Puggo Strikes Back! (Released) — Page 4

Puggo - Jar Jar's Yoda said:

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?

Correct, there is no anamorphic flag with HD video.  You will need to do the horizontal stretch in software. 

I will let others chime in for what software might be best, but I like xvid4psp.  It will let you do any size you want.  It defaults to Lanczos resizing which people seem to like.  It will also crop for you (assuming the crop position is always the same) and I think it will let you add the black bars on top and bottom too if you want to do 1280x720p so that it is blu-ray compliant.  You should do your color corrections first before using xvid4psp (and your cropping if it moves around).  When you convert the file, try to keep the bit rate so that the final size is about 8GB.  Once the xvid file is made, you can use TSMuxer to convert it to blu-ray format.  When converting the file to blu-ray, it grows a bit so you don't want to make the original xvid file too big or it won't fit on a DVD-DL disc.

What software you can use depends on how you are doing your capture too.  What format are you saving the original images to?  A bunch of pictures, a lossless AVI, ...?  Avisynth is another way to go, but is not as easy to use.  I think xvid4psp uses Avisynth anyway.

Anyway, thanks!  I can't wait to see the final product!

Mike

Edit: Molly's post may be another possibility, but I am not sure if you can set an aspect ratio of 2.35:1 on whatever resolution and have it automatically stretch it out.  This would be even easier.  All you would need to do is crop it to the sides and top, set the aspect ratio, convert it to AVC-HD/H264/Xvid or whatever you want to call it and save to mkv, and that's it. 

This wouldn't be blu-ray compliant though so if people wanted to burn it to DVD-R and watch it on their blu-ray player, it wouldn't work.  The way I mentioned above might be better in this case (1280x720p).  If you need help with the settings in the Xvid4PSP software, I can try to help you, but I would need to know what format you are working with and maybe you could send me a very small sample of your original file(s), just so I could get the settings right.

Puggo - Jar Jar's Yoda said:

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.

Here is what it would look like with one of the sample frames at 1280x720p:

http://i54.tinypic.com/vwpy74.jpg

In my opinion it looks good enough already, but if you wanted to you could try adjusting the color of the black bars to roughly match the color of the corners and it wouldn't be as noticeable.  In my case I have a projector and have black masking for my screen so the white part of the screen is effectively 2.35:1.  I wouldn't notice the difference with the black bars and corners at all.

Here is a sample with the black bars matching the color of the right side corners:

http://i53.tinypic.com/2wq494h.jpg

The left side is more noticeable to me because they don't match the bars.  Maybe just making the black bars black would be the best route and the corners would just be part of the horizontal picture.

Puggo - Jar Jar's Yoda said:

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.

I think white balance is very important. Parts of the Puggo Grande seem very 'blown out' (almost like too much light was being projected through the film?) as far as the whites are concerned, though I seem to remember you saying that was representative of the 16mm prints themselves. Those Empire caps look very very good indeed, and being as a quarter of the film is set on Hoth I think it's even more important to keep tabs on the white balance. As you said it's impossible to find a 'correct' balance throughout each reel so I guess this will fall into the 'eye balling' it category. I'd be tempted to try out a raw capture without any processing at all and see how that looks, otherwise one is altering the print. It's nice to preserve exactly how one would see this if projected, even though the temptation is there to keep tweaking the settings.

As others here have said, thank you so much for doing these transfers - you really are preserving an important part of the Star Wars universe and it's greatly appreciated indeed :)

- John

Puggo - Jar Jar's Yoda said:

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.

It depends on how big the viewing screen is. On my laptop I didn't notice many compression artifacts, but on that 110" screen they were quite obvious. Encoders just hate constantly moving scenes, and I think those particular Star Wars 16mm prints are one of the worst examples out there with all the grain, dust, scratches and so on. It would be very cool indeed to have an HD upscaled version of the Puggo Grande to give those encoders room to encode every little spot and blemish without any artifacts - Thanks for considering it and I'll keep my fingers crossed ;)

I would say this project is in VERY capable hands, it is not like Puggo has not done this before, I say you do what you think is right Puggo, I and I am sure a lot of others here will be VERY happy with whatever you end up doing, that said, good luck, can't wait to see it.

