Star Wars (1977) original Blu ray. Crappier than ever.

4K77 and don't look back.

Unless Disney pulls off a big surprise and professionally restores the old trilogy, we'll never get a better version of A New Hope than 4K77.

 

I did a write up on my thoughts on capture vs scan just a few posts back. While there are fans of fixed focal points (4K77), there is a an argument for capture (DSLR Camera) too.

But let me put it simply. If you want a Kodak Eastman North American release print version with a "red" look go with SS Edition. If you want the technicolor British version with a "green" look go with 4K77.

The SS Edition does not come with surround only the 2.0 PCM that is a duplicate of the one that came off of the despecialized edition (though it is simple to put to this version) as well as having the mono track. 4K77 has all the audio options.

You can see the youtube clips posted earlier and we all debated this thoroughly a few pages back.

If you want to believe the release prints that many of us saw were "crap" then I guess you have to wait until an official version come out. Good luck with that.

 

I know this sounds stupid but what is 4K 77?

 

Project 4K77 | The Star Wars Trilogy

Enjoy.

 

Thank you. I am a layman when it comes to film, so don't know what fixed focal points vs. capture means. But I appreciate your response.

I guess I'm just interested in something that looks natural. Whites are whites. Blacks are blacks. Again, I am a layman when it comes to this subject, but when I watched the YouTube comparison clip, I noticed quite a bit of green. It was in Vader's helmet, on his cape, on Artoo. It was everywhere in that clip.

Audio options aren't really a factor for me, as I don't have any kind of special setup. Just a Blu-ray player and a 1080p TV.

I don't believe that the "crap" reference was directed at me, as I didn't refer to anything as such. My only comment on the subject was the abundance of green in the 4K77 YouTube clip. Regarding waiting for an official release, it'll happen. It's not a matter of if but when.

Again, thanks for the reply.

 

Fan 4K restoration of A New Hope from assorted vintage 1977 prints.

 

No I was referring to a earlier reply from Vidiot in reference to him saying that release prints are "crap" and basically have very little value to him. Sorry for the confusing way I put that.

The green tint on the 4K77 looks very close to the technicolor British print, and while I don't prefer it, there are many viewers that do.

As for the fixed focal point scan vs the camera capture, to put it simply it is like this (sorry to others for repeating myself from earlier). Star Wars film is a chemical process. Every particle of that film has 3D qualities because no molecule is sitting flat on the film. A camera lens can capture 3D capability because it is not on a flat plane either and mimics the human eye. While there are 3D scanners it is a fact that they don't incorporate lens. This is not saying that there is 3D in the final form, but rather that you are getting additional detail because of the camera interpreting the same as it does when it takes pictures of still life.

Of course playing Devil's Advocate, one could say that a fixed focal point can capture a different accuracy of what it does scan. I can see both sides and will leave it at that.

The Silver Screen edition was achieved by a team using a 12 megapixel DSLR camera and taking a picture of all the frames (one by one by affixing a camera right next to the film print) over a 3 year period.

The 4K77 uses a flat scanner with sensors that has 4K resolution which is a little less than 9 megapixel equivalent.

While I am quoting these facts, that is not all that goes into a restoration.

Some would argue the technicolor print of the 4K77 is more accurate because of less deterioration, people like me argue that color degradation on the Spanish Kodak Eastman print is consistent to the nature of chemicals and can be corrected for just fine.

The end result is that it is nice to have choices. I don't have a big problem with either work and I am very glad that fans of the film went to the trouble. With the Despecialized audio options (which are easily ripped) and these awesome scans/captures it really is a great time to be a Star Wars fan.

As for grain, that too has information and the original Star Wars release print had grain as well. To take away grain is to take away detail.

 

If the official release does happen there are those of us in the fan community willing to assist in any way possible-and it would be wise in this instance to at least extend a line I'd think. There is much research that has been and detailed information that can be shared in order to finally have a definitive issue of the OT.
I'll readily admit that I have learned more in the past few years simply researching about Star Wars than in my entire college career. Sure as Vidiot pointed out if you get any number of people in a room then there will be exponential amounts of opinions-but it certainly can be beneficial when officials lack the innate knowledge and minutiae that is discussed on a daily basis by dedicated fans.

