StarWarsLegacy.com - The Official Thread — Page 40

mverta said:

That's funny...  throwing out the entire EU gave them credibility in my book.

Same here.

g-force said:

They shouldn't have stopped at the EU, in my opinion. :)

They didn't, they just disregard it ;)

Asaki said:

They also may have lost just the teeniest, tiniest, smallest, most insignificant amount of credibility when they threw the Holocron into a blazing furnace meant for biohazard waste, and maybe just a fraction of a fraction of a percentage of credibility when they kicked LucasArts in there with it and slammed the door shut behind them.

I don't know much about the EU so I'm not going to comment on it, but as for LucasArts, frankly it deserved to be dissolved. But the way Disney went about it was stupid.

My favorite Before/After so far - X-Wings in formation:

Red 5 Standing By

Enjoy!

_Mike

Thanks for another video, Mike, they're always interesting & informative.

How many hours would you guess you've put into that single shot?

God I really don't know.  It was spread over months because whenever I feel fatigued on a shot and ready to make some sort of compromise to get it over with, I leave and move on until I'm ready to finish it right.  But also, this shot needed a lot more than most!

That's incredible!
You do amazing work, Mike.

I guess at 4K the difference is probably quite big. At this resolution, the main difference is the color, mainly the black level, which is of course completely off in the untouched scan video.

Harmy said:

I guess at 4K the difference is probably quite big. At this resolution, the main difference is the color, mainly the black level, which is of course completely off in the untouched scan video.

I think the channel realignment is also very visible in this comparison, at least at full screen.

That is undeniably true but after a simple color adjustment the raw footage does look much better than before. Plus if the channels are off by a different amount on different elements, the misalignment must have been introduced in the original compositing and not in the making of the print and thus realigning the elements separately (not to mention harvesting detail from neighboring frames, which was never even on the negative) is an act of revisionism. All of that is of course ok for Mike's version, since he isn't going for 100% original and I completely agree that it is amazing what can be pulled from film but I don't think it would fit a proper restoration.

Well we all want a proper restoration, don't we, Petr?  So I'm curious, if you were me, and you know two things:  1) Not all of the channel misalignments are on the negative, and 2) It is impossible to tell which is which... which ones would you fix?

Fix none of them, and you don't have a "proper" restoration.  Fix the wrong ones and you don't have a "proper" restoration.  This goes for all the other elements in the frame which can't be determined as print or negative as well; a simple color adjustment is not a proper restoration, either. Ditto not recruiting data from adjacent frames, when we know each frame of a print is incomplete compared to the negative.  I struggle with this every day.  How would you have handled it?

Regarding the primary difference being resolution, I'd certainly have to agree that's a large factor, given that 4K is 25x higher resolution than DVD. :)

As for the blue-green tint, that's part of what's going on in this next pass - globabl color adjustment.  The X-Wings were not painted blue, nor intended to be blueish - that's straight from the horse's mouth - though the effects of lighting and compositing were anticipated.  The original TIE fighters, for example, were painted a sort of medium blue-gray, knowing that they would blow out to gray in the filming. The most likely culprit for the blue-ish tint is the overall blooming of the blue channel in composites.  It's why the stars tend to have a blue tint - it's just a photographic anomaly; the blue channel bloomed more in the photography than the others. But of course, it could absolutely have been color grading, too.

_Mike

The fact is that the original elements are now damaged enough that nobody could say definitively that any frame could be "restored" to its exact original appearance. How would we ever know what that is? That's the beauty and drawback of photochemical processes.  And as such, people can cherry pick what should or shouldn't be as they see fit.  I try to be as sensitive and respectful as I can, as a lifelong fan, student of the aesthetic, and professional restoration artist.

Wouldn't the solution to this problem be to shoot only for a theatrical release print preservation (warts and all) rather than trying to shoot for what is/was on the negative?

You'd need to check against at least one good early '77 Eastman Kodak 35mm print to rule out any issues introduced by the TechIB process, but this should involve far less guesswork than trying to guess what's on the negative.

Just my 2c. Keep up the good work, Mike.

Ultimately, the clip I just posted is as about as clear a demonstration of what this project's goal is as any.

