CT Rumor: Disney to Release Unaltered Old Trilogy on BR

I wonder if the digital releases will be announced at the Celebration.

 

Going along with the SE nostalgia thread & this thread, I would like to also see the Special Edition versions of the OT on Blu-ray. They were released to VHS back in the late '90's, but at that point I didn't have a VHS player anymore - so, the last time I saw these was in the theater, 18 years ago (January - March 1997).

I like that the SE versions of the films:

-Don't have the Boba Fett voice-change in ESB...

-Don't have the Hayden ghost in ROTJ...

 

What, you mean in Hollywood? Only a few directors have ever commented, and from what I know, none of them trashed Lucas for the changes. James Cameron had thought about updating the effects for "Titanic" when the 3D release was being done, but he had decided not to do that. But he didn't trash Lucas. Nor did Steven Spielberg when he changed "E.T." and later said that he had regretted it.

 

Kevin Smith doesn't like them.

 

One can but hope that they are but more likely it doesn't matter one way or the other to them.

Nothing "only" about it. The more and more I look into it the more you just get into all the details that people argue about how much really means what. The difference in colors alone is a massive difference and there is way more colour and detail in the PT than the OT to pick up.

http://referencehometheater.com/2013/commentary/4k-calculator/

Many people will say that 4K looks amazingly sharp and it’s impossible not to see the difference, but many others will say that in a regular living room, with a regular sized screen, you really won’t see much of a difference.

Most people who have seen 4K to this point see it at stores that have dedicated displays for it, and not at home. Many times these are setup to only allow you to be so far away from the screen, which makes 4K look great, as it really does look amazing from 3′ away. They also use special content to show off 4K.

Many reviewers have tried to compare 4K to 1080p to see if they notice a difference. David Katzmaier pulled in a panel and showed them the same content on 4K streaming from Netflix and 1080p Blu-ray and none of the people could pick out the 4K display. At the same time, HDTVTest did a similar test using 1080p compared to 4K, but they used their own custom content instead of streaming content. In their testingpeople do not notice the diffrence from a reasonable distance, though unless you are shooting you own 4K content you can’t test this yourself.

I talked to other reviewers who tested projectors, being able to instantly switch between a Sony 4K projector and a JVC X700R on a 120″ screen. They could barely notice the difference with the 4K resolution using content directly from a RED 4K camera. Even when they did notice, they preferred the JVC image because it had better blacks and a better contrast ratio, and the eye notices that more than resolution. With any display, resolution is only a single factor in how good a display looks. Knowing how much you might see that increased resolution can help you decide what TV will best work for you.
I’ve also created a chart, seen below, that gives you a quick glance to see what the ideal viewing distance is for a 16:9 display based on size and resolution. This is based on 20/20 vision, and the viewing range for each resolution is the distance you can sit from that TV and see more detail than a lower resolution, and are not close enough to see the extra detail in a higher resolution screen. So with a 50″ 1080p display, if you are closer than 9’9″ you will see more detail than a 720p display, but if you are more than 6’6″ away, you couldn’t see any more detail on a 4K display.



Resolution is one thing but hardly the only thing compared to all the others aspects of a presentation in a theater. You can 4K scan something all you want but it's just not going to make that much of a real world difference to people watching.

All HD is not equal either. The 1080 of AOTC (which as I always point out looked brilliant in IMAX in 2002) is not the same quality of ROTS:

https://pro.sony.com/bbsccms/ext/cinealta/docs/FV_StarWarsReprint_5-05.pdf

AOTC:
RGB color from the camera was converted into 4:2:2 YUV format when it was recorded. This format effectively slices the color bandwidth in half because one color value represents more than one pixel. The result is fewer chroma (color) samples than luma (luminance). This chroma sub-sampling combined with spatial sub-sampling effectively reduced HD’s 1920 resolution to 1440 for luma and 960 for chroma, according to ILM HD Supervisor Fred Meyers.

ROTS:
With the new HDCAM SR 4:4:4 RGB, however, color information is kept for each pixel, all 1920 pixels across the image. The color stays RGB all the way. And, the format stores color using 10 bits per channel, allowing 1024 shades per color, not 8-bit’s paltry 256. That provides more dynamic range for shadows and highlights.

 

I'm not sold on 4K. I got my first Blu-player in December 2012 - along with my first HD TV set. And, my first Blu purchase was the Saga OT set - which was one of the best purchases I ever made. The picture quality for these films are beautiful, as is the enhanced color - truly sublime...

Also, something a lot of people may not realize about High Definition (HD) sets & Blu-rays are that, in some cases, things may look TOO perfect - case in point - the CGI in the PT (specifically AOTC & ROTS) looks quite obvious in some parts - of course, that's the case for many older films (200X's & earlier) - like LOTR, etc.

These flaws are not as obvious on a non-HD set, i.e. an old Cathode Ray Tube (CRT) set...

So, though 4K seems to be "the next best thing" these days, I'm more than happy with my Blu-rays & HD set...Most movies/TV shows look amazing on this, and I don't need anything better...and in some cases the picture may look, as I said, TOO good...

