Here’s a quick edit of some of the silliest mid-90s trailers (from 35mm scans) to go before this release, when it arrives and if you’re so inclined. They’re all from YT, I didn’t scan them, enjoy 😃
This forum has totally spoiled me for blurays- I want to see everything scanned from a screener print now! :’(
Sorry for being thick, so there’s a partially cleaned, heavily graded v2 of the grindhouse out there?
Wow! This horrible masterpiece is getting some serious tlc. I watched the editdroid copy recently and I think the addition of the cartoon from the blu ray is a good shout.
This’ll make a good marathon with the Ewok movies! 😃
So maybe I’m just out of the loop or didn’t get the point but will we ever see this 35mm transfer of The Empire Strikes Back from Negative1 or Rogue1?
As far as I can tell everyone with access to scans is still working. It just seems like there won’t be so many updates from now on
Hi all,
This edit went pretty much without a hitch. Puggo and the SSE work fine together. Unfortunately, a small problem cropped up.
I demuxed TN1’s .mkv to .mov with a Mac app called Remux. No probs there, but what I discovered recently is that when imported to Premiere CC 2015 (it’s fine before that), several shots in the movie start with a few seconds of horrible colour distortion (like waves of green and red). This results in a flash of very high saturation, before the shot settles back to how it should look. Bear in mind, this is not before a cut I’ve made in the video clip, but at the beginning of a shot within the full SSE clip.
Here’s an example. This problem persists to all exports - ProRes, h264, whatever.
https://vimeo.com/158921713
Pass: pug
It’s not a huge deal, but it’s a little distracting. It doesn’t just happen in the desert scenes but across the film. I’m going to try to get the project into Final Cut X (Trial) and see if that makes any difference, but in the meantime, if anyone’s ever stumbled across this problem, any ideas would be incredible.
Cheers!
My mistake.
I also checked back and the fragment belonged to Poita, and I don’t think there are any more bits. Must’ve been selective memory 😛
I’ll attempt a cleanup on the raw clip and report any findings 😃
Yeah, that would be possible and then 35mm and IMAX 70mm would cut together at the same ratio, but it wouldn’t be utilising all of the 15/70 frame, so you might as well downgrade very slightly to 65mm cameras. IMAX is a square format, so if you matte it, you’re wasting a lot of dough on the square screen, the incredibly powerful bulb and the film stock itself.
Home video has gone the way of widescreen, so cinemascope looks better than 4:3 on all our screens, but if we had HD (or equivalent) square telly’s - IMAX would work great, and you’d shoot academy 35mm to go with it.
Now basically everything has to be 16:9 or wider, IMAX is kinda an aberrant format - but because it fills up most of your visual field (unlike cinemascope) it’s a genuinely unique experience, and can’t really be translated to home video.
Sorry to waffle on 😛
That segment is the stuff of restoration nightmares. Good luck to whomever decides they want to take that on. 😛
Haha, hopefully someone will now on pride alone! 😛
My problem with IMAX scenes is that the AR shift wouldn’t have to happen if they just did the whole thing in IMAX. Either use IMAX or don’t use IMAX.
It would be a wonderful thing, but the cameras are too noisy and the film stock is so expensive. 70 minutes in the Dark Knight Rises is probably the nearest to a full film there’ll be. 5 minutes in Star Wars was kinda pointless - although it did mean they had show the film on celluloid in a handful of places!
Sorry to bump this and be quite off-topic as well! 😛 A while back the then T-1 put a few seconds of 70mm 4K up on their site. The owner of the fragment then mentioned there might be a few more bits, but nothing major.
Dre did a pretty solid colour recovery of one frame. I was just wondering if anyone’s considered restoring these bits for curiosity’s sake (and maybe as prep in the supremely unlikely event of a reel popping up)? I’ve asked a couple of collectors and they say that’s nigh on impossible, but they did confirm that all 70mm was printed on Eastman so would be brick red by now, like the 5 secs we’ve seen.
I’d happily have a go on pfClean/DaVinci, but I have to say, I’m probably not the best person for the job.
What I would love to do though, is see how these fragments could be edited into the grindhouse, how sharp they are when played in sequence with 35mm and whether the aspect ratio shift is alarming or not. (Maybe they could fit inside the widescreen Grindhouse frame with some blending on either side)
Cheers!
PS: Did anyone see the Dark Knight in 15/70 IMAX? I didn’t care too much for the film, but the EXPERIENCE was out of this world. The detail was jaw-dropping.
Yes, I saw them at an ‘all-knighter’ at the BFI IMAX in London. The experience is exceptional (Interstellar was just as good) and it will be very sad if and when IMAX replace their projectors with Laser.
On the topic of whether the changing aspect ratio is a good or a bad thing, I think it’s fundamentally a good thing. It doesn’t distract at all and the IMAX 15/70 scenes are absolutely worth it. The movie industry needs ways to attract people back into cinemas and IMAX 70mm is definitely one of those ways. I think another will be reverting a few screens back to 35/standard 70mm. The drive to digitise everything, release in 3D where possible and raise ticket prices is not working. The enthusiasm for analogue technologies on the other hand, is being felt across the board.
I have to say though, that the IMAX scene in TFA was not worth it. Christopher Nolan makes action sequences work for IMAX by slowing down the editing and having lots of practical effects/stunts to make up for it. You can appreciate the higher film resolution a lot better. Whereas the escape from Jakku was very fast paced. Nolan had 70 minutes of IMAX in the Dark Knight, TFA had about 5. It’s over before you can get excited, and some people I saw it with didn’t even notice it happen.
