MonkeyLizard10

Hopefully processing of a non-beta 1.0 version can start in around a week or so. It will still take considerable time even once that is going as some parts, especially reel 1, will need a lot of scene by scene tuning to bring back the full aqua/wild blue type colors by hand as well as each reel is like 20,000 frames and it will take my PC ages to process 20,000 DNG to intermediate stills (especially since Photoshop seems to crash out overnight after only doing like 2000 frames or so, hopefully that issue can get resolved so a much longer time each night can be spent having it render frames out).

Thankfully the site is back up again quickly and all messages and PMs seem to be intact.
I suppose just in case anything went bad with the site in the future, if anyone wants they could send me an email address in PM so their will be a way to contact.

I’ve heard that seller mostly sells off a collection from some Russian who has at times had prints with toxic mold and other issues, maybe others can chime in. A bit of a shame since they get some really interesting titles.

Project scanning/storage/backup cost: $1260 (actual true full cost will likely be considerably higher for this)
Current funding level: $800 = 64% funded

UPDATE: the project will now also include a scan of the main original trailer for Jurassic Park

IMO, they (the Plinkett rantings) symbolize everything that has gone wrong with Star Wars fandom and fandom and basically the entire internet in general and perhaps best just show how little he knows of the history of cinema and he gets TONS of stuff flat out objectively incorrect. They basically ended SW discussion forums as a fun place. And ended serious criticism and swapped it for cheap click-bait. Anyway I better get my bunker prepped.

That said I’m sure you’ll get plenty of takers (except it isn’t all that possible to remaster the parts where he appears, since he probably just shot on VHS, on the odd chance he shot on SVHS or Hi8 or some super early digital format, maybe something a little bit more could be done though; the scenes from the films could get swapped in with footage from blu-ray or scans, but it seems weird to me that people who so despise the films would want to waste hours beyond hours of time pasting in higher quality footage of scenes of stuff they don’t care for? does it matter if the scenes look like compressed trash if the scenes are being mocked and considered to be trash anyway?).

Project scanning/storage/backup cost: $1245 (actual true full cost will likely be considerably higher for this)
Current funding level: $751 = 60% funded

ShonenGato said:

Hi, just joined this forum specifically to make a donation. Please let me know how I can help!

sent a PM

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Yeah it is always best to not post any PM without asking. Here or anywhere to do with anything.

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Papai2013 said:

This entire drama was so fruitless and sour. These are passion projects that take enormous amounts of money to buy the prints and then enormous amounts of time and more funds to restore. Nobody here has an assembly line where they can churn out products ready to consumed at the drop of a hat. Most of us work underpaid jobs, have numerous personal, family-related issues, health issues, etc. The biggest issue is time. The fact that such projects are at all happening is a miracle. To act like a crybaby because one has helped fund a project is unwarranted. People who have no patience and are unable to trust others should just do it on their own and not cry or rant here, or anywhere. Peace!

+1

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Yeah that would be amazing to get. Sadly I can’t afford it now, sure would be a heck of a keeper. And I don’t think I could even front it (buy, scan, resell) at the moment either unless some crazy instant fund raising happened here. But yeah that sure is a print.

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May have a wide gamut color SDR in HDR wrapper version soon.

In honor of the 40th anniversary of the release of ROTJ here is a near 1.0, say 0.94 beta, of the Return Of The Jedi SE Trailer ‘D’ Scope. This is for UHD (3840x2160) resolution, SDR, sRGB/REC709 standard gamut color palette, HEVC(h.265) very high bitrate (quick hardware encoded) with lossless PCM 2.0 48kHz optical sourced from the print and lossless PCM 5.1 44kHz Cinema DTS sourced from the proper Cinema DTS trailers file (link good for one week, file size about 2GB) of a Return Of The Jedi SE Trailer ‘D’ Scope print:

https://www.transfernow.net/dl/20230710lqabiN3j/fMZJnnfa

DeathlySin said:

Scans don’t just magically happen, they take a lot of time and effort.

Yeah this stuff can really take a LOT, and I mean a LOTTTTTTTTTTTT of time. Especially if you want to match 35mm colors, then it can take just more hours than you can even fathom put in over months. Or if something is magenta faded. Or has tons of bad scratches and dirt. Even in the easiest cases and without taking much care for color it still takes quite a while, that simple case takes a long time and trickier or more carefully color matched ones take super extra time longer on top. People can easily put in like ten or even tens of thousands of dollars of man hours into getting these projects done. And nobody gets paid (the funding just covers the cost of the scan and storage, just the raw basic costs and even then, in reality usually not all the actual behind the scenes basic costs are ever really fully covered so most people directly lose money on every project even when funding goals are hit and the best case scenario of breaking exactly even I don’t think actually happens much of the time), they have real jobs or school and other stuff going on. Even getting things to a scanner and back and getting a scan itself can take quite a while (in the case of this project, I don’t know what they are doing for color timing and whether they are going all in to match the 35mm or not or whether it is easier on the scanner they are using to do that, etc. but I know they are using a new custom scanner, apparently quite advanced, but that has apparently had some issues with breakdowns and had a lot of down time which I think has been one of the things most delaying their project here and there isn’t much they can do about that sort of delay but wait for the film to manage to all get scanned by the scanner).

