zombie84

Not necessarily, keep in mind. Print fluxuations vary by reel. If you have ever watched a black and white print that was made in the colour era you can see this--one reel might have a bit of a sepia-looking tone to it, another might be more towards red, some might be really neutral looking. So just because the beginning of the film has a bit of green tint doesn't mean the end of the film will--it might have its own problem, or it might be the same problem, or it might be fine, but its hard to know unless you were there and can see the shift during changeover (which may be impossible to tell in some cases). The problem might also be on the camera taking the photos too, making it look uniform when really the print itself doesn't have that problem. Bit of a tricky situation here for the nitty-gritty details about whether something should have 24 or 28 points of green.

"13 views and 0 replies"

Ha.

Okay I can think of a few things:

-Some of the designs and visual effects are very spectacular and awe-inspirint. Some of them are dumb and unconvincing, but the prequels have a visual scope that very few films have, and their particular combination of elements is very unique. As a visualist, it's hard not to appreciate watching certain parts just for the sheer visual splendor.

-John Williams has some pretty good scores. Not his best work, but it's generally very good stuff. Not sure if TPM or ROTS is better, but ROTS seems to be more nuanced as well as more bombastic, and I think it also has more actual musical themes in it.

Also, I enjoyed some of the performances. Liam Neeson alternates between having a sense of quiet dignity and looking like he is bored to death, but overall I liked his character. Ewan McGregor in the second two films is the anchor of the films, he's great to watch in every scene he is in, and Ian McDiarmid gives a very nuanced performance that is the only one that comes across as 100% appropriate for the subject matter, probably because he's a Shakespearian actor and knows how to deliver dialogue that other people might characterise as stiff. I especially loved him Episode III, although his character of Sidious in that film was so over the top it was awful. Pernilla August in Episode I was also an underrated part. The older actors all seem to have been able to handle the material, because they had the experience and training (and possibly the talent) to work with it, and they were also very experienced in theatre; the young stars don't know how to self-direct or work with stiff dialogue, so they are dead in the water in a George Lucas film. I also thought Andrew Sacombe as Watto was amazing and really brought credible life to that character--the only example I can think of in the prequels where an exotic all-CG character seemed real and acted well. His one scene in Episode II has a moment where he isn't sure if he recognizes Anakin and its a real moment of CG artistry like you would find with Gollum in LOTR.

Also, I enjoy the way there are a lot of clues in Episodes I and II to future events, and because they aren't spelt out or portrayed very clearly you do have to think about the plots and the subtext quite a bit, which can be a bit frustrating at times but also kind of fun. Its unclear how much is intentional and how much is just poor directorial skill--gushers will say its all the former, bashers will say its all the latter, but I think the truth is in the middle. The films have no emotional core, but at least there is some kernal of intellectualism in them. Unfortuantely, most of the Episode I and II set-ups don't pay off in Episode III (Sifo who?).

However, I do enjoy Episode III. I enjoy its sense of paranoia in its first half and its sense of operatic grandeur in its second half. And pretty good action scenes throughout. I also thought the characters were usually pretty well done--for instance, the opening sequence I find very fun, and it's entirely because of the chemistry between McGregor and Christensen, which was non-existant in the previous film. There a number of scenes in the film that I think are really classic as well, such as the sequence around "the turn" where Anakin and Padme are looking at each other from across the city; the cross-cutting that follows really works to drive the tension, and the whole scene I thought was great until the whole knighting business occurs, which is a bit ridiculous in retrospect. However, while some people bash the whole "Darth Vader goes to the dark side out of love" I thought this was the most believable or at least poetic part of the film in an overall sense, and the most pleasantly surprising.

So there, that's more gushing than I've done all year. :p

Hmm. Does the site itself do that?

The G-Force script, from my memory, punches up the saturation a bit and adds a bit of a yellow shift to the image. Or at least it did in the past.

