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

1997 SE theatrical release, home release vhs and Laserdisc-never seen again. Last time the trilogy had good sound mixes.
2004 DVD new special edition with very strange choices made and fubared sound mixes
2011 Blu-ray special special special edition with absoutely insane further changes made and a sound mix with some things fixed but still sounds terrible
Later special maclunkey edition with minor tweaks to the Blu-ray versions but seemingly the first glimpse of new 4k scanned materials first seen on Disney plus.

So now there are FOUR official special editions.

I’ve followed the author’s work for years and his visual comparisons for the trilogy have been invaluable to myself and others through the years. Sometimes just by conversing over still frames we’ve been able to figure out even more changes done.

 

Now that Lucas no longer owns Star Wars, can we safely assume there will be no further special editions?

 

I don't know why Lucas did a remix for the 2004 DVD's while the mixes on the 1997 SE Laser Discs were great.

 

I think that's a safe bet.

 

For the life of me I have no idea. The 97 SE mixes while partially a bit "hey look at me I'm super discrete 5.1 weee!" in terms of mixing as most 90's surround tracks were (gloriously so most of the time) they are actually extremely faithful to the original mixes and incorporate elements of the alternate mono mixes of SW and ESB to try and make a definitive track that has everything and is modern discrete 5.1. Outside of the added elements from the new footage and reverting to "You were lucky to get out of there" in ESB they are really great, powerful and enjoyable listens that modernized the OT for 90's multiplexes used to sonic extravaganzas. The 2.0 surround encoded PCM are the same mixes and closer to how I grew up with these releases on VHS first.

The 97 SE mixes have the most boom and sonic aggressiveness to them compared to everything else. While this isn't exactly historically accurate they are extremely impressive in a theater environment and sound great. This was the last time the trilogy has EVER sounded good period. In 1997 theaters they played in Dolby Digital and DTS to packed houses.

Then in 2004 they reworked and sonically murdered them in public for the DVDs and put out these 5.1 EX tracks with inverted surrounds, dynamic range loss, brand new changes and tweaks, and perhaps most damaging muted score in places. The worst offender was the Battle of Yavin having the Force fanfare almost completely muted in addition to the surrounds being incorrectly flipped. Many complained and all issues were officially called "deliberate creative decisions". Another thing I couldn't stand was replacing Jason Wingreen as Boba Fett's voice with Temura Morrison who played Jango Fett.

These were then quietly fixed along with some other obvious errors for the 2011 Blu-rays but the audio was remixed yet again into an already outdated 6.1 codec and had even more changes applied-some of them being absolutely unthinkable like the insertion of ROTS's Vader memetastic "Noooooooo!" into the ROTJ throne room climax or that godawful yelling noise inserted of Ben's krayt dragon call. (This new sound was a recording of the sound engineer literally yelling in the parking lot.) The BD audio is better than the DVD's EX tracks because of the technical fixes but they are a turd slightly polished with some absolutely unbearable new additions.

 

Visual Comparisons (HD)

This is the article author's ongoing incredible visual comparison that will show you every nitty gritty detail that has been discovered so far.

To each their own but I have a very hard time watching the definitive master these days. It's so drained of color and the motion smearing is really bad. If I want to watch an official release I'll at least pull out the previous LD letterboxed issues which are visually better to the eye-and this is even talking about visible difference in old school analog video!

I LOVED the Infinities series. They're such great fun and each one stems from one small change to the original film.
EU forever! I refuse to use the Legends name. The EU is the real Star Wars.

 

Also moving eyelids and a moving eyeball to the monster in the garbage compactor scene. There's a lot of little stuff that's actually hard to see: you'd literally have to A/B the entire movie to notice it. In some cases, ILM was still making changes to this stuff as we were working on the color. That's when I found out that they used monstrous file names for these shots, like "100xY-2_v2_101_update9_revision3_create_fix_02122004." I remember one file name that was literally 100 characters long, which is unbelievable to me.

