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Info: POSSIBLY FOUND - Star Wars A New Hope Technicolor I.B. dye transfer print - random post on reddit — Page 5

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Greenshift is something that's kept me from finishing my Dragon Ball projects. :P

"Right now the coffees are doing their final work." (Airi, Masked Rider Den-o episode 1)

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poita said:

I have also seen IB prints where the masking area is darker, especially where a print played at one cinema for a long time, the projected area has lightened compared to the area that stayed behind the gate-mask.

But anyway, most well preserved IB prints look fantastic, if a little contrasty and have great colour.

That can possibly be attributed to arc burn maybe?  I've seen the same thing on some old 50's drive in prints in the past.

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http://imgur.com/a/3TEhj#0

 

Here is a link to an imgur album from snapshots of reel 2.  Unfortunately they're upside; I couldn't flip them inside imgur for some reason.  

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mikeaz123 said:

http://imgur.com/a/3TEhj#0

Awesome!

I hope, as things move along, we'll get more work-in-progress samples with technical information on it's processing ... for a more definitive statement on Star Wars original color.

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Wow, the skin tones are so rich and natural, excellent saturation. Film rules. :)

I hope this can be scanned in high quality soon. :)

The Star Wars trilogy. There can be only one.

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I love the shot of Luke, he is so surly :)

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Hey, thanks Mike,

They appear to have a very warm pallette, and are very vibrant. Do they project that same way as seen in these pictures, or do they differ at all, due to the back light or camera settings?

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 (Edited)


poita said:

mikeaz123 said:

I've never heard of an IB print fading; I've had trailers from the 50's that look perfect, and there's stuff dating back to the 30's on nitrate that's supposed to look outstanding.  IB matrices can widely vary though.  I've had 3 or 4 prints of Thunderball over the years, and only 1 had perfect color registration.  The others were off.  I don't think that was due to fading, but more due to processing.


They definitely fade, just nowhere near as fast as other stocks. in 1996 I had  two IB prints to work on for a restoration,  both struck one after the other in 1972, one had faded noticebaly more than the other. One had been kept in a temp controlled film archive, the other in the general office area in a desk. If kept well, the fading over a decade or three is pretty minimal, but eventually all things chemical change with time.



I'm inclined to agree with mikeaz123. IB prints are non-chemical in nature. They are printed in full daylight, lithography-style on a clear (or "blank") piece of polyester film (or celluloid, pre-1950s). There's no such thing as IB "stock" because IB prints do not have an emulsion layer of chemicals & they don't have to be "developed" by dunking them into various photo chemicals, like color film stock does.

Everything ages, of course, but IB prints age in a totally different way from Easmancolor prints because they were made in a totally different way.

Some Technicolor labs got sloppy near the end, and put out greenish prints (there are some prints of Cabaret that suffered from this), but that was from errors in the initial printing, not due to age-related fading.

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That is true that they are not emulsion based and are printed, and will not fade the same way that other film types will, but they still fade. Just the way a print in a magazine can fade over time. Dyes are still chemicals and react to heat and light, both of which are there in extremes in carbon arc and other forms of 35mm projection.

For our purposes the fade will be so small as not to be an issue.

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Thanks so much for the sunset images, it answers some colour questions for me already.

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poita said:


That is true that they are not emulsion based and are printed, and will not fade the same way that other film types will, but they still fade. Just the way a print in a magazine can fade over time. Dyes are still chemicals and react to heat and light, both of which are there in extremes in carbon arc and other forms of 35mm projection.

For our purposes the fade will be so small as not to be an issue.


Oh, for sure. If the Book of Kells was displayed in a window for the last 500 years, it would be badly faded, no doubt. The same would happen if IB prints were exposed to sunlight or fluorescent bulbs, but since they're mostly sealed up in dark cans, they're protected from most of the bad stuff.

Of course, the Kodak stock has all those nasty chemicals stuck to it, altering and changing away, as chemicals tend to do.

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dlvh said:

Hey, thanks Mike,

They appear to have a very warm pallette, and are very vibrant. Do they project that same way as seen in these pictures, or do they differ at all, due to the back light or camera settings?

