PS78: Pre-ANH Star Wars Bootleg VHS from 1978 ***"RAW" DVD RELEASED*** — Page 11

Puggo - Jar Jar's Yoda said:

This may be the most sophisticated VHS restoration of all time.

Indeed.

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<p><span style="color: #ffffff; font-family: verdana, geneva, arial, helvetica, 'sans serif'; line-height: 17px; text-align: left; background-color: #484e5e;">No way, it seems a lot of people are interested in this, and it will be a VERY important reference. I'm sure people will come forward to help with whatever you need.</span></p>
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<p>No way, it seems a lot of people are interested in this, and it will be a VERY important reference. I'm sure people will come forward to help with whatever you need.</p>

>

My interest is definitely not waning. I've been kind of sidetracked by other stuff, so I haven't been keeping up with the thread, but that absolutely does not mean I've lost interest.

On the subject of telecine smearing, I actually don't know that much about telecine, I'm just calling what I see in old transfers.

Here are some examples of this pickup tube lag/decay issue, from one of the most egregious instances I've ever seen, the Warner Home Video release "Nelvanamation." These are individual fields, extracted using SeparateFields in Avisynth.

First, the old Saul Bass "worm" logo that WB was using at the time. Since it's red and white on black, it clearly illustrates what I'm talking about.

No, the text is not supposed to leave streaks like the credits to one of the old Christopher Reeve Superman films. Those are "ghosts" of the previous frames of film.

Notice that the closest "WARNER BROS" is not as opaque as the one right behind it. That's because the next frame is showing up "prematurely", at partial opacity. This is what I meant by two adjacent frames being picked up in the same field.

Now notice that only part of the next frame shows up, and at a different opacity than last time - you can see it sort of trail off about halfway up the "WARNER BROS".

Sounds like what SpacedRanger was talking about, though this transfer doesn't seem to have the exact issue he mentioned. I do remember seeing *some* old smeary transfer where when there was a cut to a new scene, you could see the top or bottom half of one scene show up "superimposed" over the other.

Now it looks like the two frames are picked up at almost the same opacity.

Again, the next frame seems to be most visible at the bottom of the screen.

Actually, I don't know what's going on - the "early bird" frame seems to be visible from top to bottom, but its opacity isn't regular. Look at the bottom left corner, where there's red in one frame and black in the other, and the red gets more translucent as you go up, but doesn't go away.

I don't even know if this can be called 3:2 pulldown at all. Each of these smeary images shows up in the bottom field of one frame, and the top field of the next.

I know this has nothing to do with PS78 itself. My point is this: Maybe the PS78 transfer has this kind of issue, and there are no "discrete" frames to speak of. If so, perhaps it'd just be best to blend the identical fields together to make it 30p?

I trust that Darth Mallwalker can figure out what to do after he sees the raw captures. (Actually, I'll look at that sample myself and see what I find when I break it up into fields.)

OK, I used Avidemux to stack the fields of that sample. I can't find any pattern, every field is smeary. In no instance does a single video frame, or even a single video field, exactly correspond with a single film frame.

The bottom field seems to be a bit ahead of the top field, too. Look at how you can see both sides of the shot change at the same time:

Since this telecine has no pulldown and no discrete reproductions of individual film frames, I'm not sure if this can be IVTC'ed. The closest I could think of would be to toss out the bottom fields, resulting in a progressive, half-resolution image. It would still be smeary, but there wouldn't be any interlacing, and it would also "unsqueeze" the picture.

I will say though, this sample looks great for a 70s bootleg. I can definitely see a marked increase in quality from the original capture. And I love the color; this is probably the closest representation of the timing of the original Eastmancolor prints that we'll ever see.

I can't wait to see how this project further progresses.

AntcuFaalb said:

I'd like to apologize for the comment I made regarding others' interest. It was both stupid and passive-aggressive of me to say such a thing. It's no excuse -- rather, an explanation -- for me to say that the last week of my life has been terrible. As of today, things are improving.

Sorry to hear that. Glad things are getting better, and I hope things continue to improve for you.

TServo2049 said:

On the subject of telecine smearing, I actually don't know that much about telecine ...

Clunky telecine is just frame doubling at various points, enough times to create 30 fps. The better and more clever way (and most used) is doubling and mixing fields of those frames:

Of course, this is the theory. Some equipment is just plain sloppy in applying it.

Sounds like what SpacedRanger was talking about, though this transfer doesn't seem to have the exact issue he mentioned.

I since went back to my notes and remembered that there were full fields that were superimposed, too! My fix was to invert a same, clean field (found elsewhere in the mix) and superimpose that over the superimpose-corrupted field to cancel out the one field -- resulting in a (mostly) clean other field. Wild, yes? :) [A side effect of this process was compressed levels on the remaining field, which needed to be processed / expanded. I hated the idea of extra processing, but I never took it any further -- a working theory was good enough at the time.]

... the "early bird" frame seems to be visible from top to bottom, but its opacity isn't regular. ... Each of these smeary images shows up in the bottom field of one frame, and the top field of the next.

This was the "half field" superimposed fields of my previous post.

Maybe the PS78 transfer has this kind of issue, and there are no "discrete" frames to speak of. If so, perhaps it'd just be best to blend the identical fields together to make it 30p?

Frames should always be recoverable except, perhaps, if a telecine itself was telecined (I know that sounds ludicrous but I've seen webpages documenting some examples). In those cases, judicious blending is used to make the best of a bad situation.

A place to start: http://colorist.org/wiki/History_of_Telecine

The Famous Rank Cintel MKIII

In the mid 1970’s Rank Cintel designed the MKIII telecine a radical new concept at the time, where the scan patch comprised of two field rasters on one CRT where one field shifted relative to the other to compensate for the film movement between fields. This system again was only good for 625/50 25fps systems. However Cintel came up with a version for 525/60 systems wherea 3:2 pulldown was required. This was achieved by using 5 different patches on the CRT to compensate for the different position of the film during each scanned field. As some of you who worked on these machines will remember, adjusting the geometry of the scan for each patch was  a nightmare. Misalignment caused a sort of flicker twitch of the image between fields; relatively easy to adjust for two field positions but not for five!

Various machines are mentioned in: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecine

^ Similar articles periodically show up in here: http://originaltrilogy.com/forum/topic.cfm/Theater-Performance-Preservations/post/454292/#TopicPost454292