Lucasfilm Creates A 4K Ultra-HD Restoration of the Original 'Star Wars' (4k.com)

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Lucasfilm Creates A 4K Ultra-HD Restoration of the Original 'Star Wars' (4k.com)

Posted by EditorDavid on Sunday January 1, 2017 @12:34PM from the new-hope dept.

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."

17 of 304 comments (clear)

Min score:

Reason:

Sort:

Keep it original... by Frosty+Piss · 2017-01-01 12:34 · Score: 4, Insightful

I hope they don't do something stupid like add additional content like they did with THX1138.

--
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
1. Re:Keep it original... by Rei · 2017-01-01 13:16 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  Not all of the changes were bad - just most of them. Replacing the cardboard cutouts of rebels at the awards ceremony at the end with real people, for example. Or replacing the terrible hologram of the emperor in Empire with a proper one, for another. Or fixing the low quality light saber effect in A New Hope and editing out the wires. The clank when storm trooper hits his head was also a nice touch.
  Honestly though, more than that, I'd love to see the version 2 script of A New Hope ("Adventures of the Starkiller") made into a movie - with the characters looking as much like they did the actual A New Hope, just to enhance the mindfuck effect. Because it had so much that was the same, but so much that was utterly different. Leia wasn't Luke's sister; she was Owen and Beru's daughter, who had a crush on Luke that made him uncomfortable. The capital of the empire wasn't Coruscant, it was Alderaan, but looked like Cloud City. C3P0 fired the shot that destroyed the Death Star. The Emperor isn't a Sith, he just hired the Sith as muscle - and his name is Cos Dashit (seriously). Storm troopers had silver shields and light sabers. Tuskans ride landspeeders and spy for the Empire. Grand Moff Tarkin is a "birdlike" rebel commander. Luke (Starkiller, not Skywalker) is a wannabe-archaeologist with a magic crystal. Seriously, look it up. Somebody totally needs to make it, it'd be hilarious.
  There is one thing that they changed from the 2nd draft to the final draft that I actually think might have been better left in. In the 2nd draft, Han agrees to take Luke to Aldaraan for a high fee as before, but then it turns out in the next scene that he doesn't actually own the Millennium Falcon like he claims; he's just a low-ranking crewman to the main pirate/smuggler. So he fakes a reactor leak on the Falcon to get the others to leave, then steals it, without letting on to his passengers what he's just done. Chewy is in on the plot, as is an android science officer (glad they got rid of the latter).
  
  --
  For the love of Crom, am I the only one here who wants to keep the U.S. technologically competitive?
2. Re: Keep it original... by Anonymous Coward · 2017-01-01 13:20 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  I think all of those changes are fucking bullshit. Replacing one special effect fromi 197X with one from 201X isn't useful, they'll all look stupid in 204X, but at least the original from 197X won't be jarring as fuck and out of place. A comedic clank when a stormtrooper hits his head? Fuck that change. Fuck it to fucking death.
  Give the original star wars back. Like the despecialized edition, except official. Not this shit festival of retcons and edits and anachronistic special effects.
  Oh the original lightsabers? Were amazing. Period.
3. Re: Keep it original... by ChunderDownunder · 2017-01-01 13:29 · Score: 4, Funny
  
  episode 4 was surprisingly good in resurrecting the franchise, considering how appallingly bad episodes 2 and 3 were. :-)
4. Re:Keep it original... by ClickOnThis · 2017-01-01 13:35 · Score: 4, Funny
  
  The best mindfuck would be remaking Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith with Jar Jar Binks as a Sith Lord
  Oh no, you had to say that? Now I'm doomed to keep hearing ...
  Meesa no kill your father, Luke. Meesa is your father.
  
  --
  If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
5. Re:Keep it original... by Rei · 2017-01-01 14:31 · Score: 5, Interesting
  
  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?
6. Re:Keep it original... by beelsebob · 2017-01-01 14:49 · Score: 4, Interesting
  
  http://imgur.com/gallery/Putq2
7. Re:Keep it original... by UnknownSoldier · 2017-01-01 15:06 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  > Whut? Why TF would he do that?
  Because George is highly insecure.
  He has to keep fucking around with Star Wars, tweaking this, fixing that, until it is "perfect" in his mind's eye.
  As an artist he doesn't realize he needs to move on. The work is what is. Fans loved the original vision. Some fans love the changes. Some don't.
  George Lucas is unable to respect the fans that want to see the original version.
  We're happy with the original. Is it perfect? No. But it is perfectly fine the way it is.
8. Re:Keep it original... by careysub · 2017-01-01 15:07 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  >> Unlikely. Lucas destroyed the originals when he made the Special Editions.
  Whut? Why TF would he do that?
  Because he is God of the Star Wars Universe and mere things like preservation of significant historical documents, and the desires of the fan base are nothing to him.
  Lucas is a brilliant businessman, his career with LucasFilm and ILM speak for themselves. But his talents and wisdom as a director and creative force are extremely uneven, and he seems unable to consider the views of others, no matter how well founded and insightful. Again, his post Star Wars career speaks for itself. I think he was extremely lucky to have an astonishingly talented team working with him when he made Star Wars, and he was also lucky that he had to collaborate and let others make key decisions - he was not so successful at that point that he could be creative dictator.
  
