The 3d release is sort of on hold because they didn't realise how time-consuming and expensive it would be. I'm not sure if they're still working on it. Other than the lame Clone War series, there is a live-action SW series planned for sometime around 2010 and a WWII movie called Red Tails is in early development/pre-production.
The old transformers are worth lots if they are in the package but how many people kept them in the box? Otherwise, no, they're not worth much, though they went up in value a bit with the new movie that came out.
The sith eyes thing is dumb. It takes away from the main emotional point that whats inside Vader could also be what's inside Luke. You don't need technical "markers" like red eyes, its much more sophisticated to just have Luke's face in the Vader mask. Besides, its not any kind of rule, Dooku didn't even have Sith eyes.
Cool, I didn't know that existed. Amazing that we have not one but two recordings of the 70mm.
I used to collect the Movie Maniac series from McFarland when they first came out. I think I have the complete series 1,2 and 3. I still have them all sealed actually, I guess I went through a collecting phase when I was 16. Probably sell them in a few years, I don't think they're worth all that much more than I actually payed for them, though the "extra bloody" Jason, Freddy and Leatherface ones I have are sort of rare. I've occassioned the odd figure since then but only when I've really liked it, and I've never kept carded figures since those Movie Maniacs. The 12" HR Giger Alien and Darkness from Legend that I have are pretty cool, and the two Iron Maiden displays are some of my favorites. I have a couple from the Conan line as well. I guess I'm a McFarland guy. Other than my Bender coinbank and my old Transformers and Star Wars figures that I've miraculously hung on to somehow. Actually I have three or four sealed Episode I figures, I have no idea why I bought them or why I still have them--what can I say, we all got sucked into the hype in some form or another.
The Golden Idol said:
Sluggo said:
The Golden Idol said:
I can't believe I just noticed this, but is that Zuckuss at the right of the screencap? If it is, then that's two bounty hunters in this scene!
It is actually the Zuckuss head on a 2-1B body.
Um, why???
Zuckuss isn't a droid, so WTF?
Because its just a movie. They needed props so they cannibalised existing ones to make new ones. A Zuckuss head on a 2-1B body looks like a new robot when it just goes by in the background. Thats why IG-88 is grey--its not IG-88. IG-88 is black, but thats one's grey, its supposed to be a different droid, thats why its at Bespin and painted different, they just re-used the props so they wouldn't have to fabricate new ones from scratch. EU writers couldn't resist turning it into a highly contrived story point because EU has such little room to go that they have to latch onto every petty detail in the film and enlarge into something it clearly was never meant to be.
I think this should be left alone. Its not IG-88. And even if it was black, I'm sure that in scrap yards around the galaxy there are droids that are the same model as him rotting around. Thats kind of the justification.
Are these still the ones from way-back that were 96 kbps? I was always really dissapointed that the encoding was done so low. Would be great to hear these at 196 or higher.
The guy just told us he saw it this afternoon. Take it easy there.
How do you know? This may be a print the studio has kept for its own archives since 1980.
So was it the SE?
Sluggo said:
OK, Zombie, I'm almost convinced, but how do we know that the difference isn't just a difference of the aspect ratios of each of the frames.
Well, whether you compare Zion's 16mm print, the GOUT or the SE its all the same--I just used the 16mm print for the comparison because it was the highest resolution of all the options. And in any case, even if it was an aspect ratio thing, which its not because you can just sub in the SE or GOUT, the point is that the 77 moon is the 81 moon, you can clearly see that the detail and contrast areas match (barring the slight horizontal strecthing).
Just to cut to the chase, barring a very detailed and convoluted detective chase, this is ultimately the conclusion:
This crude gif is a comparison between Zion's 1977 16mm print, which is clearly identical to the GOUT and the SE (minus the optical matte line on the star destroyer and the coloring of the moon, both of which are on the GOUT) and Moth3r's 1981 shot, which I'm sure all will agree is the most apparently different version, and thus, if this can be shown to be the same as the 1977 then all others should be as well. I cranked the contrast on Moth3r's to get the low-con milky blacks closer to the film print and also to really bring out the shading and texture of the moon's surface to more clearly show the detail.
I think what you'll find here is what I said earlier: the 1981 moon is the same as the 1977 moon, only stretched horizontally, and with smeared detail due to the poor technology of laserdisk display and capture. Also note that this comparison is not the same exact frame as the film print, merely the same shot.
