logo Sign In

the SE films are all that are left!!!! — Page 2

Author
Time
It's quite simple: I am a fan, and one who can spell too. And I will not buy the SE version...period. When the original set comes out I will buy it, but nothing will replace it and all those I know feel the same.
Author
Time
Quote

Originally posted by: GundarkHunter
First off, be careful who you attribute quotes to. It was the idiot who started this thread who made the cellulite error.
As for scanning @ 4500dpi, consider that most release prints only retain, @ best, resolution easily captured by a 2K scan. This is why most people cannot tell the difference between HD and film. Scnning @ 4500dpi is overkill and may, in fact expose certain elements (matte lines, wires) that were meant to be obscured by the reduction in resolution of a release print.
SW:ANH's biggest problem with film stock was that 5247 was a CRI (color reversal internegative) stock, which is extremely prone to fading. Not all the film was shot in 5247; it was only the effects shots that were handled this way, because it reduced the number of generations required in optical printing. As for shrinkage of the seps, Warner is using a new process (dubbed Ultra Resolution) that scans all the seps in, converts them to their appropriate colours, and uses computer technology to digitally correct shrinkage and prevent the fringing that results when shrunken seps are recombined. The first DVD released in this process was Singin' in the Rain:SE, and it has since been used for The Adventures of Robin Hood and will also be used for the upcoming release of Gone With the Wind. I don't see why LFL couldn't licence this to produce an all new answer print of ANH.
Finally, while 70mm is bigger, bigeer doesn't necessarily equal better. The 70mm prints were blow-ups and as such, bring a lot more grain into the image. The best way to see the OT is still in 35mm. Episode 2 may have looked less than stellar on the big screen, but it looked pretty amazing on DVD. That's because a digital-to-film conversion inevitably saps some of the colour and brightness from the image. If you'd seen AOTC in a DLP venue, you would have been blown away by the image.

Um... yeah! What he said.
"You fell victim to one of the classic blunders, the most famous of which is 'Never get involved in a land war in Asia'."
--Vizzini (Wallace Shawn), The Princess Bride
-------------------------
Kevin A
Webmaster/Primary Cynic
kapgar.typepad.com
kapgar.com
Author
Time
Gundark

First of all i was not commenting you,i was commenting the first man.I know who said what.

Secondly 2K resolution is good enough today.What about tomorow? In the future there will
be 4K digital cinema standards.
4K or 6K will give you all the details in the negative you need. Don't be deceved by the grain.
Grain is not the resolution limit. It is just a phenomenon of grouping of molecules,but film can
capture more details,beyond the grain limit.that is why even in still photography sometimes 8000dpi is
used.This gives you about 11K per frame of 35mm still film (or vistavision in motion pictures)
Grain can be digitally reduced without affecting the fine details beneath it.
For archiving there is no excuse for not capturing all the detail you had in your negative film.

And secondly a technical correction.
Star Wars was not SHOT on CRI's . CRI is a special form of intermediate film stock
made for speciall effects (of course not manufactured anymore)
It is a reversal film stock,not negative film.
All of the star wars was shot on negative film stock.
But the composites were printed on CRI's which fade in about 10 years or so.
In Star Wars SE you never saw any of the CRI footage because they used the camera negatives
and recomposited them onto new film stock.
The problem was that the actual color negative stock had faded.
CRI's have faded beyond use so they never used them anyway.The actual camera negatives
had faded about 10%
The color negative film that Star Wars was shot on was eastman II 5247
It was a color negative film stock (only one at the time) of ISO 100 speed tungsten balanced.
And all of the Star Wars was shot on it.
You cant shoot on CRI film stock. CRI filmstocks are used in optical printers (had been used)


Author
Time
Quote

Originally posted by: cubebox
Gundark

CRI filmstocks are used in optical printers (had been used)


Exactly. It was used on the effects shots, like I said, to reduce the number of generations used in those shots. You have added nothing to what I said. As for your comments on grain, do you actually know what grain is? Grain is the silver halide particles that form the image; no grain, no image. Finally, as to whether or not all the details shold be captured in a resolution scan, as I said before, scanning @ too high resolution is going to reveal details originally obscured by generational loss, details that were obscured for a reason. Do you really want to see all the wires and other trickery and therefore destroy the illusion that the filmmakers have worked so hard to create? I certainly hope not.
Whether or not 4K scans will become the defacto standard in the future for HD cinemas has less to do with possibility and more to do with available bandwidth. Since proposed delivery systems for digital cinema include encrypted satellite transmission, I doubt that 4K scans will become the norm anytime soon.

