zombie84

Yeah None, the data there is imperfect for a lot of reasons but I don't doubt anyone would disagree with the bigger picture (although, we didn't need graphs to tell us that). Firstly, your 2004/6 results probably show lower than real life, because no one really was searching for "2004 dvd", they would have just entered "star wars dvd", just like people aren't googling "Star Wars blu ray 2011" but simply "star wars blu ray." You get a distortion here though, since "star wars dvd" included the very popular PT DVDs at that time; the BD picture has the same distortion, but because the Clone Wars BDs aren't nearly as hot sellers they won't distort the picture as much.

But you have to keep in mind market penetration. In 2003 and 2004, VHS was effectively dead, and so DVD had about 95% of the market. There were 127.3 million DVD players sold by the end of 2004. http://www.dvdinformation.com/news/press/CES010807.htm

By contrast, Blu Ray has to compete with DVD which continues to dominate, so it's still a niche market, albeit a large and growing one. BD sales represent only 13.4 percent of all home video sales and rentals in 2009, and in 2009 there were only 17 million total playback units (which includes many PS3s, in which case a significant amount of people won't and cannot use them for BDs). http://www.dvdinformation Reports from this year indicate that 3 million more players had been sold as of september, which will probably at least double by Christmas and boxing day, which ought to bring the total units ending 2010 at about 25 million and maybe 23% of the market since it hovers at about 20% now.

If we project a growth of 100% compared to 2010 sales through the year of 2011, which isn't unrealistic, then BDs ought to have something in the range of 40 million player units in households by the time the SW BDs hit streets, with maybe a 35% market share. Compared to the 127 million DVD players of 2004, that's only 1/3 the sales capabilities. So of course only 1/3 the amount of people would have any practical interest in them.

The DVDs were also released at the height of the SW craziness during the prequel era, and also featured new restoration efforts and extra footage in the films themselves.

So, I guess what I am getting at is, if you take what the DVDs did, subtract 15% to account for hype, and then cut that number in three, that's what is reasonable to expect from Star Wars Blu Ray.

For a comparison, the 2004 set did about $100 million on the first day. This year, Avatar sold 1.2 BD units, which if we average it at about $25 a unit, is $30 million, about 1/3 the 2004 figures. The new BDs will cost at least twice that much, will will make sales figures easier but also the price will scare away some people. With the increase in household units and market share into 2011 though, I still think the proportional figures of 1/3 2004 will hold true.

Trust me, if an idiot like me can put together these figures, I'm sure those accountants at LFL have looked at this logically. Relative to the market, the BDs will do the same as the DVDs, and without Lowry work or new transfers or new SE changes will only cost them a fraction of the production price, even with new docs and deleted scenes.

Yeah, it's more likely to be from the theatre than the print, but I'm not totally qualified to say for sure. Maybe it's a combo of both. You always get some cropping from the screen, so even if the print itself is cropped, it won't be quite as bad as it looks here. As for using this for a restoration, it's unlikely that whoever owns this is interested in doing something like anyway, or has the means to do so. In any event, a cropped version of the film is what we have been watching all along anyway, this cropping, if you can imagine more picture info existing around the borders that the curtains are framing a bit, is close to many of the previous telecines.

Yeah, that's standard for theatrical projection, it's part of the system. You have those adjustable curtains that you use to crop the image, I think projectors themselves have gates that can be adjusted to crop too but I'm not sure about this. Whenever you see a film in theatre, there will be some mild cropping, and you get this in home video too (the 2004 transfer is the most open-gate transfer ever seen, so the difference seems more severe). The idea is that you don't want to see the edges of the frame or the side of the film or the white of the projector light, so you crop the sides; it's inevitable that you overcompensate a bit. This case looks a bit more severe on the sides, they may have had it that for another print that had a slightly different ratio and just didn't change it. For non-scope prints, the full negative area is used and it's up to the projectionist to frame the aspect ratio properly, so prints contain all the information that gets covered up in black bars on home video and it's the theatre that provides their own "black bars" (via the screen curtains or gate size).

I suppose it could be in the print itself as well in this case, I don't know if anyone has ever looked at IPs and prints versus the negative in terms of framing. I suppose when they are copied there could be a mild shift that eliminates picture information and the projectionist has to re-centre the frame. But I notice cropping in theatres all the time on scope prints and whenever I do I can see the "cropped" footage playing on the side curtains so its there its just that the projector and screen haven't been positioned 100% perfect.

Harmy only took out some of the SE changes, Adywan took out all of them.

Yeah, that's my website.

The SE there def was not DI. It was 100% photochemical from the get-go. Select shots were digitized, but they were printed back onto film for a celluloid master.

