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The Original Trilogy restored from 35mm prints (a WIP) — Page 4

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poita said:

Dek Rollins said:

poita said:

It will be a combination of multiple prints for all three films actually.

Is one of the Star Wars prints you’re working on a Tech IB?

Yes.

I am now screaming with excitement. On the inside. If it was on the outside my family would freak out at me. 😄

Army of Darkness: The Medieval Deadit | The Terminator - Color Regrade | The Wrong Trousers - Audio Preservation
SONIC RACES THROUGH THE GREEN FIELDS.
THE SUN RACES THROUGH A BLUE SKY FILLED WITH WHITE CLOUDS.
THE WAYS OF HIS HEART ARE MUCH LIKE THE SUN. SONIC RUNS AND RESTS; THE SUN RISES AND SETS.
DON’T GIVE UP ON THE SUN. DON’T MAKE THE SUN LAUGH AT YOU.

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poita said:

It will be a combination of multiple prints for all three films actually.

So is this the kind of thing where you utilize multiple prints in order to achieve a higher net resolution than any individual print alone?

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Looks great! Thank you so much for doing this poita!


**😮ver&out:
**mumbles

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poita said:

I’m glad you enjoyed them, here is the last one I have

Mac: https://we.tl/OoWYrD4K16
Windows: https://we.tl/srDZ35ycvt

I guess back when you could only see the movies in the cinemas, you didn’t notice the different voice actors quite as much.

Thanks again! I enjoyed that one a lot too. It reminded me of a Superfriends episode.

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 (Edited)

theMaestro said:

poita said:

It will be a combination of multiple prints for all three films actually.

So is this the kind of thing where you utilize multiple prints in order to achieve a higher net resolution than any individual print alone?

Partially, but it is mainly for other reasons.

  1. The sad reality is the popularity of these movies means that any ‘complete’ release prints are actually full of splices and are missing frames, so you need multiple prints to have a hope of getting as close to a complete movie as you can.

  2. As per above, some frames are scratched or damaged to the point where the only feasible repair is to use frames from other prints to help restore the damage

  3. Noise reduction, having multiple prints is useful for scenes that are heavy comps. They are way noisier to begin with because of the extra generations required, and as they age, in some cases they get the dreaded brown noise that you can see clearly in the sandcrawler and Speeder shots for example. Combining multiple prints helps the signal rise up out of the noise.

  4. Colour. Having multiple prints means you can make a better estimate of the original colour timing.

  5. Damage decisions. Is that a fleck of sand on Kenobi’s robe, or is it a pinpoint scratch on the film? Multiple prints help you decide what is image and what is not.

So, some scans may not end up having a single pixel in the final mix, but still may be useful, some shots will be from one scan only, others may have 2 or more prints combined on any given frame. It is a painful way to work on one hand, and is a horrible amount of data to wrangle (another 5GB of SSDs would be lovely), but it does take away the guesswork and allows you to do more restoration and less interpolation.

Donations welcome: paypal.me/poit
bitcoin:13QDjXjt7w7BFiQc4Q7wpRGPtYKYchnm8x
Help get The Original Trilogy preserved!

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Thanks for all the interest and questions. Don’t think me rude, but I am out of here now, so any other questions may go unanswered for quite some time.

If anyone wants to throw a pair of GTX 1080 cards my way to speed things along, feel free to do so 😉

Donations welcome: paypal.me/poit
bitcoin:13QDjXjt7w7BFiQc4Q7wpRGPtYKYchnm8x
Help get The Original Trilogy preserved!

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Very excited your SW will use IB prints. Hopefully for the majority of the film! 😉
I know you’re off so this question can be left, but some of what you describe of your process sounds a lot like Mike Verta’s, i.e. trying to get noise out of the image by using multiple prints. Assuming that he’s doing that, I would say it isn’t necessary for you to do that so much.
Here’s my reasoning. The Star wars blu rays are bad to watch, not for most people, most people don’t care, but bad to watch if you do. Harmy’s are good to watch, as a halfway house between the blu rays and a future restoration. They’re good Home Video versions. I would say that Mike’s project, if it sees the light of day would fall into that category - a great, polished, super clean, “new” looking restoration.
TN1 on the other hand, have introduced us to something a little different, which is the pleasure of seeing a 70’s/80’s film, demonstrably from a film source, which a lot of the hallmarks of film intact - scratches, jitter, cigarette burns etc. The SSE is a very good version of SW, but suffers from the softness of the Spanish print (your new scan will help that a lot.) The portions of Tech IB that most of us have seen - 12 minutes of reel 5, and the end of reel 3 (the remote training scene), plus a few inserts here and there, demonstrate an extraordinary level of colour and detail (whether they have accurate colours or not). I think there’s a real gap between Verta and the SSE that can be filled by a Tech IB version that brings the prints to life in the way we’ve seen. Sure, it wouldn’t be colour accurate, but it would be extraordinarily colourful; it would have film artefacts and the feel of film, but with egregious damage toned down, and it would have the detail density that only Tech IB’s can provide.
Just my two cents. I’ll see if I can help you out with drives in the next month or so. 😃

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I think it is poita’s intent to restore a print version of the films to it’s new state. Mike Verta’s version is very much a remastering. I don’t think poita is going down that route.

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Have to say I missed this whole thread for a bit–very nice, and I have to say the name FTLFT is growing on me.

I just wanted to add that once you’re certain which NTSC GOUT frames you’ll be missing from each film, syncing up subtitles would be a piece of cake. Every new Star Wars preservation deserves a global release.

Also, it seems odd that your Jedi example is of the one section of Despecialized still using GOUT footage. Coincidence?

Project Threepio (Star Wars OOT subtitles)

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yeah, FLTFT is growing on me too.

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dahmage said:

yeah, FLTFT is growing on me too.

You should get that checked out. Sounds contagious.

she/her
mwah

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Of course, now I’m trying to come up with an album cover mashup for this restoration. Right now, assuming the name FTLFT sticks, I’m gonna try something using KMFDM’s Tohuvabohu, seems to be an obvious choice to put some stylized lightsaber duel in the artwork section, FTLFT up top, and… uh… something else along the bottom. EDIT: or if that doesn’t work, I’ll borrow mumbles_’ avatar.

Project Threepio (Star Wars OOT subtitles)

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Shuggy said:

A couple of questions:
Is a Grindhouse release on the cards?

Harmy’s Grindhouse of Jedi is from these scans, is it not?

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Asaki said:

Shuggy said:

A couple of questions:
Is a Grindhouse release on the cards?

Harmy’s Grindhouse of Jedi is from these scans, is it not?

Yeah It was def a scan poita did. I don’t think he would want to rescan it since it seemed pretty good, albeit dark

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For titles, I would go with

  1. The Spout (Super Polished Original Unaltered Trilogy)

  2. The LTA 35mm (Long Time Ago)

  3. The PCC (Poita’s Criterion Collection)

This work is so great. The prints are in great shape, and I can’t wait.

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Poita, you might want to consider GTX 1070s if you are looking at new video cards. G5x ram on 1080 V GDDR5 on 1070 probably wont give much of a benefit to card performance, (as HBM1 doesn’t on the Fury cards.) Price per performance I’m betting the 1070s will be great. I’m hoping to get a new rig soon with a pair of GPUs, so, I’ll let you know, maybe I can help you with some rendering.

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The 1070 is slower than the Titan X on compute unfortunately.

Donations welcome: paypal.me/poit
bitcoin:13QDjXjt7w7BFiQc4Q7wpRGPtYKYchnm8x
Help get The Original Trilogy preserved!