Team Negative1 - Star Wars 1977 - 35mm Eastman Vs Technicolot Theatrical Version (* unfinished project *) — Page 9

So, this thread got bumped from yesterday by that stupid markdown syntax crap?

And from someone who should know better?

Sometimes, on mobile, it’s easy to accidentally hit the post button without entering text, causing unnoticed Markdown Syndrome.

http://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/911158

If this is right, and I have no reason to disbelieve you, then I hope we’ll see a T-1 / Williarob collab on this print after Mike’s pitch. If he gets the gig, then another version won’t be any competition, given the tiny circulation on here. If he’s unsuccessful then a Tech restoration will be even more important.
I wish him all the best but I don’t think any of us should accept his jibes against T-1:- being unprofessional restorers, or only in it for fame. They’ve proved both those accusations to be untrue.
I personally way prefer t-1’s work than Mike’s Vimeo previews. But I understand he’s going for the official release so it’s a different project altogether.

AllAboutThatSpace said:
I personally way prefer t-1’s work than Mike’s Vimeo previews. But I understand he’s going for the official release so it’s a different project altogether.

Genuinely curious what you mean – because you think he makes too many alterations?

RedBro said:

AllAboutThatSpace said:
I personally way prefer t-1’s work than Mike’s Vimeo previews. But I understand he’s going for the official release so it’s a different project altogether.

Genuinely curious what you mean – because you think he makes too many alterations?

Or, some people here enjoy the nostalgia of the 35mm film experience. Some (a minority I’m sure) seem to prefer the grindhouse versions, even. People have actually requested a more scratched up version of the SSE, interestingly enough.

I’m in the mverta camp where I like the fine negative grain, not the big, noticeable multiple generation print grain.

RedBro said:

AllAboutThatSpace said:
I personally way prefer t-1’s work than Mike’s Vimeo previews. But I understand he’s going for the official release so it’s a different project altogether.

Genuinely curious what you mean – because you think he makes too many alterations?

I’m sure if I saw the whole thing in context I’d change my mind, but for me, the clips on his Vimeo account seem to have been graded a long way towards the cold blue/green of the spectrum. This may just be that he’s grading in a 4K projector colour space that doesn’t match with computer screens.
I don’t want to make a fuss because he’s worked for so many years on this, and we’re all waiting anxiously to see what happens with Legacy. However it turns out, we’ll all have some very good options for seeing SW 77 in the future!

Color grading was the final step in the process, I believe. Nothing on his vimeo stream has shown his final grading, which is why many of us are eager to see samples some day.

towne32 said:

Color grading was the final step in the process, I believe. Nothing on his vimeo stream has shown his final grading, which is why many of us are eager to see samples some day.

Ah, that explains it

Dek Rollins said:

I would say that my only things to pick with what I’ve seen of Legacy are as follows:

1. The grain reduction. I prefer 35mm grain over the negative, and even when he’s using 35mm prints, he’s reducing the grain to achieve a near negative medium.

2. The opening crawl. After I saw the crawl preview on his vimeo, I just thought, Why would you do that? I mean, the crawl losing detail as it goes further up the frame is the natural fade into black. He even said that he doesn’t want to change anything internally, and I would say that is doing exactly that.

Other than these nitpicks, I am really liking how the previews look, aside from the color grading of course, and I am looking forward to more news.

I felt the same way about the registration problems he fixed in the starfield and engines etc. in the approach to the Death Star shots. I mean what he’s done constantly astounds me, literally astounds me, and I love watching his videos, but once the restoration gets to that point it starts to become a change, at least for me. Just because you can ‘fix’ something, etc. If the matt lines are left, then the occasional registration errors should be left too as they’re a by-product of the tech. of the time, and to this film. Agree with the opening scroll comments too for the same reasons. Having said all that, the work he’s put into this is staggering. I truly hope Disney hire him and hand over the negs 😉 My ideal restoration would be all 35mm grain left unaltered, colours as close as possible to how they would have been seen back when (though I guess you’d almost need two different versions at this point depending upon which print was being referenced!), and only the scratches and wear and tear eliminated. No fixes to errors caused by the photochemical processes of the time. But everyone naturally has differing viewpoints on their ideal. I still live in hope the one day we’ll all be able to see Mike’s Legacy edition in full.