I haven't had a chance to project it yet, just the 4th reel.  It'll probably be another couple weeks.  The colors are fairly accurate in the photo capture, but of course there may be some slight differences.

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Mielr said:

 

poita said:


That is true that they are not emulsion based and are printed, and will not fade the same way that other film types will, but they still fade. Just the way a print in a magazine can fade over time. Dyes are still chemicals and react to heat and light, both of which are there in extremes in carbon arc and other forms of 35mm projection.

For our purposes the fade will be so small as not to be an issue.


Oh, for sure. If the Book of Kells was displayed in a window for the last 500 years, it would be badly faded, no doubt. The same would happen if IB prints were exposed to sunlight or fluorescent bulbs, but since they're mostly sealed up in dark cans, they're protected from most of the bad stuff.

Of course, the Kodak stock has all those nasty chemicals stuck to it, altering and changing away, as chemicals tend to do.

 

Exactly, as long as the print has been stored well, it should look lovely, and the shots Mike has posted so far look like it has.

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skyjedi2005 said:


This is not the same print that was shown in Baltimore is it?  With the platter damage on the sides.

 


I wasn't aware that print had damage--- how does platter damage manifest itself, exactly? Do the sides get crunched?

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It was scratched so they matted those effected areas off during projection or so i read.

Or more clearly and properly stated they masked those areas of the image off.

The theater owned also said there was wear and tear and some color fade.

I always thought IB did not fade but i guess i was wrong.

“Always loved Vader’s wordless self sacrifice. Another shitty, clueless, revision like Greedo and young Anakin’s ghost. What a fucking shame.” -Simon Pegg.

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Those snapshots were indeed very interesting, thanks again Mike. They leave me wondering however, if the particular projector ones local cinema used, was a major factor in how you literally saw each movie.

Also, those pictures that you posted were from your I.B. print, which are from a Technicolor presentation, if I understand it correctly? If that is the case, it is no wonder the colors are more vibrant than the non-technicolor presentation that I personally saw at my local cinema in the day, but still none-the-less very interesting!

Here is a video that might be of interest to you all. A fellow describes how projectionists did their work about 35 years ago using a carbon arc projector:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0iScIfqfCGk

After viewing this video (and others that are related), I can easily understand how these films got so beat up, feeding the film into the projector alone seemed to be somewhat rough at times, not by this fellow in particular however, but in general handling of the celluloid film seemed, well...rough at best. It was though, a very interesting video to see, and worth watching.

 

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Yes, the cinema you saw it in, the light source of the projector, size of the screen, film stock, ambient lighting and even your seating position would mean that every one would have a different viewing experience. You would see different colour depending on the lamp colour temperature and film stock, you would see different colour intensity depending on the size of the screen and the number of foot lamberts output.  I was the son of a projectionist and actually got to thread and screen Star Wars as a child, the handling of film is pretty rough, but it is usually lubricated and the threading etc. is just the leader tape which doesn't have any of the movie on it. Film is very hardy, you should see how it is treated by the film editors when cutting a film!

The IB print will be a pretty good indication of how the film was *meant* to look and would have looked at the first screenings in a small cinema with a great screen. It is as close to the original negative as we can get, but it won't necessarily be the way any given person saw it.

That is why I don't get too tied up about reproducing the *exact* experience, there is no such thing. Some cinema screens would have been so dark that the garbage mattes would be invisible, others so bright that they would have been clear and bright. Some projectors would have terrible weave, others pretty stable etc. etc.

However, the overall colour balance and tone would have been much the same, so the IB print allows us to know if the greys were actually a little green, if Uncle Owen's hair was nearly black or more browny-grey, if the monsters in the Cantina were dimly lit with dark shadows etc. etc.

While everyone's experience would be different, we can at last answer a lot of questions about how it looked in '77 if you happened to see it from a great print in a good cinema.

and I'll put money it didn't look much like the bluray release....

