Mavimao

I've downloaded it and watched a bit. What a great find and the quality is pretty good for a 16mm reduction print. Good idea for taking out the chroma. 

I think I may have found a difference from the original version: when the naked hologram is dancing and THX is erm... Enjoying it, it cuts back and forth to LUH, contemplating taking her meds. Was this always the case? I have only seen the laserdisc and that was almost 10 years ago. 

DavidMerrick said:

Yeah, I mentioned in the Star Wars DE thread how some orange blotches could be seen on Mark Hamill and Harrison Ford's faces at times. Harmy said the actual discolouration was due to limitations of dealing with the official BD transfer, but those blotches are very clearly over-applied makeup. Filmmakers in 1977 weren't anticipating a future of Blu Rays and 4K, so some of these details weren't meant to be seen.

As I'm typing this I'm feeling even better about these restorations.

 There were similar problems with other restorations using the OCN: with The Wizard of Oz, the wires that were propping up the lion's tail were visible and they had to digitally erase them. The same issue came up with The Godfather Part 2 where the wires for the squibs were visible in the scene when Fanucci is killed by Vito.

DavidMerrick said:

It actually hadn't occurred to me that the loss of detail was due to added grain. Interesting.

If theatre prints are copies of copies, etc., what's the intermediary? Interpositive?

 Here's the usual process: 

Original Camera negative (OCN) -> interpositive (color correction is done here) -> internegative -> release print. 

IB prints were apparently closer to the negative: 

OCN -> "Matrix" 3 strip film -> release print

This is why Mike Verta is using these prints for his own restoration. 

Harmy had one, but I don't know how to search for it. In short, 35mm prints are copies of copies of copies. Each copy creates degreadation in the form of additional film grain. This grain eats up fine detail with each generation. The bluray, on the other hand, is directly from the film negative. So while its colors might be messed up, you can see the actors' pores, each individial hairs etc. The 35mm prints don't have all of this detail. Yes, they were meant to be shown on big screens, but they weren't meant to be pixel peeped. 

Soy, the on my keyboad is missing. It was stolen by a ascal abid abbit. Eally it was all a mistake. Fom the bottom of my heat, I'm soy. 

Looks awesome! Colors are, of course, a bit off, but the print looks really cleaned up. Does this mean you're almost finished?

With all the new influx of people, maybe we should have a dedicated Harmy's Despecialized page linked to from the homepage! Just a simple FAQ since there seems to be a repeat of the same 3 questions: Where can I get it? How can I burn it? And what's TV Fink's phone number?

That clip you linked to in the last page looked really awesome! It was a bit compressed, and my computer couldn't handle it, but you can see that you have a good looking print there!

Hubba hubba! That looks awesome!

I've just downloaded their version and it looks normal. No blue tint. 

Great news Anctu! And sorry to hear you've been tired. Please take all the time you need to get well. These little movies can wait. 

althor1138 said:

I guess you could say this is the "FACES" release for PAL-land but the covers were different. It had subtitles for the crawl (out of picture) and a French dub. There is another French THX release which has an english track with french subs for the whole film.

I guess 3-PO looking like a lemon is just the contrast of the pre-thx pressing because it looks basically like the DC/FACES releases except with higher resolution. The pre-thx print also has red fading which largely affects his color. Also, vimeo has smoothed both videos out a bit.  The pre-thx laserdisc has a LOT of noise in the picture and some scenes have pretty severe chroma issues.

If I were going to do a PAL preservation I'd definitely use the THX release for most of it.  I have about 4 or 5 separate pressings of it also which should allow for some good denoising/dropout removal.

Like you said though, the pre-thx laserdisc has things worthy of preserving too such as the original french crawl.  I just noticed that it has no episode IV so that's cool. Perhaps the dubbing is different from the Thx release too?

 Just to let you know, there is only one French dub. Even for the special edition, they kept the same dub, but had a new actor (poorly) add in the new lines for the extra Han Solo scene. 

DavidMerrick said:

Troyig88 said:

when it does get release please try not to crop it that much and thank you.

 I understand we'll be losing a bit of the edges due to necessity, but honestly I don't think that minimal of cropping is something I'd consciously notice. I had to go to Screenshot Comparison before I could perceive the framing difference between the official Blu Ray of Empire and Team Negative One's Grindhouse version. Obviously I'd notice if they went from 2.35:1 to 1.85:1 or widescreen to fullscreen but it's nothing nearly that drastic. Heck, most modern TVs don't distinguish between 1.78:1 and 1.85:1 and I don't even notice the difference. Our attention just isn't focused on that part of the screen and depending on overscan we might not see that portion at all.

