logo Sign In

The Original Trilogy restored from 35mm prints (a WIP) — Page 13

Author
Time

cool, but that music! boo. boourns.

Author
Time

poita said:

Reel2 has been cleaned and pre-scanning to check for problems is happening now.

The last reel preview was downloaded 297 times! I’m so happy that there is still so much interest in Empire, I personally love this film.

Thanks also to the first ‘Reel Sponsor’, and to the others that have chipped in to get the reels cleaned. I’m still picking up freight, scan, and storage costs, so it is great to have the cleaning taken care of. Each reel takes up a 5TB HDD, and then you want to have a backup, so each reel eats up 2 x 5TB hard drives, so it gets real crazy, real fast.

To those who have already helped out, I sent you an Infinit invite, which will allow me to share the work in progress files with you. I use the software myself all the time, it is reliable and trouble free, and if you install it from my invite, it gives me the space to be able to share the larger versions of the files with you.
I’d love it if some of you could check the reels as they come in for missing frames, and frames you think need particular attention.

Thanks again to everyone, more samples soon!

Thanks to you too, mate. I’m glad to see someone caring about the preservation of this cinema milestone - and the film-making techniques that birthed it - as much as you do.

Author
Time
 (Edited)

suFami said:

Too bad about the Australian print. I understand his reasoning though.

I see poita didn’t address this. Poita said in the past that he has had the opportunity to view the print on several occasions and can view it in the future! IMO that makes it hugely valuable for the fact that it provides a reference to grade the faded prints to.

With the TN1 scan they didn’t know how it should look because they didn’t have an opportunity to see an un-faded print. The obvious example of course being should Hoth be blue, or white?

Personally I agree it would be great if there was an avenue to getting it scanned however it still serves a really valuable service to the preservation of this film IMO.

[ Scanning stuff since 2015 ]

Author
Time

Any chance you could set up a camera and film the projected image of the Australian print?

Preferred Saga:
1/2: Hal9000
3: L8wrtr
4/5: Adywan
6-9: Hal9000

Author
Time
 (Edited)

yotsuya said:

The Doctor Who restoration team has used ultra-sonic cleaning on the recovered film reels of missing episodes. These are B&W prints from the mid 60’s so a bit older than than film prints being used here and definitely with vinegar syndrome. It is safe and very effective. The results have been amazing. Definitely worth the time and effort for the OT prints.

Indeed they do. When they got Web of Fear and Enemy of the World back in 2013, they already had a superior copy of Enemy part 3 in the archive. So they tested out the ultra-sonic process on the duplicate print as a test to make sure the prints that had been sitting around in Nigeria for 40 years would not be damaged by the process. After comparing a short stretch of the film before and after cleaning, they determined there was no damage.

They recorded some of the prep and transfer, ultra-sonic at the 2 minute mark: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsMgNCwYcXw

It would be interesting if they could try the process out on the copy of The Lion (Crusade episode) owned by that Australian collector. I think most of the print’s problems are from actual damage, but it might be dirty as well. I don’t think they’ve gotten a chance to re-scan that one since 1999.

Author
Time

Looks awesome! I’ll definitely donate to this.

Author
Time
 (Edited)

Some interesting images have been spotted by sharp eyes amongst the OT crowd.

Look at the top corners of Luke’s canopy, there are what look like hand drawn squiggles in Permanent Texta/sharpie/marker dancing around for a few frames, and then again in another scene.

A failed attempt to address the transparency issue? A bored employee? Or…

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

Author
Time

Maybe they are trying to disguise the fact that the wear and scrapes on Luke’s canopy are, through an amazing co-incidence, exactly the same scrape and wear marks as everyone else’s speeder canopies. ;^)

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

Author
Time

poita said:

Maybe they are trying to disguise the fact that the wear and scrapes on Luke’s canopy are, through an amazing co-incidence, exactly the same scrape and wear marks as everyone else’s speeder canopies. ;^)

Does anyone know if these are on the Blu Ray or GOUT or anything else for that matter?

Author
Time

Can’t see it on the Blu-ray at first glance, but their blacks are set a lot lower.

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

Author
Time

They’re there in the GOUT. On the BD, they were erased in the Luke shot, even though the shot has not been recomped (as many other shots were) but they’re there in the Hobbie shot.

Author
Time
 (Edited)

I once had to do this on one of my student films where I literally gouged a line down my print because I loaded it wrongly in the editing machine. Because this was on reversal, I couldn’t make a copy. So I took a sharpie and filled it in.

I can imagine something going wrong, either a crack in the cockpit set or whatever and they just took a sharpie and colored it in. Yay analogue effects!!

What’s the internal temperature of a TaunTaun? Luke warm.

Author
Time

You can see some transparency in those light spots in some of the shots that weren’t blacked out with sharpie. Guessing those spots in the cockpit may have been slightly blue when photographed.

The irony is that the marker probably ends up being more noticeable than a small area of transparency. Also, there are transparency issues all over this movie. Not sure why they picked out this particular one to “fix”.

Author
Time

Wow, crazy. And thanks a lot CUSI Department… I really won’t ever be able to unsee it. Haha.

Author
Time

Blackout said:


GIF provided courtesy of the Can’t Un-see It Department.

Legend : when you’re running a Star Wars marathon on your 10-inch computer screen.

Author
Time

When in doubt, duct tape, WD-40 or sharpie it, I guess.

And yes, file this one under “can’t unsee”. Haha, that’s about my only problem with the hands-on aspect of us all having to make up for what Lucasfilm won’t give us, we keep stripping away the magic more and more all on our own by having to over-analyze/scrutinize these classics. Hell, there’s probably been more work put into saving/preserving/reconstructing these films than the man-hours that actually went into the original meticulous creation of them (case in point… these marks).

Author
Time

The “marker” fix that always stood out for me was the black spot beside the emperor’s eyes in some scenes in ROTJ

Author
Time

oohteedee said:

The “marker” fix that always stood out for me was the black spot beside the emperor’s eyes in some scenes in ROTJ

Those are commonly referred to as “slugs”, from what I’ve seen.

Author
Time
 (Edited)

Reel 2 is done:
https://infinit.io/_/3n6LGiz

Anyone that donates, or has donated to something in the past, or can help in some way with feedback, or just has an interest, please drop me a PM and I’ll send you an invite to my file repository, I think I have already stretched the amount that the mods would be happy that I share via open links.
We are very close to having enough to get a third reel cleaned, so I am sending it off.

I am currently rendering out Reel1 at 1080P 10bit high bitrate for anyone that wants to take a crack at colour/repair/general fiddling. It will be a lot smaller than the 5TB raw file, but will still weigh in at around 26GB.

Thanks again to everyone helping out.

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

Author
Time

Would you be interested in help with carefully performed content-aware photoshop fixing of nicks and scratches on each frame? I would be happy to help with this. I did this with my trailer project I was working on and the end result was beautiful. If we all helped, we could get through all the frames and have a near-blemish free final product. People would need to be careful not to fix things that are in multiple frames because they are supposed to be there but look like a blemish.

Author
Time
 (Edited)

Feel free to do so, I won’t be using any output created from the community for what I am working on, but I’m more than happy for people to try their own thing on it. I tend to find Photoshop fixes result in weird crawling generally, but it sounds like you have a good system, so by all means give it a shot.

You will need to PM me for access to the full files, but here is a short 1080P sample
https://infinit.io/_/VTNTxB6
I’m rendering it out fairly flat, with the gamma a bit high, to give people maximum latitude to correct it how they see fit.

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