Mar 23, 2016 - The official Blu-Ray release of Star Wars: The Force Awakens is. There are currently dozens of copies posted on torrent, hosting.

Welcome to project 4K77. 'There will only be one. And it won't be what I would call the 'rought 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.' .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].' George Lucas, 'An Expanded Universe', American Cinematographer magazine, February 1997 ​ Sorry, George. We're not going to let that happen.

A rag tag, fugitive band of rebel scum just spent two years restoring the original, theatrical version of Star Wars. On May 16th 2018, both the 1080p and UHD versions without DNR were completed: And on September 7th 2018, the DNR versions were also completed: FAQs Is this an upscale? No, 97% of project 4K77 is from a single, original 1977 35mm Technicolor release print, scanned at full 4K, cleaned at 4K, and rendered at 4K. Who did this? Team Negative 1 (TN1) - the same crew who brought you The Silver Screen Edition (SSE) three years ago. TN1 are not professional film restoration experts, they are just Star Wars fans, like you. You mean apart from the fact that there hasn't been a new transfer of the original film since 1993 (the 2006 Bonus DVDs used the 1993 laserdisc master tapes) and George Lucas pretty much denies this version ever existed?

This is the version I grew up watching, over an over again, and I'm afraid technology has moved on to the point where the old VHS, betamax, CED, laserdisc and 2006 Bonus DVD just don't look good enough to watch on modern HDTV and 4K UHD Televisions / Home theater projectors. I wanted to show the film to my kids, and I wanted them to see the original version that I enjoyed at their age - not the one with the already dated looking CGI, over saturated colors and a strong magenta tint. How did you do this? We scanned some prints and then used a bunch of off the shelf software to remove as much of the dirt, dust and scratches as we could without going insane. Why, after spending three years on the SSE, would you do the same film again and not move on to Empire or Jedi? About halfway through the Silver Screen Edition restoration, people started to hear about our project, and offers to lend us prints for scanning came flooding in. Somebody sent us a Technicolor print to scan, and somebody else who had already had one scanned sent us that to work on too.

These were better sources than the LPP print, and at higher resolution. It was tempting to abandon the SSE and start over with the new sources, but ultimately we decided we should finish what we had started, not just to preserve the LPP, but also because of all the experience we would gain (and be able to apply) to the next project. Why does the quality seem to vary so much? 97% of project 4K77 is from a single, original 1977 35mm Technicolor release print so if it goes from blurry to sharp, grainy to not grainy, bright to dark, that's because it also did that in 1977. Color correction was a single correction per reel - the optical audio track was used to white balance the image, and the contrast adjusted to ensure that there was no clipping of the highlights or crushing of the blacks, so if the color changes from shot to shot, or it goes from very dark inside to very bright outside, that's how it is on the print. Film has a greater contrast range than home video, and of course was graded for viewing, reflected off of a giant silver screen. Star Wars was shot on four different types of film stock, some grainier than others.

(Kodak 5243, an intermediate, probably for composites, 5247, a fine grain 100 EI tungsten stock that the live action must have been shot on, and 5253, an intermediate used as a separation stock that all visual effects elements were shot on, plus the CRI stock [Magid, Ron. 'Saving the Star Wars Sequels,' American Cinematographer, February 1997.]) The Effects, the music, the editing all continued right up to the last possible moment. Some scenes were shot out in the deserts of tunisia, where the sand got into everything including the film stock. Some scenes were also filmed with nylons over the lens, others were not. Scenes filmed outside, particularly in the desert, that are supposed to be only moments apart in the narrative, may actually have been filmed hours or even days apart, with the sun and clouds in constant motion and the lighting conditions changing greatly. Color correction and film printing back then was a photo-chemical process, so not all of these shots match as perfectly as they might if shot today and corrected using Davinci Resolve, watching the scopes and turning the color wheels. This also meant that no two prints would be 100% identical, and that the alignment of the Cyan, Yellow and Magenta layers of the Technicolor prints was not always perfect - which is why you can often see green or red fringing on objects in project 4K77.