Also, it's my understanding that you need an extremely large TV to be able to appreciate the difference between regular Blu & 4K Blu...but, I'm not an expert on such things, so this info. is all really anecdotal...

 

I wonder on what kind of disc they would print 4K.

If the technology is too expensive then this will never become the new standard.

 

Yeah most of the film community doesn't mind...

Blu-ray...

 

We don't know for sure what filmmakers mind and don't mind. For instance, what people think in private and say in public are two different things and it's not as if modern movie makers have a monopoly on good judgement. The way it appears to me is that it seems like intellectual property and who owns the rights to make a profit from something trumps historical interest (unfortunately, IMO). However, whenever something is in the public domain everyone seems to be in favour of historical integrity. This seems a little hypocritical and disingenuous to me. Don't colour the early talkies (no money involved, after all) but let's go nuts with SEs of the blockbusters.

 

Colourising b/w or g/w usually looks false anyways. Film don't need the latest technology to be of merit. Updating older stuff often changes it so it's impact is cheapened. That isn't a win for anyone.

 

Spielberg didn't trash Lucas, but he has gone on about how he does see things our way. I think Spielberg would love Lucas to have taken this to heart, but he didn't care.

http://www.aintitcool.com/node/49897
http://www.avclub.com/article/steven-spielberg-sorry-he-made-all-those-changes-t-61801

The one good thing about the changes it that it has stopped a lot of directors from doing the same thing. They want to avoid the flack Lucas got.

 

I've never quite sure what people mean by this. I can say watching in HD on a 60" screen the models in the OT look very obviously like models and the matte paintings especially look like matte paintings and so on. Besides the fact that I already knew this then nothing really is at all different. In 4K and if I'm 3 feet away that will be even more evident.

The first thing I noticed when watching in HD is that you have to get used to seeing things that you don't see on standard TV's very well or at all depending on the size like film grain and video noise.

The question also is what is this CGI you are talking about? The basic problem is that so much of the "CGI" in the PT isn't CGI at all so are you talking about animated characters?

So much of this is extremely subjective. As I've said it's like the person who can't recognize that the OT has severely dated and convinces themselves that it's "timeless" when it isn't at all but will have no problem pointing out the dating of the PT. I don't know exactly how you make a point of comparison because in so many cases no one is now doing many of the things that the PT did which is getting to 20 years ago now. Which is no different than the OT which until the PT came along to surpass it no one was doing much of anything anywhere near the places they went.

 

Which is not the same thing that you said, "Aren't they disliked among the film community?" Well, no, there's no one that has said so. Only Kevin Smith. Spielberg doesn't say so. So unless you can find others that say they dislike what Lucas did, then all you've got is supposition without facts. Or were you saying, SE's in general and not just Lucas?

 

I'm not buying it. The Special Editions are better, so I'm not spending money on sub-par effects compared to the ones I grew up with

 

It isn't a question of personal preference or even if you will buy them so much as if they will be released

Personally, I'm fine with the 2011 blu-rays. They're my preferred version. But it would be unfair not to release the OOT in blu-ray format as sort of a historical document. It's the first version released, and comparing it to the most recent version would be quite fascinating

 

I hope that an OOT release is not digital only. I like my physical copies.

 

I'd prefer physical copies because I have no way to burn blu-rays.

 

I'm a huge prequel fan, but I find Lucas's desire for the OOT to be erased from history baffling.

I was introduced to SW through the SE in 97, so I'm glad they were released, but honestly, the originals are superior. I can partially understand the original fans' anger, why fix something that isn't broken? 90% of the changes were completely unnecessary.

 

To you. Lucas felt that they were broken for the longest.

 

I just use a lighter.

 

This would be very welcome news. It would also be quite nice of Disney to cut their prices, but the prospect of that happening is like Hoth thawing.

 

I mainly grew up with the special editions, though seeing the originals wouldn't be bad. I do think people should be allowed to own the originals if they want, never understood why they never got a better release.

 

Because Lucas wanted the SEs to be the only version out there. He hoped that he could erase the OOT from history. Its rather ironic that the digital technology and the rise of computers that made the **** changes possible also made it so that Harmy and others could find a way to try and preserve the original versions.

 

And your citation for a quote expressing exactly this sentiment is....?

 

"There will only be one [version of the films]. And it won't be what I would call the "rough cut", it'll be the "final cut". The other one will be some sort of interesting artifact that people will look at and say, "There was an earlier draft of this." The same thing happens with plays and earlier drafts of books. In essence, films never get finished, they get abandoned. At some point, you're dragged off the picture kicking and screaming while somebody says, "Okay, it's done." That isn't really the way it should work. Occasionally, [you can] go back and get your cut of the video out there, which I did on both American Graffiti and THX 1138; that's the place where it will live forever. So what ends up being important in my mind is what the DVD version is going to look like, because that's what everybody is going to remember. The other versions will disappear. Even the 35 million tapes of Star Wars out there won't last more than 30 or 40 years. A hundred years from now, the only version of the movie that anyone will remember will be the DVD version [of the Special Edition], and you'll be able to project it on a 20-foot-by-40-foot screen with perfect quality"