  --
  Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
9. Re:Keep it original... by irving47 · 2017-01-01 17:16 · Score: 4, Informative
  
  Just in case you (or anyone else reading this) doesn't know, there is a very very convincing, and solid theory that JarJar was in fact THE Phantom Menace alluded to in the title. Check youtube for jarjar sith theory and check them out. I'm not saying I'm 100% convinced, but I need a better reason to disbelieve than just the fanboy hate of GL thinking, "aww, no, he's not clever enough to do that."
  
  --
  I had a sucky sig.
10. Re:Keep it original... by schnell · 2017-01-01 19:18 · Score: 4, Interesting
  
  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 .sig quotes are incorrect or completely fabricated." -Benjamin Franklin
11. Re:Keep it original... by meerling · 2017-01-01 21:27 · Score: 5, Informative
  
  Not only did Han shoot first, Greedo didn't even get a shot off, he just died like the scumbag that he was. Don't forget that Greedo had just told Han that he's basically going to take him out back and blow his head off.
12. Re: Keep it original... by Maxo-Texas · 2017-01-01 22:41 · Score: 4, Funny
  
  Well the thing was Lucas was very inexperienced as a director but by the time episode 4, "A new hope" rolled around Lucas had finally learned to trust the actors and stop redoing scenes til the emotion was drained from them. And then for episode 5 Lucas handed the reigns to another experienced character director and focused on producing.
  Also, the actors chosen for episodes 1-3 were terrible so when Lucasfilm decided to reboot series with fresh new actors as of episode 4 they did a much better job, for example picking unknown actors who had a lot of chemistry with each other. The decision to go with puppets for Yoda was a big step up from the poor CGI they had used for him in the first 3 films.
  
  --
  She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
The Cantina by nickovs · 2017-01-01 12:41 · Score: 4, Interesting

"... 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?
The title is wrong. 4K != UHD by Misagon · 2017-01-01 13:02 · Score: 4, Informative

Theatrical 4K is not the same as Ultra-HD, often marketed as "4K UHD". Seriously, don't muddle these up! The linked article did not, it even had "Theatrical 4K" explicitly, being a link to an explanation of the differences.
The cinema standard 4K is 4096*2160, not quite 16:9 aspect ratio. However, movies can be of any aspect ratio that would fill either the width or the height. With Star Wars being in 2.35:1 aspect ratio, that becomes 4096*1743. Pixels are square and there is no overscan.
Ultra-HD, the TV and BluRay standard is 3840*2160 pixels. Some HDTV's do have overscan, not showing the entire picture, by the way.
Cinema 4K also uses the DCI-P3 colour space and theatrical projectors are capable of the entire range of this colour space.
Regular Ultra-HD is not that good. Ultra-HD with HDR uses a larger colour space than DCI-P3 but mainstream LCD panels at the moment are not capable of displaying that properly even if they can handle the input signal.

--
"We mustn't be caught by surprise by our own advancing technology" -- Aldous Huxley
Re:Sorry, no by TigerPlish · 2017-01-01 13:33 · Score: 5, Insightful

Luke playing with a starfighter, in one of his first scenes, is cringe-worthy.
Oh c'mon, you've never done it? FWIW, that wasn't a "starfighter,' that was a scale model of the speeder parked *right behind Luke.* That is his T-16, the one he bullseyes womp rats with. Seriously, you can see the ass end of his real T-16 right behind him.
One is never too old to play with toys. Never. I have a fair collection of 1:400 diecast aircraft, and when I clean house I *always* "land" the Pan Am 707-321 on its display place.
The day one becomes "too old" for such frippery, one is ready for the pine box. The kind with rope handles and no wheels.

--
The "Civilized World" jumped the shark ca. 1973.
Re:unique by perpenso · 2017-01-01 14:42 · Score: 5, Funny

a very unique treat
"unique" is a binary term. Something is either unique or not unique. There are no "degrees" of uniqueness.
That is a somewhat unique perspective.