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1997 Star Wars Special Edition 35mm Project (a WIP) — Page 7

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poita said:

Annoyingly, a hair got into the gate of the scanner on Reel3, and I have to rescan the entire reel.

Part of the downside of working remotely.

sigh

Anyway, here is a 720P sample, complete with dancing hair, nothing done other than a very quick levels setting, thought people might want to see it in motion.

https://we.tl/zp0MntsHeh

Note the Technicolor-style cue-dots/reel markers at the end. It’s about 200MB in size, I tried to make the file size small enough for anyone to get a look at it.

A higher bitrate and bit-depth version is uploading now for those who want something bigger.

EDIT: It’s up. 1.5GB. https://we.tl/SxaAFMqUAg

Man, that CG is so jarring. It’s way more so here than on the Blu Ray.

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Yeah, playing with some of the footage, it does make sense of some of the choices made re colour on the 2004 edition.

Also, the UHD footage I just posted of the speeder and outdoor Tatooine has been colour balanced post scan. On the print, the exposure is very high, it is very low contrast and ‘blown out’ looking, I just did a balance to see what detail was hiding in there, that is not how it looks projected.

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Interesting, could you show how the Speeder shot looks projected?

[ Scanning stuff since 2015 ]

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 (Edited)

When I get home tonight I’ll up a version that is close to how it looks projected.

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 (Edited)

I don’t know how I’m just now noticing all these things, but it looks like there are still some artifacts of optical compositing (or shitty rotoscoping) left in the SE:

JEDIT 2: Fixed it.

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 (Edited)

Wazzles said:

I don’t know how I’m just now noticing all these things, but it looks like there are still some artifacts of optical compositing (or shitty rotoscoping) left in the SE:

JEDIT 2: Fixed it.

That’s normal motion pucture blur and digital rotoscoping (if it were optical compositing, we’d see a black outline around the legs).

The problem with this part of the shot is that you have two overlapping objects that are in motion with film that is moving at 1/48th of a second. Anyone who’s shot a camera in manual mode knows that things get blurry pretty easily under 1/60th of a second.

In this shot you have the camera panning and following the speeder going right and crisscrossing the man who is walking left. With these two opposite motions, you’re going to get some weird artifacts.

Concerning the legs: because of the blur, there is no hard outline separating the two objects, and it’s difficult to cleanly create a matte for the shadow and erased wheels.

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

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That isn’t raw, it is pretty much matched to how the print looks projected.
The raw file is a 16bit log file and looks quite different of course.

The Tatooine scenes are probably intended to look sunblasted and a high key look to get across the hot, sunbaked, dry desert feel. The black levels are certainly very elevated on the print, and the image very soft.

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poita said:

That isn’t raw, it is pretty much matched to how the print looks projected.
The raw file is a 16bit log file and looks quite different of course.

The Tatooine scenes are probably intended to look sunblasted and a high key look to get across the hot, sunbaked, dry desert feel. The black levels are certainly very elevated on the print, and the image very soft.

Ah, okay. Sorry about that.

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 (Edited)

Question: What kind of colors are we aiming for? Are we going for like Technicolor colors or like the Laserdisc/Flunk '97 colors?

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Initially I’ll be matching to the print itself, so people can see how the original theatrical presentation was.

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poita said:

Initially I’ll be matching to the print itself, so people can see how the original theatrical presentation was.

Fair enough.

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 (Edited)

Alright, I’m working on a restored version of the Death Star Alderaan scene poita uploaded.
UPDATE: I’m kind of having a little trouble with trying to stabilize the film, especially during panning shots. I tried using DeShaker in VirtualDub, but that really didn’t work. Would you guys recommend anything else?

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I use Syntheyes for stabilisation, it does the best job of anything out there.
You could try the stabiliser in Nuke it also is pretty good, I haven’t tried the Resolve one in a while, I’m not sure if stabilisation is part of the free version or not?

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Avisynth has a Stab() filter, but I’ve only really ever used it on anime, so I don’t know how well it would work on a live-action film.

"Right now the coffees are doing their final work." (Airi, Masked Rider Den-o episode 1)

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Molly said:

Avisynth has a Stab() filter, but I’ve only really ever used it on anime, so I don’t know how well it would work on a live-action film.

Hmm… BRB

EDIT: It worked really well. Thanks 😃

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Sent a new donation in the other week - I’m mentioning it now to encourage more others to do the same. This is one of the best projects out there.

–SKot

Projects:
Return Of The Ewok and Other Short Films (with OCPmovie) [COMPLETED]
Preserving the…cringe…Star Wars Holiday Special [COMPLETED]
The Star Wars TV Commercials Project [DORMANT]
Felix the Cat 1919-1930 early film shorts preservation [ONGOING]
Lights Out! (lost TV anthology shows) [ONGOING]
Iznogoud (1995 animated series) English audio preservation [ONGOING]

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Thanks Skot!
I will be setting up the file share for contributors this weekend,being a newer film I’m more comfortable having longer sequences checked out by smaller private list of people, and getting feedback.

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 (Edited)

https://we.tl/xoFkz8F0uv

Last public video, its about 1GB in size, above is a shot from it.

You can really see how inconsistent the SE was shot to shot, both in the grade and the image quality. This has not been colour corrected.
It’s obvious why the home releases had a total overhaul.

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