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The Phantom Menace on 35mm (* unfinished project *) — Page 3

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ZigZig said:

Of memory, all scenes of TPM were analogically filmed with Arriflex lenses except for one scene shooted directly in HDCAM.

90% of the film was processed digitally, which leaves still 10% of “natural” scenes, but the entire film was processed through a Digital Intermediate at 2K (but Poita’s remark is quite relevant).
Eventually, there were 2 final masters : one Kodak 35mm and one TI at 1280x1024.

The first LD/DVD/HDTV master was made from InterPositive ; the last BR master was made with a new scan directly from the 35mm master, fully scene by scene color-regraded.

On the other hand, AOTC and ROTS were digitally filmed with Sony cams at 2K.

I’ll try to find the exact information tonight.

I don’t know about the DI but TPM was shot on Arri 435ES and 535B cameras, the lenses were mostly Hawk anamorphics, shot at a 4.5 aperture when on set. Yet again, George wanted a soft look, like that on Star Wars where he shot often through nylon stocking (old school even at the time), so they shot a lot of TPM through a Tiffen ProMist soft filter, to try and achieve a similar look. They shot on Kodak 320T 5277, which is categorised as a low contrast stock, but it depends how you shoot it. Out in the desert they used EXR 5248, which is a slow stock, but light is rarely an issue outside in the desert sun.

Which scene was shot in HDCAM? That is really interesting.

So no matter what, the image is going to be a little soft, so scanning as high a resolution as we can will capture all that is there and any softness will be in the original, not as a result of the scanning.

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There is an old ASC article on all this is someone can dig it out.

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IIRC, it’s the night scene outside the slave quarters where Qui Gon gets the blood sample from Anakin.

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SilverWook said:

IIRC, it’s the night scene outside the slave quarters where Qui Gon gets the blood sample from Anakin.

Right!
And IIRC, that explains why this particular shot has a totally different contrast level on BR than on theatrical 35mm: it was the only scene digitally re-rendered for the BluRay without going through a 35mm scan.

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AOTC was filmed at 1.4K, not 2K… or at least much of it was. The HDCAM tapes could only record 1080p at 3:1:1 subsampling which is a luma resolution of 1440x1080 (which was cropped to 1440x818), and a chroma resolution of 480x270. It was also only 8bit, so not a lot of dynamic range to play with. I believe they had to hand-draw the mattes on many greenscreen effects. Not all of the film is that quality though, sometimes they would have reduced the size of the live action which means that it may as well be 4K (luma anyway), and sometimes they may not have used the HDCAM and instead recorded using a different data recorder capable of 4:2:2 sub-sampling, but it’s unclear how much was actually recorded at that rate. In any case you can see from the film many scenes where the chroma resolution is quite low - doesn’t always matter because they don’t have sharp contrasting colours on the live action, but I can make some examples of that sometime.

[ Scanning stuff since 2015 ]

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RU.08 said:

AOTC was filmed at 1.4K, not 2K… or at least much of it was. The HDCAM tapes could only record 1080p at 3:1:1 subsampling which is a luma resolution of 1440x1080 (which was cropped to 1440x818), and a chroma resolution of 480x270.

As far as I know, the cams used for AOTC were Sony CineAlta HDW-F900 with Panavision lenses (so called “Panavision HD-900F”), with 1920x1080 effective pixels and 10bits/sample (but 8 bits for compression processing).

You are right about the tapes limitations: the HDCAM tapes were Sony BCT-HD, which provided 2 332 800 samples by frame (=> 2K), divided into 1440x1080 samples on Y channel, 720x540 samples on Cb and 720x540 on Cr. But the HDCAM codec used rectangular pixels, so the recorded 1440×1080 content was eventually upsampled to 1920×1080 on playback.

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It produces a native 4:2:2 picture, so I imagine the CCD has a bayer pattern as that is 1920x1080 green and 1920x540 red and blue pixels.

There is no question that the live action elements look inferior compared to TPM’s. On the subject of TPM there are actually a few digital shots in it, this is one of them:

The give away in this shot is the haloing on the contrasty parts of the picture. It’s much harder to tell on the DVD/HDTV version as the haloing is all throughout the film as it is, but you can see in that screenshot haloing on the umbrellas and other parts and that’s from the digital protoype camera Lucas tested on some of the shots he filmed in post-production (or after the principle photography anyway). This shot also looks to be digital as it has haloing on the Bluray:

Here’s another, very easy to spot on the bluray:

Note how the dark reds are really low quality, that’s indicative of the bayer pattern and when you see it in motion it looks really horrible. I’m surprised they didn’t digitally inpaint that for the bluray. There are other parts of this celebration shot digitally as well including possibly the last shot of the movie. Which makes sense as it looks like they used the same steps they used in those Tatooine crowd shots:

[ Scanning stuff since 2015 ]

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All of the first unit footage for AOTC was recorded on (multiple) outboard recorders, the second unit often shot straight to HDCAM.

