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Info: POSSIBLY FOUND - Star Wars A New Hope Technicolor I.B. dye transfer print - random post on reddit — Page 6

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Jabba didnt have a tail in 77 :p

mike, Until you are able to properly project this, any chance you can get your hands on a old transparency/overhead projector? sometimes thrift stores have them for like 20 bucks. could be agood way to get some larger, fully lit pictures.

Preferred Saga:
1/2: Hal9000
3: L8wrtr
4/5: Adywan
6-9: Hal9000

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nightstalkerpoet said:

Jabba didnt have a tail in 77 :p

You don't know that! Greedo neither says that he does, nor that he doesn't.

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 (Edited)


Baronlando said:
Harris said that several years ago, could be wrong but I think things have changed.


I went to home theater forum to see if I could find any recent comments re: IB prints from Mr. Harris. Well, apparently, they've updated the site (I haven't been there in a while and had to get a new password to log in) and I'm having a lot of trouble getting any results for anything other that posts that are a few months old (!?)

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Mielr said:

Not to be a wet blanket, but according to Robert Harris, Tech prints can't be transferred satisfactorily because of their density & they best serve as color reference, not much else.

There are some dissenting views out there & you can take it up with Mr. Harris over at home theater forum, if you care to. ;-)

I'm not sure what he means by that, The Battle of Britain was transferred from an IB print as the 3 strip masters were in bad shape, and it looks great. Perhaps he was talking about striking a new neg from an IB print, or maybe on flying spot telecine systems.

It is more difficult to scan, and with older scanners you would get noisy shadows, but a current sensor and light source like I am using has no trouble. An automated system might struggle though.

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poita said:

...a current sensor and light source like I am using has no trouble.

 What kind of setup have you got, anyway? If you don't mind me asking.

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The light source is a pulsed array of Red Green and Blue LEDs, it can pulse incredibly quickly so acts like a 'flash' or strobe and will freeze any film movement. This allows for a continuous speed scan, but the rig also has the ability to stop the frame in place, pulse each LED array in turn to a 2K mono sensor. This gives you 3 images, one red, one blue, one green.

If you use a colour sensor, your colour resolution is reduced by the bayer mask, and you get 50% of the resolution in the green channel and only 25% each for Blue and Green. Some of this is recovered via clever algorithms, but you never get the full resolution that you can with using a mono sensor. Each channel is captured in either 12bit or 16bit per pixel, and a LUT is applied to ensure the full dynamic range of the film is captured, as the toe and shoulder of the film needs more 'steps' to be captured fully.

The 3 mono images are then combined into a single colour image.

For important scans each channel is captured 3 times and averaged to remove sensor noise, so there are actually 9 images per captured frame.

If speed is of the essence, then a 2K colour sensor is used and the film is run at 24fps and captured in real time at 48bit colour. This still gives an astoundingly good result, and is a good choice if the film is already graded and you just want an accurate transfer. The mono setup is really for when you want the headroom to do corrections in post.

 

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That's quite a system.  How do you automate the film movement and digital capture?  Is this your own proprietary setup?

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In simple terms the sensor is triggered via a laser that counts sprockets and the light source flashes in synch with the sensor basically. The length of the flash is adjustable, as is the LUT used depending on the density of the film.

The film transport is sprocketless and the film tension is adjustable in real time via software. Anyway, I don't want to derail the thread further, but that it the overview of how it works.

As the links from Mike show, IB prints can transfer beautifully as long as you know what you are doing.

 

Check out the Battle of Britain DVD if you want to see how an IB transfer looks.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZ-2X609LRE

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poita said:

In simple terms the sensor is triggered via a laser that counts sprockets and the light source flashes in synch with the sensor basically. The length of the flash is adjustable, as is the LUT used depending on the density of the film.

The film transport is sprocketless and the film tension is adjustable in real time via software. Anyway, I don't want to derail the thread further, but that it the overview of how it works.

As the links from Mike show, IB prints can transfer beautifully as long as you know what you are doing.

