Project #4K77 — Page 17

Wow! I can’t believe the wonderful sources you all have to work with!

This was the site’s biggest dream and here it is coming true.

Williarob said:

Two new videos were posted in the last 24 hours, one on some of the new techniques we’re using to clean the film:

and another about the 35mm sources:

Anyone who was wondering, but are they using THAT Technicolor scan will be pleased to see that we actually have a BETTER technicolor print to play with than the one we were experimenting with earlier in the year…

Excellent news! I wonder about this Tech print though, since Mike said he had 2 Tech scans, one in rough shape and one that was quite clean. Are we sure that this isn’t the same as the clean one that he is using? The only print I know of that is in better shape than that is the one used at the Senator theater screening.

Also, perhaps the ending music on your videos a tad loud? It’s kind of startling.

Still anxiously anticipating Mike to weigh in on all of this…

NeverarGreat said:

Excellent news! I wonder about this Tech print though, since Mike said he had 2 Tech scans, one in rough shape and one that was quite clean. Are we sure that this isn’t the same as the clean one that he is using? The only print I know of that is in better shape than that is the one used at the Senator theater screening.

Also, perhaps the ending music on your videos a tad loud? It’s kind of startling.

No, we got the better of Mike Verta’s two prints. The other one is in even worse shape. Nor is this the Senator print. Mike Verta does not have this particular Technicolor print (or at least he didn’t at the time we scanned it, and with Legacy completed I see no reason for him to have acquired it since). At his request I did send him the end credits from it because he was looking for some missing frames there, I don’t know if he found any use for it though.

And this time I can be 100% sure of all this because I have contacted the owner of this Technicolor print myself and have also arranged to borrow and scan some 35mm James Bond trailers from him.

Also, if you don’t believe me, and this thread is about to turn into another “He said/she said” pissing contest about Mike Verta and whether or not I have the “rights” to use the scans I have, then I’m out of here right now. I am not going through that again. I’d rather shut down the project. But think about it - at the end of the day, I’ll still have Star Wars in 4k. What will you have?

Oh no, I didn’t mean that at all. I was referring to him commenting on whether or not this restoration has the photography right, and the insight he might have that we don’t in terms of accuracy, etc. I also don’t mean to undermine the inconceivable efforts and results you’ve collectively brought to this project, either. I’m extremely grateful for everything you have done.

Swazzy said:

Oh no, I didn’t mean that at all. I was referring to him commenting on whether or not this restoration has the photography right, and the insight he might have that we don’t in terms of accuracy, etc…

That would be nice, but if Mike Verta makes any comment at all, it will probably be more along the lines of “Still looks like crap compared to Legacy”, “f**k Negative One” and “if you like it so much go masturbate to it”. Those were his comments on the Silver Screen Edition anyway (I’m probably paraphrasing the first comment, but the second two are direct quotes), so I’m not expecting much in the way of constructive criticism from that direction…

Yikes, hadn’t seen those comments. But what I can say is that both works are shaping up to be superb.

Williarob said:

I’m thinking I might abandon the DNR version. I’m just not liking it as much as I thought I would. Would anybody here be too upset? If anybody needs to use scenes for Despecialization, it will be easy enough for them to add the DNR to the shots they need to mix with the blu-ray…

My 2 cents: I wouldn’t mind if the DNR version was dropped. Grain-lover here 😉 Still I wouldn’t mind a (very) light reduction of the grain in the effect shots to make the
whole thing more coherent. But now I’m almost steppin in revisionism territory so I’d say
a 1080P/No DNR of this would be my definitive version 😃

Williarob said:

Two new videos were posted in the last 24 hours, one on some of the new techniques we’re using to clean the film:

Thanks for the detailed info about the sources Williarob! Got somewhat confused for a moment before watching it even though I do my best to keep track of this project.

Wish I could contribute to the final result in some way but I’ll just leave it to the pro’s 😉

To add yet another meaningless opinion to the thread: any and all DNR work should be an after thought, IMO. Its existence wouldn’t keep me from watching the raw version, so I don’t care if one is made, but if working on a DNR version would hinder any ability to sooner finish the standard raw versions of all three films, I think it should sit on the shelf as long as it needs to. And from the looks of things, most of the film, regardless of Tech or Eastman source, is probably going to look well managed enough for everyone here to enjoy anyway, even if it gets a little chunky in some Tunisia shots or composited shots.

Anyway, the point is, as long as I (and other grain lovers) can still watch a finished 1080p version with zero DNR done, then I’m sure we’ll all be really happy with your wonderful work of love. I’d also just like to thank you, Williarob and DrDre (and everyone else involved in all this); it’s gonna be great!

theMaestro said:

Williarob, have you experimented with Mike Verta’s technique of layering different prints in order to remove grain & get closer to the o-neg’s grain structure? I guess it’s not the goal to implement such a thing for this project, but if you manage to figure that out then future projects could perhaps look even better than Legacy. Because it does seem like you now have the absolute best prints to work with and so the only step remaining to surpass Legacy would be Verta’s grain removal technique.

