Williarob said:
A single correction was made for each reel. In most cases it involved nothing more than white balancing the image using the optical track for the white point and then adjusting the contrast so that the brightest point on the reel is right at the top of the scopes and the blackest right at the bottom. With a single adjustment like that, you can’t make space or the end credits completely black or you will crush the blacks in other parts of the reel.Colors and levels could be greatly improved with a shot by shot grade, but I wanted to preserve the original colors and levels as much as possible for this version. So the colors quite accurately represent the digital scan of the print, which isn’t necessarily the same as when projected in a dark room with a 70s bulb, but nor is it anybody’s idealized imagination of what it should look like.
So if I understand what you say, wouldn’t this mean that if you screen 4K77 in a dark room with a 70s bulb you would have similar colors to what you see in the online screenshots of Technicolor screenings (assuming correct color balance)? Or does this mean that, even with 70s bulbs, people in 1977 did not see completely black space and end credits when they were screened a Technicolor print?
One thing to remember is that Star Wars was a rush-job, with budget problems and a lot of people working in the SFX crew that had never worked on a feature film before, and in some cases, doing things never attempted before.
So yes, if you were in a good cinema in 1977, and you were lucky enough to see a really good print, there still were many scenes where the inky blackness of space was a bit green, or a bit blue, or a bit grey, and the level of blackness varied considerably shot to shot.
Now, back in '77 you probably didn’t notice, because your mind was busy being blown by the visuals, but the optical shots really stand out, both in their heavier grain levels, and varying colour and sharpness. Not just the blacks either, the colours across the board vary a lot shot-to-shot on the original prints.
I just watched reel 1 of an IB in the same room as Reel 1 of the UHD version of 4K77. The colours are similar to the projected print in some places, and considerably different in others.
The grain looks completely different.
Part of the problem is projection vs rear-lighting an array of pixels. Projection has no ‘black lines’ around each pixel, so looks softer. It also has a lot more light scattering, so you tend to get a hard to describe luminous quality to the image, that tends to soften the perception of the grain.
Projecting 4K77 looks different to watching 4K77 on a television or monitor, let alone to watching it on film.
Short answer is, a project like this gets you a lot closer to seeing how the movie originally looked, before the home releases, you can see the colour variance, the varying levels and many of the flaws in the original way more clearly.
It isn’t really how it looked if sitting in a cinema, but it certainly does give you an insight into the less-slick experience that seeing a film in the 1970s was. Also, the Tech print has quite different colour to the non-tech prints.
If you want to really see how the film looked back then, you will need to grab a print, and a cinema and fill it with friends and project the film.
Short of that, feeding 4K77 to a home projector is as close as you will get right now.