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RU.08 said:

Yeah I know we need to scan higher than 2K, just letting people know what we have. We’re not going to get 4K detail out of the print. Would they have produced prints straight from the digital files, or do they output a negative digitally to strike prints from?

Good question.

These days they do film outs directly quite often for prints, but with the large print run for TPM, and the technology of the day, then they would have had to have been striking prints from a neg.

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The DoF on that second shot would make me think it was not shot on HDCAM, though it could have been composited later to have the shallow focus plane.

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Since when Episode I was originally finished, it was done on a per shot basis - “done sort of old style, final a shot, film out a shot, look at a print of that negative and that’s what we would final”. It went through a conventional negative cut. An optical timed IP was generated from that and then then master printing negatives were made from that timed IP. So everything audiences saw in the theater was two generations down from the original. “When the original DVD was released,” Knoll says, "it came from scanning in the timed IP because it was the simplest thing to do.

A bit of info from here: https://www.fxguide.com/featured/art-of-stereo-conversion-2d-to-3d-2012/

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Here’s a shot that looks pretty bad in AOTC:

The chroma in that shot is terrible quality. They may have zoomed that one. You can see they went ahead and denoised it for the Bluray wiping away some of the fine detail in the process. I remember there being a couple of pretty noisy shots on 35mm that never seemed to look that bad again.

It’s funny you mention DoF, I’ve noticed that objects/people in-focus often look perfectly fine, but those out of focus have a funny somewhat digital look to them as if the out of foucs blur is sharper then it should be.

[ Scanning stuff since 2015 ]

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ZigZig said:

SilverWook said:

IIRC, it’s the night scene outside the slave quarters where Qui Gon gets the blood sample from Anakin.

Right!
And IIRC, that explains why this particular shot has a totally different contrast level on BR than on theatrical 35mm: it was the only scene digitally re-rendered for the BluRay without going through a 35mm scan.

It’s more noticeable on the DVD. The majority of the DVD transfer if quite grainy, but this shot is exceptionally clean.

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I’d definitely like to contribute towards this, even if I’m not much a fan of the films, but just to see the Theatrical version out there besides VHS/Laserdisc. Would donate but can’t just yet, would be next week at least.

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Thanks for the people who have shown interest so far, nice to see a couple of Aussies in there as well.

Everyone who has donated, if it all goes ahead, I’ll be sending details soon for the file-store, as I have anything to show, it will pop in there first.
I’ll be looking for people to help look for missing frames, and scanning errors etc. and will need help aligning the DTS tracks to the scans and other fun stuff.

I’ll be making a decision on Friday on TPM.

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poita said:

I’ll be looking for people to help look for missing frames, and scanning errors etc. and will need help aligning the DTS tracks to the scans and other fun stuff.

Hi Poita,

You can count on me for finding missing frames: I have a rough cut of my current work-in-progress project (TPM theatrical reconstruction) and I’m pretty sure that I have a video montage with no missing frame (by merging several sources: Althor’s LD, my own LD, ORF1 PAL broadcast, C+ PAL capture and Malaysian VCD). After several months on this project, I think that I know all the frames by heart!

I’m obviously ready to help for DTS aligning too.

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I’ll definitely be donating some $$$ to this project and the SE scans as well. TPM is my favorite prequel, and seeing it properly preserved would be a dream come true. Fingers crossed this goes ahead smoothly!

“That said, there is nothing wrong with mocking prequel lovers and belittling their bad taste.” - Alderaan, 2017

MGGA (Make GOUT Great Again):
http://originaltrilogy.com/topic/Return-of-the-GOUT-Preservation-and-Restoration/id/55707

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Here’s another one who’ll gladly donate. I’m really looking forward to this. Give me a couple of days…

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I’ve been lurking here for a couple years now reading up on various projects but this was the one that convinced me to register. I grew up with TPM and despite it’s flaws I have a strong sense of nostalgia for it. Although I can’t contribute much I would love to donate to this project and see it come through!

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Okay, I’ve decided to go ahead with this, there seems to be a lot of people who would appreciate the Theatrical Version being preserved.

Any help going forwards much appreciated, the level of cleaning and scanning we can afford will depend quite a bit on donations going forwards.

Thanks to everyone that has shown interest so far, I haven’t seen the film since 1999, will be interesting to see how it looks.

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

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Great to hear! Once my paycheck is deposited tonight I’ll send my donation your way.

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GREAT NEWS!
Thank you very much Poita!

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I’ve sent a small donation. May send more later if I can.