1977 VERSUS 1981
That makes sense; I should revise what I said earlier--after comparing all the various screenshots for the home video versions, the matte painting is all the same. In other words, the Moth3r/Citizen transfer simply provided the best point of comparison because they are the clearest 1981. Bottom line: all home video versions have been the same and they are all the same as the 1977 except the composite is different--the 1977 version had distortion, while the 1981 re-composite had a new starfield and no distortion, and either the same Tatooine as 1977 or a new composite of it as well; I'll have to take a further look at that and the small moon.
Its actually been a bit of a process. First I thought I had discovered an alternate matte painting used for the 81 release. Then I realised it was the same as the 77 painting. Then I thought the 81 release was the same painting from 77. Then I once again thought they redid the matte painting in 1981. Then I thought maybe the foreign--french/german--releases had a different matte painting. Its been a very tricky process of changing my conclusion as new pieces of evidence become available.
I've worked with
1) all the screenshots in the screenshot thread of the shot, notably the SE, GOUT, Moth3r, Citizen and Cowclops shots
2) my own screenshots from the HD-SE, GOUT, plus my VHS and my Editdroid LD rip just for the heck of it
3) a photograph of the movie screen of this actual shot from a 1977 screening
4) a medium-quality reproduction of the matte painting itself taken from the Lucasfilm Archives book
5) high-res scan of a 16mm print of the shot from Zion's 1977 print
6) low quality reproductions of the raw matte composite
I have done extensive graphic manipulation to reveal that:
drumroll....
There is no "alternate" matte painting or alternate moon. Both the 1981 shot and the 1977 shot are the same. If you look at Cowclops, Editdroid, pretty much any 1981 version, the moon doesn't look very different from the GOUT/SE, other than massive detail loss and wildly fluxuating colors. The only version that looks different is the Moth3r/Citizen PAL versions. This is why I wondered if maybe there was an alternate matte used for the foreign version. But I've always noticed that Tatooine was exactly the same, just cropped, and the contrast areas on the moon match up if you look at distinctive areas, although in some areas its tenuous--did a hypothetical alternate matte artists try to replicate the look of the original? No, I realised. It IS the original.
Explanations:
1) why is it that the Moth3r/Citizen French/German captures look different? They do indeed look different. There are four reasons for this. 1) as detailed as they are, they lack the fine detail of the GOUT/SE. None of the LD captures have sufficient detail to reveal the craters and cracks that are visible on the GOUT and SE, not even Moth3r's. Yet Moth3r/Citizen's still are clearly different looking from the other R1 captures, which have even less detail. This is because 2) contrast/brightness. This is why the atmosphere haze matte line and dark side of the moon matte line are visible. This matte line visibility is seen in some of the R1 caps as well, which causes the landscape/detail of the moon to change. This is why some of the R1 caps sorta look like they might be the same moon as the R2, but not entirely. I imagine this was a home video thing. 3) cropping. If you look at the R2 Moth3r/Citizen versions, most shots have some cropping compared to other versions, but this Tatooine shot is massively zoomed in, and this also contributes to the feeling that the shot is different. But then, even when we account for these three combined factors, and play around with the levels in photoshop to equalise all the versions, the Moth3r/Citizen caps still don't quite match up--they begin to resemble the R1 caps and the GOUT/SE caps, enough to make you consider that they may all be the same matte painting, but not entirely, because they are still not 100% identical. This is because of a final, crucial factor:
4) distortion. The actual matte painting that McQuarrie painting was very large, much larger than what is scene--yet it had to be framed and photographed within a 35mm 2.35 aspect ratio. When it was photographed, there was too much headroom--Tatooine only occuped a small section of the bottom frame. When it came time to do the final composite, it was vertically stretched to fill more room on the frame. Haven't you noticed that the moon in the GOUT/SE/original prints is so distorted? It looks eliptical. The R2 Moth3r/Citizen caps are simply the undistored, original composite, although it has additional cropping as most shots in this print do. This, I argue, is because the shot was re-composited for the foreign French/German prints because of the foreign crawls. They composited it without vertically stretching the Tatooine/Moon matte.
I'm going to do a graphic-heavy analysis of this so people can see for themselves, because they probably don't entirely believe me. I'm not 100% on this yet--but I'm 99% that this is the explanation.
EDIT
Further revelations on the 77 comp: it appears it was manipulated far more than we may have imagined. Each planetoid--Tattoine and its two moons--seem to have been isolated in three matting stages and each one manipulated as a seperate element and then re-composited with the starfield and ship models. This is concluded by comparing the raw matte element to the final optical composite. 1) The colors have been shifted on all three elements. Tatooine has been darkened and has more blue in it, while the moons have been rendered black and white from their original pale reddish color. This may be why the moons appear blue, green and grey in various prints/transfers, due to recompositing in 1981 and for foreign re-comps. 2) after being broken up into three seperate elements, each one has been repositioned! Tatooine remains as it was, basically, while the large moon has been moved higher in the frame and slightly to the left, and the small moon has been moved way higher and slightly to the right. 3) Theres been distortion applied on top of this. The small moon has been left as is, but the large moon has been stretched vertically. Additionally, it appears Tatooine may have been stretched horizontally, though it is a bit difficult to tell.
