team negative1 - star wars 1977 - 35mm theatrical version (Released) — Page 40

The bigger question is, if there IS a team, why do we still have to stomach -1's asinine formatting?  I'm pretty sure we didn't on the blog, but it's been awhile.

Joel said:

As a former post-production person, I am picturing a workflow after manually cleaning the film:
1) scanning 
2) digital cleanup
3) color correction
4) audio sync
5) make a video master

If I were the project manager, I'd have 12 people each take 10 minutes of one film, do digital cleanup (with predetermined rules from team -1) for a couple of weeks, then send it all back for final color correction. Is this not feasible? Too much chaos introduced? 

That is assuming you have 12 people of equal experience, that can all do film restoration work, and that have the hardware capable of handling the job.

It is hard enough to find 2 people that have the time, software, experience and hardware :)

It also assumes that the 'master' person has over 100TB of HDDs to handle the scans, a backup copy of them and the works in progress.

I have no idea how many are on their team or what their skill level is or how much hardware and software they own, but it is a big job however you slice it.

Expectation levels are quite high too, so quality-creep might be playing its part.

I thought "Team -1" was 3 people.

Aren't they all just bingowings?

team_negative1 said:

poita said:

Joel said:

As a former post-production person, I am picturing a workflow after manually cleaning the film:
1) scanning
2) digital cleanup
3) color correction
4) audio sync
5) make a video master

If I were the project manager, I'd have 12 people each take 10 minutes of one film, do digital cleanup (with predetermined rules from team -1) for a couple of weeks, then send it all back for final color correction. Is this not feasible? Too much chaos introduced?

That is assuming you have 12 people of equal experience, that can all do film restoration work, and that have the hardware capable of handling the job.

It is hard enough to find 2 people that have the time, software, experience and hardware :)



It also assumes that the 'master' person has over 100TB of HDDs to handle the scans, a backup copy of them and the works in progress.

I have no idea how many are on their team or what their skill level is or how much hardware and software they own, but it is a big job however you slice it.



Expectation levels are quite high too, so quality-creep might be playing its part.

A couple of weeks will clean a few seconds of film.

Team Negative1

TV's Frink said:

As soon as he posts his password, we can all jump in and knock this puppy out in a week.

I'm not sure that would actually help unless someone can also show us how to enter a linefeed into the password field.

TV's Frink said:

At the risk of sounding more stupid than usual...what's a linefeed?

US-ASCII (and character-sets derived from it, including Latin-1 and UTF-8) has two character-codes that signify "move to the next line":

10: Line Feed, a.k.a., New Line

13: Carriage Return

http://www.asciitable.com/index/asciifull.gif

*n*x systems (e.g., GNU/Linux) use a single Line Feed to represent newlines. Classic pre-OSX Mac systems used a single Carriage Return to represent newlines. Microsoft systems (e.g., MS-DOS and Windows) use a Carriage Return followed by a Line Feed to represent newlines.

These terms come from the typewriter days of old...

Carriage Return -> return the carriage to the start position

Line Feed -> move to the next line on the paper

AntcuFaalb said:

TV's Frink said:

At the risk of sounding more stupid than usual...what's a linefeed?

US-ASCII (and character-sets derived from it, including Latin-1 and UTF-8) have two character-codes that signify "move to the next line":

10: Line Feed, a.k.a., New Line

13: Carriage Return

http://www.asciitable.com/index/asciifull.gif

*n*x systems (e.g., GNU/Linux) use a single Line Feed to represent newlines. Classic pre-OSX Mac systems used a single Carriage Return to represent newlines. Microsoft systems (e.g., MS-DOS and Windows) use a Carriage Return followed by a Line Feed to represent newlines.

These terms come from the typewriter days of old...

Carriage Return -> return the carriage to the start position

Line Feed -> move to the next line on the paper

And, I would think, carried over because dot-matrix printers are just like that.

timdiggerm said:

AntcuFaalb said:

TV's Frink said:

At the risk of sounding more stupid than usual...what's a linefeed?

US-ASCII (and character-sets derived from it, including Latin-1 and UTF-8) have two character-codes that signify "move to the next line":

10: Line Feed, a.k.a., New Line

13: Carriage Return

http://www.asciitable.com/index/asciifull.gif

*n*x systems (e.g., GNU/Linux) use a single Line Feed to represent newlines. Classic pre-OSX Mac systems used a single Carriage Return to represent newlines. Microsoft systems (e.g., MS-DOS and Windows) use a Carriage Return followed by a Line Feed to represent newlines.

These terms come from the typewriter days of old...

Carriage Return -> return the carriage to the start position

Line Feed -> move to the next line on the paper

And, I would think, carried over because dot-matrix printers are just like that.

Yes, and teletype machines (UNIX was developed on one).

Man did the air get sucked out of that joke :(

Like David Bowman re-entering the Discovery.

Fantastic work. Pleasure to see this project.

Joel said:

team_negative1 said:

A couple of weeks will clean a few seconds of film.

Team Negative1

Argh - forgive my frustration here, but this vague, grammatically-challenged proclamation doesn't even address my question, it just re-states what I already said - in essence, "This is taking a long time."

My question is: WHY does it take a couple of weeks? I'm curious as to why it's taking so long, that's all. 

Since physically cleaning a few frames takes less than 1 second, we must be talking about digital cleanup.

I'm a digital media guy, so I'm having a hard time understanding why it would take someone with a modern computer *weeks* to do anything.  Photoshop, After Effects - is the "team" using these? If not, why not? 

Am I grossly oversimplifying?! Probably!

The team is using a program that I've worked with quite a bit. (PM me for the name.)

The reason it takes weeks is that:

(1) Despite the fact that this particular program has an incredible state-of-the-art automatic dirt/dust fix tool, you have to examine each frame individually to guarantee that the tool didn't produce any unwanted artifacts (e.g., "cleaning" someone's pupil). Furthermore, you have to modify the settings to work best with each and every shot.

(2) If you're careful and the automatic dirt/dust fix tool doesn't produce any unwanted artifacts, then you're most likely left with dirt/dust that you need to clean manually. This takes a long time.

(3) Other kinds of damage (e.g., scratches and tears) are much harder to fix.

(4) Each member of the team has a life outside of OT.com. They're only working in their free time.

In conclusion, it's not just about pushing buttons and waiting for progress bars to finish. The team has to painstakingly examine and restore each and every one of the ~175,000 frames in Star Wars.

If you want to better understand what's involved in digital film restoration, then please PM me and I'll hook you up with everything you need to try it out first-hand.