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The Original Trilogy restored from 35mm prints (a WIP) — Page 11

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this guy must’ve either been a troll or some jumped-up conspiracy nut.

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Unbelievable.
Thanks for the sample with audio. It looks and sounds amazing! I don’t think there was any speculation, to be honest. The person who wants to call bullshit on the scan should do it here and fight their corner rather than send you a pm. Except they shouldn’t because it would be waste of time.
Happy trails and cheers as always!

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This is the first time I have ever seen a “full” scan of a film including the audio track. It’s fascinating to watch, thank you very much for that

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poita said:

There is no timeframe on getting the rest cleaned and scanned, the cost is around $150-$200 per reel for cleaning alone, plus shipping etc.

It would be pretty cool to be able to sponsor a reel.

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poita said:
I got a weird message from a user … that it was clearly just the GOUT with noise added …

Ah, the secret’s out! That is awesome quality you pulled out of GOUT with your proprietary process®! Seriously, hire the best lawyers you can to market this! And when you’ve made your billions please remember your poor friends over here at OriginalTrilogy.

here is Reel1 of the UK print with sprockets, soundtrack and audio.

My favorite extras! Thanks for an early Cyber-Monday gift.

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They weren’t particularly rude about it or anything, just quite adamant that it clearly wasn’t a 35mm source. I found their reasoning a little flaky to say the least, but thought in case any conspiracy theories abound, the new sample will make it patently clear that it is a 35mm print.

Donations welcome: paypal.me/poit
bitcoin:13QDjXjt7w7BFiQc4Q7wpRGPtYKYchnm8x
Help get The Original Trilogy preserved!

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dahmage said:

poita said:

There is no timeframe on getting the rest cleaned and scanned, the cost is around $150-$200 per reel for cleaning alone, plus shipping etc.

It would be pretty cool to be able to sponsor a reel.

Feel free to do so!!

Donations welcome: paypal.me/poit
bitcoin:13QDjXjt7w7BFiQc4Q7wpRGPtYKYchnm8x
Help get The Original Trilogy preserved!

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poita said:

I normally don’t respond to that kind of thing, but to stop any speculation, here is Reel1 of the UK print with sprockets, soundtrack and audio.

WOW - it also looks amazingly clean for a raw scan! Aside from those ugly glue marks that are in the source (the o-neg). Thanks for sharing it!

[ Scanning stuff since 2015 ]

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poita said:

dahmage said:

poita said:

There is no timeframe on getting the rest cleaned and scanned, the cost is around $150-$200 per reel for cleaning alone, plus shipping etc.

It would be pretty cool to be able to sponsor a reel.

Feel free to do so!!

Despite my desire to do so, i posted instead of donating (which i plan to do), because i think that having reel ‘sponsors’ would be a great fundraising idea. need to get people invested and give them a sense of ownership, right? 😃

How much does shipping a reel tend to cost, when sending them off for cleaning?

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Poita, is there any reason why your latest upload of Reel 1 is only playing sound out of the right speaker? I am not familiar with film captures so I am not jumping to any conclusions about it here, but my speakers are only playing the right channel. Is it possible I got a corrupted download? Is it something else? And yes, my speakers play other things just fine.

she/her
mwah

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Honestly, if you somehow made the GOUT look like that, that’s a far more impressive feat than what you’re actually doing. Maybe they were trying to compliment you in some odd way.

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 (Edited)

how are the 2 prints you have of empire not faded are they lpp re-releases or is it luck they were taken very good care of and haven’t started to fade yet almost every time when you see empire showing up on ebay for sell ever reel of every print is faded brick red I don’t mean any disrespect just wondering how these 2 prints have not faded yet they look amazing tho makes it hard to watch the grindhouse version after seeing this because you can really see how the color is off and all over the place on the grindhouse even tho that was brick red they did the best they could trying to restore the color

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Poita, thanks so much for sharing your work so far. It has certainly been educational as I was one of those laboring long under the delusion that much of the Hoth colour-timing had leaned more toward white then blue. I don’t know where I picked up this misconception - a stubborn memory of early low-contrast video transfers perhaps - but you’ve won the argument: it’s all there in living colour.

I will be happy to make some kind of contribution to help see this project to its conclusion. These rare Empire materials are endangered and time is clearly of the essence so maybe someone needs to be more aggressive about passing the hat around.

What’s the whole thing going to cost to scan and ship?

Who’s ready to chip in? Can we get a show of hands?

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Poita Thanks for sharing this
Yes it’s funny grading the reel so I’ve used these two picture as a reference

And this is the result,a bit too much yellow in the skintone…





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pathustler85 said:

how are the 2 prints you have of empire not faded

They are faded. Badly faded - they would look completely red with no color at all if projected. The scanning process is able to recover the color information by scanning at a high bit rate. Standard consumer bitrate is 8bits per color channel, whereas film scanners can scan at higher bitrates. For example, when I finally get around to having BATB scanned I have the option of having it scanned at 10-bit or at 12-bit, but as BATB is not faded 10-bit is fine. I’m not sure what bitrate poita has scanned these at, but it could be as high as 16bits per channel.

As for the “un-faded Australian print” I have no idea how it’s possible - my guess is it might have been struck much later for example in 1983 or something; or it could be a pre-release print made a year earlier than the release prints, or there could be some other reason.

Shuggy said:

I will be happy to make some kind of contribution to help see this project to its conclusion. These rare Empire materials are endangered and time is clearly of the essence so maybe someone needs to be more aggressive about passing the hat around.

