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StarWarsLegacy.com - The Official Thread — Page 58

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I love all the clips that have been posted so far Mike, if not only for the restoration work then your analysis and thoughts on each shot. Really interesting stuff for a Star Wars fan.

A couple years ago when I was working on pulling the most out of the 2006 bonus DVD as possible, I came across tons of things that seemed pretty weird to me, not knowing much about how everything in the film was done, or in 70's film at all.

There are some of these shots I am personally very interested in knowing your thoughts about, and maybe it would be nice as future videos about your restoration work on them. I didn't want to clutter your forum with this so I'm going to post them here instead.

First of all: Splicing glue marks. (is that the correct term?) They are all over the film but especially in almost every shot's first or last frame in the scenes on Tatooine. Did they appear like this in the tech prints? If so, what will you do to clean them up? Some examples:

In the Death Star battle there's this shot at around timecode 1.44.26 in the 2006 bonus DVD that has a line running over it on the right side. What is it? Is it in the tech print too and how will it be handled?

At around timecode 1.45.29 there's a shot of a Tie fighter chasing an X-wing and the starfield is full of dark "blobs" that appear in different areas during the shot.

And here's one I'm especially interested in what the heck it is. A cockpit shot of Biggs around 1.48.40 where there's one frame where the background element turns blue behind his face and has some big black mark in it.

And finally, a cockpit shot at 1.49.52 where a big horizontal line appears in one frame.

I would love to see videos about these shots in the future if possible.

Thanks for everything that has been posted so far!

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Splicing/glue marks are a problem inherent to anamorphic film because it uses so much of the horizontal area.  To combat the flashes often seen at edits, projectionists began using a projector aperture gate that was narrower in the vertical, meaning that when projected Star Wars was actually 2.39-2.4. 

As for the other damage in those frames, normally I'd remove them!  Also, this sort of thing is precisely what the Legacy forum is for, so no worries there!

_Mike

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 (Edited)

mverta said:

Splicing/glue marks are a problem inherent to anamorphic film because it uses so much of the horizontal area.  To combat the flashes often seen at edits, projectionists began using a projector aperture gate that was narrower in the vertical, meaning that when projected Star Wars was actually 2.39-2.4. 

As for the other damage in those frames, normally I'd remove them!  Also, this sort of thing is precisely what the Legacy forum is for, so no worries there!

_Mike

 ^^ this. Thus why some people refer to scope sometimes as 2.35 (the ratio on the film) or 2.39/2.40 (the ratio projected on the screen). 

And those splice glue marks are on all scope films. Nothing to worry about. It's what holds the film together on the negative. 

What’s the internal temperature of a TaunTaun? Luke warm.

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To give a visual explanation...

In order to join shots together in the pre-digital era you either primarily used tape or glue (cement). Tape was used for the editing booth (easier to take off and on) and cement was used for joining the negative (much stronger and cleaner than tape). To show how they used cement to join film, here's this great video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7s_kB2_C668

You can imagine how nerve wrecking being a negative cutter could be. One bad splice and the shot is ruined. 

Now why do we see this residue on scope films and not others? Well, let's look at the spaces between frames in a scope film frame: 

Do you see how there's very little space? Now let's look at a sample of film frames from the 1.33 Academy Ratio (note: 1.66 and 1.85 aspect ratios are cropped versions of the academy aspect ratio)

There is MUCH more empty space between frames (the reason for this was so that films could keep their 1.33 aspect ratio when sound was added in the 20s). Because of this, the cement doesn't "spill" into the frame. 

Make sense?

What’s the internal temperature of a TaunTaun? Luke warm.

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It's been suggested that for certain shots in the original version, the original camera negative of those shots is genuinely gone for good (through some combination of wear and tear, that defective composite stock, or just not surviving the '97 cleaning process). If that's true and they attempted to do a full OCN restoration of the original cut, would something like this project be the best source to plug the holes? Or would they use another method?

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They'd have to use a print to show them the structure if there's no negative (i.e. the o-neg is configured to the 1997 SE).