Well, Yoda clearly existed prior to the events of Empire Strikes Back, so you figure he'd have to be part of the earlier story. Lucas couldn't pretend he didn't exist. I have a better question (which is asked in The Secret History book): why did Yoda hide for 20 years on Dagobah and become a hermit? And why did Obiwan do the same thing on Tatooine? I'm sure the story of their "lost years" would be interesting to tell. To me, it looks like they were cowards and just hiding to save their own asses.

 

I still have the LD's too, but right now my LD players are all non-functional. Last time I compared them, the DVD looked better to me. I just use it for reference once in awhile, more for content than anything else. - and I barely do THAT.

 

I'd actually recommend "Machete Order:" IV, V(, I), II, III, VI(, VII, VIII, IX). This re-contextualizes the prequels as a sort of "flashback," preserving "twists" like Yoda and Vader. Once you find out Vader is Luke's father, then you get so learn his and Obi-Wan's backstory. (Episode I is optional. Skipping it thrusts you right into Anakin's late adolescence/early adulthood at the beginning of the Clone Wars and avoids the explanation of midichlorians, but you do miss out on the introduction of the "Chosen One" prophecy and some other formative origin snippets.) Anakin's ultimate fall to the dark side and disfigurement is immediately followed by his redemption story. It almost feels well-structured this way.

 

What I meant was that the surprise is gone from the bit where Yoda has not introduced himself to Luke yet. And of course, the one of Vader's identity.

Now that you say this, I suddenly start to wonder, how the story would look if it were ordered in a sort of Godfather style, starting in the original days, but with longer flashbacks to Anakin.

I'm not even sure it would look so bad, apart from mismatched technology. Even Obi vs. Vader fight #2 could be a shorter flashback parallel montage with their first fight.

 

Well it's obvious that Obi-Wan stayed on Tattooine to look after Luke and make sure he was okay, albeit in the custody of the Lars'... a wise decision, as it turned out.

Yoda went into exile on Dagobah because... uh, um, he just did... likely to stay under the radar until Luke had come of age so they could train him to kill his pappy and undo the mistakes they made a generation before.

Of course they were trying to save their own asses; it wouldn't do Luke or Leia or the galaxy much good if they both ended up dead in a ditch somewhere... I'm sure Palpatine had an Empire's Ten Most Wanted List issued... and them two would have been top of it!!!

Not sure there's any story of substance to tell in those 'lost years' though... it won't stop Disney from trying, though... every last drop ...

 

Hi all,
first post.

I somehow stumbled over this thread and read about 4K77, which I downloaded and watched yesterday on my 2,50m wide projection screen.
I am not a graphic designer, I have a CS degree and I work in IT. But I am also a hobby still photographer and have scanned a few thousand old slides my grandfather shot, mostly in the 70s and 80s, with a Nikon 4000ED (4000 DPI / 5782x3942 CCD scanner).

I was born in 1977, the year before the movie came out here in Germany (Feb 1978), so I do not have a recollection of how it looked in theaters. But I have a few observations to share, and also questions for Vidiot as someone who works in the industry.

1. Reading the first dozen pages or so of this thread with its discussion of resolution, I'd like to remark that a 4K scan of 35mm (equilavent of ~6K for a 36x24mm still photo frame) is not really high resolution. Many photographers know that even 11000 DPI drum scans do not extract all available information from film. You have to stitch photos taken through a microscope to come close. Maybe 10 years ago I saw a good example of that somewhere, but I cannot find the page now.

To extract everything into a fixed matrix from a medium such as film, you'd need infinite resolution. This problem already begings during photography where let's say a 5000 lines image from the lens + a 5000 lines image sensor sampling it results in a ~2500 lines image. Nobody would think copying an audio tape to another audio tape of the same quality would result in an identical copy, but somehow people seem to think scanning something at the same resolution as the source does. It doesn't, resolution is halved. Therefore, it makes a lot of sense to scan at a much higher resolution than what you deliver in the final product. At some point, there are diminishing returns, of course. Film has detail response similar to the frequency response of a loudspeaker, it gradually falls off. That's why MTF curves are specified. Plus practical photography has limitations on what resolution it can deliver.