Hi Shuggy, use poita’s paypal.me link - I’m sure he’ll appreciate it!

Who’s ready to chip in? Can we get a show of hands?

It’s unlikely, lol. Just because you don’t see people put up their hands doesn’t mean stuff isn’t happening - I just made a contribution to something else behind the scenes, and I have to start prioritising my own projects now.

[ Scanning stuff since 2015 ]

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RU.08 said:
As for the “un-faded Australian print” I have no idea how it’s possible - my guess is it might have been struck much later for example in 1983 or something; or it could be a pre-release print made a year earlier than the release prints, or there could be some other reason.

It could be a low fade dupe made by a collector.

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The ‘Australian’ print is one of 6 ‘Exhibition’ LPPs that were struck in 1983.
There may be more, but I know at least six were originally made for a few places to do a ‘Trilogy’ marathon when Jedi came out. This is the only surviving one I have found, another appeared to turn up in Atlanta, but turned out to be a Fuji print.

The UK one I am looking to get scanned next has not faded anywhere near as much as the German prints, it was kept in a Coolroom, and that seems to have slowed the fade compared to other prints I have seen.

The German print looks like the samples on the first page of this thread.

We scan at 16bits per pixel, this means the total ‘colours’ able to be captured jumps from the approximately 16 million colours that a DVD can reproduce @ 8bpp to 281 Trillion colours @ 16bpp.
In practical terms it means each channel, Red, Green and Blue, jumps from 256 shades each to 65,536 shades each.
This lets us recover as much colour as if left in the print.
It would be better to have an unfaded print or negative, but, when it comes to Empire a partially faded print is the best we have available to scan, and generally only heavily faded prints turn up, and it is getting worse by the day.

I wish we had access ten years ago, but am glad we have access now, it is literally in the nick of time to ensure the theatrical presentation of Empire is relatively well preserved, warts and all, either for future generations to see the state-of-the-art film making from 1980 as it was, or for people to look at as a base for restorations back to an imagined ‘perfect’ version from 1980, one where you kept each composite frame meticulously clean, got your mattes as precise as possible and used the finest grain film stocks etc.

My interest is in warts and all preservation of one of the most important films of the early 1980s, and hopefully with the generous help of a lot of behind the scenes people, we can get it done.
We have already had help for the scanning of other prints, by two people in the US that I will be forever grateful to, and many others that have allowed the dream to become a reality. I can’t thank the preservation community enough.

Donations welcome: paypal.me/poit
bitcoin:13QDjXjt7w7BFiQc4Q7wpRGPtYKYchnm8x
Help get The Original Trilogy preserved!

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 (Edited)

Shuggy said:

Poita, thanks so much for sharing your work so far. It has certainly been educational as I was one of those laboring long under the delusion that much of the Hoth colour-timing had leaned more toward white then blue. I don’t know where I picked up this misconception -
What’s the whole thing going to cost to scan and ship?

I think it is more an assumptive memory. We think of snow as white, so we remember it that way.
Ask most people the colour of the Sun, and they will say ‘yellow’ but walk outside and take a (quick) look and you will see that it is actually white.

I forget the term at the moment, but there are a bunch of colours that we automatically associate with objects, green grass, yellow sun, blue ocean etc. and we tend to remember them this way even when we saw them quite differently at the time.

As for costs, the main cost at the moment is ultrasonic cleaning, which comes out at 0.6c per foot plus taxes and shipping, which equates to about USD150 per reel, which means a 6 reel film is about $900 or so.

Donations welcome: paypal.me/poit
bitcoin:13QDjXjt7w7BFiQc4Q7wpRGPtYKYchnm8x
Help get The Original Trilogy preserved!

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poita said:

The ‘Australian’ print is one of 6 ‘Exhibition’ LPPs that were struck in 1983.

Yay for my guess! That’s pretty much what I was thinking (trilogy screening). I’m not at all surprised the owner is protective given the rarity.

Question - you said it could be scanned if you brought the scanner to him - what if we paid to fly him out to the scanner instead? If that were possible it’d cost a lot less, but then again I suppose he may not be able to keep the film as check baggage which would an issue.

[ Scanning stuff since 2015 ]

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poita said:

We scan at 16bits per pixel, this means the total ‘colours’ able to be captured jumps from the approximately 16 million colours that a DVD can reproduce @ 8bpp to 281 Trillion colours @ 16bpp.
In practical terms it means each channel, Red, Green and Blue, jumps from 256 shades each to 65,536 shades each.
This lets us recover as much colour as if left in the print.
It would be better to have an unfaded print or negative, but, when it comes to Empire a partially faded print is the best we have available to scan, and generally only heavily faded prints turn up, and it is getting worse by the day.

Well I’m utterly astonished at the colour you’re able to rescue from a red faded print. It seems like some kind of alchemy to me, like turning beetroot into gold. I can’t wait to see the finished preservation.

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 (Edited)

poita said:

As for costs, the main cost at the moment is ultrasonic cleaning, which comes out at 0.6c per foot plus taxes and shipping, which equates to about USD150 per reel, which means a 6 reel film is about $900 or so.

I’d be happy to throw $50 into this project. If 17 contributors match that we’ve got our 900. Or 30 people could donate $30 each. Surely there are 30 ESB diehards lurking here who can spring three measly tenners to preserve (and own) this movie milestone.

What say you, gentlemen?

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go ahead and do it! i already did