For example; there are variations in the original film where the end credit texts and the liftoff effect shot of Rebel fighters from the Massassi temple base differ in various prints and video versions for some strange reason. It has never been identified as to what caused this but they are there.

The reason we are even at this juncture is an overall lack of willingness from official sources. It's about time to bridge the gap and end this silly moratorium. If Batman '66 can be released then so can the unaltered trilogy.

Because it's a darn shame when I have to tell people the best official release of Star Wars anything like its original self is a very hard to find 1993 Technidisc pressed Laserdisc. But it's absolutely true.

 

My memory is no, it wasn't that bad, but the reality is that Kodak 5247 negative was always grainy by modern standards. ILM and John Dykstra did some remarkable things with the optical effects for those films, because quite a few shots were basically done in-camera, repeatedly exposing the film to get certain elements in place, avoiding optical grain build-up. Even when they did do blue-screen composites, they were done very skillfully, creating very clean results (for that era). I can remember my jaw dropping when I saw the effects, because I had never seen blue screen done so well. And when I found out they had done all the optical work in-house, I realized, "ah... they controlled every bit of it themselves instead of farming it out, so nothing could get screwed up." Very smart.

Everything about Star Wars was so innovative, it just blew the lid off the business in 1977. A lot changed when that film happened, particularly for effects, sound, and distribution (reminding the studios that there was a huge untapped market for summer blockbusters). I know the lab where the 35mm -> 70mm blow-ups were done, and they did absolutely meticulous work making sure it was as pristine as possible for that era. Those prints were grainy, but not gigantically so. The two advantages of 70mm were first, you could put 6-track mag sound on the prints, and secondly, you could pump a ton of light through the image, so you got a really bright, clear, sharp picture. And the prints were basically done one at a time, very carefully and with a lot of quality control, so they looked fantastic. The run-of-the-mill 35mm prints were not done that carefully at all, especially by DeLuxe (which was a crappy lab at that time).

Some historians don't like degraining -- Sony Pictures restoration exec Grover Crisp is not in favor of it, as one example -- but I think it's a necessary part of digital restoration, and you just have to use restraint and good taste not to do too much. I think even taking half the grain out of the image is a pretty good average, and then you have to just watch every shot to make sure the grain level never suddenly pops up (as in a big VFX shot) or drops way down (as in a camera original shot). I don't agree with a few creative people (like Jim Cameron) who want to take all of the grain out, because the results are pretty weird with film. It's a little too "antiseptic" to me. But I can kind of see Cameron's point with digitally-shot images, because that's the overall effect he wants: just pure image and zero noise. It never had grain to begin with, so maybe that works organically for what he's trying to do.

 

I don't think they'd give a crap what version of the movie you watch. When people see the movie for the first time, they react to the story, the music, the characters, the dialogue, the music, and the visuals. The changes Lucas made don't really matter -- they don't alter the experience so drastically that it really matters... not if you hadn't seen it back in the day. I know people who first saw the film on pan/scan on a 12" TV, and that was their life experience for many years until the letterbox DVD and Blu-ray were released. And when you saw it that way, you're losing 40% of the picture... and that's a lot.

BTW, when we were doing the mastering, I asked at one point, "oh, BTW -- do you want to do a pan/scan 1.78 pass for HD?" (which is increasingly standard for some cable channels, particularly Disney). Lucas made a face and said, "good god, no. Let's leave it as it was shot." And yet... there are pan/scan HD versions still being aired today, and I'm not sure if he ever even saw them. At least with those, you're only missing about 25% of the picture.

 

I saw films in the theater in '77, '80 and '83, but I was so young. My primary experience with the trilogy was with the pan and scan VHS tapes that I watched over and over in the 80s. I didn't even know what pan and scan was. I just loved watching the movies. When the trilogy was first released on DVD in 2004, I bought the fullscreen version. I had a square CRT TV and wasn't quite ready to buy into this widescreen, black bars at the top and bottom of the screen nonsense. I didn't realize how much picture I was missing until I noticed Han wasn't on screen in a scene in which I clearly remember him being on screen. The scene is in Empire in which Han says, "Not entirely stable. Well, I'm glad you're here to tell us these things. Chewie, take the professor into the back and plug him into the hyperdrive."