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Hal 9000 said:

Fascinating. Who would have thought that a film print would be such a uniquely valuable thing for AOTC?

Yeah, it is interesting. Whether it is just an artifact of how print film picks up those colors or intended and then later lost by getting stuck in early REC709 work flow post theatrical release there do seem to be colors that get chopped off by standard gamut for AOTC.

Here are some more examples of how it extends beyond standard gamut where I compare the 35mm left in wide gamut (ProPhotoRGB in this case) and then compare with the same frame converted down to standard sRGB gamut (same color palette as REC709 although different gamma tonal curve in the standard, but the latter part is not relevant here):

Here are some demos that show the differences between how AOTC looks when you have wide gamut color palette available vs. when it is restricted to sRGB/REC709 color palette (of course you need to use fully color-managed browser/viewer and have a wide gamut display set to wide gamut display mode with proper display profile installed in order to see the differences, and in some cases, to even see the WG labelled images properly at all). For each pair SG is first and WG is second (should be obvious on a properly set up wide gamut display):

I may have made an interesting finding. I’m getting a weird feeling that the official releases for the prequels accidentally got locked into sourcing from a standard gamut REC709 source at some point.

I’ve read that sometimes home releases were given a slight magenta push to try to counter the apparent yellow-green push that apparently the average consumer CRT TV had back in the day. I wonder if that is why the DVD for AOTC got a bit of magenta on some scenes. And then I wonder if they have not stuck with the HD master made for the DVD as the starting point ever since? Or some early master work done in REC709 as the basis (back then with no consumer wide gamut home formats around). And thus even the blu-ray ending up still with a magenta tint? And then even the UHD.

But the really new thing, the more shocking thing than just some home releases having some different tint or grading (which I think is very common), but I have a weird feeling that someone forgot to realize that at some point the main masters for the prequels got handled in REC709’s limited gamut colors and so when presented on the UHD… they still seem to clip away stunningly rich colors to REC709 even though UHD has full REC2020 gamut capability (although it is often aimed more at P3 a bit smaller wide gamut).

The reasons I say this are:
I just compared some scenes of AOTC 35mm side by side with AOTC UHD/BD/DVD and ALL of the home discs, not just the DVD/BD which would have to clip, but even the UHD which does support wide gamut colors, seem to show the same muted aquas/turquoise/deep cyan/deep intense green-blue (like of the blue girl, a Pantoran maybe?, in the early scene in Palpatine’s Senate office or the laser field along the floor of Padme’s bedroom near the start or the aqua rectangular the probe droid opens up in the force field on her bedroom window when it drops those poisonous creatures in or or some lighting on Coruscant cityscape or some of the heads up display items on Obi-wan’s ship, etc.) and even the intro title “A long time ago…” all look relatively similar on all home formats but then are often wildly more intensely saturated (or even a different shade of color that does not even exist in REC709) on the 35mm print and then if you digitize a frame of the print and mess around until it looks the same as the 35mm side by side on a calibrated wide gamut monitor and then convert the frame to standard sRGB/REC709 gamut all those colors in those scenes suddenly become muted in exactly the same way as they look on all the home formats.

Also interesting is that looking at the “A long time ago…” intro on say the ROTJ UHD it does have at least some of the intense weird slightly turquoise blue as scene on the AOTC 35mm print intro and the OT were fresh scans seemingly treated in wide gamut workflow.

So it almost seems like a mistake was made at some point and maybe the prequels official post-theatrical working masters got locked into limited gamut REC709 colors at some point! Either that or somehow the transfer from digital master to film simply boosted some of those shades wildly and the original 35mm prints never looked like the digital masers or the theatrical digital versions. I sort of feel like it might be more likely that they simply ended up bogging their modified working master into REC709 at some point and got stuck with that limited palette (and didn’t try to bring it back by hand at some later point once wide gamut home formats and digital P3+ projection came out), at the least for AOTC, but perhaps for 1 and 3 as well (since a quick glance at those also showed the “A long time ago…” looking a pale, muted blue on the UHDs).

Anyway, for whatever reason, I see some really wildly intense blues/aquas in some scenes on the 35mm print, stunning colors, that are simply not there on any home version (not that DVD or BD would be capable of showing them but not even on the UHD which is). So it seems to be a lot more than just a bit of a magenta tint or teal tint. It is interesting since AOTC was said to be shot on a camera that only did limited gamut REC709, but it would seem that they boosted up some colors that film can handle well intensely (stuff in blue-green intense range) in post, either that or somehow the transfer to film just made those colors go wild naturally.

It is also wild how completely absolutely different the color and saturation of “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away…” looks on the AOTC 35mm print than on any home release. And that Pantoran(?) shown in the post above.

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