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StarWarsLegacy.com - The Official Thread — Page 94

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Wazzles said:

poita said:

That is incorrect. It was not printed out to a new negative.

That’s new information to me. Is it purely digital?

Mike has not done a film-out to a new negative and then scanned that back in.
For starters, it costs an absolute fortune, and the very few places left that could do it, such as FotoKem wouldn’t touch it. It’s not to say he couldn’t, just that he hasn’t.

Secondly, and more importantly, it would achieve nothing to do a film out to a neg, and then scan it back in, other than giving you a generation loss.

Doing a film out is a good preservation move, as preserving a neg is a lot easier than preserving a digital file, but scanning it back in to then work on it, I cannot see what that would achieve other than a quality drop.

Combining multiple prints does help you reduce the print grain and sensor noise and blemishes etc, whilst potentially preserving the neg grain, and can give you great results, but i doesn’t get you back to the negative. The neg has way, way more latitude than is in any of the prints, and much of the neg information is irretrievablly lost when you only have prints to work with.

Using multiple prints gives you the best you can get without the neg, and Mike has done a great job of getting the most out of the prints that you could expect to get.

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I’m pretty sure I remember Mike saying he would get this output on film - to make it easier to archive and preserve.

You know of the rebellion against the Empire?

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Erikstormtrooper said:

I’m pretty sure I remember Mike saying he would get this output on film - to make it easier to archive and preserve.

Yep. I don’t know anything about the process of going from digital to film out (is there still a negative involved?). But physical prints were definitely part of the plan last time we heard from him. I don’t recall him ever suggesting that the finished digital product was supposed to be a scan of that, though.

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Hopefully he’ll return at some point to let us know the actual nature of the restoration.

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He was hoping to do a film-out at then end of the process, so that it could be projected from film for an authentic experience. It certainly was never part of the restoration process.

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poita said:

He was hoping to do a film-out at then end of the process, so that it could be projected from film for an authentic experience. It certainly was never part of the restoration process.

That was it exactly, as I recall, and to then archive the print.

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UnitéD2 said:

From A print ? Is it not a combination of numerous prints, in order to obtain an image as accurate and sharp as the negative ?

Doesn’t matter how many prints you use it’s still not as sharp as the ON (original negative) or IP (interpositive) they’re made from. With SW there are some scenes that even on the ON are a 3rd, 4th, 5th, or even 6th generation copy of the camera negative (optical wipes for example are at the very least 2nd generation copies and possibly 3rd or 4th generation depending on other factors) - for the 1997 SE they scanned every camera negative they could to replace and re-composite material that suffered from generational loss. That is to say that not even the ON was as sharp as some of the stuff that’s in the 1997 SE ON (such as the speeder sequence through Mos Eisley).

[ Scanning stuff since 2015 ]

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Ok, but didn’t Mike do something like superposing/averaging Tech prints (supposed to be made by the same IP ?) to get a level of detail which is not on one of them individualy ?

There’s a video showing the Tantive’s door were we see very small details. Can a 4K scan of a very good print be as sharp as it is ?

So, what we call original negative is not the image directly captured by the camera for each shot.
What you say about the SE remastering is very interesting. Is this true only for recomposited shots of for all the film ? In this case, how faithful is the way of using the 2004 master for a restauration of the OT ?

I learn a lot about cinematographic technics on this forum and I’m surely not alone. 😉

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SilverWook said:

towne32 said:

TheHutt said:

Possessed said:

Leftover aotc material?

Yes, the scene where Obi-Wan brings Luke to Owen & Beru was actually filmed during AOTC shooting.

Actually, I believe I read that they re-shot the characters for this shot on green screen during RoTS filming anyway. IIRC, they did it to change who was holding Luke. Could have also been for better visual continuity for Ewan, though he had his hood up, I think.

edit: I would have never guessed I was in this thread based on the topic. I must’ve just clicked it like a robot.

http://www.starwarz.com/tbone/archive/index.php?categoryid=14&p2_articleid=324

It’s too bad this footage has yet to appear on any Blu Ray extras.

