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No, George cares about every presentation, film or D-Cinema, or he wouldn't have hired TAP to do all we were doing for the past 6 weeks... Alignmnets, Evaluations, Phone THX, Lab QA all over the world. Really, he cares, and wants the best for the audience. He feels that D-Cinema is the best way to see the film. That is how he feels. Maybe that is because of some of the complaints raised here. But nevertheless, he wants the best for every single audience member at every single presentation of his film (yes, I said film), and absolutely no defects were intentional, by Lucasfilm Ltd, or by the labs manufacturing the prints.

I hope the force is with every print out there!

Talked with some friends over in SE Asia. The digital presentation there was great, the film was a little less than that. However, "soft focus" was the only comment they had on film, the quality of the prints there were otherwise fine. I think the reason for that is they strike their own release prints in Thailand at a very good lab -- this was by Kantana, I believe. The Interneg would have to come from the States. No negative dirt or other deficiencies. I don't yet know how many prints were done for that market, but nowhere near the number required by the US theatres.

The prints there were also in the theatres 3-4 days ago. I compare that to several posts here where prints arrived hours before their first presentations. Sounds like delays in the process made the whole thing more hurried than it should have been. The the exchange for speed and late delivery is quality, right from the labs.

Be interesting to know how many film prints there are in the US and the time frame in which they were made and shipped to theatres... Seems like the digital material has been in place for several days, hasn't it?

Pat

Regarding directional dialogue:

I only care about what the film sounds like in my theater and could care less if a certain process causes the studio to spend more time or money to show the film in another market.

The ads, PSA, trailers, and the feature were all clean, nary a black speck in sight. Ep2 did have some white specks here and there but nothing drastically bad. I saw no CAP codes or lab splices. Image quality was OUTSTANDING, sharp as I've ever seen it at this theater. Bright and steady as well, and centered in the masking. Reel change splices were very clean, wouldn't have noticed them at all if not for cue marks.

I went in prepared to find lots of digital artifacts and other "defects". I'm happy to say that, for the most part, the movie looked great to me. The CGI work is BY FAR the best ever done as far as I'm concerned. There were only 1 or 2 times when it kind of fell apart, but overall it was a large cut above the norm in today's movies.

The live-action stuff, especially closeups of faces, was a little soft, no question about it. But had I not known this was basically shot in HDTV, I wouldn't have noticed. In fact that part looked better than I was expecting. The lower the lighting, the more video-like it looks though, but even at its worst, I thought the live-action images looked mostly at least good, and sometimes very good.

So basically, I thought the movie looked fantastically good, and anything non-filmlike about it seemed to be in line with how it was intended to look. I noticed no video-related defects calling attention to themselves.

Not that this proves anything, but I sneakily shot a photo of the screen image just for the heck of it, to see how it would turn out:

The sound was in SDDS, and except for a stretch of dropouts near the end of reel 1, it was FABULOUS. I can't say enough good things for the film's mix, and this theater's ability to reproduce it in something approaching its full glory. Give Gary Rydstrom, Ben Burtt, and the sound crew the Oscar now because no other film this year is likely to come close to this. Sub and surround action was brilliantly used and not over-used.

The SDDS sound did repeatedly drop out for the last few minutes of reel 1. Several people went out to complain to theater staff. After that though, it was fine for the rest of the show. After the movie, I spoke to the manager and he said they are probably going to switch it from SDDS to DTS.

I must see this in DLP now...

As for the question, "Is this a good movie?" I'll answer that in the reviews section.

Color quality was good and even looking, although some parts of the film got pretty grainy. Early on, I noticed some digital mosquito noise artifacing in the backgrounds when Padme, Anakin and Obi Wan first meet in the film. Subtle details like stands of hair were noticeably lost in many scenes. This image quality just is not nearly as sharp as imagery originated on film. I also noticed a lot of the heavy CGI scenes actually looked sharper than the live-action-only stuff. Usually the reverse is the case.

There was a particular technical gaffe on the digital image during a cliched scene where Obi Wan meets this big octopus looking dude in a 50's style diner. The two are seated in this booth talking across the table at each other. During a single shot on Obi Wan, the video image scrambled for just an instant on an area of Obi Wan's face, making it look kind of like one of his eyes and part of his face was floating off somewhere else. Really wierd.

