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Info: Anyone Got A Spare 1300 Bucks? Star Wars 16mm on ebay... — Page 2

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Originally posted by: mcfly89
If we only scanned the parts that were changed, how would we go about that?

That would bring it down from Alpha Centari to Jupiter. Keep in mind there were trims in the 2004 dvd. If you want to bring it down to skyscraper, then the absolute most important bit would be a few seconds of Cantina footage...

Any old scanner is higher resolution than 1920 x 1080, but does film require some kind of special scanner? How do we re-align the frames when we put them together?


Scanners do dpi. Not very many square i's in a negative... Article writers who review scanners don't seem to think you'd need a whole lot for the average slide, but I suspect their estimation is way off. Haven't tried it yet.

Bare minimum, you need a transparancy adaptor. (A light that shines through the film, by whatever means the manufacturer chooses). You'd be better off with a dedicated slide scanner. And, to really do the job, it needs to be 48-bit (and not just claim to be). It also needs to be able to save in raw format. Once that's taken care of, you would have to align each frame--- at 24 frames per second. And then there's the matter of making the brightness curve match the 2004 DVD (or future HD botchup), the color-correction & matching, cleanup... sounds like it could be done. But a few seconds would make a bonafied Project, with a capitol P. Of course there's probably something I'm overlooking...


Tinkerers have websites on their results for stepping systems to advance 8mm film, frame-by-frame through a scanner. One of them tried a bunch of ways, and one even wrote a bit of software for automatically cutting strips that were scanned on a flatbed. Too bad I don't know where I saved the links. (Tired now, will probably forget tommorow. But you could probably Google them up). I'd think a person could adapt that to 16mm.

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Karyudo: some of the equipment on that site is 700 line broadcast cameras. Thats a lot better than SD, no?
Yes, I was referring to the Sniper/SniperPro, at $3000. It's hardly prohibitive. Nearly anybody could raise that kind of cash if they were enthusiastic enough.
I'm sure it would be difficult and relatively expensive, but why all the negativity? I think we are being pretty realistic here. It just needs someone (or a group of someones) to organise it.

Only the legal part is really scary, and to be honest I don't think that Lucasfilm will go after an anamorphic SD scan if they don't bother with all the transfers already done.
Darth Lucas: I am altering the trilogy. Pray I don't alter it further.
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I think Karyudo is just trying to be realistic. We'd all love to see a really good new anamorphic transfer. But the chances of that being acheived from a second-hand 16mm print are pretty slim, even if you had the best film scanner available. IMHO, it just isn't worth considering for an SD/DVD final product, as you would be unlikely to get better results than you would just by upscaling the new DVD.

Now if you want to make a new HD transfer, that's a different matter.
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Let me put it this way: I have gone a lot further down this road than any of you (except maybe Silverwook), and it is far more difficult journey than any of you imagine. I obviously don't think it's impossible, but the threads that pop up every time a battered 16mm print go up on eBay make me laugh and frustrate me, all at once.

Maybe if the chit-chat went beyond "maybe we could get the money together to buy a print!!!" and started heading toward "maybe we could get the money together to help those who have prints make transfers!" it would be worth paying attention to.

Actually, no, it wouldn't. Because the attention generated by taking up a collection would almost certainly kill any transfer project, either because LFL would come to bear, or because of the sheer reporting burden ("No, still not enough progress to make any of you happy...").

(Oh, and by the way: ronlaw, I don't see that the 700-line broadcast camera is anything but SD. That's still 20 lines off the digital SD spec, and nowhere near the 1280 "lines" of 720p.)
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NTSC has 480 lines dude.
The main problem would not be the telecining though, a 16mm print from the 80s would today be in a very bad shape, with scratches and dropouts and stuff. Okay, you could take the audio from the LDs (LPCM), but you would have to repair the video to a very high extend.
And also, the 1080p "resolution" of 16mm film is only valid to high quality prints. I doubt that a home theatre print would be that clean and sharp.
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Originally posted by: iRantanplan
NTSC has 480 lines dude.


No, it doesn't (dude...). It has 525. And how many does it have the other way (vertical columns)? Hmm? That's right: not exactly defined in the analog domain. Which is why a broadcast camera is free to quote 700: it has a frequency response that gives 700 resolvable vertical lines in that direction, with 525 defined horizontal scan lines. Even lowly VHS has 525 scan lines. It has to: that's how NTSC works!

A broadcast camera claiming 700 lines is possibly analog, and certainly SD.

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Originally posted by: iRantanplan
[T]he 1080p "resolution" of 16mm film is only valid [for] high quality prints.


