SilverWook said:

The Emperor hologram seems slightly different somehow, or all the fine scanlines lost with the old video transfers?

 I just watched Adywan's ESB reconstruction last night and I believe the scanlines were visible?

I know everyone's saying it, but this is looking very awesome. Would be even more so if this is the 70mm edit.

IIRC it has already been confirmed that this is the regular 35mm cut, and those hologram scanlines were always there, you just cannot see them on the GOUT due to the shitty transfer, the irony is that they're visible on the DC LD.

I believe Adywan used '97SE footage to reconstruct that scene, that's why it's not affected by that problem.

Love those screen-caps Puggo! :)

This looks great! Can't wait!

Those screens do look pretty damn COOL!

Both scenes in question appear to be from the 35mm.

After reviewing the captures I've done so far, I have concluded that I need to go back and recapture everything.  I had too much dirt in the film path for my satisfaction, especially in reel 3.  Surprisingly, dirt shows up more clearly when watching it in motion, rather than in still frames, because the dirt doesn't move with the picture so it stands out like a sore thumb.  And cleaning the path at each capture doesn't guarantee new dirt won't get in halfway through a reel.

Puggo, thanks for all the hard work you've put into these film transfers!  I just got my hands on Puggo Grande (thanks to the help of another board member here).  I've only had a chance to skim it, but it is so AWESOME!  I can't wait to sit down & watch it all the way through!

And this ESB project has me on the edge of my seat!  I'm not really one for fan edits but projects like this & the work DarkJedi is doing have gotten me to broaden my horizons and venture outside the general star wars discussion...

So much of the technical chatter is so far above my head that I can't fathom how you guys do this stuff, but it's still intensely interesting.  And the final products speak for themselves!

canofhumdingers said:

I'm not really one for fan edits but projects like this & the work DarkJedi is doing have gotten me to broaden my horizons and venture outside the general star wars discussion...

Thanks for the kind words.  Actually, I don't consider this a fan edit because I'm not changing anything about the movie.  Ironically, the officially released version is, to me, a fan edit.

Yes, I didn't mean to imply this was a fan edit.  I meant that I'm not really interested in fan edits, but other types of projects such as these preservations/restorations highly interest me.

ratpack1961 said:

So does the emperor not fade in on this print (if I was understanding a previous post correctly)?

He does, but not in Puggo's ESB Super 8 transfer which share a few visual differences with the 70mm cut.

Right, on the 16mm film that this thread is about, he DOES fade in.  In the 8mm project from a couple of years ago, he doesn't fade in.

Looks amazing Puggo. The colours are even better than on the 8mm. This might be the first time people see a transfer of a Star Wars film look close to how it actually does.

I finally have a scan of reel 3 that I'm satisfied with.  Now I need to go back and re-scan reels 1 and 2.

thorr said:

I just realized that this is already in quasi-HD (basically anamorphic HD, like how DVD's work, but more resolution)!  You captured this at a vertical resolution of 480.  If you do a horizontal stretch to a 2.35:1 aspect ratio, this comes to 1128x480.  You aren't adding any horizontal resolution, but you are gaining vertical resolution compared to DVD.

PLEASE, pretty please with sugar on top, convert this to an HD format and not just stick with DVD.  It is debatable if you should convert it to a standard resolution like 1280x720p in which case the picture area would be 1280x545 because you are upscaling the vertical a bit which might introduce artifacts.  Either way (1128x480 or 1280x545) would be a drastic improvement over 720x306.

Here is a sample pic:

http://i53.tinypic.com/343rxvp.jpg

 

This sounds like a good way to go.  So now I have some questions...

In the past, I would use the anamorphic flag to have the player stretch the video horizontally.  So, not having worked with HD video before, is it the case that HD video doesn't use such a flag?

And if that's the case, then the entire horizontal stretch is done in software?  Any suggested tools that would do the best job at that?

Nerfherder said:

Ditto. Even though the source material perhaps isn't in the best of condition every bit of resolution helps. I was watching the Puggo Grande on a 110" screen last week, upscaled via an HD 1080p Epson projector. Whilst it looks fab and REALLY gives one the feel of seeing it 'for real' again (ahh those worn prints of the early 80s!) the blocking/compression in having to squeeze it onto a DVD-5 and the encoders freaking out over all the film grain and dust/scratches etc is really quite apparent. If you're going to the time & trouble of scanning in a film, might as well push the boat out with the encoding to make it as 'perfect' as possible instead of possibly having to do another transfer further down the road...

By the way, I ran a test for reel 1 of Puggo Grande last week at full SD bitrate (which would fit on a DVD9)... it's hard to say if many people would notice any difference.  I was hard pressed to see any difference, but I think I saw some at the borders of horizon and sky in the desert scenes.

After I'm done with PSB, maybe I'll go back and make a HD upscaled version of PG.

thorr said:

Regarding the border, if you would, please just crop it to the top/bottom and sides of the frame leaving the curved edge on the corners alone.

I'll consider that.  It depends how "noisy" it is in those corners.  Sometimes they can be distracting if there's a lot of junk in them, or if the soft borders clash too noticeably with the sharp borders of the rest of the image.

If you want to adjust the color, brightness, etc. please be careful not to wash out the brighter or darker areas.  It might be fine just to leave it as is and not adjust this at all, but you are obviously the best judge about that.

Definitely, I'm going to try and be extra careful throughout on this.  My goal is to make sure that everything that made it from the print to the raw cap, is retained in the final version.  Some color correction will be necessary, as it is pretty much impossible to find a single white balance on the camera that works on an entire reel.