AntcuFaalb said:
camroncamera said:
The GOUT image... It's like the original telecine process was transfered at 16:9 anamorphic and was converted to 4:3 letterbox at the mastering stage (and caused all of that awful aliasing) by throwing out every other scanline like yesterday's bagels.
Close, but the process was significantly simpler (and 100% analog) than you describe: http://originaltrilogy.com/forum/topic.cfm/Star-Wars-GOUT-in-HD-using-super-resolution-algorithm/post/771079/#TopicPost771079
Thanks, I now remember reading this a couple weeks ago.
By the time I started to work in Telecine (circa 1999), CCD scanners (Philips Spirit 2K) had taked the crown of "best image" away from flying spot telecines (Cintel). The facility where I was employed had one of the first Spirit installs in the US. Virtually all of our clients were commercial (advertising) or television, so there was almost never any anamorphic (features) film on the machine.
Although non-anamorphic letterbox projects were very popular (especially with Super 16 DP's), the occasional anamorphic 35mm print Indian Bollywood movie that we'd be hired to transfer would be telecined as either 4:3 letterbox for our first few jobs, or 16:9 anamorphic SD for all the subsequent transfers. In the case of the 4:3 letterbox transfers, the CCD Spirit "datacine" would continuously scan at 2K internally, and would beautifully downconvert/de-anamorphize on the fly with it's high-end scaler, no special anamorphic lens gate required. TV scanlines were never simply tossed away, as seems to be the case wth Star Wars. I've never worked with a flying spot telecine, though I understand that Cintel and others eventually caught up with (and in some cases surpassed) CCD datacines.
Man, what a difference 7-8 years made in telecine technology.