Harmy said:

It was probably kind of unthinkable to store tens of terabytes of data in 1999.

 Yeah, exactly. I mean, the film was released in 1999, but the scan took place in 1997. I think we forget how absolutely primitive data storage was back then. My computer from 1998 had something like 4 GB of storage on it. Can you imagine suggesting 500 GB drives? And can you imagine suggesting, "So, this digital master is gonna be about 16 TBs in size...." Probably they would have said, what's a terabyte. Which is why probably what happened is each shot occupied a drive of a few GBs and it was printed out individually onto 35mm negatives and then cut together. Maybe they migrated it all to increasingly larger servers over the years, but the film would have been on a server farm of hundreds of drives, and not necessarily all in one centralized place, so they might have just wiped it all clean when the film came out. But who knows for sure.

It's probably not a real video listing. There are definitely video distribution deals being hammered out, but since nothing is publically official, that's probably just a placeholder. But It'll be legit soon enough, I'm sure.

Baronlando said:

How practical/doable is it for them to re-use the 2004 source, but correct something like the lightsabers? And by "practical" I mean on the LFL scale of effort and quality control, not the normal scale everyone else has to go by.

 You mean how easy would it be? Well, look at SW Revisited. I mean, if a single guy in England can do all that in his spare time using his home PC and commercial software...come on. Basically, fixing the lightsabers involves bringing the shots into something like dinky Aftereffects and rotoscoping a mask to change the hue and brightness. I mean, 12 year olds do lightsaber effects for their fan films right? It's never been a question of doability, really, it's a very simply fix. 

Anchorhead said:

SilverWook said:

Lucas has been known to borrow from things...

He has indeed;

http://moongadget.com/origins/index.html

That said;  I've never made any secret of the fact that I doubt nearly every word he speaks and generally think of him as a dishonest person - at least with regard to his Original Vision Bullshit Story.  However, I don't think he would blatantly copy something that closely and then claim it as his own.  Conveniently leave it out of any discussions and hope no one ever noticed? - you bet.  Steal and change the paint job? - no.

My take is post-Star Wars on those pictures. The clothing is correct for my high school years.  (shut up)  ;-)

 What about the Imperial Walkers he stole, I think from Syd Mead? Or C3P0 being straight out of Metropolis? I'd say its well within the realm of possibility and pretty consistent with the style of Star Wars, which is entirely assembled out of borrowed pieces, which is part of what made it so clever. Some of them are cultural and meant to be apparent to the audience to engage their own knowledge of cinema and pop culture(Chewbacca=Cowardly Lion, Han Solo=John Wayne, C3P0=Metropolis robot, trench run=Dam Busters), but some of them are obscure and not obvious (droids=Hidden Fortress duo, Chewbacca="Analogue" mag design, Darth Vader=The Lightning from Fighting Devil Dogs serial, Bespin=Flash Gordon base), many of which are never admitted by Lucas (he may have even forgotten).

So, I'd say it's legit. It may turn out not to be, but if you are going to judge it based on his past actions then the only logical conclusion is that he deliberately borrowed it ("stole" seems a harsh word; if you are going to judge it as theivery, then you ought to write off the entire film in virtually every aspect, element, character, design and story point).

It's possible they kept them, we really don't know. It's hard to say what kind of long term digital storage they were looking at back then. By 2005 it was standard practice to save all these digital masters of films, but in 1997-1999 there was no such thing as digital masters because it hadn't been done. Especially when you consider the state of HDD storage back then. I wouldn't be surprise if there was no actual "digital master", probably what happened is that the individual shots were printed onto individual negative segments and then edited together by a neg cutter just like a regular film. So, in the somewhat unlikely event that the digital files weren't wiped out after the film came out, they are probably in piecemeal individual states and not conformed to an edit, because the negative was cut together and then colour timed in the physical realm, not the digital realm.

Yeah, the negative would be a 35mm printout of the computer composites of the 2K scans of the original elements. Every shot except one had a digital effect in it, according to Rick McCallum.

So its:

original 35mm elements>2K scan into compositing software>35mm negative printout.

Yeah, so this is probably a new scan of the film-out negatives from 1999.

Ady: For sure, the red shift of the previous transfer was gross. But you are right, it's the gamma that's making it look flat and unattractive, your correction there looks a lot better. I hope for the film's sake that the BD transfer looks more like that.

With regards to TPM's 2K DI...you know, I'm not even sure if it was a proper DI. Someone might have to go look up the American Cinematographer article on it. I know that the film was all scanned, but a DI involves more than scanning the film, it also involves the colour correction process and all that post processing work, and since DIs were extremely rare and experimental back then I would think that the actual release was a photochemical intermediate. They did have it all sitting on a computer, but I'm not sure if they would have re-scanned the final negative or answer print, or if they even kept all the scans from back then. So, the new transfer is probably a brand new DI based off the original shot scans/composites if they did hold on to all that, or it's a new DI based off the original film-out answer print or negatives from 1999. But I could be wrong, it could be a new transfer from a 1999 DI.