Another claim I'd dispute. If you want as good quality SD as you can get from a 16mm print, then you pretty much have to start at a higher resolution. There is quite a lot of stuff to worry about at the edges of the frame/gate, and if you want to be able to maintain as much quality during resizing (16mm Scope prints do exist), cropping, cleaning, colour correcting, sharpening and editing (of reels together, for example), then you'd want to keep as much resolution as possible. The absolute final step (if I was doing it) would be to drop to PAL or NTSC SD resolution from at least a 720p work print.

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Has anyone who has a print tried to scan it in any way, even by recording off a screen? I know the results wouldn't be as good as a real telecine and I'm sure contrast would be worse than the new dvd's but I think even a Hi8 camera could get more resolution than the letterboxed release. Is there a way you could tell a computer to use the color and contrast of one source but render it into the resolution of the other source?

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1) You can see a 35mm frame in this thread;

2) Shooting a projected print on Hi-8 would look approximately 1.7 million times worse than the official letterbox discs;

3) See this thread.
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I have a 16mm Workprinter-16. After reading the messages in this thread, I get the impression that such a scan might not be up to the standards people here want. With it, I can only scan at the resolution of a good DV camera (I'm using a Sony TRV-900 camcorder as the camera - you don't actually need to have tape in the camera because the image just gets sent straight to the computer). But it is telecine, frame-by-frame, and the results therefore are easy to edit. I bought it because I was spending a lot of money on 16mm scans at duplication houses... the Workprinter gets WAY better results than any of the transfers I paid to have done (mind you, I never paid for a rank transfer). I use it a lot, so if someone had a good print and if there was any interest in such a scan, I might be interested too.

It's true that it's silent. That's because it runs at 6fps. I capture the audio separately and synch it up later. It can be tedious but it's a lot less difficult than the cleaning would be. In my experience, the biggest problem with the Workprinters is grain. Whereas a rank transfer smooths out grain and scratches with the water immersion, the workprinter just shines a light on the film and the projector scans it. So although the picture is very sharp (presuming you get a good focus), the sharpness can also manifest as more grain, depending on the type of filmstock used. I've had scans turn out gorgeous, and others turn out pretty grainy.

A month ago I did a scan of a 1952 color film of a drum and bugle corps. Watching it on a friend's big screen TV, the colors leap off the screen - really amazing, it looks like it was filmed yesterday. I also have a scan of a table tennis exhibition from 1972, and it looks like an 8mm home movie. Obviously, your mileage may vary.

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Originally posted by: Karyudo
Originally posted by: iRantanplan
NTSC has 480 lines dude.


No, it doesn't (dude...). It has 525. And how many does it have the other way (vertical columns)? Hmm? That's right: not exactly defined in the analog domain. Which is why a broadcast camera is free to quote 700: it has a frequency response that gives 700 resolvable vertical lines in that direction, with 525 defined horizontal scan lines. Even lowly VHS has 525 scan lines. It has to: that's how NTSC works!

A broadcast camera claiming 700 lines is possibly analog, and certainly SD.



Well kind of - erm - dudes.

NTSC is a 525 line format, but only 484 of those lines are *active* lines. i.e. only 484 or less are used to display the picture. The remaining 41 lines are used for synchronisation, the vertical retrace and stuff like subtitles or closed captioning (or whatever it is called inb the US).

The cameras that put out a so called 700 lines do not do so via NTSC, they can't as NTSC is stuck at 525 lines, they can theoritcally output that many lines via RGB but what are you going to capture them with. Basically it just means you get a well defined 480 or so lines of picture, they are still very much SD.

There were plans for a 625 line NTSC system at one stage, but they never eventuated.
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Originally posted by: ronlaw
Karyudo: some of the equipment on that site is 700 line broadcast cameras. Thats a lot better than SD, no?
Yes, I was referring to the Sniper/SniperPro, at $3000. It's hardly prohibitive. Nearly anybody could raise that kind of cash if they were enthusiastic enough.
I'm sure it would be difficult and relatively expensive, but why all the negativity? I think we are being pretty realistic here. It just needs someone (or a group of someones) to organise it.

Only the legal part is really scary, and to be honest I don't think that Lucasfilm will go after an anamorphic SD scan if they don't bother with all the transfers already done.


Well the Sniper Pro is $5995 and is still SD, you would need to add another $2-4K for a HDV camera and about another $500 or so for a suitable lens to have a hope of getting something better than what we already have. I would think you would be lucky to get away under $9000 (assuming you already had a print) and then a *lot* of post production work. As there is no way you could legally sell or distribute the final product it is a lot of money to pony up.

Even then the snipers don't have infrared capability so you are going to have a very scratchy dirty looking transfer that will need a lot of cleanup even with a really good print.

So kind of like Karyudo said, possible but difficult and expensive with no guarantee of a great result.