Print preservation is a different project - sort of like preserving a cassette recording you made off the radio of "Beat It" in 1985.  It would certainly be no more representative of the actual fsource; it would just be a different kind of different - especially Kodak prints, which are not as detailed as a Tech print.  And no two prints are the same.  So which do you use? That said, my process here is labor-intensive but fairly straightforward.  I'm not creating any new elements, merely finding some detail in adjacent (and vertical) frames within a print or from other prints.  The goal is to get as close to the source as possible, and I honestly don't know how else to do that. I also know that there is absolutely no way in hell this project is going to make everyone happy; that's impossible.  But I do know that the final product will not draw attention to itself as a restoration save for the few of us who know every frame and will delight or bristle at the quality.  Rather, the goal is to see the film, take every frame for granted, and become lost in the experience of watching it, which was the film's goal from the very beginning.  Let that be preserved.

I'm sorry, I didn't mean to be a dick - what you've been able to do there is pretty amazing - in my original comment, I just wanted to say that the difference can't be properly appreciated at this resolution.

And I actually agree that preserving print quality is too low of a goal for a good restoration but since you have multiple prints, couldn't you just compare them and see, which flaws (in this particular case misalignment) they have in common and preserve those - In this particular case, the misalignment of separate elements could only have been introduced during the compositing and therefore was definitely a part of the original negative of the movie and any misalignment introduced at any other stage of the process would have to be consistent over all the elements, so if you looked at a Kodak or Eastman print and the over-all misalignment wasn't there, you could safely assume, that it wasn't on the o-neg and was introduced in the I.B. printing process and if it was there on three or more different prints, it should be quite safe to assume that it was on the o-neg.

This kind of scrutiny wouldn't of course be normal for a standard restoration but you set the bar so high with the level of scrutiny that you're doing for your project, that doing this doesn't seem that far fetched and, since as a result you could do a single alignment of the entire frame and arrive at something actually closer to the o-neg, it actually seems easier than rotoscoping and re-aligning all the elements separately.

Especially if those prints were made using different techniques. I've always felt that being able to combine information from several different prints into a single image was the main advantage of Legacy and a great way to arrive at something that is much closer to the original source but not only in terms of its detail but also in terms of its flaws.

Absolutely, and of course I compare the prints constantly.  That said, if you're looking at the negative and you see misalignments, you know that's it.  It's the negative.  If you're looking at a print?  Especially a Kodak print? That's an IP/IN and a print stage all of which might've done their own thing, and you just don't know what's what.  No print can be held up as a definitive anything. Now, because of the shitty B&L lenses they shot Star Wars with, chromatic abberations (which look like misalignments) are all over the entire film, so you have to sort of know which is which, and sometimes that can be hard to tell, as well.

But you know what?  If this was a "proper" restoration being done from the negative, I'll bet you anything they'd align the channels, because when you're looking at this stuff on a 4k monitor and it's giant in front of you, it looks so obviously wrong you can't really turn your back on it in good conscience.  You'd have to have a dictum from on high that said, "warts and all," and...man...that'd be so rare.  Still, I have to work with what I've got, and I always follow my instincts.  At least I know nobody will see this or any shot and think it looks bad. And for sure, I'd be doing things differently if I had the negative.  Aligning the channels yields a sharpness without having to sharpen, for example; a sharpness the negative absolutely would have over a print.  So you gain some quality, you lose some purity?  This is all maddening.  At least it's not a CG flyby done in Electric Image anymore....

_Mike

I do agree with you Harmy about the flaws, what I liked most about negative 1's release was the grain levels changing during every scene with optical effects in it. I was reading this forum page (it's very fascinating), and paid particular attention to this comment by Jim Wicks:

I have color restored over 200 classic motion pictures to date, and picked up quite a number of observations.
Typically, I have noticed that the opticals change at a much different rate than the body of the film.
The opticals are the opening title sequence, fades, cross dissolves, and closing credits.
It's as though I am working on two completely different films: the opticals and the body of the film present different challenges.

I suppose the million-dollar question is whether or not Mr. Wicks, having discovered the huge, non-original discrepancies between opticals and the body of the films, decided to intentionally leave them mismatched or not.  I would be surprised to learn that he didn't balance them back to their original appearance, versus preserving the way they'd degraded while in storage.

_Mike