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Lucasfilm Creates A 4K Ultra-HD Restoration of the Original 'Star Wars' (4k.com)
An anonymous reader quotes 4K.com:
When the first ever of the Star Wars films, "A New Hope" turns 40 in 2017, millions of dedicated fans of the immensely popular franchise might get a very unique treat in the form of a limited theater screening in beautifully restored form with theatrical 4K resolution of the first movie released in the series. According to recent comments made by Rogue One director Gareth Edwards, a 4K restoration of Star Wars Episode IV "A New Hope" does indeed exist and now the only real question is whether or not the cleaned up and sharpened version of the movie will be hitting the big screen once again.
White it's release status is unknown, the ultra-high definition footage is said to be spectacular. In the interview, Edwards says "You can't watch it without getting carried away... It just turns you into a child."
White it's release status is unknown, the ultra-high definition footage is said to be spectacular. In the interview, Edwards says "You can't watch it without getting carried away... It just turns you into a child."
"... now the only real question is whether or not the cleaned up and sharpened version of the movie will be hitting the big screen once again."
No! Now the only real question is whether or not they will show that Han shot first!
If intelligent life is too complex to evolve on its own, who designed God?
My favorite retcon is that Obi Wan was personally involved in the deaths of Owen and Beru.
We'd known from early on that he was a total manipulative liar. Telling Luke, for example, that Vader killed his father, convincing him of precisely the opposite of the truth, and then layer gaslighting Luke as if it was Luke's fault for not understanding his lie. After the original trilogy came out, it gets way worse. He lies about having never seen the droids before. He sees no reason to mention that he personally chopped up Luke's dad and left him for dead. His whole purpose for being near Luke on Tatooine is to "watch over him" "until the time is right" to recruit him into the rebellion.
So we know his motivation going into this. To recruit Luke into the rebellion. It's essential to him, for the fate of the galaxy. And we know the guy is a horribly manipulative liar. And let's face it, Luke is a moron. The guy is given a light saber for the first time and he nearly accidentally stabs Obi Wan when he turns it on.
So Obi Wan tells him this yarn about Vader murdering his father, rather than... well, Obi Wan's attempted murder of him. And then they head out and find the sand crawler, and Obi Wan insists that it had to have been attacked by the Empire because, why again? "Only Imperial Storm Troopers are so precise." Which we all know to be unadulterated BS. If it's precise, there's no way in hell storm troopers did it. And there's no way Obi Wan would think that they did. So he knows he's lying. Which means that he was probably involved in it in some way. Which means that he would have likewise been involved in the related attack on Owen and Beru. The very thing that, shock of all shocks, motivates Luke to go with and join the Rebellion, just as Obi Wan could easily have foreseen.
And there's no shortage of people he could have hired to carry out the attack, on a planet as lawless as Tatooine. Heck, I couldn't rule out him working with the Tuskan raiders themselves. Let's not forget, Obi Wan "coincidentally" showed up right on time to "rescue" Luke from said Tuskan raiders just moments before. They just ran off when he arrived and alerted them... I'm sorry, "scared them off", with a Krayt Dragon impersonation that wouldn't fool anyone. It wouldn't be the first time they had worked with a Jedi (Sharad Hett) - and Obi Wan had tried to kill the guy who slaughtered one of their villages years prior. And beyond the Tuskan Raiders, there's a whole bar full of bounty hunters and violent thugs in town who could have suited the bill Heck, he could have done it all himself, having arrived to "save" Luke on his way back from burning the homestead and sandcrawler while Luke was out searching for R2D2; all it would have taken was a landspeeder, and they're not exactly unattainable.
For the love of Crom, am I the only one here who wants to keep the U.S. technologically competitive?
http://imgur.com/gallery/Putq2
All the luddites CLAIM that 35mm film is a WHOLE LOT BETTER than digital... why did they have to clean it up and do digital restoration?
It's because in reality, SW EP4 film is lower resolution than real 4K is so they are getting rid of film grain and using their high end software that will make it less obvious how low of resolution the 35mm film really was.
Hell you could see the lack of sharpness and film grain on the 1080p release.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
There may be no original prints of A New Hope left, but all the source material almost certainly exists.
The explanation, from what I recall, is that while the original source materials may exist, they are so degraded as to be useless for any kind of theatrical or master-quality presentation again. (Fair warning: my recollection is from watching documentaries on the Star Wars DVDs from several years ago, so anyone can feel free to correct me if they have watched them more recently.)
The original master 35mm print of Star Wars, being celluloid, was subject to scratching and wear throughout the process of making all the copies for theaters to show. On top of that, even well-preserved celluloid is subject to natural degradation over time - colors wash out, etc. Think of old photos in a photo album that over time have grown dimmer and less distinct.
I recall someone (John Knoll?) on the DVDs saying of the digital remastering efforts in 1996/1997 that the original master was already in bad enough shape that, had they not digitized it then, there could never have been a copy good enough to convert to high definition digital or theater projection quality. When they did the digital conversion though, they didn't keep (this logic sounds a bit fuzzy but bear with me) the pure original scan. Like a photographer who shoots an original photo that isn't "good enough" but needs to retouch it before publishing, they made their digital upgrades/cleanups and didn't bother to keep the unretouched versions since they (George Lucas?) in essence said, "what we scanned was crap so who needs that?"
Ergo - at least according to the then-Lucas-owned-LucasFilm party line - you end up with a badly degraded original celluloid version in a vault somewhere still, but the only high-def/digital version left is the one that had all the cleanup and alterations done to it. That doesn't necessarily mean that they didn't keep a digital version where Han shot first, but it does mean that there is no digital version left of the fully untouched "original." Which may be a fine point of distinction worth considering as to whether it's still possible to see the "original" depending on what that means to you.
"95% of all Slashdot