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Video dropout? Can't think of anything in the printing process that could cause this. Due to the half second length, I found this more annoying than a lab splice (only 1 frame) or even the negative dust.

the white specking was immediately apparent from the outset, most of the marks looking like small hairs rather than dust.

The focus was iffy but I think that this was largely down to the cinema set up rather than the print as there was a left to right difference even during ads and trailers.

The splices were lousy. Nice and jumpy with black marks across the screen. At one reel change just before the arena scene there was a nice black vertical scratch for a couple of seconds about third way across from left side of screen.

Oh and to top it all the feature presentation tag between ads and AOTC was out of rack ! Film done right, I don't think so.

Of course, both are being FilmGuarded. FilmGuard should be mandatory in all theatres. But then again, so should properly trained projectionists who care and know what they're doing.

From the few parts that I saw yesterday, I feel that contrast, sharpness and colour saturation are lacking, and the picture overall lacks 'bite'. It seems pale.

Both our prints have negative dirt in exactly the same places, indicating that the same printing negative had been used. It will be interesting to see how frequent it is tonight.

CAP codes are definitely present in both prints - the blue kind. I think they are mainly in reel 3. They were also noticed by our floor manager who wasn't aware of the capcode system. The fact that they were noticed at all is a no-no. They aren't subtle.

CGI elements look excellent, whereas studio/live action plates look like...video. The fact that film wasn't used is screamingly obvious to me, and I would have picked it even if I didn't know it was video beforehand. It's higher-end video to be sure; very different to say, 'The Anniversary Party'. It is, however, unmistakably video complete with all its visual trappings.

Furthermore, it is more obvious in this production than most where the seams are with respect to studio plates and composited background action plates. Usually, it is fairly hard to tell where the blend is, but here it is almost cardboard cutout in nature, especially in scenes where the characters are riding in a vehicle with a visible background. It should not be this obvious that they are in a studio.

I don't really know if video cameras can ever achieve the look and feel of film, but I can't see how they could. One is electronic, and the other is photochemical, and these processes both have different properties with no way (that I can think of) of making one resemble the other. I feel that resolution may become comparable at one point, but the look will always be different. Even though popular TV shows such as 'The X-Files', 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer' and 'Angel' are destined for the small screen, there is a reason why film is chosen for these projects. It's not just about resolution. (Not that anyone here doesn't know that already!).

Is anyone playing their SWII print through a CP-650? We found a nice surprise yesterday - the display on it read, 'Auto Surround EX', with the format 10 selector lit up. This is our first print encoded for auto-EX decoding. We like this! Keep doing it.

I'm not a digital artist and I'm not tuned in to spotting digital artifacts. I didn't see anything that screamed "Digital Artifact!!" If I didn't see that stuff, I can't imagine that 99% of the viewers would see it either.

Maybe my impression of the sharp "look" is better than some others are reporting due to the relatively small size of the screen I saw it on: only 30 feet wide if the ceiling tiles are 2' x 4'. I'm guessing most of you are seeing it on larger screens. I need to pace off one of those tiles to confirm their size. If I see this at Cinemark, I expect it to look a lot softer due to their larger screens (40+ feet) and because their image quality is a notch below the Regal I saw it on.

The image was extremely bright. I have no way of knowing whether it's 16fl (or more or less) but it seemed brighter than usual, and I didn't notice anything like unsaturated colors or poor contrast. It really jumped off the screen. All those white-background scenes were impressive-looking (and clean). Maybe they installed a new xenon for the movie?

I will say though that sometimes the fleshtones in the actors' faces didn't look quite right. Whether that's a printing issue or related to the video source, I don't know. Faces are probably the dead giveaway to the video source.

When I said "live action looked a little soft", what I meant to say is "live action lacked the finest detail". Especially faces. The focus was extremely sharp overall, and uniform across the whole screen.

I agree that sometimes that blend of live-action (soft) and CGI backgrounds (sharp) seemed out of balance. Maybe the CGI stuff turned out so good that they couldn't bring themselves to soften it to exactly match the live action. Anyway I think the CGI in this movie is by far the best I've ever seen in any movie, by a wide margin. If they made a decision not to dumb it down, it was the right decision.

I missed a few minutes of the beginning of reel 2 when I was reporting the sound problem, so maybe that's where the CAP code was. For the time I was in my seat though, I saw no flaws like splices or dots, just the occasional random white speck.

I went in wanting to not like the look of the movie, but based on the 1st viewing I'm impressed.