Princess Leia: I happen to like nice men.
Han Solo: I'm a nice man.

Author
Time
I thouth you said that SFX shots were shot on CRI. They were shot on negative film. I guess i misunderstood you.
But you did say that 5247 was CRI,and this is not true.

As for film grain. I could ask you the same question. Do you know what film grain is?

Color image is formed after silver halide makes a chemical imprint into color couplers.After that
the silver halide is washed away leaving organic dyes with color information.

Anyway the grain you see in the image are not the particles themeselfs.
These particles are miscroscopic. You never get to see them,not on screen,
not on 4K scans or wherever.Only under the miscroscope,even for the fastest films.
What you DO see on screen and in scans are actually large groupations of
these particles.To be more specific,groupations of clusters of these particles.
One visible grain "dot" you see on screen is composed out of hundreds of actual grain particles.

So when a film manufacturer says that some film is "fine grain" he refers to the size
of those microscopic particles,not the grain dots you see,although there is a strong connection between these two things.
The thing is that small grain particles form smaller clusters,and therefore these
clusters and groupations are less visible on screen.
Large grain particles form large groups,and those groups are more visible on screen.

And as for scanning and grain reduction,
imagine it like this:
you watch a large crowd of people from an airplane. They do not stand equaly dense everywhere.
On some places there are more people,and on some there are less people.
So what you see is actually an equivalent of film grain.
But only because people are grouped in groups,that doesn't mean that those
groups are the limit of what you can see from the plane,those groups are not the building blocks of your image (like pixels in digital).
You can still see every human separatly.
This is only an illustration,in film emulsion the actual resolution limit does not go that far beyond
the grain size,but still, film emulsion captures image details beyond the size of the image grain you see because that grain is just a groupation of smaller particles,not the actual particles.

The limit of resolution in film is determined by light dispersion in the emulsion
and is limited by the grain particle size,but not at that level that you think.
At a smaller level than the size of visible image grain.

Here is a great example of this.
As you know eastman EXR 5245 has been a synonime for best resolution and fine grain.
Now Kodak has introduced vision2 100T (5212) film stock that
surpassed the resolution of 5245. And yet 5245 still has finer grain.
So basicly,this proves my point. 5212 has fine grain,but not as fine as
5245,but it has more resolution than 5245.

You would see what i mean if you took your negatives and have them scanned
on a drum scanner or on Imacon 8000dpi scanner.
Or at least read some literature about photographic technology.

As for 4K scanning and cinema.

IF someone was to scan star wars at 4K he would most certainly recomposite all the
effects digitally.Nobody scans old dupe negatives of SFX's
When digital restoration is at hand,original negative elements are
usually used.

Most organisations (not equipment manufacturers,the would sell their own mother as the new cinema standard if it brought them enough money)
that discuss what is to be the future standard of digital cinema
agree that it should be 2K minimum and that they should strive for 4K.
Kodak digital cinema system is currently 2K (true 2K) ,and they plan to make the
next system 4K. Yes,it wont be in the near future,it will probably be like
10 years untill someone makes a working 4K cinema system at a resonable price.
but it will be some day.

In 100 years from now there will be electronic systems that will surpas the qualitty
of every photographic material recorded in 20th century,and then,who is going
to explain to spectators of that time that 2K (a small fraction of film resolution)
was "good enough" today,and that we preserved films in that resolution.
Author
Time
Shouldn't all this crap be moved to the "Don't Get Technical With Me!" thread?