The main problem with this scene in the movie is that it seems like Yet Another Crap Looking CGI Thing.

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Erikstormtrooper said:

I’m pretty sure I remember Mike saying he would get this output on film - to make it easier to archive and preserve.

In my opinion, I’m not sure if film would be easier to preserve. The main problems people cite is how video formats change and how digital media storage mediums deteriorate. Let me tackle the latter first. Film also deteriorates—-look at how hard it is to get a good film print of Star Wars. You can alleviate the digital storage problem by just copying it listlessly to new storage devices. You can even try to checksum it to make sure you’re getting an exact replica of the original copy. (You can also do the same with formats and codecs) As far as I know, that’s not possible with film. So, I think most of this as possible should be done digitally.

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It’s the same reason they filmed out the 4K restoration of the Godfather onto a new negative. It was shot on film, so it should be preserved that way.

The documentary Side by Side has a scene that addresses the whole film vs. digital debate regarding long-term storage. Steven Soderbergh is against the idea of preserving his digitally-shot movies on film, risks of data corruption be damned.

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yhwx said:

Erikstormtrooper said:

I’m pretty sure I remember Mike saying he would get this output on film - to make it easier to archive and preserve.

In my opinion, I’m not sure if film would be easier to preserve. The main problems people cite is how video formats change and how digital media storage mediums deteriorate. Let me tackle the latter first. Film also deteriorates—-look at how hard it is to get a good film print of Star Wars. You can alleviate the digital storage problem by just copying it listlessly to new storage devices. You can even try to checksum it to make sure you’re getting an exact replica of the original copy. (You can also do the same with formats and codecs) As far as I know, that’s not possible with film. So, I think most of this as possible should be done digitally.

Of course it would (and surely has been) archived digitally. The lossless versions are probably >20TB/copy. There will always be issues with formats, though. It’s easy to think a few years and a couple operating systems down the line. But over longer periods of time, compatibility will be more difficult to ensure. The format needs to be well documented, and presumably the software should be open-sourced. None of this is to suggest that it isn’t possible or shouldn’t absolutely be done. Just that, worst case scenario, that film is always going to just be film.

An LPP would have color that outlives all of us except for Frink. Other deterioration wouldn’t be an issue for an archival print. Star Wars prints are in bad shape because they’ve been watched a million times over the decades (sometimes perhaps by people who don’t know what they’re doing with film).

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towne32 said:

yhwx said:

Erikstormtrooper said:

I’m pretty sure I remember Mike saying he would get this output on film - to make it easier to archive and preserve.

In my opinion, I’m not sure if film would be easier to preserve. The main problems people cite is how video formats change and how digital media storage mediums deteriorate. Let me tackle the latter first. Film also deteriorates—-look at how hard it is to get a good film print of Star Wars. You can alleviate the digital storage problem by just copying it listlessly to new storage devices. You can even try to checksum it to make sure you’re getting an exact replica of the original copy. (You can also do the same with formats and codecs) As far as I know, that’s not possible with film. So, I think most of this as possible should be done digitally.

Of course it would (and surely has been) archived digitally. The lossless versions are probably >20TB/copy. There will always be issues with formats, though. It’s easy to think a few years and a couple operating systems down the line. But over longer periods of time, compatibility will be more difficult to ensure. The format needs to be well documented, and presumably the software should be open-sourced. None of this is to suggest that it isn’t possible or shouldn’t absolutely be done. Just that, worst case scenario, that film is always going to just be film.

If you’re not using some super exotic file format, almost all of them now a days are well documented and there are plenty of open source tools to handle them.

An LPP would have color that outlives all of us except for Frink. Other deterioration wouldn’t be an issue for an archival print. Star Wars prints are in bad shape because they’ve been watched a million times over the decades (sometimes perhaps by people who don’t know what they’re doing with film).

Sometimes accidents and natural disasters happen. My point is that you can copy digital data without any loss of information and can have massively redundant systems, which you can’t do with film.

