team negative1 - star wars 1977 - 35mm theatrical version (Released) — Page 30

TV's Frink said:

Ahhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!!!!!

Not crystal clear enough, you should be able to pick them. ;)

Hoth is pink-ish white! :p

Great examples! I'd love to hear the details on your new process. 

Owyn_Merrilin said:

Tobar said:

Harmy said:

And now imagine what kind of detail level could be achieved if they did a proper 4K scan of the original negative, when even a poor 1080p scan of the o-neg, that doesn't actually resolve much beyond 720p, can show more detail than a 4K scan of a projection print.

I wish that could still be done. This was taken from a recent article about the rediscovery of Black Angel, the short film originally shown before ESB:

Tanaka: I remember when we were working on the Star Wars restoration, that was a different process. I think we optically recreated interpositives. But in order to do this, it went through some kind of warm chemical bath cleansing. The weird thing about Star Wars was that it was made up of different film stocks, so it went through this bath and they didn’t know what would come out on the other end...

Parker: You mean if it would survive or not? ‘George we might destroy your entire film, but it’s... we think it’s going to be OK.’

Tanaka: There’s a space battle shot and a close-up on Hans Solo, and the original negative is coming out of this cleaning solution and it’s just acetate.

Parker: It’s all clear. Oh no, did the bath dissolve it?

Tanaka: Yeah, it dissolved it, depending on the film stock.

='(

 

That is absolutely horrendous, but at least the entire film wasn't destroyed. If it's Star Wars we're talking about, and not Empire or Jedi (which seems likely, considering how much worse the deterioration supposedly was on Star Wars, and how many stocks of varying quality it used), if Disney were to get serious about resoration, they could go back to a technicolor print, or maybe even the technicolor separation masters, and still wind up with something higher quality than you can get from a standard 35 mm release print. I'm sure that's what they had to do for the special edition, anyway -- there aren't exactly any scenes where it's just a black screen with a description of what's missing, afterall.

Even the 97 restoration had to use dupes made from the separation masters at certain areas. Perhaps the chemical bath was the reason why...

But yeah, any restoration of the original 1977 Star Wars will not come 100% from the original negatives. Perhaps a combination of OCN, separation dupes, interpositives/negatives. With today's technology, this is rather par for the course with typical restorations done (especially with much older films that rely on a lot more dupe material to reassemble). 

Man I hope Moth3r doesn't get too pissed off...

haha not at all, it's the Team's repeated ignoring of his requests to clean up their formatting. Also the fact that it's clearly -1 on the account.

TV's Frink said:

bkev said:

Man I hope Moth3r doesn't get too pissed off...

AS THE DEATH STAR TURNS!!!

lol

bkev said:

Also the fact that it's clearly -1 on the account.

Now, now.  It's all about plausible deniability.

Harmy said:

...while at first sight, the print seems better, because the BD bears unmistakable signs of the upscaling, when you look closely, the BD actually resolves more detail on the skin.

I fail to see how the Blu looks better =) It just looks like purple veined waxy man.

But okay.

Well, of course the colors are shit, this is the 2004 version after all, but the "waxiness" is there because of the upscaling from 1080p to 4K (waxy faces were never really one of the 2004 master's many problems) and there is simply more discernible detail in the pores on his skin on the BD and the scars on Hamill's face are much more visible.

I love this forum!

This is the only place in which people would discuss Luke's pores, Obi-wan's beard, and the snowflake on Chewbacca's foot seriously.

^_^

... well, maybe not that last one.

Well, the fact that the pores are specifically Luke's isn't the important part :-)
That's what I love the most about HD, how you can actually see these minute details on people's skin and then also fabrics and such - I find it fascinating and it gives a whole new dimension of reality to the viewing for me - whenever I compare some screenshots of different releases of movies over at caps-a-holic.com (and I do that often, when I'm trying to decide which release of a movie to buy or whether to not buy it at all if a clearly superior master isn't available in my country), I always go for details of people's faces, as these are always the most revealing as to which master is superior.

Harmy said:

...the "waxiness" is there because of the upscaling from 1080p to 4K...

 Not DNR?

Not really - check out the original image:

Do you really want a film look like a 4k scan from the original negative, when nothing close to that was ever seen in theaters? The generational losses that occur in the stages from original camera negative to release prints works miracles for sets, costumes, models and special effects. I fail to understand why anyone would like to see these films straight of the negatives when they were never made to be seen that way, that's making the films a huge disservice. You would see mattepaintings, make-up and effects work for what they really are instead of blending in nicely with the rest of the footage.

msycamore said:

Do you really want a film look like a 4k scan from the original negative, when nothing close to that was ever seen in theaters? The generational losses that occur in the stages from original camera negative to release prints works miracles for sets, costumes, models and special effects. I fail to understand why anyone would like to see these films straight of the negatives when they were never made to be seen that way, that's making the films a huge disservice. You would see mattepaintings, make-up and effects work for what they really are instead of blending in nicely with the rest of the footage.

Agreed. This is why I think that the best source for a restoration of the OOT would be IP prints.

Joel said:

The O-Neg is the intended finished product, not an unfinished product waiting to be somehow "corrected" by generational loss.

Doesn't the O- have none of the SPFX?

Furthermore, directors work under the assumption that some things will be hidden due to generational loss, so I'd hardly call the O- the "intended" finished product.

To make an analogy, HD audio restorations often don't go all the way back to original multi-track master tapes because that would require remixing rather than remastering, which can fundamentally change the music (e.g., the 40th Anniversary Edition of Jethro Tull's Aqualung).

If the SPFX isn't on the O-, then cobbling together a restoration from the O- and various intermediate print sources containing the SPFX would be similar to going back to the original multi-track master tapes for an HD audio restoration, which is a big no-no.

Joel said:

AntcuFaalb said:

Doesn't the O- have none of the SPFX?

No - you might be thinking of workprints?

http://www.theasc.com/magazine/starwars/articles/sped/ssws/pg1.htm said:

Fortunately, Fox's head of postproduction, Ted Gagliano, made the restoration of Star Wars a personal labor of love, working closely with YCM Labs, Pacific Title, Lucasfilm editorial, ILM and Skywalker Sound. Had the negative been constructed more conventionally, the first order of business would have been to wash it in a sulfur bath a 104F, then wipe it down by hand. But those four different film stocks couldn't be washed together; instead, they had to be separated and washed in batches. That meant dissecting the original Star Wars negative, washing it, and then reassembling it. "That made everybody suck in their breath, " Kennedy says, recalling the stressfull situation. "Thankfully, Robert Hart, the neg cutter on the second and third films, came in to put the negative back together. After doing various tests, we found out right away that nothing beats scanning original negative. Star Wars was an A-B neg cut, which meant that they could actually lift and slug original negative and send it back to ILM whenever we were enhancing a live-action shot. I think this is the first time someone has tried to bring a Seventies effects film back to the big screen."

Sadly, after 17 years, the CRI material had lost so much dye that every shot realized on that reversal stock had to be removed and recomposited from scratch in order to bring Star Wars back to its original glory. Soon, Kennedy had Star Wars Special Edition film editor Tom Christopher (at Skywalker Ranch) and visual effects editor Dave Tanaka (at ILM) searching to come up with the original effects elements so that these shots, as well as other less-than-perfect opticals, could be recomposited digitally.

OK, so maybe not none, but certainly some original shots are missing from the O-.

At this point the O- is so fucked up that I think using it for a restoration of the OOT would possibly lead to errors, such as leaving in the new wipes done for the 97SE by Pacific Titles.