The post-1997 versions have been the standard versions for over twenty years now, longer than the twenty years that elapsed between the release of the original Star Wars in 1977 and the release of the Special Editions in 1997. For an entire generation, the post-1997 versions are the only versions they know and are interested in. That younger generation either doesn't know about the changes or are indifferent to them. I may be in the minority on this forum in that, though I prefer the pre-1997 versions that I grew up watching, I don't dislike the post-1997 versions.

 

I see your point, and I get it that everybody only knows the world in which they grew up. But when we technicians do these restorations, one thing I try to always keep in mind is the old physician's maxim: "first, do no harm." And that means don't change the film from the way it was originally intended to be seen. So even though what's in your head is what you know, it may not historically be correct. You can make the same argument about albums that have been remixed many years after it was released.

But I'm fairly certain that Disney will most likely eventually release the films in 4K & HD for home video as they were originally seen in theaters, and then (out of respect to Lucas), simultaneously release the versions that reflect his final visions. They'd be crazy not to do this, at least in some form. A lot will depend on whether Disney winds up owning Fox in a few weeks.

 

So now there is the propaganda that the cameras and scanners are creating grain?

"Degraining" is changing the image artificially. There is no 2 ways about it. This is the problem I have with the ideology of some film technicians. When I debated one a while back (not on here), not only do they think this is right, but that actually decry an optical photo chemical process and said that any such process should not be allowed to exist!

This is the thing, when people read about this loss of detail and it goes from 4K to 2K with each duplication of prints it comes from a fundamental misunderstanding of how the analog process works. There is not "K" in an analog print and what is duplicated is a physical attribute of the original information, not a digital RECREATION that a computer does.

Take your hand's shadows projected up on a wall. While a digital camera can take a picture of your hand and give you recreation of your hand, does that mean your shadow has suddenly not become accurate to what your hand has blocked with a direct connection to the photons of light that hit it? Who would stupidly assign a "K" value to that? While simplistic, the point stands.

Yet we know that technicians have been doing this constantly. See the teal generation. When we have the mindset that all release prints are "crap", I don't know how anyone can say that all vital information to solve the puzzle are being considered.

The idea that what is in a viewers head "may not be historically accurate" is just like the mindset that an analog print has a "K" value. When it comes to what a viewer experienced, there is some bits of information that are absolutely accurate, and I would argue if one is being honest, all of it could be. The key is how someone expresses those memories.

It is like a cop saying "yeah witnesses are often poor at details and can be often wrong to what actually happened". Yet how often are those witnesses questioned under duress, confused by the interviewer, and most importantly, do not understand context of the actual questions being asked!?

As for waiting for Disney to release the originals, what someone thinks compared to what does happen may be two different things. Song of the South...tick tick tick...yet there is Birth of a Nation front and center in 4K! (this is not to start a racism discussion, but this is to show that just because people want something to happen, doesn't mean it is going to happen based on one controversy over another). George Lucas doesn't want the originals released. He has made it clear. To this day, no one, and I mean no one knows what is in that contract of sale other than high ranking Disney officials and the same goes for the deal with 20th Century Fox which is why the only unaltered version was the crap DVD so many years ago (through George's permission). It may not be about being crazy, it may mean it can't happen.

But I got a proposition, what if Lucas made a sale that says...sure you can have all rights to Star Wars name just as long as "Star Wars" is my altered vision. Does Disney scoff at this or do they just buy under those conditions? Is it further hard to imagine that Lucas says...and if you obtain Star Wars at any time in the future it is still MY VERSION.

Remember, no matter the deal with Fox, they only had the rights to distribute. What was distributed..what Lucas changed, nothing else after it happened.

 

De-graining old movies is B.S. The grain is a part of the movie. It doesn't matter how it gets there. It's there. That's how we love those movies. There's no way to remove the grain without altering the image in some way. At the very least, there should always be two versions available - "cleaned" and pre-DNR.

 

Wasn't 5247 a fine-grain stock though? Every vintage film I've seen shot on that film negative always looks really great, and not at all grainy... The Empire Strikes Back, for example. I adore the look of 5247 personally; it had such a beautiful overall aesthetic that no other stock at the time could match (great detail, contrast, and color reproduction)... wish Return of the Jedi had been shot on it too, providing a certain aesthetic unity across the three films, even if the lighting choices were very different.