This is why, on some of the artificially brightened home video captures like Moth3r's, there are matte lines around the large moon (VERY visible on its darkside) and the atmosphere haze on Tatooine--even though it was painted as one matte painting, it was recomposited as seperate elements!
Reading The Making of Star Wars, there was two starfield passes done because Lucas didn't like the first one. This may be where the other 1981 starfield came from. Interesting.
Johnboy3434 said:
lordjedi said:
One of his latest policy outlines is requiring community service in order to graduate high school and college.
The bastard. Why doesn't anyone realize that by making people help the community, you only inspire resentment towards the community? Think of it this way: would you live in an apartment building where you not only have to pay rent, but also wash your landlord's feet everyday? Would that endear him to you? No! You'd high-tail it out of there as quickly as possible. Unfortunately, in this case the entire country is an apartment building, meaning the only way to escape it is to jump the border and get a degree in Mexico or something. Who here wants our kids doing things like that?
Here in Canada this is mandatory and it hasn't stemyed our charity programs. I think its a good thing; kids ought to help out and learn the responsibility, even if they resent it, and its a good source of labor for charity. How many teenagers like work anyway?
Nice. Its coming to Blu Ray soon I believe. I saw some 1080p footage from it (not the Blu Ray release itself, just footage from the movie) and it was so freaking awesome. I've never seen it in theaters and its one of those things I would just love to experience.
Grain was not removed for Blade Runner. Its just made from the O-negs and it looks marvelous.
But I agree with the basic argument--how a director WISHES he could have made the film is irrelavent to the way it WAS made.
bkev said:
I don't know if you could do this, Adywan, but I liked how in the original version Reville said "yes" twice, with a pause inbetween, like he took a second to ponder it after agreeing. Is it possible to somehow edit McDiarmid's dialogue so that he does the same? Or maybe apply a series of filters to Reville's dialogue, and add one of the "yes"'s to the '04 dialogue? I understand what I'm asking for may (and probably is) be ridiculous, but I think that if it could be done it would work well.
Thats why I don't like the McDiarmid version. It doesn't work in the context of "Vader suggests it, Palpatine hadn't thought of that angle but likes it." The SE makes it seem like maybe Palpatine is faking it, and maybe Vader's faking it--whether due to deliberate design, or, more likely IMO simply poor performance/constuction, as the scene is totally unclear. The Revill version was "yeah, yeah thats a pretty good idea now that you mention it," while the McDiarmid version is more like "yeah, um, [shifty eyes], yeah I was going to say the same thing, thats right." The reason I liked Goodmusicians version is because it actually injected ACTING into the scene, theres character motivation and subtext showing: Vader tries to make excuses for why they should ignore Luke, Palpatine sees through them, then Vader plays his backup card of turning him instead of killing him, and Palpatine decides that will suffice, to which Vader reassures him Luke will join or die. This doesn't work dramatically in the SE the way it is IMO. The original edit works in terms of what I wrote in my first sentence but not the way McDiarmid plays it; there needs to be a pause so you can see the thought process after he says "yes."
Aha! I've solved the moon! Not only was the starfield a recomp, the entire matte painting is a new one, which I have now found. Be back with my full report later. :p
GoodMusician said:
Anywho, here's the file:
I kinda like this edit... I'll explain more when people see/comment...
Bravo sir. That was incredible. I love the interuption--gives the scene a real subtext because you can sense Vader trying to downplay Luke's importance to the Emperor but the Emperor isn't buying it. And the conversation works real well. I wouldn't change a thing here. Good job.
^^
That sounds about right to me.
Problem is they are so blurry/out of focus that whatever grain is gone. Its like DNR, you soften it a little bit and the grain blurs away. The 70mm scans from the CD on the first page looked more grainy in part because they were so sharp so nothing was hidden, so for the purposes of grain a scan isn't much help unless it is equally sharp, though these definitely look like they may be much cleaner than the GOUT (the shot of Luke in the cockpit is sorta in focus, and there clearly isn't coars grain like on the GOUT). But these are still cool to see Meilr
Tiptup said:
at least Bush picked smart dudes to back him up).
I would strongly disagree with that. Perhaps better spoken than him, but thats no accomplishment when you have the diction of a ten year old.
Luke really needed to listen to his ELO mix tapes on the way to Dagobah.
