Star Wars on Super8 (Released) — Page 2

frank678 said:

Asaki said:

It's a little less colorful than I was expecting, but looks pretty awesome.

I think it would be possible to make things 'pop' a bit more with some adjustments - I had tried a quick and nasty boost https://vimeo.com/72009834 but I would be worried of doing too much in case of ruining the nice texture the original has

Thanks, Nice colours, impossible to judge the detail loss as Vimeo compression will be obliterating the fine detail anyway.

I'm hoping more people will have a play with it and see what they can bring out of it.

The scan is in 16bit per pixel colour so there will be a lot more latitude for colour adjustments than the compressed file I posted.

frank678 said:

Asaki said:

It's a little less colorful than I was expecting, but looks pretty awesome.

I think it would be possible to make things 'pop' a bit more with some adjustments - I had tried a quick and nasty boost https://vimeo.com/72009834 but I would be worried of doing too much in case of ruining the nice texture the original has

 I'm not saying the colors are bad, I just remember them being slightly different (a little more greenish?), but that's coming from the memory of a YouTube video of the film being projected onto a wall...so not exactly the best reference =)

The images in that other thread have crushed blacks and incorrect gamma curves, so it is hard to compare one to the other.

The sample I posted is straight out of the scanner, I haven't yet gone through and adjusted colours to match the film yet. It is a purposely wide gamut scan to allow colour correction later. So it is not a good colour reference yet either.

A lot of people don't realise that a full scan of a film will look nothing like the original projected image. It will look somewhat washed out and very flat. This is required to ensure you capture *all* of the detail from the print or negative.

Much like the output from a video camera that shoots in raw. You capture the full range then colour correct in post.

If the aim is to make it look like the print, you then use the print on an editor as a reference and take readings directly from the print using a calibrated light source if that is the aim.

Plus, every print will be slightly different.

Unless a colourist has gone back to the original print and done a grading pass to match it, what you get out of any scanner will be rather different.

As for the process for this particular scan (as requested by pittrek), the sensor is a mono sony ICX694ALG, three 16bpp exposures per frame, using a Red, Green and Blue light source spectrally matched to the CCD, to allow full resolution and the full dynamic range to be captured.

Capturing this way is slow and eats up a *lot* of storage, but gives the best quality.

frank678 said:

@Asaki, did you mean the youtube clip that negative1 posted some stills from here: http://originaltrilogy.com/forum/topic.cfm/Star-Wars-Colortiming-Cinematography-was-What-changes-was-done-to-STAR-WARS-in-93/post/569016/#TopicPost569016 this might have gone through a different chain perhaps

 Yeah, I think that's the one. Certainly not a very good reference =)

An interesting 1980 article mentions that when ESB came out, that compared to Star Wars,  The lighting schemes are bolder and the color saturation richer.

This would suggest that the cinematic release of Star Wars had somewhat muted colours, which would be in step with most films of the day.

www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/longterm/movies/review97/empirestrikesbackarnold.htm

Maybe the crappy Eastman prints in The US had muted colors.  UK prints on mylar, or Technicolor were far from muted.

I screened Star Wars multiple times, and it was never what I would call 'vibrant'.

Eastman stock when new had good colour saturation, it just didn't hold its colour over time.

BTW, here is a simple wetgate test, I have installed a wetgate onto the Super8 scanner.

The first file is the film after cleaning, the second one is the same sequence with the wetgate installed. It does a pretty nice job.

Just a few seconds of footage, it is low quality, just a quick test to see if the wetgate works.

http://we.tl/VjgaTXH6Bt

The liquid is close to the same refractive index as the film base, the liquid fills in any scratches, so as long as the emulsion is not damaged, then the scratches disappear, as they are now filled with the liquid.

This means that for base scratches, you get the actually data that is on the film, unlike software scratch removal that 'creates' data to fill in the scratches.

It saves a lot of digital cleanup work and means you get the real picture information, so it is a win-win.

You can get a similar result by soaking a film with filmguard, it fills in the base scratches and makes the lines disappear.

Top is wet, bottom is dry.

The horizontal ones look to be damage on the original print that this print was duped from, so nothing we can do about that unfortunately.

It's amazing what a little science can do.

Hoping to have the Derann print completed with wetgate by the end of next week.

Are you going to be able to do a sprocket hole stabilization?

Easy to do, but not really needed, there were only a handful of damaged sprockets and the drive is extremely accurate, so other fluctuations were of a sub-pixel nature,  but there is plenty of gate weave in the film even with the sprockets totally stabilised, that is just how it was.

You could go through and stabilise the footage so it was rock-solid, and anyone should feel free to do so, but it will be a different beast.

poita said:

Hoping to have the Derann print completed with wetgate by the end of next week.

That's amazing!

What's the next step?