Info: POSSIBLY FOUND - Star Wars A New Hope Technicolor I.B. dye transfer print - random post on reddit — Page 4

I thought Mike Verta's version was from a tech IB. If he can scan it, there must be a way.

If I got this right, an IB tech print can be scanned and look very good if doing it in a high dynamic range (HDR), like for example doing like team negative1 except take 3 shots at each frame, one with low exposure, one with normal and one with high. Then combine them afterwards and balance them.

CatBus said:

If you had the OCN, why on earth would you bother to use the tech IB?

 

My understanding was that the original camera negative for star wars is damaged through over use of making prints/the poor stocks that went into it/time decay, so any prints struck from it now reflect that damage. Whereas the tech IB was struck early in the lifespan of the OCN and has a special dye which protects it more from fade (and possibly why it makes the print thicker and harder to transfer or something?). I also read the colour separations for star wars are also missing sections or something. Therefore in this case the tech IB would be the best record of the original look of the film. George Lucas showed his team his personal ib tech print to the team making the special edition and said this is what it should look like!

frank678 said:

George Lucas showed his team his personal ib tech print to the team making the special edition and said this is what it should look like!

Too bad they didn't listen.

Do IB prints deteriorate/degrade in any way, as far as anyone knows..? Or do they always maintain there exact image qualities for an indefinite period of time?

Another quandary...When theaters played the movies in the day, how does one determine, or even know, what equipment was used to display said movie in said theater? Was there only one professional projector used for every theater in this, and other lands? If a certain projector used a certain type of bulb, or other piece of equipment, could that have tainted the way the filmed look in any way? Is it possible that the screen itself could have displayed the image differently from one theater to another?

It's really quite amazing to think of how many variables could have played a factor into what each of us saw, or thought we saw, when we saw it. It must be factored in. Just because a certain person says "This IS how it looked in 1977" doesn't always mean that is how it looked to me, or to others who saw it at there local theater. Now if we all saw the same movie, in the same theater, using the exact same everything, then, and only then, could one, or a group of people say, "This is how it was" IMHO

dlvh

Mike Verta has talked about this kind of thing before.  According to him, scanning Technicolor prints is possible, but getting any kind of usable result requires the latest and greatest in scanning equipment, and that sure as hell ain't cheap.  The high contrast of the prints is such that duplicating them using traditional methods is impossible.

As far as colour is concerned, provided they are stored properly they will never fade, and therefore make excellent references.  The dye matrix master was made directly from the negative and thus the Tech prints are one generation closer to the source than regular 35mm, potentially yielding higher detail (though they're still fairly soft—the high contrast makes them look somewhat sharper than they actually are).  Because of the way they were made, no two have exactly the same colour balance, although they are pretty close to each other on the whole.  Extreme deviations may occasionally appear on a few of the prints, but these are due to human error in the lab and should not be considered representative of the film's true look.  There is a possibility that the colour timing isn't exactly the same as it was for standard 35mm anyway, since going from the negative and not the existing interpositive means it would have had to be done over again, but presumably they got it close enough not to worry overmuch about this.

The different colour balance inherent in 70's projection bulbs means that putting it through a neutral light source will yield inaccuracy.  This must be compensated for to get a meaningful result, or else the image won't show enough of the warmth it was intended to have.

And yes, unfortunately they all seem to have had their first reel hacked off and replaced with Eastman versions containing the Episode IV crawl, so there just isn't as good a version out there of the film's beginning as there ought to be.

Thank you both poita and hairy_hen for this information!

The information you've provided here is invaluable, and would explain how individual prints can, and do vary slightly, and how people might perceive images differently from another persons perception of how it might have been, or looked at a given time. 

poita said:

Every cinema experience would have been quite different depending on the print, film stock, the size of the screen, number of foot lamberts, the type of screen, its colour, its reflectivity, the amount of ambient light and even where you sat in the cinema etc.

In the 70s in Australia, nearly all projectors were carbon-arc projectors. That is, they work kind of like a welder, two carbon rods are held near earch other and the 'arc' of elecrtricity between them provides the light for the projector. You had to keep slowly winding the carbon rods inwards towards each other as they burned away, and replace them sometimes in between reels. Carbon arc rods have a pretty fixed colour temperature, this is easily catered for.

Actually, regardless of how they are stored, IB prints do fade, all film stock fades no matter what it is. A 30+ year old IB print will look a lot better than other prints, but will still have shifted somewhat, and it depends how it was stored, how many times it was shown, if it was lubricated correctly etc.