 This. Plus, scope films are shot knowing that they will be cropped from 2.39 to 2.35 in theaters. 

AFAIK, the original releases were too biased towards magenta. The re-release is apparently more faithful, but with a few modern biases. 

This sounds an awful lot like Star Wars Revisited. But your own take. All the more power to you, but yeah, this is in the wrong sub-forum. 

To give a visual explanation...

In order to join shots together in the pre-digital era you either primarily used tape or glue (cement). Tape was used for the editing booth (easier to take off and on) and cement was used for joining the negative (much stronger and cleaner than tape). To show how they used cement to join film, here's this great video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7s_kB2_C668

You can imagine how nerve wrecking being a negative cutter could be. One bad splice and the shot is ruined. 

Now why do we see this residue on scope films and not others? Well, let's look at the spaces between frames in a scope film frame: 

Do you see how there's very little space? Now let's look at a sample of film frames from the 1.33 Academy Ratio (note: 1.66 and 1.85 aspect ratios are cropped versions of the academy aspect ratio)

There is MUCH more empty space between frames (the reason for this was so that films could keep their 1.33 aspect ratio when sound was added in the 20s). Because of this, the cement doesn't "spill" into the frame. 

Make sense?

mverta said:

Splicing/glue marks are a problem inherent to anamorphic film because it uses so much of the horizontal area.  To combat the flashes often seen at edits, projectionists began using a projector aperture gate that was narrower in the vertical, meaning that when projected Star Wars was actually 2.39-2.4. 

As for the other damage in those frames, normally I'd remove them!  Also, this sort of thing is precisely what the Legacy forum is for, so no worries there!

_Mike

 ^^ this. Thus why some people refer to scope sometimes as 2.35 (the ratio on the film) or 2.39/2.40 (the ratio projected on the screen). 

And those splice glue marks are on all scope films. Nothing to worry about. It's what holds the film together on the negative. 

They are insanely easy to obtain in lossless quality on certain sites of a certain questionable legal status. 

CatBus said:

By my count, that gives Harmy every damn thing I ever wanted him to have.  Except for lots of free time to put it all together.

Does this mean that the next ROTJ (and next ESB) releases will both be GOUT-free?  I wonder what the lowest-quality source would then be: are there any bits from the 97SE DVDs, or would the 2004SE HD broadcast now be the worst bits?  If so, quite a change from when this project started...

 Let's see... There's Jabba's palace door. The shot of Bobba Fett during the barge battle. Those shots would necessitate the pre-bluray versions. 

team_negative1 said:

This is the new version, that should become a standard, especially replacing Puggo's 16mm for film fans of the original.

We have made a combined version:

======================

1 Cropped and resized to correct 1080p

2 Patched 2 minutes+ that was missing after Reel 2, with LPP scan

3 Added stereo audio (NOT GOUT compatible)

4 Fixed duplicate scene in Reel 3

This new Grindhouse 8mm version is a much more reasonable 8 Gigs,

without much loss in quality.

Will keep you posted when it is complete.

Team Negative1

 Awesome! Thanks for taking the time to do this 

Hey, Harmy's Despecialized got a lovely endorsement on the Incomparable podcast. On their latest episode (238: Caucus with the Dark Side) they talk about it being their go-to version of the original trilogy at 1:31:00. 

Great demonstration, Mike! You mentioned that you would like to look at the original elements and composite them digitally. This was already done for the Special Edition for the SFX shots that did not get replaced by CGI. 

This is really great work, Mike! I had a quick question: how do you handle grading and restoration between different shots that have a wipe between them? I can't imagine it's easy creating a clean enough matte seperating them. 

Looks great, Harmy! Just a couple cents of creative criticism: I think the -1 scan looks good, but it seems a bit off. Some details in the outdoor shots seem blown out and the skin tones look a bit too green. I think you tend to rely too faithfully on the -1 color at times; I find that somewhere between the GOUT and the -1 scan seems perfect.

This is, of course, just my own humble opinion. 

But what Catbus said: my God, those bluray colors are horrible. 

Congratulations! I knew your great work would have to catch someone's eye. You deserved it!