The Original Trilogy restored from 35mm prints (a WIP) — Page 17

This is awesome, you can’t get much more unaltered than these babies

Thanks to an old friend…

https://vimeo.com/194932634

poita said:

Thanks to an old friend…
https://vimeo.com/194932634

Wow and in pretty good shape too do you plan on restoring them some how ?

Long term yes, it takes quite some time to do the restoration at 4K, but yes, restoring film is my day job anyway 😃

poita said:

Long term yes, it takes quite some time to do the restoration at 4K, but yes, restoring film is my day job anyway 😃

That’s awesome man, good luck 😀 I’d love to get copies when they’re all done I’m sure they’ll look incredible

Looks beautiful, I am very much looking forward to a restored version of this print.

Kreyhn said:

poita said:

All reels of the UK print are now scanned and with Harmy. Thanks again to everyone that helped make that happen.

You’re welcome! So, all 6 reels are cleaned and scanned? Also, you mentioned it taking many thousands to have someone scan a film. Were you able to rebuild and use your own scanner?

Unfortunately with this print, I had to use a scanning service in the USA. The good news part is though, that it is a better scanner than mine, there isn’t a better print scanner than what this print was scanned on, so the scan is as good as was possible to extract from the print.

pittrek said:

But I have a question - why does the level of grain change from shot to shot?

Scenes with optical effects have more grain, this includes scenes with optical wipes.

At this stage Harmy will be using it for despecialised, he isn’t planning on releasing a ‘grindhouse’ of Empire.
I am working on fully restoring all 3 original movies from multiple prints, to create versions that are faithful to the original release prints for archival purposes. The aim is to have them restored to the point that they could be recorded back to film for archiving, to preserve the original releases, the way they were seen in cinemas.

If anyone wants to see work in progress etc. on that, bounce me a PM.
It is an incredibly time consuming process, and really requires checking and repairing every single frame of each film, so progress will be slow, but I feel it is worth it to preserve these films.

I don’t think in terms of ‘public releases’ of finished products, or talk on open forums about releasing any complete versions, so you might notice those questions keep not getting answered by me here 😃

I’m sure once the films ae restored to archival level, that I or others might use that as a base for restoring the film completely, removing composited-in dirt and scratches, minimising and matching grain between shots etc. to get back to an ‘ideal negative’, but the archival versions will be done first.

RU.08 said:

pittrek said:

But I have a question - why does the level of grain change from shot to shot?

Scenes with optical effects have more grain, this includes scenes with optical wipes.

This is completely correct. To do optical effects in a pre-digital age, it required physically stacking pieces of film into an optical printer.
So for the asteroid sequence for example, some shots had 25 separately filmed elements that would be combined optically into a single shot.

They were using positive separations (equivalent to Red, Green and Blue channels) so this would mean 75 separate passes through a traditional optical printer, with the grain getting multiplied on each pass.

Now Edlund and his team had developed a new kind of optical printer (the Quad) which halved the amount of passes required, but it is still a lot of passes, and each pass adds another layer of grain. (The Quad itself is a fascinating beast, and I could talk about it for an week and bore anyone to tears…just ask any of my friends).

Also, a lot of Empire is dark, and with 1980 film speeds, less light = more grain, and the film was shot on a variety of stocks, each with its own grain issues, so the film does vary a lot shot to shot.
No you would digitally grade and match the shots to be less jarring for an audience, and even in 1980 it was possible to do a better job of that aspect than was done for Empire, but as with Star Wars, they were under extreme time and money constraints, so the final grades and composites left a little to be desired.

Oh man, I would love to hear you talk about the quad!!

I am after some people to view the complete scan, to give feedback as to missing frames and frames that are so damaged as to need replacing. Anyone who wants to help with that, please bounce me a PM.

Mavimao said:

Oh man, I would love to hear you talk about the quad!!

Don’t tempt me.
It’s 5am, I probably should get some sleep, kids will be awake in an hour.

Well get some sleep and come back tomorrow! 😛

I went about it a different way where I sync’ed the timecoded file with the gout, stacked them next to each other, then marked down missing gout frames. Then I made a side-by-side encode for visual reference.

This is what I came up with, assuming that the title card on ESB should start on frame 688 according to The Gout Sync Thread set up by chewtobacca. This is how it pops out when you index the dvd with forced film as an option and I think it’s generally accepted as the way to achieve gout sync.

Here it is to the best of my ability:

Missing Gout Frames

0-23
21724-21726
29694 There is a frame missing in this shot somewhere. There is glue on the frame before this one indicating the end of the scene but I couldn’t find the missing frame anywhere in the shot so I put it at the end of the shot.
30738-30748
40111-40116
59563-59575
81241-81273
81748-81757
90885-90894
112393-112569
120470-120482
121717-121729
122818-122823
150203-150208
172853

Damaged Frames

47170 Tape
52751-58190 semi-transparent red splotches
80033-80036 emulsion scratches
105404-105444 semi-transparent red splotches
106771 semi-transparent red splotches
127286-129000 semi-transparent red splotches
170020-170021 semi-transparent red splotches

It occurs to me that I don’t know what an “irreparably damaged” frame is. I did not annotate all of the red splotches or emulsion scratches but these are the ones that stuck out to me. I guess it really boils down to how much motion is in the frame and how much time you want to spend trying to fix it.

EDIT: I indexed the timecoded file with l-smash btw.

EDIT2: @Oohteedee. I believe you have indexed the files incorrectly or something because gout frame 75073 is not a duplicate. For example, if you are using directshowsource while editing it’s like shooting yourself in the foot because it returns the wrong frames or even drops frames sometimes.
This frame is where the three hologram commanders are standing in the hallway in front of vader on the super star destroyer and you can see arm and leg movement on the guys walking down the hallway in the background if you toggle between the previous and following frames on the timecoded 35mm file.