It would have also been highly interesting to have seen Return of the Jedi had Lucas' second-choice pick to direct it got the gig over Richard Marquand... none other than Lamont Johnson, who directed, among many things on television and cinema (some of it to much acclaim and awards), some classic Twilight Zone episodes... it kinda puts to rest the urban myth that Lucas hired the Welsh-born Marquand 'cause he couldn't or wouldn't hire an American director who was a DGA member... clearly that wasn't entirely accurate if Johnson was runner-up.

The things you learn every day...

 

No. It was grainy and crappy under a lot of shooting conditions. Technically it was rated at 100 (which is fine-grain), but the reality is that it was noisy by modern standards. Today, 5219 Vision 3 -- which is a 500 ISO stock -- actually looks a lot nicer. I personally think this is the best film stock ever made, but it took them 70 years to get there.

The lighting, lenses, and filtration between all the Star Wars films is so vastly different, that accounts for fairly epic changes in the look. When I was struggling to control the "diffused glow" that affects a lot of Episode 4, I actually turned to Lucas and remarked, "man, Gil Taylor sure loved this heavy diffusion." He shrugged and said, "well, you'll notice we didn't use it much after this film," which was true. The subsequent films were a lot sharper. But sharpness alone is not necessarily an indication of picture quality.

 

I wonder why does Return Of The Jedi has always looked so fuzzy and lucking definition,not in a way like Star Wars or Superman The Movie were difusion filters were used, I don't think those were used on Return Of The Jedi, even less thinking that by 1983 they were out of fashion, it's like if there was something wrong with the film stock used to shoot it, or the lenses, or the interpositive used for home video releases was not properly done.
Return Of The Jedi is mi least favourite movie of the Star Wars Original Trilogy but also in my opinion the worst looking of the three.

 

Interesting. I have to say though, that when I watch a vintage movie (released between 1977 and 1984) shot on 5247, I just don't see the grain in any prominent manner like some other stocks... I defer to your expertise, but I just never saw it myself, and I'm usually perceptive to onscreen grain.

I agree that it's the least classy-looking of the OT, and it's not because it was shot quickly and on the cheap; it had a $33m budget, and took nearly a hundred days of shooting to get it in the can. And the late DP Alan Hume has done some impressive lensing in the past (his work on the 1988 Jack the Ripper television mini-series is gorgeously atmospheric without being too flashy), but I think what you saw was what director Richard Marquand wanted... he said himself in an interview at Jedi's release that he didn't like Irvin Kirshner's more sophisticated lighting in Empire, and he wanted to return Jedi to a more subtle, natural lighting that didn't draw attention to itself... some would call Jedi's cinematography dull, mundane, flat, I wouldn't go that far myself, but it is what it is... for better or worse.

Jedi itself was shot on the then-new 5293 film stock, which was a very fine-grain, high-contrast stock that was supposedly superior to the likes of 5247 on several technical levels... I don't doubt it, but it certainly didn't look better than the latter, at least not to me; it's not ugly but it has a bit of a harsher look to it that 5247 simply didn't have, plus I think the color reproduction was much, much better on the latter. As far as Jedi looking soft on ancillary release, quite a few people have mentioned that over the years, and I always believed that it was the mastering not the movie itself that made it look such; it shouldn't look soft, considering the film stock it was shot on, and there's certainly no trace of diffusion filters. I think if they went back to the O-neg and scanned it properly this time for a new re-release, it would look immeasurably better overall... let's hope that happens some time relatively soon.

 

RotJ looks fine technically. It's just a weak movie per se.

 

That is right, a preference does not mean it is accurate. Dialing back the precious information that is the film grain is obscene. How does one separate film grain (which is the metallic silver and dye) when it is the picture! I am glad to see a technician actually stating what most of us that know about many transfers where they have been DNR's to death and have colors that are just crazy off.

