Thats very cool. I have to wonder who out there cares enough about this to want to pay up to $50,000 for it though. I feel like this is something that would better be served through a library or museum purchase but I doubt any would be interested in binders full of camera schedules and test memos.
The greenish hues seem to be on the negative. The Technicolor prints and theatrical bootlegs all have green coloration in the white levels for the Blockade Runner scene.
Personally, I thought those screens looked pretty fantastic. I can't wait to see this. :)
Anchorhead said: That mental energy is put to much better use - motorcycles, baseball, wine, and beekeeping.
I know this is better left to your "Putting Faces to Names" thread, but seriously dude, are you actually this badass? I mean, going off your new profile pic I can totally see that face casually standing in a swarm of bees, on a motorcycle, drinking from a bottle of wine while hitting a home run.
There was a thread about Uncle Owen vs Ben Kenobi, but I think there should be one about Uncle Owen vs Anchorhead.
Unexpected youth FTW! Most people think I'm like 40 years old for some reason, it's fun dashing their expectations, although I will admit I look a bit younger than I actually am.
All right, I'll play. :p
Gaffer Tape has a good point, in that we are the "outsiders" of the fan community, at least by official designation. This place gives us a sense of belonging, like any form of outsider community.
We are also bonded by an unrivaled passion for the films. I don't think a lot of fans of the official party line would go to the lengths to preserve the films and their obscure anxillary products and bootlegs, etc., the way we have. We are obsessive, but not in a creepy "I must collect every Star Wars doll" way, we just really, really like the films and appreciate the historical context of them, and most people don't dig as deep into the history as we do, nor put so much effort into appreciating them.
This makes it difficult to talk with "normal" people about the films, because we have such density of knowledge about everything. It's sort of the academic's dilemma, you can't go to a place like TFN and talk to twelve year olds about using an X0 player to capture the 1993 DE and 1986 JSC Laserdiscs, or whether Luke's lightsaber was recomposited in 1997 or 2004. It goes over their head. So, if we are a community of experts on the original versions, this is our equivalent of conferences and peer-reviewed journals. It's the only place to share, check, and expand the knowledge base.
Finally, disaster creates community. Nothing brings people together like a crisis. You can live in a neighbourhood for years and hardly speak to the people in the house next to you, but when there is a disaster in the neighbourhood suddenly you will discover a bond that you never knew was there. If Lucas hadn't suppressed the original versions, we wouldn't have needed to bond together to fight it out. If the original versions had been remastered on DVD and then Blu Ray right from the beginning of both formats, there would be no dedicated website to discuss them. So, in a weird way, this wonderful website and all the people that I've met on here--this is the one unintentional gift that Lucas' behaviour brought.
MJPollard, I predict this thread will soon be massively derailed by that comment....BUT, I'll just rebuke it as efficiently as I can so as not to waste too much space.
The purpose of this site was to get the original Star Wars films released in the highest quality possible. This was because, in 2004 or so when the site went online, we were in the age of DVD yet the original versions only existed as Laserdisc in the best of forms. In 2006, Lucasfilm released the master for the very same Laserdisc. So, how did that solve anything? We already had that, basically. Putting a Laserdisc on DVD and calling it "a DVD release" is not meaningful. The point of the site was not to get the films released in any form no matter how bad the quality, because they were already available on Laserdisc, the point was to have them released properly to the standards of the day. A similar comparison might be to transfer a really good VHS tape to DVD and release that and then say "this site now has no purpose." Furthermore, while a Laserdisc master was unacceptable in 2006, it is doubly so today, where we live in the age of high definition and Blu Ray. If anything, the site has more purpose than ever now. In 2006 it had been 13 years since the last telecine of the films (the 1993 Laserdisc master, which was reused in 1995 and released on DVD that year). In 2011, it is now close to 20 years since the last telecine of the films, and we aren't even using the same resolution standards anymore. The original versions are in more dire straits than they ever have been.
Anyway, I'm sure there will be more vocal critics than me here, but I don't want to say more than that.
Is there really any advantage to upscaling an LD to HD rather than just letting your player do it? Or does the quality vary according to the quality of your player?
A DVD9 would be great for the reasons already stated if you can do so. These films are grainy and dirty and mpeg is not good for those kinds of pesky details mucking up the screen. I'm excited to see this though. Looking forward to the first preliminary caps!
