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Team Negative1 - Return of the Jedi 1983 - 35mm Theatrical Version (unfinished project) — Page 20

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clutchins said:

Are there any efforts to retrieve a DCP?

I would love the DCP copy… But for me, I think it would be even more awesome to track down the film on 70mm. Hey, a man can dream, can’t he? haha 😄

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Bobocop said:

Not to mention there wouldn’t be any point, as JJ Abrams and Disney are not likely going to tinker with it after its release.

Do you think we’ll see George on here working on his own edit of The Force Awakens?


**😮ver&out:
**mumbles

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mumbles_ said:

Bobocop said:

Not to mention there wouldn’t be any point, as JJ Abrams and Disney are not likely going to tinker with it after its release.

Do you think we’ll see George on here working on his own edit of The Force Awakens?

George will resort to Fanedits to continue on his warpath.

she/her
mwah

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Wazzles said:

Asaki said:

team_negative1 said:

And then the SE, and the Prequels.

You forgot about The Fanfic Awakens!

That would be a pain to get their hands on considering there’s like 2 prints in existence.

I thought TFA was an utterly ridiculous/worthless movie, but there will still be plenty of 35mm film prints of it once it hits the second-run theaters. A lot of small time theaters still only have film projectors, and even though the big studios won’t make them prints anymore, there seem to be middle-men that will. A couple of years ago a couple of local small-time theaters were trying to raise funds for digital projectors because of the announcement that they could no longer get film prints. However, just this past summer I watched the new Terminator movie at the drive-in on 35mm film (they still only have a film projector). According to their Facebook page, they found a source, despite their fears of impending doom from a couple of years ago. It wasn’t just the new Terminator movie either; they showed the then-current crop of second-run movies all summer long on film (I had to sit through “Minions” as part of a double feature before I could watch Terminator Genisys).

As a side note, I’m never going to a movie in a theater with a digital projector again, and when film projectors finally die out for good, I’m never going to a movie theater again. The only good thing about the new Star Wars movie was that it was shot on film, but that was entirely negated by the digital projector. Digital projectors can’t match the black levels of film and CRT projectors, so the blacks in TFA (shots of outer space for example) were dark gray, making the movie look like it had bad contrast, and like crap in general. I hadn’t been to a first-run theater since 2007 when I took my nephew to see Transformers, and they used a film projector at the time, so this TFA foolishness was the first time I’d ever been gypped by a digital projector (and it will be the last time, too).

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Well. That was absurdly off topic.

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towne32 said:

Well. That was absurdly off topic.

The OP mentioned future plans of doing transfers of the SE and the prequels. Someone else mentioned TFA. Then someone mentioned the practical non-existence of film prints of TFA, and I pointed out that there should be plenty of TFA film prints soon enough, along with the reason why. That wasn’t off topic at all, much less “absurdly”. As for the side note, well, of course it was off topic somewhat (though still on the topic of film prints); that’s what a side note is by definition, which is why I prefaced it as such.

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Let us not discuss purloining a DCP around here. Getting one’s hands on a decades old movie print is one thing, a DCP is getting into outright theft. We don’t know what the new Mouse Overlords might do, versus Lucasfilm’s kindly indifference in the past.

And no capsule TFA reviews where they don’t belong, either. 😉

Forum Moderator

Where were you in '77?

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I do hope that guy knows this is a digitised version of a 35mm film and neg one isn’t distributing actual 35mm prints out or he’s going to be so dissapointed.

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lpd said:

I do hope that guy knows this is a digitised version of a 35mm film and neg one isn’t distributing actual 35mm prints out or he’s going to be so dissapointed.

What guy? It is a safe bet that everyone here knows that, by the way. 35mm prints of any of the OT movies are not only very expensive (usually 4 figures), but they are big and heavy as well (about five or six 2000-foot reels, weighing about 50-60 pounds total).