My God, I'm reading Greek in English
"You fell victim to one of the classic blunders, the most famous of which is 'Never get involved in a land war in Asia'."
--Vizzini (Wallace Shawn), The Princess Bride
-------------------------
Kevin A
Webmaster/Primary Cynic
kapgar.typepad.com
kapgar.com
Author
Time
I think there is no tneed for that,we are about finished here.
there have been some misunderstandings here.

If mr. Gundark has nothing to say to what i have posted now
then we are over with this.
If he misunderstands me in something,or disagrees
with some facts,then well need more room for this,so we'll move
Author
Time
I will just close with this. I would never say that DVD is the best way to preserve film. A great way to build a collection of movies, sure, but not the best way to archive. I would prefer to let experts like Kevin Brownlow, Robert Harris and James Katz continue to do what they do best, because they have ensured that films like Vertigo and My Fair Lady will survive until technology catches up. 2K scanning has yielded some cinematic miracles in terms of restoration, but only with very old films and is not to be thoroughly dismissed. Eventually 4K and higher scanning will become the norm, but we must never forget that cinema is first and foremost a commercial medium and how and what films are preserved will continue to be dictated by the market.
I just want to add one thing. Follow this link: Grain is not the Enemy.

Princess Leia: I happen to like nice men.
Han Solo: I'm a nice man.

Author
Time
Forgive me for asking what might be a stupid question, but what about all of the reels that the original trilogy was shown on?

Gentlemen, you can’t fight in here, this is the war room!

Author
Time
Those are release prints, and given the abuse they go through, not to mention being 3-4 generations removed from the ONeg, are not the best source material for a video transfer.

Princess Leia: I happen to like nice men.
Han Solo: I'm a nice man.

Author
Time
Damn it to hell...

How about if you had a projection system capable of showing 35mm reels? Would it be worth it to view the release prints on those?

Gentlemen, you can’t fight in here, this is the war room!

Author
Time
Oh yeah; it's just that if you're going to transfer to video, you want the best possible source. Video, despite its lower resolution, has a tendency to show up flaws in souce material. Besides, after a release print has been used for about 12 weeks straight, the wear and tear manifests itself in ugly ways.

Princess Leia: I happen to like nice men.
Han Solo: I'm a nice man.

Author
Time
Yup, video is clean and 100% linear in the tone curve and it shows all the contrast, color and grain problems from
prints. And besides telecine devices hate high contrast material like reversal films
and prints. A lot of the dynamic range and suble nuances are lost
when telecining such material. It is possible,but you wouldn't get the best
results.

And as for film scanners,they can't scan prints at all. Their sensors are calibrated for the specific
range of color negative film.And they are made to simulate how print film "sees" negative film.
Imagine how print film would "see" print film if you wanted to copy print film to print film. It would blow up the contrast and give
you ugly unusable images.Same would be with scanning print film.

All in all,you need to use interpositives (or internegatives) for video transfers to get
nice clean colors as you see them on all the new DVD transfers.
Author
Time
Cube, do you work in the industry? I'm curious.

Princess Leia: I happen to like nice men.
Han Solo: I'm a nice man.

Author
Time
I'm impressed with the depth of your knowledge, so it was a logical progression.

Princess Leia: I happen to like nice men.
Han Solo: I'm a nice man.

Author
Time
Well thank you,but i didn't really say anything "deep" here that
only filmmakers know about.

I'm a still photographer,so i know a lot about film technology,
which is pretty much the same for both fields.And i am interested in cinematography,
so i like to learn a lot.
And i talk a lot with cinematographers and filmmakers,so i learn a great deal from them.
If you have roots in still photography,and you want to learn about
cinematography,it is just a matter of adjusting your brain to some
minor differences. The problems,chalenges,and technology is the
same in both fields.


Author
Time
That explains an awful lot. Most of my knowledge of film has been derived from dabbling in still photography (actually learned how to process B&W) and working as a projectionist. The web has been helpful in some respects, too.

Princess Leia: I happen to like nice men.
Han Solo: I'm a nice man.

Author
Time
Yes,if you work with still photography (not point and shoot shit)
the web is a great tool to help you convert yourself like that.
You allready know the technology,you just need to know how
they use it to make motion pictures.