EDIT

Yeah, I just browsed through all the AC articles (4 seperate ones), I couldn't find any mention about a digital intermediate. There was mention of a special digital intermediate made for the experimental digital projection screenings, but this was a special side project created for specific events. Maybe they kept that, but it would have been a 1920x1080 downconvert anyway, so I'm not sure if this would have been kept and/or used for future releases (although I guess it would be okay for a BD). Likely they are using one of two methods I mentioned above though. I know they kept all the digital finals starting with AOTC, but I'm really curious if any of those TPM files were held on to for long term access.

You know aside from the improved detail of a new transfer, I think I like the old colouring of TPM. For sure it's too red, but the new transfers seems way to yellow, too milky and too bright. It makes the image look more artificial, IMO, whereas the older transfer had better (but still imperfect) contrast and gave better definition. Whatever.

Yeah traditionally most European ports were dubbed, but you still find examples of subtitles, especially in the case of quick imports and unpopular films. These days, it seems more common to subtitle a foreign film in Europe. I saw Due Date in a theatre in France last month, and even a silly film like that was subbed. But I guess if the German THX was the "premiere version" and it aired in the 80s (I am assuming this is a taped version of a very, very old broadcast in order to be called such a thing) then you are likely correct in assuming it was dubbed. But we should still acknowledge that this is an assumption though, since we don't actually know.

Wow, this was cool since I was under the impression that she had dropped off the radar and was basically MIA (i.e., doesn't want to be pestered by Star Wars nerds). I had heard that she was in softcore pornography, which only added to her mystery ("softcore porn" I think carries more of a stigma today though, whereas acting in a soft porn/erotic films in the early and mid 70s was more respectable since there was a lot of mainstream crossover). It is very interesting to hear about the Fisher casting bluff, since I don't believe that anecdote has been told anywhere else. Her description of Lucas and Kurtz seems pretty consistent with other people, even if she says both Lucas Kurtz were Quakers (Lucas isn't but Kurtz is; the fact that she assumed they both were is a telling indication of why the two worked together frequently, as conservatism such as that is rare in Hollywood).

Msycamore: Now the question is, is this the original Italian 1971 release? or is it the only Italian version pre-'04 CGI version? or maybe just an International-cut/TV-cut? It's very interesting anyway.

Well, it would be hard to say if it is a TV cut without another source to compare it with, and impossible to say unless there is some sort of commercial tape to compare it with. It is certainly possible that it was edited for both time and content so that it could run on television. I was going to say its a bit unlikely they would have spent the time and money doing all the foreign dubs for the 1978 re-issue, especially since re-issues are mainly on a territory by territory basis. However, the German version that is analyzed on a link posted on this page says that its less than a minute shorter than the UK version. I must assume that the UK VHS compared is based on the 1978 cut, since this is (reportedly, anyway) the only version ever released on home video until the DC.

So, either both the UK VHS and German TV versions are both the 1971 theatrical cut, which is not very likely, or the German version had the extra scenes added sometime in or after 1978. This is complicated by dubbing versus subtitles. It's not said whether the German version was dubbed or subtitled; if it was subtitled, it's no wonder the 1978 cut was ported, since it required extremely little work, unlike dubbing. The Italian version in discussion here is dubbed, so it would require more work on the part of Warners to port over the 1978 cut and thus slightly less likely.

Msycamore: the only difference between the re-release and the German TV is basically the re-ordering of the arrest, which somehow loses a few seconds, and the extended Donald Pleasance scene. No deleted White Limbo stuff, no humour. Nothing close to 4 or 5 minutes, just 45 seconds or so of less footage. So it's not the 1971 American theatrical that is being sought. It is, however, another variant in itself. Which goes to show that between the three known transfers from Italy, Germany and English-speaking countries there were three different cuts of the film. I wonder how many more there are.

My German is not amazing, but it looks like that was just a German TV version that, for their own reasons probably, trimmed off a scant 45 seconds. They also re-ordered THX's arrest scene so that it makes no sense, for some reason. The site owner attributes it to an error in the master which ommitted a few seconds and mixed up the scene order for the arrest sequence, which may or may not be true--but either way, its less than a minute shorter overall. Another interesting variant, but not the droids we're looking for. Cool catch though!

EDIT

This does seem to lend further credence to my theory of regional variation. Because it seems totally re-editing the scene order of the arrest sequence is not just "an error" in the broadcast, but a deliberate manipulation.

