In the editing room, Lucas discovers that he needs footage of a character facing the opposite direction. He has two options.
01- Call in the actor for an unscheduled, unexpected day of shooting with all the associated costs and logistical difficulties (ie, crew members, new and unexpected contracts for everybody concerned, time-investment, etc).
02- Flip the image, potentially saving tens of thousands of dollars in a fix that only nerds will notice or care about.

Which of those is he supposed to go with?

I've got a challenge for you. I want you to find a non-Jedi braid/non-Mustafar example of a flipped image in the PT. If they're so easy to identify, you shouldn't have any difficulty find at least a few. Bonus credit for you if you mention why it's so terrible when Lucas does it but other filmmakers get a free pass on it.

As for the garbage mattes and other things people bitch about all the time, I'm not ready to crucify Lucas for that one either. The way I heard it, he wanted to release only ANH in 1997 to mark the 20th anniversary. Presumably the other two movies would follow in time. The wishlist he outlined for ANH was imminently doable considering the resources he had access to... until the jackasses at Fox persuaded him to do similar things with ESB and ROTJ. No problem except that the time he had to work on each movie had effectively been reduced to a third of what he planned. Add in the fact that ILM was overwhelmed with TPM-related work as well as other projects and the priority eventually became completing the new sequences and leaving the smaller things for the future. Haven't you ever wondered why the number of changes made to the OT decrease with each passing chapter?

Flash forward to 2003 when the DVD's were announced. Not only did Lucas have to supervise the remastering process and the polish of scenes that were likely thrown together in haste back in 1996, but he also had to add a few newer elements in to better jibe with the PT (Jango Fett's voice, Ian McDiarmid, Hayden Christensen, etc). Crunched for time, the remastering process had to be cut short (Lowry is on record for saying they didn't get as far as they wanted to) so that the corrections and enhancements on the agenda could be allowed to proceed. This would be tough enough under the best circumstances, but Lucas also had to work on bonus material (commentaries and interviews, which fans would bitch and moan about had they been absent) and, not least of all, also work on ROTS!

Frankly, he's never had the luxury of sitting down and methodically refining each scene as much as he might've wanted. For PR, I'm sure, he spouts off that "my original vision" stuff but the fact is there's no way he can be fully satisfied with some of those effects shots, video/audio choices, color timing issues, etc.

Now that ILM's effects capabilities have been increased immeasurably by work they did on the PT (to say nothing of other films) plus their slackoff in work post-ROTS and Lucas's own new freedom, I'd be surprised if we didn't see a final version of the trilogy within the next four or so years. I don't begrudge Lucas anything since he's clearly never had the opportunity to work on the OT with the resources he might've preferred.

GL's original forecast was the OT DVD's he wanted to make wouldn't be ready until 2006 (or so) because he was so swamped with the PT. Considering how things have turned out, you can't say he was wrong.

I agree with what you said thecolorsblend. He definitely didn't have the time to really work on the OT as he had hoped.

Maybe now that he's having a lot more time to sit down and work on the OT DVD's, perhaps by next year for the big saga box set release all the audio and visual stuff will be corrected for the OT DVD set. Ya they did say the audio and visual error stuff for the 04' DVD box sets were "deliberate creative decisions" however I think that was just a statement for saying, "We didn't have nearly enough time to work on these because we were pushed into getting these out on DVD sooner than we wanted."

So here's to hoping that next year everything is picture perfect for the OT DVD set and same for the Prequels.

We may or may not see four more sets of this since after next year's release of the box set since they will be really into working on the two new TV series. So if there will be any more versions of the OT they probably won't happen for another 5 years or so after the TV series are finished.

Poor sad little multimillionaire. He certainly found plenty of opportunity to release multiple versions.

I *know* you're not saying that rereleasing them as they are somehow requires a similar time-investment as finishing the effects shots, finishing the Lowry remastering, adding in the final correction everyone seems to complain about, etc etc etc requires.

Uh, no. I just found your defense of the helpless Lucas to be quite charming.

You know, Steven Spielberg directed two movies last year, and another one the year before that. That equals Lucas's total for the last...uh, 19 years, right?

There was a post here but now there isn't. I've had to edit way too many posts just for quoting. Quoting is seriously getting on my nerves.

Quoting the post right above yours:

There is no need to quote the post right above yours unless you think the post is going to be edited. No one wants to read that shit twice.

Line By Line Quoting:

Alright I guess if you are responding to multiple people.

Instant Messenger Quoting:

Where a poster and another person go back and forth, starting up a conversation in a thread. www.aim.com

Again... Outside of Militia and Reservation (and even then you will be mocked) we need to put the brakes on this shit:

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NESTED QUOTING



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LINE BY LINE QUOTING



rah



rah rah



rah rah rah



rah rah rah rah

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QUOTING LONG ASS POSTS with a SINGLE EMOTICON REPLY and/or SHITTY ONE WORD/FEW WORDS REPLY



blah

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Yours forever,
MF Quality Control.

Don't forget quoting a previous post where said post was nothing more than half a dozen large pictures all in a row. Sheer murder on suckers with 56K.

Why does one have to repost the pictures all over again to simply say that they like them?

But I've always been ambivalent about line by line quoting. If somebody rants to you, and you don't pick apart the points of their argument, it can look like you're avoiding answering parts of their post because you have no defense/comeback.

And if multiple posts appear in between their post directed at you and your response, I can't see how your response will make any sense unless there is at least some quoting.

Ah yes, quoting the images. If images are bogging down those on dialup's contact one of the admins and we can edit them accordingly. In fact I should make it where you can choose how many posts you see per pages, so those on dialup can choose a lower number for image heavy threads.

Why the need for such footage? You shoot it that way, leave it that way. Or better yet, you handle those things beforehand. That's what prep, pre-viz and storyboards are for. This is especially true in the PT (Ep. II and III) where things could be viewed very quickly after they were shot.


That would be pointless without a frame of reference used as proof. I’d say something was flipped, you’d say it wasn’t. It’s not like you have a list of what was and wasn’t flipped. And I said why - bilateral symmetry. Chest plates, helmet antennas...braids. He's doing to characters that aren't symmetrical. Characters that are different on one side than the other. Those are the ones you have to avoid doing it to at all costs. It’s not like he’s flipping a standard character in a standard movie wearing typical clothes (i.e. nothing that would stand out).


I haven't counted, but I'm not sure that's true. For the DVD, he completely redid Jabba (giving him yellows eyes now for some reason), altered the Han/Greedo scene yet again, fixed Vader's and Kenobi's lightsabers, and if you count box removal around ships the number of changes/fixes becomes quite large. And this is just ANH.


Wait a minute. They come up with the release date. Sure, you can say he gave into fans who were tired of waiting. However, a simple press release saying, "You want them or you want them done right" would have shut up a majority of the fanbase. And none of us know that he wants to sit down and methodically go over anything with regard to the OT. 3D seems to be the new game now.

So next year when a BluRay set comes for the 30th anniversary of ANH and Luke's saber aboard the Falcon still looks cyan, matte paintings are still fucked, shots are poorly color timed and audio in some scenes sounds like someone yelling from down the block, well, what then?