[ Scanning stuff since 2015 ]

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mverta said:

Another shot:

Falcon Peels Off

It's got a luminance error in it, since corrected.  Something invisible in P3 which popped right out as soon as I put it online, but I didn't feel like remaking the video. :)

 That engine glow is gorgeous in the restoration.

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RU.08 said:

They'd have to use a print to show them the structure if there's no negative (i.e. the o-neg is configured to the 1997 SE).

 As far as I know, they still had the three strip seperation masters to work from.

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We know the ON is incomplete at best, and I do not believe they have intact 3-strip masters, at all.  There are WAY too many lack-of-detail and/or suspect internal color problem shots present in every official restoration for me to believe that.  If they have them, then somebody should be shot, because you'd have to be trying to fuck things up that badly.

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For the record, what was the first official restoration? The defcol/faces/gout transfer?

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 (Edited)

I think it was the 1997 version. Before that my understanding is they just scanned the o-negs in Telecines to produce the SD outputs for TV/Laserdisc/VHS. The negatives were cleaned for the 1993 transfers, I don't know if that qualifies them as "restorations" though.

In any case, new theatrical prints were struck for the 1997 SE.

[ Scanning stuff since 2015 ]

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RU.08 said:

I think it was the 1997 version. Before that my understanding is they just scanned the o-negs in Telecines to produce the SD outputs for TV/Laserdisc/VHS. The negatives were cleaned for the 1993 transfers, I don't know if that qualifies them as "restorations" though.

In any case, new theatrical prints were struck for the 1997 SE.

I'm pretty sure IPs were used for all pre-97 releases.

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Interesting, I didn't know that. But whatever they used it would only have been one film source per reel (whether a negative or a print) per release, right?

[ Scanning stuff since 2015 ]

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mverta said:

We know the ON is incomplete at best, and I do not believe they have intact 3-strip masters, at all.  There are WAY too many lack-of-detail and/or suspect internal color problem shots present in every official restoration for me to believe that.  If they have them, then somebody should be shot, because you'd have to be trying to fuck things up that badly.

 Didn't George Lucas claim to  Christopher Nolan that they found the 3 strip was unusable.

I mean somebody in another thread said they saw that in an interview i have not seen it myself.

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skyjedi2005 said:

mverta said:

We know the ON is incomplete at best, and I do not believe they have intact 3-strip masters, at all.  There are WAY too many lack-of-detail and/or suspect internal color problem shots present in every official restoration for me to believe that.  If they have them, then somebody should be shot, because you'd have to be trying to fuck things up that badly.

 Didn't George Lucas claim to  Christopher Nolan that they found the 3 strip was unusable.

I mean somebody in another thread said they saw that in an interview i have not seen it myself.

 Unusable in 1995-7 doesn't necessarily mean unusable today, though. Wasn't the issue supposedly with alignment of one color channel?

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poita said:

RU.08 said:

They'd have to use a print to show them the structure if there's no negative (i.e. the o-neg is configured to the 1997 SE).

 As far as I know, they still had the three strip seperation masters to work from.

 

http://www.dga.org/Events/2011/04-april-2011/George-Lucas-on-Star-Wars.aspx

Around the 51 minute mark Lucas explains that the cyan channel was all out of sync and useless so they couldn't use the three strip masters.

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That is correct, he has stated a couple of times that the Cyan was out of sync, but other reports state the seps were used for some of the restoration, so they definitely have them, but probably didn't use it for much for the SE.

As to whether it would now be usable is an interesting question.

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Some of the ON was destroyed for good too, according to this article:

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2013/09/once-lost-star-wars-related-short-to-screen-for-the-first-time-in-33-years/3/

"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. If you compare it to something like that, this isn’t as risky because we’re into the digital scanning era. But of course, anything can happen."

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Hopefully that guy's iffy memory  ("I think" and "some kind of warm chemical bath") is incorrect. But wow. That sounds... entirely unprofessional.

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mverta said:

In 25 years as a professional, I've found labeling people "professional" means very little.

There's a bit of amusing circularity here.

A picture is worth a thousand words. Post 102 is worth more.

I’m late to the party, but I think this is the best song. Enjoy!

—Teams Jetrell Fo 1, Jetrell Fo 2, and Jetrell Fo 3