On p.97 of the book Skywalking (first printing), it is stated that 4 minutes of material were cut out of Lucas' version for the 1971 theatrical cut (but later restored), which were mainly to do with the White Limbo sequence and George's bizarre attempts at humour. So, this gives us some clue as to what was added for the re-release in the late 70s that subsequently became the standard pre-SE home video version. However, it also says "mainly", not exclusively, so there might have been other bits taken out. But at least if this Italian version is missing some parts from the limbo and some of the weird "humour", we can at least say that this probably reflects the original American editing.

I had replied to Msycamore's PM with this, but the more I think about it, the more I think I am right. There was talk about whether this was actually the 1971 theatrical cut; I had initially thought perhaps this was a preview cut or workprint, with Warner's "freaks up front" (as they say in the DVD doc), that somehow was shipped to Italy. But, in the end, I am just going to say that this is just a foreign cut of the film. It's impossible to say if this version was specific to Italy or if it represents a more general "International Cut".

This was what I wrote:

"Well, after re-watching the clip again for a re-fresher (I had seen it long ago) here are my thoughts:

-Robert Duvall narration"--this is misleading. I hadn't realized it was all dubbed. So, Duvall never was in the studio to record voice-over: only his Italian doppleganger for the dub.

-This brings us to why they would add their own voice-over for the Italian version. Well, this is related to the whole re-editing in the first place. Sometimes, foreign versions are simply edited differently. They have to add voice-over, make the plot clearer, or just have the option to make things stylistically different. Sometimes its because it is felt that certain cultures require different emphases for the film to make sense or be effective. Sometimes it purely due to contractual traditions that allows producers, execs and foreign distributors the right to make their own stylistic changes. A good example is 1978's Dawn of the Dead; George Romero edited the American version himself, but producer Dario Argento reserved the right to re-edit the film for the Italian and international version, making it faster paced and less humorous, because 1) he preferred this method of storytelling, and 2) he thought this would be more appealing to an international audience. There are other examples I can give, perhaps more contemporary being Miramax who often buy up foreign films and re-edit them to play to domestic tastes. Anyway, it's not so unusual for foreign versions to get some tweaking, it doesn't happen all the time but it's not unheard of. [This is prevalent in low-budget and obscure cult films too, where the cost and distribution (even with Warners at the helm) is dispersed across multiple companies and partners for different world regions because the films are not very commercial, but as part of that deal said partners reserve the right to modify the film for specific regions]

So, perhaps in the case of THX, there was an issue with the right to tweak the film for foreign versions. So, Warners, who was keen to have "the freaks up front" thought they could use this as a good opportunity to do so, with additional dubbing for narration from the Robert Duval-equivalent to make this introduction more sensical. Maybe this was part of Lucasfilm's negotiation: they got to keep the original structure for the domestic version, but in the foreign prints Warner could put their "freaks up front" structure into place.

Also, as it relates to the rough splicing, foreign prints are often made from dupe material and look rough, and if they are edited its not from the original negative, which is why there is crude splicing in the newly-cut scenes.

Just a thought. So, right now I am going to say this is a rare and previously-unseen foreign cut of the film."

"However, as a follow-up, since I am suggesting this is a 1971 foreign print, probably many of the differences compared to the 1978 cut are a reflection of the 1971 American theatrical version. If I am right, it would still be a bit difficult to know which was ported from the 1971 American and which was an original foreign change, but the Skywalking blurb may help guide in distinguishing this."

This is slightly off-topic, but building on what was suggesting above, if you are editing non-smear sources into a GOUT-based comp, why couldn't one just use the 2004 DVD, colour-correct it (which you will have to do with any source anyway) and then just softening it until it matches the GOUT in terms of detail/resoution? I know about crushed blacks and stuff, but when dealing with matching GOUT-levels of detail this really should make no difference. Because it seems filling in the GOUT DVNR patches with any alternate, even this or the JSC, will not work because the video does not match due to lack of resolution and other problems that are not easily correctable (i.e. all the video noise we see here).

So...sorry what is the source of this? A Laserdisc pressed in August of 1993? How do you know when this was mastered?

Also, this looks to me like it is the JSC. I think in one of the other threads on SE changes we discovered that the JSC was actually released in the United States as the 1992 LD, so could that be what this is?

I'm a little hesitatant to believe this is just the DC without DVNR, because the colours and video quality don't match at all. Actually, there's an awful lot of video noise on there that makes it look like its actually quite an older master than 1993 (again--1986?).

Some clarrification about the source and format of this and your info might help.

You know, I haven't read an EU book since 1998, but this one always sort of interested me for the reasons you state.