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Not sure if you’re being intentionally thick but on the off chance you really didn’t understand the comment, let me explain - Team Negative 1 is creating a digitized version of 35mm film, just like the DCP of Star Wars TFA you saw in the cinema was a digitized version of 35mm (and 65mm) film, so if you’re expecting this project to be closer to the projection quality of 35mm than the DCP, you’re going to be disappointed, just like you must be disappointed with all Blu-Rays and other digital media.

Just to clarify, I too regret the near-loss of film as a projection medium (I’m actually thinking about driving 6 hours to another country to be able to see The Hateful 8 in 70mm) but if I can’t see the movie on actual film, good digital projection is the next best thing - I actually keep a log on projection quality for all projection rooms I visit and I can tell you that the quality of digital projection can vary greatly, so if you only have a couple of experiences with DCP and they were so bad, you may just have stumbled into bad ones - the projection of TFA 2D I saw looked amazing and it was very film-like.

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Harmy said:

Not sure if you’re being intentionally thick but on the off chance you really didn’t understand the comment, let me explain - Team Negative 1 is creating a digitized version of 35mm film, just like the DCP of Star Wars TFA you saw in the cinema was a digitized version of 35mm (and 65mm) film, so if you’re expecting this project to be closer to the projection quality of 35mm than the DCP, you’re going to be disappointed, just like you must be disappointed with all Blu-Rays and other digital media.

“Intentionally thick”? What are you talking about? I know exactly what Team Negative 1 is doing, and anyone who got the impression that I don’t, didn’t properly read what I typed.

The problem with the image quality of TFA when I watched it at the theater was due to the digital projector. Had they projected that exact same DCP through e.g., a Barco 909 or Sony G90 CRT projector (or better yet, a pair of either one of them in unison) it would have had glorious image quality. Also, had they simply made a film print from the film source and used a film projector, it would have had glorious image quality. Even 100% native video looks better when transferred to film and shown through a film projector than if left in video format and shown through a digital projector, because film projectors are capable of better black levels than any digital projector due to film doing a better job of blocking the backlight for areas that are supposed to be black (and that outweighs the generational loss of transferring video to a film print in my opinion).

The best black levels come from CRT projectors though, because they aren’t backlit at all. The CRTs generate their own light (via energized red, green, and blue phosphors), and for blacks, the CRTs simply don’t generate any light for those areas. For an all black screen, the CRTs would simply be off, while with other forms of projection, the backlight is always on and something has to attempt to block the light for the black areas.

By the way, high quality, high resolution video (such as Blu-ray, or Team Negative 1’s digital scans from 35mm film prints) looks fantastic through a CRT projector, very film projector-like; potentially a bit better even (assuming the scan/encode is of high enough quality and resolution to be a ~faithful representation of the film print), because of the CRT projector’s better black levels.

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“As far as I’m concerned, nothing beats shooting on 35mm film. Film is so much more beautiful than digital; it gives so many more textures and variations. I don’t know very much, but the amount of work that goes into working on digital to make it look like film after the event seems like a great waste of time. Why not just shoot on film?”

  • Daniel Craig.

Which is why they shot Spectre on film. Read more here

TheStarWarsTrilogy.com.
The007Dossier.com.
Donations always welcome: Paypal | Bitcoin: bc1qzr9ejyfpzm9ea2dglfegxzt59tys3uwmj26ytj

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Wazzles said:

Asaki said:

team_negative1 said:

And then the SE, and the Prequels.

You forgot about The Fanfic Awakens!

That would be a pain to get their hands on considering there’s like 2 prints in existence.

There actually is at least one 70mm IMAX print, it’s playing at the Tech Museum of Innovation in San Jose, CA. I saw it, it was a trip. But we’ll never get it.

(Are there any 35mm prints in release, or only 70mm IMAX ones?)

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TServo2049 said:
There actually is at least one 70mm IMAX print, it’s playing at the Tech Museum of Innovation in San Jose, CA. I saw it, it was a trip. But we’ll never get it.

(Are there any 35mm prints in release, or only 70mm IMAX ones?)