There have been times that restorers have had to go to the IB print. For example The Battle of Britain, when they went to the colour separations to make the DVD they found they were in appalling shape and not fit for use. So they found a truly prisitine IB print and Ted Turner used that for the transfer.

I recently stumbled across that actual print of TBoB that was used to make the DVD, it was up for sale for $5000, and is the best quality print I think I have ever seen.

You can get very good results scanning a good IB print, it won't have the dynamic range of the original negative, but if it was printed well then you can get close. These days it is not usually necessary to do multiple scan passes if scanning a print, the dynamic range and SNR of current sensor technology, especially those from Sony is so good that you can get it all in a single pass by using the correct gamma curves, or scanning in high bit depth and using a LUT. As the dynamic range of a print is already compressed, you can usually get it all in one go, unless it is unusually dense, which would only be the case if you shot extremely underexposed.

With a neg the dynamic range is so high that it may in some cases still make sense to do a multiple pass scan.

I've never heard of an IB print fading; I've had trailers from the 50's that look perfect, and there's stuff dating back to the 30's on nitrate that's supposed to look outstanding.  IB matrices can widely vary though.  I've had 3 or 4 prints of Thunderball over the years, and only 1 had perfect color registration.  The others were off.  I don't think that was due to fading, but more due to processing.

poita said:

We are lucky there is an imbibition print of Star Wars at all. Star Wars would have been the last big release to get an IB print I would wager.

Technicolor had already stopped producing IB prints at all in the early 70s, All Star Wars IB prints were produced at the one remaining facility in the world, in the UK. They shut down in 1978 and sold the gear to China. Had that happened a year earlier, there would be no IB prints of Star Wars for us to try and find.

 

I'm not positive, but in the States I believe the last big title was Godfather 2.  In the UK, most likely it was Star wars.  Would be interesting to hear for sure though.

Actually, Technicolor had a lab in Italy I believe, that remained open until '79 or '80.  I've heard there is actual IB prints of Empire Strikes Back in Italy, but whether this was a one off test print for Lucas's archive or not, I don't know.  I did have a trailer for Grey LAdy Down (79) that was IB and had dutch subtitles, so likely that was from the Italy lab.

poita said:

Every cinema experience would have been quite different depending on the print, film stock, the size of the screen, number of foot lamberts, the type of screen, its colour, its reflectivity, the amount of ambient light and even where you sat in the cinema etc.

In the 70s in Australia, nearly all projectors were carbon-arc projectors. That is, they work kind of like a welder, two carbon rods are held near earch other and the 'arc' of elecrtricity between them provides the light for the projector. You had to keep slowly winding the carbon rods inwards towards each other as they burned away, and replace them sometimes in between reels. Carbon arc rods have a pretty fixed colour temperature, this is easily catered for.

 

This is true.  You have carbon arc, incandescent, and Xenon.  I've never seen a carbon arc presentation, but incandescent gives off a warmish hue, while Xenon gives off a blu-ish hue.  The difference to me when I converted was night and day.

Hey Mike, did you get to those reference prints yet? I'd like to see how yours may differ from some others.

dlvh said:

Hey Mike, did you get to those reference prints yet? I'd like to see how yours may differ from some others.

Not yet, sorry... hopefully in the next couple days.

poita said:

I've never heard of an IB print fading; I've had trailers from the 50's that look perfect, and there's stuff dating back to the 30's on nitrate that's supposed to look outstanding.  IB matrices can widely vary though.  I've had 3 or 4 prints of Thunderball over the years, and only 1 had perfect color registration.  The others were off.  I don't think that was due to fading, but more due to processing.

They definitely fade, just nowhere near as fast as other stocks. in 1996 I had  two IB prints to work on for a restoration,  both struck one after the other in 1972, one had faded noticebaly more than the other. One had been kept in a temp controlled film archive, the other in the general office area in a desk. If kept well, the fading over a decade or three is pretty minimal, but eventually all things chemical change with time.

You also get considerably colour differences between prints done at different times, so they are not the be-all and end-all of colour references. You could have three different people print from a neg and get three different results. IB prints tend to be more contrasty too.

However, for Star Wars, an IB print will be the closest we can get to knowing roughly what the colour was like back in 1977. If kept well it won't have changed much. It would have looked a bit different at every cinema anyway, but it is a great starting point for colour restoration. I'm very excited by the prospect of getting to know those colours again after the odd colour pallete of the bluray releases.

When you say "Fade" what exactly do you mean in film stock terms? I know what the terminology of fading means in general, but does film stock fade differently than say, photographs or pigments used in painting? Is it different with each print? Do the prints colors loose saturation, or become a different color, like we all have seen, to a pinkish-red, or can it be a myriad of things?