Puggo - Jar Jar's Yoda said:

See, that's the problem. A telecine capture doesn't ever preserve exactly how one would see the film if projected, because of a myriad of factors. The range of colors you get on the video depends on how the film is illuminated (what type of light), how the lens settings respond to the lighting used, the white balance setting on the camera, etc. Cameras don't work the same as our eyes do. And if you find a setting that works on one scene, it generally doesn't work as well for other scenes... sometimes it's way off.  So, if you want it to look as close as possible to an actual viewing of the film, you HAVE to tweak it scene by scene in post.

Can you pause the capture and adjust the camera scene by scene?  Another idea would be to do multiple captures with different settings and take the best version of each scene before adjusting in post.  If any scenes are really bad to start with, do another capture.  I am not sure how hard this is to do, so I may be asking too much.  :)

Anyway, I agree with Dark Jedi and am only throwing ideas out there that may or may not help.  I am very excited about this project!

Anyway, I agree with Dark Jedi and am only throwing ideas out there that may or may not help.  I am very excited about this project!

That goes for me as well - it's such a treat to be able to see a 16mm print of these films transferred by someone who cares. Much appreciated indeed! :)

I'm with 'Video Collector' on the whole rounded edges issue, but I understand the issues you've outlined above. The aim of this is afterall to preserve the 16mm experience, and having those unique rounded edges there - to me - preserves that 'old skool' 16mm screening experience.

I got a real nostalgic kick from those screen shots you posted earlier Puggo. One of my fondest Star Wars memories was my 7th Birthday in June, 1980. I hadn't seen the film yet at that point (that treat was to be a Star Wars/Empire double bill later on in the month which just absolutely BLEW my mind at that age, and was the first time I went to the cinema also!). MY parents arranged for a guy to come around to my Birthday party with a 16mm projector. I seem to recall we watched a few cartoons, but the real treat was the trailer for Empire. I think we got him to screen it several times and we were all sitting their open mouthed especially during the few shots of the walkers! Ahhh good days!

So thanks for rekindling those precious memories with those still captures, not to mention the prospect of actually being able to own 16mm capture at some point! That little kid inside of me is still sitting there open mouthed at those shots some 30 years later ;)

- John

Thanks for all of the updates and info.  It's great to learn about this stuff.  Keep up the great work!!!  Yeah corners!!! ;-)

By the way, I am also very excited about the prospect of the upscaled HD version of the PG.  Here is a sample pic to wet everyone's appetite.

http://i51.tinypic.com/116kw2h.jpg

:-)  :-)  :-)

Mike

Here is a comparison between the current PG and the upscaled version.  I only did the horizontal stretch and left the vertical resolution as is (horizontally scaled to 1128x480 then cropped to the borders).  As you can see there is significant resolution to be gained.  The current PG is a bit squished vertically from where it should be, so there is another reason to redo it.  ;-)

http://i56.tinypic.com/jjlgzk.jpg

Sorry about that.  I just compared it to the original and the PG does look pretty close to correct.  They chopped quite a bit off the bottom and a little off the top.  The good news is this means there is even more resolution there natively as long as you continue to do the horizontal stretch and never shrink the resolution vertically to fix the aspect ratio.  I tried stretching the raw uncropped frame to 1280x480 and it looks pretty close to correct.  It would need to be cropped from there then upscaled back to 1280.  It would be cool if you could get the camera in the exact spot so the raw capture was right on the edge of the frame so no cropping would be needed on the sides, but it sounds like it loses focus and causes the other problems you mentioned.  Maybe you could keep it placed in the same position as before, but zoom it in a bit.