I doubt they have kept all the raw CG composites. Re-comping a movie that was 50% digital and had a composite in every shot except for one would cost so many millions of dollars. No one would be able to tell the difference anyway, since we would be watching it in 1920x1080 at home anyway.

If you think about it though, a real Special Edition of Star Wars could be done in higher than 4K, because of the live-action plates. Most of them were shot in Vistavision, so you could scan the plates at 8K and then re-comp the VFX elements digitally. Some people may say 8K scans are a bit overkill, but when you consider the possibilities and then look at the actual SE, which is a 1080p scan that already was partly printed from 2K (like a photocopy of a photocopy, with each generation on crappier paper), it's kind of sad. But like I said before, that was fine for the prequels so Lucas either doesn't care or can't tell the difference. Judging by the horrendous colouring of the SE, either one of those is perfectly plausible.

Hmm, that's weird. Is there a malicious site warning on my page itself? Because if its not on the page itself then it shouldn't be in the hotlinks. I've never got a warning like that in the recent past and I haven't changed that page recently. The page that was hotlinked is not giving me warnings in Chrome or any other browser I have...

Weird.

Puggo - Jar Jar's Yoda said:

FYI, Firefox is reporting savestarwars.com as a malicious site. It states:

Of the 9 pages we tested on the site over the past 90 days, 1 page(s) resulted in malicious software being downloaded and installed without user consent. The last time Google visited this site was on 2010-09-16, and the last time suspicious content was found on this site was on 2010-09-16.

Malicious software includes 2 scripting exploit(s). Successful infection resulted in an average of 3 new process(es) on the target machine.

 For maybe an hour in total, there was one or two pages that were uploaded with a malicious script maybe three weeks ago, which unfortunately infected my whole hard drive. I took down the pages and edited the script out of the HTML coding and re-uploaded them. The site should be fine now. I don't get any warnings from my browsers, and I got warnings in the brief time the infected pages were up.

Problem is, especially with old movies that have faded--there is no 100% colour reference. Nothing photochemical will last, so there actually is no perfect record. The best single reference, not just available but possible, is a Technicolor print, because it doesn't fade. It's a print, so it has it's own variables, but this is what a restorationist would use. It's what YCM Labs actually did use for 1997 Star Wars restoration colour reference.

The truth is that every colourist eyeballs it to some degree when grading a film because its impossible to get it 100% right. You can start with the Technicolor print as the base, try to collect other film pieces and information, perhaps consult with those involved in the film if you think they are reliable--which, with old movies where you would need them because the prints have faded, they sometimes aren't as reliable as everyone pretends they are--and then use your own judgement to make little tweaks to brightness and contrast. The result is about 95% accurate but if you could get in a time machine and travel back and view the answer print when it was fresh from the lab you would probably find that a scene that you thought had 53 points of yellow actually had 47 points, or something like that. But to your eye it probably "looks" basically accurate.

So, when the restoration of Star Wars happens, they will be looking at the Technicolor print and matching that, perhaps not to 100% faithfullness but it will be the guide to how things should "look".

In another thread he said he will be waiting for the Blu Ray, and tackling it after ESB:R is done.

There is a bit of a green tint because of the print and/or white balance of the camera. It accounts for some of it, but not nearly all of it. Let's say about 20%.

I should mention though, that correcting the GOUT to look like that, on second thought, is a bit of a futile attempt. In all likelihood it would make it look worse. The reason being, there is so little color in the GOUT that when you pull it out you get all sorts of noise and colour patches and it looks kind of gross, it would probably be popping all over the place too. Even the milder saturation boosts on all the Avisynth projects had some colour popping issues, and also bleeding in the reds in some instances. I tried experimenting myself using the GOUT in photoshop to match the Technicolor levels but it just isn't the same, and video colour correction isn't as good as photoshop. If you were working from a film scan it would be different, but the GOUT is just really crappy 20 year old video and it can't withstand that much manipulation, at least from my own attempts. Personally I think leaving it as it is, or going with the milder saturation boost of previous attempts, is the best it can look colour-wise. You could maybe brighten the sunset scene and get rid of the blue, but I don't know if the noise would be too much.