Am I missing something, or are movie industry workflows running at resolutions quite near to the final product? Then again, 4K Blurays are nowhere near real 4K, with part of it lost due to square pixels (reduced active image area), chroma resolution only at 50% to begin with (4:2:0 chroma = squares of 4 pixels each have 1 color) and compression over 100:1. Improvements people are seeing compared to the 2K versions mostly come from the higher bitrate and the fact that these versions are also heavily compressed.
I downscaled 4K Bladerunner 2049 on a few frames, upscaled it again, and it lost pretty much no detail, as expected at 4:4:4 and no compression. Why did I do this? Because 4K projectors are still expensive, but I suspected you can get almost identical quality on a regular HDTV projector by downscaling properly - which, however, currently still requires a high-end video renderer like MadVR utilizing a 3D graphics card to do this in real time.

Tl,dr: 4K Blurays deliver something like 2-2.5k to the consumer, and normal blurays maybe 1-1.5k.
Scanning at just 4K on a professional workflow offers some headroom, but much smaller than I would expect.

Most of the time, of course, the fairly small 35mm movie frame does not have a lot of resolution to begin with. Photographers know how hard it can be to get 5k+ on a 36x24 frame (equivalent to ~3k with movie 35mm) in anything but bright light and with enough depth of field before diffraction kicks in, so I guess it's a case of "good enough". Maybe Vidiot can comment on this?

2. 4K77 and also 4K83 clearly show typical, lumped together CCD scanner / amplifier noise and should actually look closer to the original with slight DNR.
Movie grain has a lot more luma noise than chroma noise, something Nikon's JPEG engine mimicks with high chroma but low luma NR.
The colored noise especially on 4K83 is similar to what I see on my 4000ED scans, and that is NOT what you see on projected or photochemically printed film. I never saw such grain in theaters, and I did watch more than a few ones shot in the early 80s there.

Now I don't know what the noise characteristics of professional film scanners are, but I doubt they are much better than my Nikon was, which still sells used for more than what I originally paid for, after 15 years - because there has been very little development on this technology due to low demand by customers. Most newer scanners deliver lower quality.

Hm, this post got a bit long..

 

I'm watching them in 4, 5, 1, 2, 3, 6, 7, 8, 9 order. Did 4 and 5 Tuesday and 1 and 2 last night. Will hit 3 and 6 today and then the whole Sequel Trilogy run tomorrow.

I think "Phantom Menace" is more necessary than others believe. Without it, you lose introductions of a bunch of characters and their backstories. The comments about little Anakin and Padme make no sense, and you have no idea who Jar-Jar is or how Palpatine built toward taking control..

 

It's still a lapse in storytelling. An "Obiwan: The Lost Years" series is being developed for Disney+, and they hope to bridge the gap between Episode 3: Revenge of the Sith and Episode 4: A New Hope, which will finally explain some of this. But as always, it's frantic ret-conning because Lucas hadn't really planned on it.

Yes, you don't know what you're talking about. Here is one of the scanners used for motion picture scanning, totally different than for still photography:


ARRISCAN XT website

Last I checked, an Arriscanner XT with all the options is close to a million dollars. All the specs are there. Motion pictures are not still photos, and vice-versa. Not the same thing. They typically work at with 6K 16-bit Log DPX files for significant projects, and the scanner internally runs at 6K; the 16-bit is per color channel (RGB), so it's really a 48-bit scanner in that sense. It takes several hours to do a single 20-minute roll of 35mm negative.

Kodak has said many times that 6K would be the edge of what's possible with camera original, and that was during the late 1990s. The reality is that the film stocks used in this era (a lot of 5247, which was 125ASA back in the day) were not sharp enough, particularly with anamorphic lenses, to resolve anywhere close to 6K or even 4K. At best, I'd say maybe between 2K and 4K, but even then, the first film used an awful lot of diffusion, so that's going to have a drastic effect on MTF and so on. From an archival point of view, they still should do all the work at 6K "just to say they did," so there's no possible way anybody could object. The key to machines like this is the pin-registration, which the scans we were using back in 2004 did not have.