 

Check out the Battle of Britain DVD if you want to see how an IB transfer looks.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZ-2X609LRE

It's on NETFLIX in HD too. Looks better than Battle Of The Bulge or A Bridge Too Far.

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IMHO nearly nothing beats a good old fashion Technicolor movie of the 30's, 40' or early 50's. There are so many good ones made during that Silver Screen era, but it is impossible to name them all. The beauty of a Technicolor movie can be a thrill to watch...another reason why this thread is so interesting, and it is my way of keeping, mostly on topic.

But, just in case you are not familiar with the beauty Technicolor can bring out in a "subject", here is Rita to demonstrate it...

 

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Ahhh Miss Hayworth....

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Mielr said:

Read this if you want to know what 20th Century Fox stupidly did to their entire Technicolor catalog (post #8):


http://www.hometheaterforum.com/topic/323596-help-required-what-happened-at-fox-in-the-1970s/?p=3956832

I didn't know this had happened in the 70's..the fire at George Eastman's house or the trashing of valuable film footage at FOX, how stupid of them!

I guess I hadn't realized also, that the digital format, isn't the end-all and be-all either. It is very susceptible to possibly being "out dated" and not backwards compatible. If you read the above linked articles, it does a lot better job of explaining it than I can. The point being, if we don't transfer these films to old time film stock, we may lose them forever.

Mike do you have plans on duplicating this film on to other film stock, or are you only going digital with the preservation? Is it even possibly to transfer a film unto new film stock nowadays?

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I had a quote of 7000 british pounds to get a negative made from an IB print.

There are a few places that will do it, but that was the cheapest I had found.

It is still the case that when a cinema has oultasted its license to project a film that the print is often destroyed. There is a beautiful IB print of apocalypse now sitting at a cinema in QLD Australia, and their license to show it has run out, and the film company has asked them to destroy the print.

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They never learn, do they? Seems like an awful waste to destroy a perfectly good print. Do the studios require proof of destruction?

Now I'm having visions of some crazy person concealing old film prints in their house, like a scene out of Fahrenheit 451. Or maybe it's just someone I know...

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Where were you in '77?

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Shhhhhhh!

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SilverWook said:

They never learn, do they? Seems like an awful waste to destroy a perfectly good print. Do the studios require proof of destruction?

Now I'm having visions of some crazy person concealing old film prints in their house, like a scene out of Fahrenheit 451. Or maybe it's just someone I know...

I think I've heard of some major actor with a stash of fenced old 35s...

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

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I do know of someone who has 35mm prints of all 3 OT films (in addition to a lot of other 35mm films that he screens at his house regularly). He works at a place that does telecine work, etc.

He usually works late at night or early in the morning, so I've never had a chance to meet him to ask if the prints are SE or OOT.

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nightstalkerpoet said:


Jabba didnt have a tail in 77 :p


Not only that, he was a human with an Irish accent! :-P

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If only we could create a kickstarter to purchase the necessary technology to scan this thing at 4K. We would pass the goal ($300k?) with flying colors... if we made it clear what we were doing with the thing. Of course, at that point the stormtroopers would come down hard on us.

Regardless, this is still very exciting. Here's hoping something great can still come out of this!

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There is, all-in-all, accurate information in this thread :)

 

IB's are exceedingly rare; pristine IB's essentially extinct.  Fading on a pristine print is essentially negligible at this point.  Scanning is a big deal. At 4k, scanning multiple passes also requires 30-40TB of storage.  In Star Wars' case, absent the negative, absent complete color sep masters, a combination of scans from IB prints and low-fade Eastman prints would yield a fantastic restoration.

 

_Mike

View the Restoration and join the discussion at StarWarsLegacy.com!

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40TB is no issue these days (and that is just for storage, not editing), but scanning is a real PITA, and not many people are used to working with 4K that haven't had to do it for a living. Even then a lot of work I used to do was delivered at 2K because 4K is so much more unwieldy to work with.

It isn't something you can do for a bit of fun, it requires real workstations, real dedication, a real workflow and a lack of other life :)

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Can we just not set up a paypal donation to help with some of the scanning costs?