Really that aspect ratio shift is not doable in home video, because we’re all watching on wide screens. It’s nice to have something that a cinema can do that home video can’t. 😃
I have it on good authority that the actual 35mm prints are up for sale here:
http://www.35mmforum.com/forums/topic/25197-for-sale-star-wars-trilogy-prequels/
But I could wait forever to get my account approved for that forum so I can’t check.
Will someone see this and pass it on to the right people? This seems like the right thread!
Apologies if they’re already sold- I can’t access the link 😦
Hi Towne,
Thanks for the advice! I did as you suggested and it took a little while but was 100% successful!
Ended up making about 50 edits into the SSE in Adobe Premiere and I found I needed to do a combination of syncing Puggo to SSE and vice versa depending on where the problems were. The two are actually perfectly in sync for very long periods, which I didn’t expect, but between scenes, and sometimes during, the 16mm print holds on shots for longer - it’s actually slightly more loosely edited in many places than the 35mm! (For example when Obi-wan squeezes Luke’s shoulder to revive him, the cut is a lot later and feels if anything a bit more natural. And there’s a few like that)
Puggo also goes out of sync during the wipe transitions, and between reels. I managed to get it to work without using any black frames and only repeated a couple of frames once so fingers crossed it shouldn’t be noticeable!
Thanks again for your help!
Hi all,
Wondering if anyone can help.
I’m not an audio specialist but I’m trying to sync the mono audio track from the Puggo Grande 16mm scan with the Silver Screen Edition of SW 1977.
Why? Good question. I really love the sound of the 16mm for some reason 😛
I realised beforehand that they would be heavily out of synch, so I’ve tried using the software pluraleyes to bend the Puggo audio to that of the SSE, but no luck so far.
Anyone have any thoughts or is it near enough impossible?
Cheers!
The former team members are also going to work on releasing a new one with new scans from Poita, so, a better release will come in due time, not to mention when we may hear about any Tech restorations progressing soon.
Do you think the Tech’s likely to see the light of day? Do you have some new intelligence? 😃
I don’t have any info, but AntcuFaalb has stated:
"For all interested (especially Stinky) I will say this: scans of other 35mm IB Technicolor prints exist and at least one non-TN1 team is in the process of booting up to start restoration work. It will likely be worked on last (since it’s the least endangered of the three from a preservation POV), but it will get worked on.
No names; no threads; no team accounts; no updates; no credits; no interviews; no deadlines; no guarantees except that the scans will get passed on if the team falls apart or loses interest or spontaneously combusts."
And Poita:
“There are already other Tech IB restorations in progress, Rob has said that he still has access to the print, and IMHO, a rescan now is a good idea anyway, and it sounds like Rob or others can get that happening, and regardless, other Techs have been scanned and are being worked on, so nothing is really lost.”
Thanks, I’d missed those two posts!
There’s still hope!
I’m still on the fence about the purchase, but it’s hard to say no to owning the film.
Just noticed the print sold! Hopefully it was one of us 😃
The former team members are also going to work on releasing a new one with new scans from Poita, so, a better release will come in due time, not to mention when we may hear about any Tech restorations progressing soon.
Do you think the Tech’s likely to see the light of day? Do you have some new intelligence? 😃
They reuse footage from that sequence, or alternate footage, but no way, the SE still opens with him arriving at Death Star II.
My mistake, I haven’t watched them in 3 years 😛
https://beta.liveauctioneers.com/item/43946386_star-wars-return-of-the-jedi-special-edition-film
Here is a ROTJ 1997 SE print. Not mine and not sure of the details.
Looks like it’s just reel 1, which would mean a different end point to reel 1 on the original LPP, as the Vader arriving at Death Star two is chucked onto the end of Empire in the SE’s right?
Is this a good resource? Might be a bit cleaner but that’s about it?
Seemed fine to me. Sure you don’t have a calibration issue? Perhaps a sub-optimal gamma setting?
AllAboutThatSpace said:
or very dark (as in Jabba’s palace and on the barge)
Well I think everyone’s screens are different, but I think that was mentioned before by someone else.
It may well be a feature of the LPPs across the board.
Those frames look good!
Count me in. 😃
35mm restoration of Spaceballs?
Color grading was the final step in the process, I believe. Nothing on his vimeo stream has shown his final grading, which is why many of us are eager to see samples some day.
Ah, that explains it
The Grindhouse looks wonderful, and certainly has a lot of potential for a great restoration.
Thanks so much to Harmy and Poita for bringing it to us! However I definitely support the drive for more sources. Some of the current grindhouse print is quite badly damaged, or very dark (as in Jabba’s palace and on the barge) and some is a little faded towards the blue end (like the Endor daytime sequences).
You never know, the print on eBay might have slightly less degeneration in the bits where the Grindhouse print falls down, and could save a lot of cleanup work in the long run.
cybr1d - if you have the funds and would like the print as a collector’s item anyway, I think we’d all be thrilled if you were able to collaborate 😃
I’d grab this print, but I’m pretty poor, and I also need to get rid of my 35mm print of Dirty Dancing, which has proved nothing but useless. Side note, anyone want Dirty Dancing on 35mm? 😉