I have tried averaging the layers on a single frame (using this technique: http://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutorials/image-averaging-noise.htm), and the results were pretty good. However, I don’t have as many prints as Mike does (nor as much time and patience). As I understand it, Mike has some proprietary software that carefully examines the pixels in each layer and makes choices based on how many match/don’t match? Something like that. I don’t think he’s just averaging the layers and since I don’t know exactly what he is doing, it’s hard to try it out.

I can tell you that for the layering to work, every layer of every frame has to be perfectly aligned, and color matched and that any dirt or damage on any of the layers will come through at least faintly if averaged, so all layers would have to be cleaned of dirt first. There may be a way to Median or Subtract or Add or some kind of blend mode that gets around this problem, I just don’t know.

On top of this, our scan of the LPP is not nearly so sharp as the Tech and Eastman scans, so if I throw that in there it may soften details and result in losing some detail rather than gaining it though for most shots I suppose the Blu-ray could be thrown in there too to offset that, if you were so inclined.

So the answer to your question is, I’d love to try it out and I’m open to suggestions. But just aligning and color matching two prints at a time is a lot of work and gigabytes of data!

And that right there ^ is why Mike Verta looks down on projects like this one. He’s a perfectionist. He took the time to get better scans and to make sure he had all the disk space he needed, and he did spend the time aligning each frame of every layer. His attention to detail, and the amount of time and effort he was willing to pour into his project is just way above anything that we are willing to do, and that is what will always make Legacy Edition superior to any other project, and I’m fine with that. That’s why I didn’t get upset by what he said about the Silver Screen Edition. He was just stating the facts as he saw them. Compared to Legacy Edition, I expect the SSE does look pretty crappy, and no doubt this project does too. I do think he rather missed the point of our project though, which wasn’t to compete with Legacy or to make the best version of Star Wars ever. The point was to try and reproduce the theatrical experience of watching the LPP print projected and I think we achieved that quite well. The point of this project of course is to make the best version of Star Wars ever, (so far, not including Legacy Edition), and I still think we are on par to hit that goal.

I don’t have the time or the experience or the knowledge or the resources that Mike has. That’s why I’m still really hoping he succeeds with Disney. I’d rather watch Legacy Edition than this project, and I’m sure most of you would too.

But I do enjoy working on the film. It gives me something to do during my down time, and figuring out ways to improve the quality, to speed up the process, to automate the repetitive processes with scripting, it’s that sort of thing that makes it fun to me. Part of the reason I am sharing the experience with all of you is because I need your encouragement to keep going. Now that I have figured out most of the “how”, it is just a matter of doing. Knowing that all of you are eagerly waiting for more gives me a reason to do some more.

So, thanks for sticking with me.

You have my axe!

There’s still hope Legacy will be released, don’t be pessimistic :
Even so, Verta’s work could still be a useful reference for other fan restorations (in fact IIRC Harmy’s Despecialized used some of Legacy’s early scans as color reference).

Great work, Williarob! I’m looking forward to seeing more of your #4K77 😃

I wasn’t trying to start any drama, I just wanted to clarify if this was a new scan or not. It’s sometimes difficult to determine what sources are new or not, with so many floating around here. And that’s exciting! It feels like a renaissance of Star Wars around here recently, with things happening so fast it can make your head spin.

Beautiful work guys, I’ve been reading this daily and will continue reading. 4K sample looks great. I don’t have anything to add, just keep up the good work and all the best with the project.

NeverarGreat said:

I wasn’t trying to start any drama, I just wanted to clarify if this was a new scan or not. It’s sometimes difficult to determine what sources are new or not, with so many floating around here. And that’s exciting! It feels like a renaissance of Star Wars around here recently, with things happening so fast it can make your head spin.

No worries. I just had visions of everything spiraling out of control like it did earlier this year, with everyone freaking out about the prints, me getting banned and all of you missing out on something pretty cool.

I’ve had this other Tech scan since December 2014 and some of it was actually used in the SSE - most notably shots that included a star field in Reels 1 and 3, since most of those stars were too faded on our scan of the LPP.

Meanwhile the work continues. I cleaned two more shots today, bringing the tally up to 78 shots completed (26% of Reel 1). The first 15 “shots” include the Fox intro, logos and title cards, Crawl and Flyover. I currently only have all that on Eastman stock at 2k, (Plus the ANH version at 4k and a 35mm '97 Special Edition version also at 4k) so most of that is currently just upscaled SSE at the moment. It looks pretty good, but not quite as good as the footage that follows it. Hopefully I can get a new 4k scan of all of that before the project is complete, and can come back to that section later.

AllAboutThatSpace said:

…
On a technical note, although the new longer sample looks terrific, I preferred the old encoding. I think it was mentioned above, but H264 is making this one a little gravelly in the busier shots, in my opinion.
Thanks so much for the hard work!

You’re welcome. I used Handbrake to do both the H265 and H264 encodes. Interestingly, even when I set the H264 to the placebo setting it still only produced a 280 MB H264 file. The 1080p version was almost exactly the same size (279 MB) which seems a bit fishy to me - I would have expected the 4K to be 4 times as big. Not too worried about it at the moment though. Still a long way to go before the final encodes begin!