Spielrock said:
Hi all,Long time lurker. Thought I'd sign up and post as I think it is great what Team Negative1 are doing here.
I've noticed a lot of talk about comparing this to the Blu-ray, if you understand the technical process of how these films are transferred from their dirty 35mm camera negatives to what you see when you pop in that disc... you'd see that comparing this to a blu-ray for quality/detail is just silly.
A company by the name of Lowry Digital who were responsible for the blu-ray transfers for the James Bond films, run the films through a digital film scanner that runs at a cost of about $300,000. They have over 700 terabytes of local storage and huge server farms. Not to mention the team that tackles all the footage once it has finished. I don't have much detail on how Star Wars was restored but I doubt it was anything less than this.
Looking forward to it.
Team -1 as I understand it built their own film scanner, and have kept the exact technical details of it private. Poita on the other hand bought a used $450,000 Imagica film scanner (in fact there's another one on eBay right now that is being sold with a cleaner as well here). MikeV has access to an industry-standard film scanner as well due to having friends in the industry. And reportedly there are other people who will scan a film-based source for you without asking questions about copyright.
Your information that Lowry Digital's film-scanning cost is $300,000 seems inaccurate. It may have cost that much in total for MGM (or Eon) to have all 22 films at the time scanned (Skyfall was shot entirely in digital FYI) and prepared for release (cleaned). That would equal about $13,600 per movie or so. If I'm not mistaken, Lowy used an Imagica scanner for Bond - which is the same scanner that Poita bought (or a different model of the same brand film scanner).
For starwars the "official" restoration can be traced back to 1995. At this time several elements were cleaned and scanned by ILM at 2k. Not the entire films, but certainly the parts with the most generational loss such as the optical wipes. In order to do this those parts were scanned from an earlier source to the o-neg (eg the camera negative), and put into a computer so effects could be added. This was done for instance with all optical wipes, and any scene that ended up having a special edition effect in 1997. Ultimately the o-neg was then reassembled with the restored/special edition segments inserted.
Fast-forward to 2004, this time ILM reportedly used a Cintel C-Reality telecine. The main difference between a telecine (T/C) and a scanner is that a T/C produces a format intended for television, straight onto a digital tape that can be duplicated and broadcast. It seems to be all but a dead-format now. But in 2004 it was fast and cheap. You can correct me if I'm wrong, but in 2004 they didn't bother with the camera negatives again, they simply used their 1997SE o-negs and "scanned" (or more accurately they T/C'd it) it at either 1080p or 2k. The T/C introduced all that horrible noise and would have been grainy as hell before Lucas had Lowy degrain the movies for him. Had Lowy done the scanning in one of their film scanners then it would have been better quality. I don't believe that Lucas wanted to use Lowy though, I think what happened is that ILM did the "scanning", cleaning, and colour-correction, and came up short and then they sent what they'd already done to Lowy to see if they could fix the problem and make a release-quality product from their jumbled mess. They gave them a tight deadline too so they could get the DVD released in 2004.
Fast-forward to today. Poita and MikeV have both scanned prints of the film in 4k using industry-quality film scanners. On the other hand, ILM "scanned" it using a 1080p/2k T/C from the o-neg in 2004. In 2011 or perhaps 2010 Lucas had what we think is the 1997 SE o-negs scanned at 4k for a future release (probably to be the basis for his 3D versions and all future home releases). Despite these plans, the 2004 version was released on Bluray in 2011 (with some minor changes).
So far the film has never been scanned in a film scanner and subsequently released onto a home-video format - EVER. So that is what I would say is the major difference between James Bond and Star Wars!