Puggo GRANDE - 16mm restoration (Released) — Page 16

MoveAlong said:

budwhite said:

I just watched a few minutes of it.(d/l from a.b.starwars) Very decent looking, better than I thought it would be. But is the aspect ratio correct? I had thicker black bars than usual on my 32" WS TV.

The bottom of the print Puggo telecined was severely cropped. Therefore the black bars have to be bigger to maintain proper AR.

I noticed that if I used an older DVD player to play it on my widescreen plasma, I had to tell the DVD player that it was talking to a 16:9 display.  Otherwise, it REALLY squished it and everyone looked stretched horizontally.  So make sure you have your player/TV all set up right for anamorphic display.  And yes, even when set up correctly the black bars are mighty thick.  480x720 squished to 310x720 and then stretched another 25% by the hardware - you do the math.  Just pretend you're at the Cineramadome!

bill77 said:

Thank you sooo much for all your time and effort in making this possible. After watching this today, I really feel that I have experienced Star Wars circa 1977.

Thanks for the kind words. I'm really glad that people are enjoying it.  It was a good year's worth of work.

Interestingly, I have to say that, while I understand people seeing it as a trip back to 1977, it really isn't that for me.  My memory of 1977 was seeing it in pristine glory, without any blemishes.  I won't transport back to 1977 until SW is properly restored from a 70mm high quality print, like we saw back then in the theaters when it first came out.

When I watch something like the SE, there are moments when I feel like I'm back in 1977 experiencing that sparkling brilliance again... then Han steps on Jabba's tail and it's "aw crap!", back to tragic reality.

As a reminder, everyone who received a disk, will be receiving a replacement disk.  They are already in the mail.

Yes, reel 2 was in worse condition (color-wise) than the other two reels.

Here's an interesting observation that perhaps someone here can explain(?).... the fact that reel 2 has a different leader, and was much more red (different filmstock?) would ordinarily lead me to conclude that the reel was part of a different set than reels 1/3, and that therefore this was a mix-and-match set.  However, there are two things to counter that...
- reel 2 was erroneously cropped in exactly the same way as reels 1/3, and
- in the Swedish subtitled set, the leaders shared the same differences in style as in the normal set (that is, reel 2 had the circular countdown leader whereas reels 1/3 had the fat block numbers).  This despite, again, all of the Swedish reels having the same (non-erroneous) cropping as each other.

So, is this leader pattern normal on 16mm film sets, and this was not a mix-and-match set?

budwhite said:

puggo, you don't happen to have any comparison pics so one can see how much was cropped?

Look on post 151 of this thread.  It's actually a tiny bit less cropped than that, since I recaptured it after much wrangling with the gate and lens mount.  But the cropping is significant enough to have caused some problem with one 5-second segment of Greedo's subtitles.

I have a technical question.  How would one take this dvd at home and add on say the 35mm stereo theatrical mix like the belbecus capture from the laserdisc ?

Would be possible to sync that to the video or would the reel changes make that impossible.

skyjedi2005 said:

I have a technical question.  How would one take this dvd at home and add on say the 35mm stereo theatrical mix like the belbecus capture from the laserdisc ?

Would be possible to sync that to the video or would the reel changes make that impossible.

Ideally, you'd want to use the original .avi files of the video, and then use a video editor such as Vegas to synch them up by hand.  That would mean cutting, moving, stretching, and squeezing the audio scene-by-scene, using your eyes and ears until you had an audio file that matched the video.  Then you'd need to encode the new audio file to ac3 or whatever.  There would be no need to reencode the video.  Of course you'd need to reauthor the DVD too.  And if you wanted both audios on the same DVD, you'd need to make some room - I don't think they'd both fit right now.

Tedious, but it's exactly what I did to synch the mono mix from one set of reels until it matched reasonably well with the other set of reels.

The bigger question is, why would you want to do that?  The 35mm mix is missing "close the blast doors", right?  That's a deal-breaker, IMHO.  :)

Never mind sounds like too much work, lol.

Transfering from a 70mm print would not be ideal it would print in extra grain not on the original 35mm negative printed in at the blow up stage.

I wonder what the state of the internegative used to make those willits deigns film cels is in?  The empire cels had good color and grain structure and contrast, the star wars ones while going a little magenta werr far less faded than they should have been given the territory of eastman filmstock before LPP.  But the color on return of the jedi was almost gone and was faded severly, funny as the same year LPP printing really took off jedi was released. Not sure if these represent how the 70mm film cels actually look, or if it is due to the process of how they were scanned but they are here at this link.

http://www.jedi1.net/

Ideally what you would want to do is retransfer the vistavision plates or elements from their original camera negatives in 8 k, not the 35mm reduction of the same elements.  The you would also transfer the live action 35mm footage at 4  minimal. The Vistavision effects negative was i believe 65mm.

Which is what i think Ridley scott did on blade runner they had saved the original opticals produced in vistavision, and were able to use them for that added sharpness and effect on the blu ray.

Star Trek the motion picture was also photographed as far as its optical effects n vistavison by John Dykstra but Paramount would not pay the expense to retransfer them.  I wonder if the seperate elements were even saved, knowing them probably not as they never saved the optical elements for the original tv series making it necessary to recreate all the effects in cgi,lame.

Fortunately for star wars fans as lucas has said in the 1997 restoration documentary he saved every piece of film and all the separate opticals.

skyjedi2005 said:

 

I wonder what the state of the internegative used to make those willits deigns film cels is in?  The empire cels had good color and grain structure and contrast, the star wars ones while going a little magenta werr far less faded than they should have been given the territory of eastman filmstock before LPP.  But the color on return of the jedi was almost gone and was faded severly, funny as the same year LPP printing really took off jedi was released. Not sure if these represent how the 70mm film cels actually look, or if it is due to the process of how they were scanned but they are here at this link.

http://www.jedi1.net/

 

puggo,

just finished watching it !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

awesome job!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

i loved it, every scratch, grain, wrinkle etc..

this is the 5th time, i've seen the original non-SE version, so it's really meaningful

to me.. (i've mostly watched the SE version)...

can i post a short teaser on youtube?

be seeing you

+1

TMBTM said:

Can't wait to see it. I'm waiting for rapidshare links.

I know there will be some but I'll go on holliday for 2 weeks starting saturday!

Damn, maybe 2 weeks before I can see it ......

hehe, soon TMBTM!!  I just got my disc in the post.  expect RS tomorrow :)  thanks again Puggo.  really this is a tremendous disc.  I was impressed when I previewed v1.  Can't wait to sit down and watch this one :)

DOWNLOADING IT RIGHT NOW.

this is now available via RS.  check tehparadox, or PM me or Puggo.  enjoy!! :)