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If your hard drive fails, all data is lost; if a film fades or gets damaged, you can still retrieve data from it. Also, that print could be watched with the most primitive technology, what makes it even watchable after some sort of apocalypse, whereas the digital file relies on someone deeming it worthy of converting it to the next generation.
There is absolutely no downside of an archival print additional to a digital file, so I don’t get what you’re arguing about here. It’s not one or the other.

Ceci n’est pas une signature.

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i’d love to see some more stills from this restoration.

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a_o said:

i’d love to see some more stills from this restoration.

So would we.

she/her
mwah

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UnitéD2 said:

So, what we call original negative is not the image directly captured by the camera for each shot.

It can be, or it can be a dupe with the camera negative in stored away. Some films even have more than one ON. Profondo Rosso/Deep Red may have had two entirely different ON’s - I don’t know I haven’t looked into it, the alternative is the director had the ON reconfigured for export. My understanding is it would have had an export ON seeing as the 4K restoration was made from the ‘original negative’ implying that the Italian Cut was intact.

Can a 4K scan of a very good print be as sharp as it is ?

Well clearly it can be. Prints do get scanned and released on Bluray when there’s no ON or IP available. Studies will use whatever they can, depending on the condition and their budgets, but they prefer using the ON or the camera negatives where they can - Robocop 4k was scanned from the camera negative for example. Obviously that could be much more expensive and time consuming than simply scanning the ON because you may have to first catalogue all the camera negatives and find all the pieces that were used in the final cut of the film before you can even start work on scanning it.

[ Scanning stuff since 2015 ]

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clutchins said:

TV’s Frink said:

Team account confirmed.

Joke’s on you, I’m schizophrenic.

“Roses are red, violets are blue, I’m a schizophrenic and so am I”

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Think of it this way, the original negative is the master negative for creating all interpositives and presentation prints. It includes all composited effects, scene changes, and titles. For Star Wars/A New Hope, a 3 color separation master was also created which supposedly would let them create a duplicate of the original negative. For the SE, they went back to the camera negatives, the raw footage, to recomposite most (but not all) of the shots. I’m not sure to what extent they did this with the composited effects shots (which were all done in VistaVision so the final composite would not have increased film grain over non-effects shots) or whether they kept the original composited elements. In some cases the stars are obviously different, but in others they aren’t. The snow speeder sequences in TESB were all redone to correct a flaw with the way it was originally composited (that allowed the background to show through the darker areas of the image).

I often watch TCM in HD (720p) and a lot of the movies they show are from original prints with the cigarette burns intact. One was a restoration where the only complete version was 16 mm so the shots missing from the 35 mm copy were fuzzy. But at 720p, the scans of the original prints looks pretty good. The older technicolor prints often have some obvious misalignment, but a properly calibrated scan and subsequent filtering can separate and realigns the colors (Mike did this in a couple of shots - one scene he found several levels of misalignment and corrected them all because he couldn’t be sure of which were due to Technicolor and which were through some accident of production). Citizen Kane only exists as a high quality presentation print (the negative was lost long ago). For many old movies, the print is all we have and some of them are damaged. But I am often amazed at the quality. And some of the modern restorations are just incredible. About the only way to see the original 1977 Star Wars better than Mike is doing would be a full restoration of that 3 color separation. It has the same problem that a lot of old, pre-color negative technicolor films have, the negatives have shrunk unevenly. A problem in 1996 when GL wanted to use them to restore the faded negative, but not a problem today with digital technology that can realign the colors (this has been used in countless films, such as Gone With The Wind and a lot of early color negative films that were distributed in Technicolor that have the yellow too faded on the negative so they use that piece of the technicolor color separation). The restored ones are so much clearer, but even the unrestored ones scanned form original prints are pretty clear. And even Mike has commented that no all prints are created alike. He has seen one high quality one and one lower quality one (according to his comments). He’s also gone beyond just archiving and cleaning up the technicolor print to using algorithms to see through the grain and recover details, such as on the infamously low quality shot of Luke’s landspeeder passing through Mos Eisley.

