(For anyone interested in this kind of thing, this post is just my blab and pics of clean up of…)
I’d never seen this movie and thanks to Hal 9000’s posting the above screengrabs I decided Octorox’s new version seemed like an “It’s now time” opportunity. 😃 Octorox was nice and gave me his version…but in an above post you see him say “As for the dirt and scratches, I think that would require some level of manual cleanup, which is beyond my time and abilities right now.”
When I started watching the film, I found what this was referring to, and it was a shame. The opening of the movie (but NOT anything after!) — the first almost two solid minutes of this print — was afflicted by damage ala a dancing line, and it was definitely an attention magnet, rather ruined the opening of the movie for me, which is a bummer because this film has a quite neat, atmospheric opening. 😦
But I can see why Octorox didn’t try to fix this damage. Indeed, it would have to repaired by hand, frame by frame (photoshop or similar) and it turns out we’re talking around 2400 frames!!! Who would subject themselves to that kind of insanity?
Long story short, I told Octorox I would dive in to take a shot at this crazy task, as both a challenge of sorts and to give full life back to this movie’s opening that was being robbed of its cinematic artistry/immersion. Could I actually do this whole thing without burning out? I gave myself a week and a half or thereabouts to see how much I could get done. Perhaps I’d end up only finishing the most crucial bit (the first minute), or maybe I’d pull off some miracle.
A big difficulty was that most of the the work required patching. I’d initially hoped I could just quite quickly airbrush away the dancing line in each frame, but that turned out not to be possible without looking terrible. So except in a very small percentage of the frames, I had to add many steps to each frame’s clean up to get something that had a chance of not being just a different kind of attention magnet.
Here we are a week and half later and I’m finished with everything (even if all is not at Hollywood-level perfection). I can’t believe it really. 2309 frames photoshopped in ten days. 😮 (Note that in addition to eradicating that #&^%ing dancing line I also cleaned up hundreds of obnoxious specks, as in things that are present for only a frame or two: dirt bits and white spots/blotches.)
Thanks for reading if you made it this far. I obviously wasn’t paid for this work and it was a lot of effort and I wanted to let the world know about it in this little spot, even if in the grand scheme of things in the world this is rather a nothing accomplishment.
Thanks to Octorox for making his fantastic home release version of this film, surely the best one ever available on home video to this point in time. 😃
Images to show…
One of the more grungy frames, before and after… (Grab/slide center bar left&right)
original vs. end result compare 1
The frame with the most specks in the project…
original vs. end result compare 2
Short vid if anyone wants to see a compare of the things in motion…
https://mega.nz/file/30AnzSTa#1fr8aPFR5fgSsTL4l3vpGPsknxk4zUkkER3YZuVvb4U