, people are paying attention.

The colour is fine. Like Adywan showed, it's very easily recoverable using digital tools. The negatives for Star Wars are much more faded than this and you can see how much colour the SE's got. This kind of colour recovery is pretty much standard for most movies from the 1970s. It's the smallest of the problems. The biggest issue will be cleaning up the dirt and print damage, but luckily this print looks like it is in good condition. I for one would like to see the raw scan released, so that we aren't locked into one interpretation of dirt cleanup and colour correction, but maybe that is asking too much right now.

hairy_hen said:

I have a feeling it probably works better when the sources aren't too radically different--the scenes of Luke lost in the snow in ESB looked pretty terrible; the colour was mostly right but some elements became inexplicably bright purple(?!) and there was crazy blocking going on in the backgrounds sometimes.  That whole sequence is so screwed up in the SE, it's like there's a thick blue haze over the entire image;

 That thick blue haze over the image is in the original theatrical version too. The SE is actually less blue than the theatrical version for some of this sequence, for instance inside the wampa cave the SE is not very blue from my memory, but the theatrical version of the wampa cave is pretty blue.

If you think that looks like shit, I don't know how many private prints you've seen. This is pretty immaculate looking, I would say. The fade is fairly mild, with easily recoverable colours, there's very little damage and only mild dirt. It would be a lot of work to clean up, of course, but that is a given--most pro scans clean the film before they telecine, and if this print got a pro cleaning before telecine it would look as good as anything Criterion would do. The only thing remaining would be to hand-paint out the scatches, which probably would be a couple hundred hours of labour for the film, but something that could be completed within three or four months with some dedication.

The crawl will always look green. This is because that shot is not red shifted like the rest of film, so it just gets the green boosted. That shot is tacked on to the GOUT so it doesn't have the red problem. So, get the crawl right and the rest of the film won't look correct if you are just using one setting. I would say, do a custom setting for the crawl and leave the rest of the film the way you have it.

dark_jedi said:Cool that is what I will do, I really want people to look at this sample, I really like this ALOT! but I am also a fan of Terminator 2 Skynet Edition and the new Predator, they might have been overdone on the cleanup, but to me look FANTASTIC.

 See, I think this is a big problem right here. The new Predator disc looks terrible. It doesn't look like a film, you lose all the fine detail, and everything has this fake, plasticy look. I had to track down the older Blu Ray on eBay.

There is nothing wrong with grain. I can understand wanting it to be reduced a bit, but you should never get rid of it entirely, especially when the side effect is that it takes away detail and highlights on a video source that is already in severe want of these things. This isn't how Star Wars, or any movie shot on film, ought to look. Don't be afraid of grain, look at a lot of Blu Rays of contemporary films like Sherlock Holms and you will see ample grain, that's just the way movies look, they don't look like a video game or like video because they aren't video; that super-clean, smooth "HD" look is something you only get in video sources and it's not a yardstick to measure quality by any means, it's just an element of the medium the images were created with.

Anyway, I've said my piece. This was the only problem I ever had with DJ's older transfers, and it was bad enough that I couldn't really watch them. The earlier screenshots of V3 looked like it reduced the grain but didn't eliminate it and I thought it was a good compromise, I'd hate to see this edition ruined by a lazy eye towards film preservation.

I think anyone who posts their picture on a public messageboard implicitly gives up any rights to control it, and I think most people recognize this, so I wouldn't be aware of offending anyone, Anch. Anyone comfortable enough to change their avatar won't care about a well-intentioned bit of fun using it.

This got me thinking...

I know I'm kind of bursting the happy-go-lucky vibe around here saying this...

But does anyone have a picture of Laserman? I feel like we need a memorial for him. I mean, we all know he's dead right? It's something that only a couple people sort of uncomfortably acknowledge. He was a huge part of OT.com history--hell, as far as I know, he came up with the term GOUT, which ironically may be his most lasting legacy. Do we have a face to go with the handle? Or a real name maybe?

He didn't, the art department did.

see you auntie said:

http://www.cracked.com/article_19043_6-classic-series-you-didnt-know-were-made-up-fly.html

Obviously not everyone believes Lucas' revisionism. Small Zombie/Kaminski reference included.

 

 You know, I never really thought I'd actually have an impact on the development of Star Wars historiography but I'm seeing a lot of this kind of stuff in response to the book. It get's cited in the weirdest places. I just bought the BFI "Classic Films" series book on Star Wars and sure enough in the first chapter, "according to Michael Kaminski, 'blah blah blah...." And it turns out that was before the book got legitimately published, since it cites the website from 2008. Weird.

Looks amazing Puggo. The colours are even better than on the 8mm. This might be the first time people see a transfer of a Star Wars film look close to how it actually does.

Maybe special edition refers to the Blu Ray release, not the film; as in, a Special Blu Ray Edition. "Special Edition" was and is a standard term for 2-disk(+) DVD editions. "Deluxe Edition" "Collectors Edition" "Anniversary Edition" and "[Novelty Name] Edition" were also often used, but Special Edition is the most common. Here's hoping it's more a case of that.

It depends on what kind of contract he has. Usually in cases like these, it's about making your star client (i.e. George Lucas) happy. Because if you piss him off, he isn't likely to make future investments into the company, and you don't want a respected filmmaker like him badmouthing you. He also might have friends and allies in the company who make sure things go his way. On the other hand, if the audience demand for a certain product outweighs the benefits of placating the star filmmaker; sadly, few know or care about the original version of Graffiti. The changes are so small anyway that a lot of people may see it as nitpicking.

I thought Grievous was pretty fun for what he was, and he had a lot of character for someone with so little screentime, the problem was that there wasn't much room to develop him because he only was in 1/3 of a single film. Now, that's okay, but the damn trilogy is so crowded that every single villain is like that. On his own, Grievous is a cool character IMO, I think it's more the context that makes people dislike him. There were too many useless, undeveloped, CG characters with spinny acrobatics and funny voices and no room for a more developed, realistic, adult characterization. Dooku had so much potential but he ended up on a development arc that went right into a brick wall, even if his death scene was really cool.

Eh, could say the same thing about Boba Fett. Doesn't really do anything. Only in like four scenes. Has a stupid death. A few minutes of posing goes a long way.

Rick McCallum couldn't possibly be Go-Mer-Tonic AND kenkraly could he?

I think Ken generally comes off as so obviously a clown that posting there would not only be superfluous but waste valuable space.