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yotsuya said:

Think of it this way, the original negative is the master negative for creating all interpositives and presentation prints. It includes all composited effects, scene changes, and titles. For Star Wars/A New Hope, a 3 color separation master was also created which supposedly would let them create a duplicate of the original negative. For the SE, they went back to the camera negatives, the raw footage, to recomposite most (but not all) of the shots. I’m not sure to what extent they did this with the composited effects shots (which were all done in VistaVision so the final composite would not have increased film grain over non-effects shots) or whether they kept the original composited elements. In some cases the stars are obviously different, but in others they aren’t. The snow speeder sequences in TESB were all redone to correct a flaw with the way it was originally composited (that allowed the background to show through the darker areas of the image).

I often watch TCM in HD (720p) and a lot of the movies they show are from original prints with the cigarette burns intact. One was a restoration where the only complete version was 16 mm so the shots missing from the 35 mm copy were fuzzy. But at 720p, the scans of the original prints looks pretty good. The older technicolor prints often have some obvious misalignment, but a properly calibrated scan and subsequent filtering can separate and realigns the colors (Mike did this in a couple of shots - one scene he found several levels of misalignment and corrected them all because he couldn’t be sure of which were due to Technicolor and which were through some accident of production). Citizen Kane only exists as a high quality presentation print (the negative was lost long ago). For many old movies, the print is all we have and some of them are damaged. But I am often amazed at the quality. And some of the modern restorations are just incredible. About the only way to see the original 1977 Star Wars better than Mike is doing would be a full restoration of that 3 color separation. It has the same problem that a lot of old, pre-color negative technicolor films have, the negatives have shrunk unevenly. A problem in 1996 when GL wanted to use them to restore the faded negative, but not a problem today with digital technology that can realign the colors (this has been used in countless films, such as Gone With The Wind and a lot of early color negative films that were distributed in Technicolor that have the yellow too faded on the negative so they use that piece of the technicolor color separation). The restored ones are so much clearer, but even the unrestored ones scanned form original prints are pretty clear. And even Mike has commented that no all prints are created alike. He has seen one high quality one and one lower quality one (according to his comments). He’s also gone beyond just archiving and cleaning up the technicolor print to using algorithms to see through the grain and recover details, such as on the infamously low quality shot of Luke’s landspeeder passing through Mos Eisley.

Interesting stuff!

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http://originaltrilogy.com/topic/Episode-1-TPM-game-sounds-files/id/15201/page/1

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Red Dwarf Night 10th Anniversary

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UnitéD2 said:

Ok, but didn’t Mike do something like superposing/averaging Tech prints (supposed to be made by the same IP ?) to get a level of detail which is not on one of them individualy ?

I think so. As far as I understand, averaging prints should at least make a restoration close to their master, and I think Verta actually said in a podcast Legacy has as much detail as the negative, in some cases even more detail. I think it’s great, and because of his meticulous work, it’s definitely a step forward to what we have now, not to mention it’s a cleaned up theatrical version! Also, if Disney were to commission him an official restoration, he would probably be able to use the actual negative, so I’ve no doubt Legacy would be near perfection if released.

a_o said:

i’d love to see some more stills from this restoration.

Me too! 😃

yhwx said:

SilverWook said:

picture
It’s too bad this footage has yet to appear on any Blu Ray extras.

The main problem with this scene in the movie is that it seems like Yet Another Crap Looking CGI Thing.

Yeah, I think some of its close shots look fine, but overall the scenary looks too static, unnatural.

The Original Trilogy’s Timeline Reconstruction: http://originaltrilogy.com/forum/topic.cfm/Implied-starting-date-of-the-Empire-from-OT-dialogue/post/786201/#TopicPost786201

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It certainly won’t have more detail than the original negs, I don’t see how that could be possible as the prints are derived from them.

If they had more detail then I think we would be breaking some fundamental laws of physics 😃

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 (Edited)

Well, in one of the videos, Mike did talk about harvesting detail temporally as well as vertically from different prints, so it might be possible for low movement shots, but is it good?