In addition to the 35mm prints that small-time theaters in the U.S. will get their hands on soon enough, there are guaranteed to already be plenty of 35mm prints that have been sent to places such as Mexico, Africa, South America, etc., that haven’t widely converted to digital projectors.

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Thanks for the discussion, but please move further speculation of the new film to another thread. Some of the team members have not seen the new movie yet, and don’t plan too.

Talking about it is irrelevant to what our plans are for preservation.
Team Negative1

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mumbles_ said:

Bobocop said:

Not to mention there wouldn’t be any point, as JJ Abrams and Disney are not likely going to tinker with it after its release.

Do you think we’ll see George on here working on his own edit of The Force Awakens?

Haha, brilliant!

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I haven’t used this forum a lot, but with respect, talking about getting hold of a print of TFA is really silly on a number of levels. There’s at at least 15 IMAX prints in the world, but you’d actually need to work for the IMAX corporation, or be an incredible engineer with acres of time and money to scan them. Watch any of their youtube vids to see how massive IMAX prints for a 2 hour movie are. As it happens the IMAX print of TFA has already been through a computer- there were a few frames of 1080p (or a comparatively low-res digital format) early on in the movie - so you wouldn’t be getting a digital copy of a film source, you’d be getting a digital copy of a film copy of a digital copy of a film source.

More importantly though, I think it begins to stray from Restoration into Piracy, when you talk about getting hold of a new movie. I’m sure the blu-ray will be absolutely fine.
team Neg1,
That line-up of your workflow is exciting to see! Thanks for the incredible work!

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I like the new font on your section headings.

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AllAboutThatSpace said:

I haven’t used this forum a lot, but with respect, talking about getting hold of a print of TFA is really silly on a number of levels.

I was intentionally being silly, in case nobody caught that 😉

This signature uses Markdown syntax, which makes it easy to add formatting like italics, bold, and lists:

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I absolutely agree with MaximRecoil’s feelings towards digital projection. All of the movies I’ve seen in theaters since the transition have had grey blacks. The last time that I brought this up on a forum, people just didn’t understand - “durr…you can’t get blacker than #000000”. xD

In addition, I’ve yet to see any new TV technologies replicate all of the advantages of CRTs, including durability. Plasma has a slight fuzziness and wears out. Regular LCD has grey blacks. OLED is close, but also wears out. The closest is LCD with full-array RGB backlighting (edge-lit isn’t as good). Solid blacks, good colours. But CRTs still have better contrast.

A shame that SED never happened…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surface-conduction_electron-emitter_display

BTW, Pretty much all films since the 90’s have gone through colour timing via digital intermediate. Modern vinyl records also tend to have gone digital at some step during production.

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lurker77 said:

I absolutely agree with MaximRecoil’s feelings towards digital projection. All of the movies I’ve seen in theaters since the transition have had grey blacks. The last time that I brought this up on a forum, people just didn’t understand - “durr…you can’t get blacker than #000000”. xD

I made a thread to reply here - http://originaltrilogy.com/topic/Digital-projectors-in-movie-theaters-and-other-things-digital/id/47478

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MaximRecoil said:

As a side note, I’m never going to a movie in a theater with a digital projector again, and when film projectors finally die out for good, I’m never going to a movie theater again.

Have fun with that.

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Harmy said:
Just to clarify, I too regret the near-loss of film as a projection medium (I’m actually thinking about driving 6 hours to another country to be able to see The Hateful 8 in 70mm) but if I can’t see the movie on actual film, good digital projection is the next best thing - I actually keep a log on projection quality for all projection rooms I visit and I can tell you that the quality of digital projection can vary greatly, so if you only have a couple of experiences with DCP and they were so bad, you may just have stumbled into bad ones - the projection of TFA 2D I saw looked amazing and it was very film-like.

He’s got point. Much as I’d love to live those glorious film days, I’d settle for DCP if I had to. But… I would dearly pay to see a 70mm film print…

Ol’ George has the GOUT, I see.