Harmy

That would be great!

Exactly.

Well, yeah, on a 4:3 display, the BTS would be window-boxed even in the purist version. But making a version for 4:3 displays in this day and age would be kind of ridiculous.

Isn’t that exactly what the Purist version does?

Well, it’s not like I didn’t use their material, though as far as the video itself goes, I’m pretty sure it’s fair use but since I did link the full movie under the video and I even say so in the video, I wouldn’t really have a leg to stand on. I just kind of assumed BBC wouldn’t care about this old documentary that’s not available to buy anywhere but apparently, they do.

Anyway - let’s continue the discussion on the Horizon documentary here:
https://originaltrilogy.com/topic/Horizon-How-To-Film-The-Impossible-Remastered/id/61748

Well, shit, that was fast.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1hQ0GQjmIWDPOv0Xs3rJ2SgzOLDVQoiP2gPeHBNuqZto/edit?usp=sharing

https://youtu.be/MSmZarFF398

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1hQ0GQjmIWDPOv0Xs3rJ2SgzOLDVQoiP2gPeHBNuqZto/edit?usp=sharing

Also, could I find someone willing to make English subtitles for this?
This would be a great starting point to getting it translated to other languages - I myself would love to make a Czech translation.

Does anybody have hi-res scans of any of the matte paintings shown in this doc? Without the live action footage - with the holes.

OK, seeing how many people prefer the black bars, I think I’ll make a purist version 😉

The idea of the small image over blurred background is to make the low-quality image smaller on a moder large screen, like it would have been on a small CRT back then and yet to keep the screen visually filled like in the original documentary. Then the idea extended into using the same thing for the film footage to make it visually consistent and again fill the screen, like the original documentary’s Pan&Scan footage. And finally, I added the extra horizontal blur under the BTS footage to simulate the same AR as the film footage. I personally really like the look.

As for adding a bit of dirt to the Indy (and 2010) footage, I wanted to preserve the feel that the original documentary had, where the film bits just breathe celluloid even through the layers of analog noise, so I used the film scans for Star Wars footage and I wanted to give the footage where I had to use Blu-Rays similar feel - I even regraded the Indy footage closer to the way it looks in the documentary.

Hi guys. Here’s a little side project I just finished a workprint of. Check it out, if you like 😃
https://originaltrilogy.com/topic/Horizon-How-To-Film-The-Impossible-Remastered/id/61748#1226042

Hi guys!

Horizon - How To Film The Impossible is, in my opinion, possibly the best documentary about classic VFX ever made.

I found a fairly decent copy of it on Myspleen some time ago but it’s still only a DVD transfer of an old videotape, with lots of noise, dropouts, interlacing artifact and really noisy sound. So I wanted to clean it up a little but never got around to finishing it.

It is a project I’ve wanted to do for ages and when I recently wanted to use this amazing documentary to demonstrate something, I found that out of the two copies that used to be on youtube, only the worse one remains and it’s really bad.

Also, our company started a VFX academy to train future compositors, because they always have trouble finding good people, and as part of this, they started doing lectures on history of VFX and I suggested this documentary to my colleague, who heads the academy and he loved it and asked me if I could possibly bring him a higher quality copy than what was on youtube.

This motivated me to finally do this little cleanup project this weekend (well, Friday night and Saturday, really - I was at work all day today) but those of you who know me will probably know that I didn’t stop at just doing a bit of cleanup 😄

And so, here’s the Horizon - How To Film The Impossible - Remastered:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1hQ0GQjmIWDPOv0Xs3rJ2SgzOLDVQoiP2gPeHBNuqZto/edit?usp=sharing

They were shot on 35mm but as far as I know, those elements were then composited in video, which is why they had to, and could, be recomposited digitally for the HD version. I bet the elements shot directly to video were the ones that had to be recreated with CGI.
As to whether TNG is available on Netflix in Slovakia, I have no idea, though I don’t see why it wouldn’t be, if it’s available here in the Czech Republic. And if the article says that the fixes were done specifically for Netflix, I’m sure that’s what you’d get.