The GOUT coloring is pretty off in most places, either through deliberate re-timing such as in the sunset scene or just through color fading. If you want a RAR of all the photos I made one, its just over 300MB, but they aren't perspective corrected, so you will be seeing the screen from an angle, and they are unnecessarily large as well (approx 10MB for most), so you will probably have to shrink them and then distort them, which is more work than it sounds. I posted about 70% of the photos with perspective correction, but there is about 10 more that you would have to do yourself to view them properly (this isn't 100% necessary of course). The coloring there isn'y 100% either, as there is some exposure and also white balance and print tint fluxuations, but they are probably the best colour reference currently available.

Neither Woods nor Burtt mixed the prequels. In fact, in the documentary on the Episode III DVD Burtt is trying to argue Lucas to get the sound effects louder and louder until the mixer finally gets upset and basically argues Burtt down. So if it was up to Burtt, you'd have the prequel mixes being fucked too.

Brilliant sound designer though, he should stick to that. This book sounds kind of interesting. Are there any sound outtakes and alternate versions that never made the cut?

Well, like you said, the 1997 wipes might not have matched the 1977 wipes to a T--because that example never existed in 1977, technically. The A roll is a new CG shot, so they had to do a new wipe from scatch using a new A roll CG print out and a B roll from the original camera negative.  It looks like the difference here is about 4 frames. Deliberate or maybe just a mistake. But its likely because they were not technically re-creating an original cut but working with new material.

What you really need to do is compare 1997 to 2004. Because if I am right then the 1997 versions should basically match 1977, but then 2004 starts early. If 1997 and 2004 are both the same early starts then it would just be that they decided to start each transition a few frames early for some random reason.

My theory is that Pacific Titles did what they said: they went back to A and B and did a new C. There would be no point in saying Pacific Titles re-did the transitions using new optical printers if they didn't do this. What I am saying is that ILM then slapped new digital wipes over top of the new 1997 opticals. Why? Dunno. Smoother looking? Hide some splices? No idea. Why did they speed up the opening logo? No idea either. But they did.

I don't believe that Pacific Titles just bullshitted all that.

The only other explanation is that ILM re-did the work that Pacific Titles did by going back to A and B themselves and making yet another C. But this doesn't explain why the wipes are exactly positioned to hide the 1997 ones. The only explanation that accounts for this is mine above. So thats what I'm going with for the moment.

Not for wipes and dissolves and opticals though. The "original negative assembly" pieces are actually second-generation copies that have combined two original pieces. The original original pieces are not used because they have to have a wipe combining them on a copy. For the SE, rather than cleaning up or scanning the second-generation copy that combined them with the wipe, they went back to the original original camera pieces in storage and re-combined them in a brand new transition.

So, for instance it might look like this

Camera negative piece A (sandcrawler) + Camera negative piece B (stormtroopers and dewback)

[copied using an optical printer to overlay a wipe on the cut between them]

=

New original negative piece C that starts as A (the sandcrawler) and then wipes to B (the stormtroopers) within the same shot

So A and B are then put back in storage and C is the actual piece that goes in the negative assembly.

I think the reason they re-did them was the same reason they redid the titles in 2004 and had the title logo sped up. It doesn't make a whole lot of sense, but they just wanted to do it. Pacific Titles definitely is independently reported on at least two non-Lucasfilm published sources to have made new opticals, so I don't think this is BS. If you might argue that the only did SOME of the opticals again, why are the new fades covering up the older ones on EVERY shot? So, by this logic either they did none of them or they did all of them. My answer is that the re-did all the optics in 1997, which then had digital matches covered over top of them for 2004. Maybe they did this to hide splices better, I don't know.

