You can’t trust corporations to respect or protect art. You can’t even buy or screen the original theatrical release of Star Wars. The only option is as you say. There are many more examples of the owners of IP altering it in subsequence editions/iterations. This still seems so insane to me that it’s not even for sale anywhere…
I don't understand why you're getting downvoted. So many beautiful things have been lost to perpetual IP, e.g. old games that could be easily ported by volunteers given source code, which can never be monetised again.
Sometimes people create things that surpass them, and I think it is totally fair for them to belong to humanity after the people that created them generated enough money for their efforts.
Self-reply because I’m outside the edit window: the dvd “original” releases are based on the laserdisc, but supposedly they modify it to restore the pre-1981-re-release title, so I’m actually wrong!
I can’t find out if they fix the 3% speed-up from the laser disc. The audio mix, at any rate, will be a combination of the three (stereo, mono, 70mm) original mixes, like on the laser disc, so identical to none of them. The source should predate the replacement of Latin script with made-up letters (not conceived until ROTJ then retrofitted on some releases of SW and Empire) so that’ll be intact unless they “fixed” it.
Still stuck with sub-ordinary-dvd-quality picture, as far as official releases go, so that’s too bad. Oh well, fan 35mm scan projects solved that problem.
Yeah I clicked this link going “oh god it’s because they printed to film, I bet, and man do I hope it looks worse so I don’t have to hunt down a bunch of giant 35mm scans of even more movies that can’t be seen properly any other way”
But no, of course it looks between slightly and way better in every case. Goddamnit. Pour one out for my overworked disk array.
And here I was thinking it was just my imagination that several of these look kinda shitty on Blu-ray and stream rips. Nope, they really are worse.
Piracy: saving our childhoods one frame at a time.
I recently watched the despecialized edition. During the lightsaber duel between Obi-Wan Kenobi and Darth Vader, there are moments where Obi-Wan's lightsaber has no glow and looks more like a very thick metal antenna, or like he's play-dueling with a short curtain rod.
I can't figure out how to determine if that's intentional.
The ignited sabers used spinning sticks with reflective tape covering them, and some rotoscoping applied in post to get the final effect. There are spots in the un-retouched Star Wars where the effect is missed, or something, and you can indeed see the raw stick. Something similar's also behind that one weird shot where Obi Wan's saber seems to almost fizzle out (the tip is pointed too much toward the camera, and messes up the effect)
The careful eye may also notice they almost never strike the sabers against one another in that scene... because it'd break the spinning sticks. Apparent contact is usually gently done, or a trick of perspective.
The glow was done in-camera with a prism, the reflective tape was retroreflective so the light source would go into the prism, bounce off the quartz reflector material and into the camera lens, hence the dust coming off the sticks and the lack of glow in that spot where you see it end-on. The 'roto' was for color I think.
I'm not sure why you're getting downvoted. What you're hinting at is that a lot of original 35mms are now getting scanned and uploaded privately, especially where all the commercial releases on Blu-ray and streaming are based on modified versions of the original movies, or over-restored versions.
These can be especially hard to find as the files are typically enormous, with low compression to keep things like grain. I see them mostly traded on short-lived gdrives and Telegram.
> I see them mostly traded on short-lived gdrives and Telegram.
Someone tell this community to share over BT. Aint nobody got time to keep up with which platform/server everyone is on and which links are expired and yuck.
The main reason they are not shared as widely is that there's a bit of conflict within the community between those that really want to stay under the radar and not risk being targeted by copyright owners (and so try to keep things very much private between the donors who funded the 600-900 usd cost of the scans) and those who want to open up a bit more and so use telegram, reddit and upload to private trackers.
One’s an accurate recording of how a real thing looked.
The other’s fake noise.
One’s a real photo from 1890. The other’s an old-timey instagram filter.
It makes sense that some folks might care about the difference. Like, I love my old family Polaroids. I would not want a scanned version of those to have the “noise” removed for compression’s sake. If that had been done, I’d have limited interest in adding fake noise back to them. By far my favorite version to have would be the originals, without the “noise” smoothed out at all.
Lots of folks have similar feelings about film. Faked grain isn’t what they’re after, at all. It’s practically unrelated to what they’re looking for.
> One’s an accurate recording of how a real thing looked.
> The other’s fake noise
But since there is no such thing as the real thing, it could just as well match one of the many real noise patterns in one of the many real things floating around, or a real thing at a different point in time with more/less degradation. And you wouldn't even know the difference, thus...
> It makes sense that some folks might care about the difference
Not really, it doesn't make sense to care about identical noise you can't tell apart. Of course, plenty people care about all kind of nonsense, so that won't stop those folks, but let's not pretentd there is some 'real physics' involved
I think you missed the "a" vs " the", you can encode different sources that would have different grains, or the same source would have different grain at different times.
But also a simulation called compression of a real thing is different from that real thing, so that purity test had already been failed
Well film grain doesn't matter because compression exists, apparently, and may as well be simulated because it's already failed the "purity test" and may as well be algo-noise. That holds for everything else! May as well maximize the compression and simulate all of it then.
[EDIT] My point is "film grain's not more-real than algo noise" is simply not true, at all. An attempt to represent something with fidelity is not the same thing as giving up and faking it entirely based on a guess with zero connection to the real thing—its being a representation and not the actual-real-thing doesn't render it equally as "impure" as a noise-adding filter.
You're still dancing there in the slop, hallucinating the arguments thinking it's a pretty dress!
It may as well be stimulated because you won't see the difference! So now you've imagined some purity test which was never true, so you have nothing and start hallucinating some hyperbolic AI thing
And it's for things like this that people just don't understand the value of a healthy alternative way to archive things.
A true fan who wants to preserve and be faithful on its scan is going to dedicate their life to get it just right, while a mega corp will just open the original, click "Export as..." and call it a day.
"toy story film scan" on Kagi led me to a reddit page that may or may not contain links that might help you, but don't dawdle those links may not work forever.
Another one that's been hard to find is the 4k matrix original color grading release. Ping me if you have it! (Not the 1080p release)