"In the 1970’s, Erich Heynacher from Zeiss provided the decisive proof that humans attach more value to coarse, contour-defining details than to fine details when evaluating an image."

https://c-sideprod.ch/wp-content/medias/2012/10/4K_plus.pdf
https://www.camera-info.com/contaxinfo/pdf_files/Zeiss-Resolving_power_and_contrast.pdf

Through most of us that sat in the movie theater seats and watched these movies put up on the big screen, film grain was a part of experience. When you don't see it in a home environment than a technician has ruined it, I believe that wholeheartedly. While no film grain is pleasing to some that doesn't change the fact that it is WRONG.

I don't know how anyone can make a judgment on what certain film stocks look like on the many releases when the quality control is all over the place. If one is being scientific you should be noting who is doing the mastering and what they are actually doing to it.

When you have someone like Kubrick where he had a specific grainy choice with Eyes Wide Shut (where he force developed EXR5298) and of course Barry Lyndon, film grain was obvious not an issue with him. I think he specifically filmed "dirty", and yet you have many technicians that think they should be deciding what to change on the fly. At least with fans that captured Star Wars they opted to keep the grain in and captured the look of the release print for what it is..."warts" and all.

I totally agree, it is a double whammy.

Can someone explain this comment to me? Is this during a mastering/transfer? If so what medium?

I mean seriously talking crap on Gilbert Taylor's choices?

 

Hume’s style tends to favor a slightly softer image as reflected in his three Bonds from the same era. Merely compare these to the sharper photography of his successor Alec Mills on The Living Daylights. Ironically Mills was the camera operator on ROTJ and apparently did some second unit stuff.
However like ROTJ none of those have proper HD releases that accurately reflect the original release so this is all with a grain of salt.
I think in ROTJ it was desired to have a flatter lighting style to avoid the cost overruns and delays that came up on ESB much like everything else was done to avoid being more expensive and headache inducing. Sadly that included many creative facets as well.
This is gone into in great detail in Mike Kaminski’s Secret History of Star Wars which is ESSENTIAL READING.

I really enjoy the fact that each film looks different as it helps to give them their own visual identity within the same universe. This was a big problem in the prequels as going from the film based TPM to the all digital II and III was a huge step backwards.

Many early transfers look as if they treated all three original films roughly the same which is incorrect to do. They each have their own visual identity and only when the letterboxed laserdiscs started coming out did they start to look individual again on home screens. Then of course came the definitive set in 1993 which sucked all the color out and added so much NR that it left visible motion smearing and we went backwards again.

 

https://www.amazon.com/Star-Wars-Ar...1529106279&sr=8-1&keywords=star+wars+archives

New Star Wars Archives coffee table book covering the Original Trilogy with input by Lucas. I wonder if he will discuss the CGI dumps he took all over them?

 

I would think him wearing a Han Shot First tshirt is all the commentary we'd ever need on that subject.

 

Well, don't forget they used Panavision lenses on the first movie but Arriflex cameras and Cooke lenses on the others. They do have different looks, but I think it's more differences in lighting styles and art direction. Anamorphic lenses were very soft (to me) in that era, and I think they only really got sharper in the last 20 years, when gigantic improvements became possible with computer modeling.

Well, you believed wrong. We didn't do anything to make it softer. If anything the Lowry Process actually grain-reduces and sharpens the picture, and there was an effort to actually compare all three films to make them "somewhat" in the ballpark. There were conversations about the overly-diffused image Gil Taylor used on the first film. We routinely checked still frames from all three films throughout the mastering sessions (though as I said, I didn't do Empire).

Sharpness is affected by exposure, lighting, contrast, lenses, and a lot of other factors. One hidden additional factor that people don't consider is pin-registration, which helps improve apparent sharpness, and we did not have that benefit for any of the Star Wars film scans. I was very, very pissed-off about this, but they were too far along in the process to redo it. And as I said earlier, I was not happy with the levels, like the clipped details in the lightsabers, which drove me mental. When I can control these circumstances, I would've scrapped a lot of those shots and made them redo them... but in this case I was just an employee, just one cog in the wheel.

If Disney doesn't wind up owning Fox, I think you can kiss goodbye any chance of the original 1977 release being remastered anytime soon.

 

Thanks for the heads up on this. I have the Taschen Books Stanley Kubrick Archives book and a thing of beauty it is too. Hoping the price might come down a bit but the calibre of the images themselves, their reproduction and the paper quality can all be taken in advance to be of the very highest quality.