Watched ROTS sometime last year when it was on Spike. My parents were semi-interested as they heard that one was decent and wanted to watch it. It was about as good as I remembered it, which is good in parts, bad in parts, decent overall (my parents seemed to enjoy it for a friday night television movie). TPM I probably watched some time in 2007, I always had a certain fondness for it so maybe I'll see the Blu Ray next year. AOTC, maybe 2006 or 2007, but I think I chapter skipped about 1/3 of the film, if not more. Of course, I've seen little snippets of the films since those years because I had to reference something for Secret History of Star Wars. To be honest, I watched TPM and AOTC about a dozen times or more before 2005, which is far more than either of them deserve in a lifetime, so I have no real desire to watch them for a long time to go, AOTC possibly never again. I honest to god tried to watch AOTC in early 2008 and I just couldn't make it, it was so awful I had to turn it off out of embarassment. ROTS I don't mind, I seem to watch it every 18 to 24 months or so, if only from television, and that seems to be enough.

Sevb32 said:

Why does it have to be either/or why can't it be both?

 Sorry, was there a high def transfer of the OOT from the original negatives like there was for the SE? I certainly couldn't have missed that bit of news...

Empire of Dreams was fine as an A&E special--which it actually did air as in 2004--but as the "definitive documentary on the OT" its just a big fluff piece, really. Star Wars needed its own doc, and then they could have done a second part about 1978-1983.

Actually, I think at least a handful of us here could produce a better sound mix, and I'm not even being facetious. Certainly most of us could have produced a better color grading. Most could have probably also produced better supplementary material. The 2004 release was just lacking in all departments, except maybe the menus which were pretty kickass.

Lucasfilm rep: Hi, Mr. Filoni, how are you?

Dave Filoni: Good, busy finishing the third season of Clone Wars, what's up?

Lucasfilm rep: Well, we're doing a panel on the positive fan reaction to the prequels and we'd like you to take part.

Dave Filoni: Uh, um, well, you know, I'd love to but I'm a bit busy here with all this work...

Lucasfilm rep: Please Mr. Filoni, it would really be a big help to us here, and George personally would appreciate it. Think of it as part of the Clone War promotion, pushing the next-generation material.

Dave Filoni: Hmm, well I guess if its that important I can take a few hours to do it...

Lucasfilm rep: Thank you very much Mr. Filoni, I'm sure you'll stay with us for many more season of the Clone Wars. You might be asked about Hayden Christensen in Return of the Jedi as well.

A panel organized by the very company promoting the "hated" films, and full of employees of the very same companies....Please. This is as artificially constructed as the prequels themselves. What the fuck do you expect Filoni to say when they tell him to go on the panel and talk about Return of the Jedi?

The early 1990s, as far as my study shows.

www.secrethistoryofstarwars.com/originaltrilogyreception2.html

Th signs were starting to show by the late 80s but only in some quarters, but really it is the early 1990s that this becomes widespread, so that by the mid and late 90s it has become a sort of consensus.

He read the crawl aloud into the mic to record what it said.

Maybe they re-did them digitally to get a more consistent "look" with the prequels. I mean, they redid the opening titles in 2004 too...why? No real reason. They look cleaner or smoother I suppose. So, the wipes were re-done optically from scratch in 1997 using the original pieces, but then in 2004 digital fades were used to cover up the original 97 opticals, so all you see is the 2004 digitals. Thats my best answer right now.

That's what I was thinking. There is a consistency there that speaks to this being the case.

This does conflict with reports that Pacific Titles redid all the opticals using the original negative pieces. It also conflicts with the quality you can see yourself, as the 1997 SE wipes do not look as grainy as 20-year-old optical composites. In the Anatomy of the Dewback video feature, they even show the sandcrawler shot and how they totally re-did the wipe from scratch using new optical printers. They even showed it being done.

So, this doesn't make sense. It could be as Baronlando said that they didn't care or want to match the old wipe 100%. If it started a frame early, who cares. But the consistency with which this happens to "cover up" the old wipe is bafflingly coincidental if that is the case. Are there any exceptions to this that you have found?