 

I think TPM is a better film than AOTC but it's not as vital to the overall story. There are so many missed opportunities in those films.

 

I'm watching them in my order: IV,V and then skip around in Jedi so it's about 30 minutes long.

 

I think that is the premise of the upcoming Obi Wan Disney + series.

 

Welcome to the forum!

tl, dr: hey.

 

Excellent.

And right you are, sir. We should all value our time more.

 

I should clarify that I meant the versions before the definitive master was made in 1993. So this means the early 90’s letterbox LDs and vhs releases. If you want to get really fancy there’s the Japanese special collection import LDs as well.
Comparing the 2006 dvd to the 1993 definitive LDs will show the dvd as sharper since it’s component, from the source master and not on LD but the laser has far better pcm audio. Still the dvd has the baked in motion smearing and low color because of the source used.

 

Yes, I believe I covered that in a previous message. Everything is shut down now, but Ewen McGregor did agree to do the show. This happened back in January:

Exclusive: ‘Obi-Wan’ Disney+ Series on Hold as Crew Sent Home

 

I didn't have the chance to watch all the SE's in English at a theatre, only Star Wars, but then I got my first Home Cinema set up in late 1997 along the US Laser Disc box in faux black leather and I remember it sounded outstanding,it was a very powerful mix with deep bass and good use of the surround channels and sound had a clarity that the 2004 DVD's lack.

 

It's still that awesome. I would re-run my 97SE letterbox VHS tapes sometimes before I ever got into LD for those soundtracks even in hifi 2.0 and they sounded so much better than the DVDs. Then one of the first LDs I ever purchased was the SE boxset and it was also the first thing I tried out after finally finding an ac3 rf demodulator. Those tracks still rock and the 2.0 PCM surround non discrete version is STILL better than the DVD, BD or newest remix.

Those mixes can be so powerful that in ANH SE even the Death Star ambient noise and exterior traveling shots are impactful! And the LFE gives your sub a nice workout on all three films.

 

Thanks for your reply. The specs of that scanner are actually similar to the 4000ED's, which also scans full RGB at 16 bits per color, outputting uncompressed 128 MByte TIFFs per scan of a 36x24 negative or slide (similar size as VistaVision).
I'm sure it delivers much better real-world results considering its price, especially in regards to added amp noise.

This ~4000 DPI density is certainly not enough to extract most detail from high res film emulsions, though I guess these are not used for motion pictures.

Now we're getting somewhere. My figure above was incorrectly remembered, scanning at the same resolution as the source does not result in half resolution but about two-thirds (also see Kell factor). This is because naturally a lot of detail does not perfectly line up with the matrix of the sensor, creating a kind of generation loss during scanning, similar to what happens when you generate an "analog" (photochemical) copy of a film.

This also applies to the optical system of lens + film or sensor, but nobody directly looks at the output of the lens, making it less obvious.

4K is 2/3 of 6K which would suggest a 6K RGB scan does extract most if not all detail from common motion picture film, even considering its maximum resolution is maybe 90% of 6K because of the optical low-pass filter it requires to avoid aliasing. It could theoretically miss a bit of detail, but on a level only interesting for hobbyist pixel counters and not in professional production. It's what I would expect from such equipment.

However, film grain is smaller than the details the emulsion can reproduce, thus I assume such a pro scanner still amplifies grain by lumping it together, which has to be brought down again by DNR. This can be done perfectly in software nowadays, especially for motion film. My second point was it really has to be done when digitally scanning film, even just to remain faithful to the original. When using consumer equipment, visible sensor / amp noise is added, making this even more important.

 

p.s. this also explains why a 4K scan with this machine is perfectly fine: it's not really scanned at 4K on the sensor level, as I assumed when I wrote my first post, but at 6K and then scaled down by either the scanner's firmware or the software receiving the images. Thus there are no issues with missing resolution headroom.