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poita said:

Yes, the cinema you saw it in, the light source of the projector, size of the screen, film stock, ambient lighting and even your seating position would mean that every one would have a different viewing experience. You would see different colour depending on the lamp colour temperature and film stock, you would see different colour intensity depending on the size of the screen and the number of foot lamberts output.  I was the son of a projectionist and actually got to thread and screen Star Wars as a child, the handling of film is pretty rough, but it is usually lubricated and the threading etc. is just the leader tape which doesn't have any of the movie on it. Film is very hardy, you should see how it is treated by the film editors when cutting a film!

The IB print will be a pretty good indication of how the film was *meant* to look and would have looked at the first screenings in a small cinema with a great screen. It is as close to the original negative as we can get, but it won't necessarily be the way any given person saw it.

That is why I don't get too tied up about reproducing the *exact* experience, there is no such thing. Some cinema screens would have been so dark that the garbage mattes would be invisible, others so bright that they would have been clear and bright. Some projectors would have terrible weave, others pretty stable etc. etc.

However, the overall colour balance and tone would have been much the same, so the IB print allows us to know if the greys were actually a little green, if Uncle Owen's hair was nearly black or more browny-grey, if the monsters in the Cantina were dimly lit with dark shadows etc. etc.

While everyone's experience would be different, we can at last answer a lot of questions about how it looked in '77 if you happened to see it from a great print in a good cinema.

and I'll put money it didn't look much like the bluray release....

A great and informative write-up poita, thanks so much for this. A nice read!

I bet that was nearly a thrill of a lifetime, being able to actually thread in the movie Star Wars in 1977. I can only imagine that you were giddy with excitement!

A question to you though. Do you have any clue as to how many, of the movie houses/theaters showed the Technicolor print, versus the non Technicolor print? or what was the percentages made of the Technicolor print versus the non Technicolor print? I thought I read it was very small.

Also, a Technicolor print would look a lot different than a non Technicolor print, and thus would have a totally different color timing look, as noted in the pictures from Mike, posted above.

 

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Returning to the topic of how many IB tech prints were created.  Do we know if all these prints were English audio?  Every year new countries were getting the movie, would some of those countries have been given IB prints?  Was the re-release only for the US/UK?

dlvh wrote: Do you have any clue as to how many, of the movie houses/theaters showed the Technicolor print, versus the non Technicolor print?

According to: http://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?page=weekly&id=starwars4.htm

At it's peak, Aug 19-25 1977, SW was in 1,094 theaters. [non-Technicolor]  The 82 re-release was also in close to 1,100 theaters.  The Technicolor estimates have been between 200-300.

Also were there US created IB Tech prints, but it's generally acknowledged that only the UK ones made it into collector's hands?

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The London lab was the only one that hadn't shut down yet, I think the UK was all of it.

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That is correct, the US IB plant had closed down years before. The only IB prints likely to exist are the ones made in the UK.

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dlvh said:

I bet that was nearly a thrill of a lifetime, being able to actually thread in the movie Star Wars in 1977. I can only imagine that you were giddy with excitement!

Actually I was just standing on a milk crate and quite blase about it.

On Tuesday nights Dad used to set the first two reels up and then leave me to do the change-overs, keep the carbon-arc rods at the correct distance (our were manual and used to throw a small rainbow pattern on the ceiling that looked a bit like a spaceship from close encounters, you would gradually wind them in as they burned down during the showing, keeping that pattern roughly the same as a guide) and rewind the reels when they were done. He had a 2nd job and used to leave me there while he typeset the local newspaper on Tuesdays. He was usually back in time to thread reel 3, but sometimes he was late and I would do it.

I think I saw nearly every movie released between 76 and 79, and saw Star Wars countless times. Dad had to convince me to come that night, I only saw the name and thought it was going to ba a war movie that would give me nightmares, he assured me I would like it, and promised I could go home if I didn't.

Well, I went along....and two hours later I never wanted to leave the cinema again!

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poita said:

and I'll put money it didn't look much like the bluray release....

You mean to tell me that audiences in 1977 didn't laugh their socks off when Han Solo stepped on Jabba's tail!?!?

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