If he's doing his own sort of restoration of the original, probably someone will leak it, even if it's a friend of his. His "Legacy" version was just his own thing. It's not like he has any obligation to release it anyway; he's not really part of the community here. He's just a VFX guy who wanted to correct the SE to his liking and built a website to show what he was doing; eventually he lost interest in updating the website, but finished the "Legacy" cut nonetheless. Not a big deal.
Puggo speaks the truth. No one is going to return anything. How many of us did in 2004? Anyone at all? And we are about as extremist as there is.
The seperation masters were indeed used to make new parts for the 97 SE.
Yeah, my website has them in HD res basically.
http://savestarwars.com/technicoloribscreening.html
It is not that the pics have to be matched exactly, because they aren't totally accurate, the contrast and exposure and tinting is slightly off because they are just screen photographs. But they give you a rough idea to guide you, which is one reason why I wanted to create the page here. They are pretty accurate in terms of saturation, though.
And yeah, at least with ESB you can't just port over the exact same settings, although the settings for the other films should not be radically different. There is a consistent method in that you just increase the saturation, shift it cyan, and dial down the reds. SW requires some brightness and contrast increase because it is so dim, but I don't think ESB require much or any, though I haven't taken a second go at ESB.
@DJ: http://www.starwarslegacy.com/ Check out the stuff under "the restoration" to see the sort of things he was doing.
Also, I don't see what the problem with Lee's stuff is, its pretty much the exact same correction on GForce's script except better because the colour and contrast is stronger. Its not like he is fucking around with the colours, he is just unwashing some of the washed out GOUT colouration. He doesn't go far enough IMO, but as it is the most saturated correction of all the projects so far that probably makes it the most "authentic" looking. I do understand his decision for wanting to hold back on the saturation though, as he is trying to make this watchable and not popping and artifacting the way a "better" colouration would. It's a tough balancing act.
The whole film is way off. The shot-by-shot colouring is pretty fucked, especially since it seems that many of the problems were ones the 2004 set created in the first place. In terms of colour information, usually its all there which is good, but the colours have been boosted and manipulated in unnatural ways that often makes them look ugly (i.e. skin tones, colour casts, popping, inconsistent colours, desaturation, oversaturation). In some ways its easier than the GOUT because the colour is all there you just have to tweak each shot, but that shot-by-shot manipulation is a lot more work than the GOUT which mainly just requires a gamma and saturation boost. If you look at Mike Verta's page on CC'ing the 2004 version you can see it is a lot more work than it looks at first. Wouldn't Adywan have already done this though? He probably has a CC'd 2004 master sitting somewhere from before he began editing and vfx work.
Who cares about a nice DVD of the 2004 SE anyway? There's nothing depressing about holding on to that. There's a holy grail of Star Wars sources, but that's the total opposite of what that is.
That might make a bit of sense, since it usually deviates the most from Catnap and Puggo:
Really? Hmm, I didn't know that. Do you have any caps from the source?
Harmy said:
Cool, I'm interested in this as a way of finding out what the colours should be for colour correction.
Btw, I noticed this:
One drawback of saturating the GOUT is that it sometimes brings out the flaws in the master. Although difficult to see from a still, this shot has a lot of video noise and artifacting in the sky, because the original negative is very grainy and also because the video master has a hard time with strong primary colours. This noise is on the uncorrected GOUT but it becomes more noticeable when saturated. The 2004 master had the same problem with this shot as well, and you can see it in the Puggo 16mm too.
The 2004 master can't possibly have the same problem with this particular shot as it's been replaced by a completely new one for the SE.
D'oh! In my defense it was 6 am when I wrote that and I hadn't been to bed yet.
I posted a rough version of this in a theatrical colouring thread in the preservation forum, but now I'm making this more public:
People interested in this topic can check out an improved version of my initial page here, with a lot of extra-GOUT source comparisons.
http://www.savestarwars.com/goutcorrect.html
Lee, regarding the binary sunset scene:
I have a semi-finished page on GOUT colouring that takes a look at theatrical sources. You will find a few sources here that will indicate sort of how the binary sunset looked. The page is chronological so scroll down. I'm going to attempt my own version of the scene soon.
LOL that audio menu is insane!
I think the saturation could be bosted by about 10% as well, at least for most shots, to match Technicolor levels without sacrificing anything. But these still look very nice. Good job!
My description is just based off a blurb that is equally vague in ILM: Into the Digital Realm. At some point, the Fox archives outgrew their own compound so they had to start storing some of them off-site. They selected a former salt mine in Kansas and turned it into a film vault.
I have no idea how much of the Star Wars material, if any, Fox kept. Lucasfilm seems to have all the negatives in their own archives now.