Dek Rollins said:

I would say that my only things to pick with what I’ve seen of Legacy are as follows:

1. The grain reduction. I prefer 35mm grain over the negative, and even when he’s using 35mm prints, he’s reducing the grain to achieve a near negative medium.

Wholeheartedly agree. I loved the grain on the -1 v. 2.0 preview. This is why, frankly, while I support the Legacy Edition I really, really want just a scan of the IB Technicolor print. I’m also not wild about some of Verta’s “corrections.” I agree with Spielberg here:

"(In the future) there’s going to be no more digital enhancements or digital additions to anything based on any film I direct. I’m not going to do any corrections digitally to even wires that show.

If 1941 comes on Blu-Ray I’m not going to go back and take the wires out because the Blu-Ray will bring the wires out that are guiding the airplane down Hollywood Blvd. At this point right now I think letting movies exist in the era, with all the flaws and all of the flourishes, is a wonderful way to mark time and mark history… And I think the other good thing is that they understand when they see a movie and they suddenly see something that obviously could have been done much better today and could have been corrected in the DVD/Blu-Ray transfer, they really appreciate seeing the strings attached.

If somebody put out George Pal’s War of the Worlds and took the strings off the machines I’d be very upset. When that machine crashes in downtown Hollywood, and you see the strings going from taut to slack, that’s the thing that allows me to both understand this movie is scaring the hell out of me and at the same time this movie is a creation of the human race.

That little taut-to-slack moment of those wires on that wingtip makes the original George Pal War of the Worlds work for me. It embraces my fears and it also alleviates them in the same breath."

To be fair he’s not “correcting” anything that is a direct result of the photography and compositing. He explained that his fixing the registration issues on the Death Star approach is because it’s impossible to tell which registration issues happened during the original compositing and which ones happened further down the line at a different stage, so just to be safe, he corrected all of them.

It’s still the original elements. It’s still the original matte lines and all of the evidence of 1976-77 compositing techniques.

The only thing he’s done that I don’t necessarily agree with is his recreating of the crawl. The degradation of the crawl as it recedes is a product of the processes of the day, and I think it should stay, but overall, that’s the only thing he’s done I have a problem with, and it’s something I can live with.

He’s doing a far more pure, honest, and respectful restoration than anyone in Hollywood right now. We are perhaps too scrutinous of work done to this film because it means so much to us and we take ownership of it. To the point where we nitpick stuff like this, even when it’s the best, most pure restoration we’ve gotten of just about any film, not just a Star Wars film.

Plus, it’s not like it would be hard to digitally add extra layers of grain on top of it to simulate the grain that would be present on a 35mm print in 77, if that’s what you really want.

Harmy said:

Actually, in that particular shot, the channel misregistration is different on the models and on the background, so it was clearly part of the original compositing and in order to fix it, Mike had to cut everything out of it’s background and shift each element separately, thus literally re-compositing the shot.

Thanks for putting it way more eloquently than I did 😉

It’s not a big deal to me, but it just ‘feels’ wrong to correct that, IF its visible on all prints and not just a bad single print. But again it highlights how many different opinions exist to what constitutes the ideal restoration/representation.

Other than that and the crawl (the colour timing remains to be seen) I’m totally blown away by what I’ve seen of Legacy from the videos.

Darth Lucas said:

Plus, it’s not like it would be hard to digitally add extra layers of grain on top of it to simulate the grain that would be present on a 35mm print in 77, if that’s what you really want.

To me adding in digital grain is a HUGE no-no. Because one is then at the mercy of the judgement call of the person adding it back. And it’s fake. It’s an addition. No matter how well done. Mike’s is a unique process of course as he’s not degraining, but by combining multiple prints the ‘gaps’ between film grains are presumably being filled in by the other ‘layers’ of film scans, to get closer to how the original neg. would likely look. I’m cool with that for an ultimate version of what Star Wars could look like, but part of me would prefer an honest representation (albeit cleaned up) of a 35mm print, with the original grain intact, extra grain & contrast anomalies on the FX shots when more elements are added in the shot, etc. But I guess we have Silver Screen for that (which I’m very thankful for!). I think my own personal holy grail will be the Tech scan, if that ever comes to light.