Agreed. I watched it on Netflix and none of the effects ever felt out of place. The situation here is, of course, quite different, since the TNG vfx shots never existed as anything else than SD video, just like the rest of the assembled show, so they received the same treatment as the non-vfx shots by being upgraded to HD and the original shots are preserved in the best quality they ever existed in on DVD.

The situation is quite different for TOS though, where the VFX shots were composited optically on film before being telecined for broadcasting and the new CGI shots in the remastered versions look terribly out of place, so I find the version with the original VFX much more pleasant to watch. But, luckily, on BD you can choose which version to watch, so no problem there either.

Well, it’s my least favorite version to watch. I have no principial problem with the recompositing there, since it’s not claiming to be a theatrical version but the problem is it wasn’t done very well in some places - the very first shot, while much less grainy than the other versions, shows very clear signs of badly digitally composited smoke for example.

Simple - his main job was to figure out in what order to put the elements through the optical printer to make the shot work and to make sure all the masks aligned properly, which was a near impossible task in those days and he still managed it. In digital compositing, the same task is laughably easy in comparison. It’s like tearing down the pyramids and rebuilding them using modern cranes and diggers and stuff and saying that they’re the same thing, because they look almost the same only more polished.

Plus optical compositing has a very specific visual aestetic to it, which is lost when the elements are recomped digitally.

I would be pissed off to no end. As a compositor, the original compositing is the most interesting thing to me about those effects.
I mean watch this and tell me the compositing work isn’t worth preserving: https://youtu.be/A69N-FQvaqI?t=5m13s

Well, if they’re so similar I can’t tell the difference, then they might stay provided the quality actually is better.

Same as always.

Took a bit of effort to find, because I actually posted this upon seeing some of the previews of 4K77, not upon its release but here’s what I said about the altered mission statement of Despecialized in light of great 35mm preservations existing (and in reply to someone asking about the look of the logos at the beginning of the film):

[Harmy said:]

Haven’t really thought about this specifically yet - but here’s my general thoughts for v3.0:
We now have 35mm preservations for that authentic experience of watching a 35mm print in a theater and I personally thoroughly enjoy watching the films that way, and if what I’ve seen of 4K77 so far is any indication, we will soon have extremely good versions for watching that way, so in order for Despecialized to make sense to even exist, it will have to take a slightly different approach.
My plan is still to undo every single change we have found, because I still stand by the argument that if we start picking and choosing which changes are the good changes and which should be removed, there could be a thousand versions and it would not please everyone. But I will try my best to do this in such a way that there are no distracting drops in quality or increases in grain levels, so that it is a consistent experience of watching a remastered release of the original version. If you think about it, this actually makes a lot of sense, seeing as how the main source will still be the official BD (otherwise, it wouldn’t really be the Despecialized Edition any more) which is remastered in this way even in places where no other changes were made.
So, in this case, I will try to make the logos look as close to how they appeared in theaters but they probably won’t “shake like crazy” just as they wouldn’t in a BD remaster.

On the contrary - we’re not likely to get much better sources for Star Wars, which means that the version of Despecialized, which can be created now can be pretty much definitive. Whereas putting a lot of effort into Empire and Jedi using less than ideal sources, which will be replaced in due course by sources on par with 4k77 is what seems redundant to me.

I believe I stated the reasons behind still making v3.0 and what will make it unique and worthwhile even in the face of 4k77 existing right after 4k77 came out. Let me find the post and get back to you 😉

It seems he’s just a kid and English may not be his first language. I’m sure he meant well but he kept commenting on every single one of the pictures in my ESB comparison albums saying variations of:
“This Shot Needs To Replace With 35mm Print Scan (Team-1) or Poita’s 35mm 4k scan For The Empire Strikes Back Despecialized v2.5”

and he kept at it even after I replied a few times with:

“I know you’re probably trying to be helpful here but all you’re doing is spamming my email (I get a notification every time someone comments) because I know very well which shots need to be replaced using 35mm sources - all of them. There’s no reason to use old standard definition sources in the new versions any more and all shots need to be redone, since the next versions will be 1080p.”

So, I ended up blocking him from commenting.

Nice find - thanks!