Actually, I was impressed by the fair number of responses on TFN that were more moderate, and even some expressing our views. It's probably just as easy for us to assume that they are all raving mad (because of a few loud idiots) as it is for them to think that we all subscribe to the "r..... my childhood" view.
I'd like to see a debate between Obi-Rob and generalfrievous.
Yeah there is blown-out stuff on both ends (whites and blacks). That's just the way it is - it's a primitive process.
I doubt that GL keeps up with what is going on here. More than likely, a few of his employees are. In this case, Harmy may get a C&D - after enough time has passed for D2 to make its way into the ethosphere. I have to believe that, privately, there must be at least some LFL staff who think as we do.
Hey, no need to go all postal on this guy. Just gives them more material to inject into their tirades.
I will say that whenever I read this crap on TFN and elsewhere, I'm just so thankful for this forum where sanity prevails most of the time - or at least isn't censored.
How about the colors on the cartridge restoration in "Rescuing Star Wars"? :)
I've always wondered how folks at these "more official" forums could characterize us as just a bunch of do-nothing haters. It wouldn't make much sense for Harmy or DJ (and many, many others here) to put in the kind of hours they have restoring a film they allegedly hate.
Harmy said:
I wasn't implying that there's anything wrong with the DVD, Puggo.
I know you didn't. Just thought people might be curious on the bitrate. I think PG was 4500 average. With the added soundtrack in PSB, I needed the extra space, and at 4275 for the movie (and lower for the extras) everything just fit.
Asaki said:
Also, speaking of the 35mm...I was wondering about something we were talking about on the blog before, and if the film (PSB) really is supposed to be that blue, or if it was to compensate for the yellow of the bulbs they used back then (like how most of the Star Wars print they have is blue). I noticed a lot of the bonus trailer was very blue also, like a lot of shots from ANH that aren't usually tinted like that.
I didn't do much of anything to try and clean up the bonus. The colors seemed really inconsistent - fixing one snippet would throw something else out of whack. So I pretty much left it alone. Overall it's too purple, I think (usually).
Hard to say on the blue-ness of Hoth. After Ady's color correction it looks pretty much how it does when projected. But I'm not as discerning when it comes to color balance - which is why I didn't try and do it myself.
Oh, and the bitrates on the "extras" were lower. So expect many more artifacts on the "making of" and the "bonus".
Harmy said:
The PQ is definitely better than PG but I do believe this would benefit greatly from an HD upscale (the horizontal resolution of the capture should after all be much higher than here, especially with the wider than 2.35:1 AR) but mainly a better encode using a more modern codec and higher bitrate,
If anyone is curious, the bitrate on the PSB was variable, with max 7000, average 4275, minimum 3000. Encoding was with TMPGEnc.
captainsolo said:
-What exactly causes the highs to warble and distort so badly on the optical tracks? This was thankfully very very minimal in PSB, but of course all over the place on PG.
-Is there any reason for the darker block boxes on the left third of the frame on and off throughout the film? Most notable on end credits etc. It's just something that stuck out to my eye for some reason.
I consider it a minor miracle that I'm able to grab the sound as cleanly as I can. These old projectors are hardly what one would call hi-fi. And I don't know of any other mechanism for grabbing 16mm audio.
There is actually one difference between the PG and PSB with respect to sound... the PG I captured with an EIKI, and the PSB I captured with an Elmo. Some sources on the web say that the Eiki has slightly richer sound, but the Elmo has a more stable film path. The Elmo is easier to work with and more reliable, but I'm not totally sure which one has better sound, all else being equal. I think the Elmo turned out better when comparing PG and PSB.
Can you be more specific regarding the "darker black boxes"? I'm not sure exactly what you're talking about. If I knew I might be able to figure it out.
jero32 said:
New mix, doesn't that kinda prove that this was an officially made print then? I mean it can't be bootleg if they have a new mix in there.
Indeed it certainly seems that way. Unless there were some later 35mm prints with this mix, but there doesn't seem to be any evidence of that.
I had always thought that most 16mm prints were sort of grey-market things printed up by other companies. This seems like it must have been in-house.
Asaki said:
Puggo - Jar Jar's Yoda said:
I'm pretty sure I grabbed rsortor's audio too.
I'm assuming you're going to release that transfer later, too, like you did with the Swedish print?
Actually I wasn't planning on it. Maybe someday, but I was assuming the other projects (such as ROTP) would have higher precedence.
I'm pretty sure I grabbed rsortor's audio too. If there is something in particular you folks would like me to look for I could do that. I could also probably just make it available. Although I'm not planning to sync it - I'd rather sync the Scofield. If it turned out to be something significant, like a 70mm folddown or some such (ha!), then yeah I'd sync it.
There's one thing that I didn't mention in the "making of", that I probably should have. Since the film has the 3:2 pulldown bit set, I can't even use the capture directly to sync with the audio. I have to do a temporary pulldown and sync to THAT. That's a bit of a pain, because after doing the sync you can't really go back and add/delete any frames, without major re-synching.
Oh, and you might have noticed that the fanfare at the beginning is incomplete. That's how it was on the film.
So the 16mm mix is unique for 16mm? That in itself is quite interesting, and apparently a new discovery.
Is it a completey new mix, or is it the 35mm mix with extra things layered on top of it?
bilditup1 said:
So the 16mm prints were only for home or something? That's not what I understood earlier; I thought that a good amount of people saw SW in 16mm in smaller theaters that couldn't afford 35 or something like that.
That would probably have been VERY late in a film's run, or only in the tiniest hole-in-the-walls. Back in the 1977, most theaters that could afford Star Wars would have been showing it in 35mm, with the very best theaters showing it in 70mm.
Even on relatively new prints, you'll notice some minor flaws that simply won't show up on digital, and I think that's part of what Trooperman was referring to.
Yeah, but nothing like is on PSB or PG. I got to see 2001 in 70mm shortly after it was printed for the revival (and BD scan). It was the single most pristine image I've ever seen on a screen - not a hair, scratch, or even the slightest wobble. Better than the best digital image I've ever seen. The colors were also considerably richer than I had ever seen. The BD of that movie is made from that print - have a look at it if you don't think film can reach the level of perfection as digital.
I heard that several years later, after doing the arthouse tour, that print became very worn and the experience wasn't quite as memorable.
I personally don't know if I've ever seen a 70mm film, truthfully.
I was rather young and didn't appreciate that many of the movies I was seeing were 70mm. In retracing the films I saw and the theaters in which I saw them, I'm pretty sure I saw 2001 (in 1968) and SW (in 1977) in 70mm. The theater where we usually went had at least one 70mm projector, so I likely saw many others in 70mm as a kid.
Later when I knew a little more, and went to that 2001 showing in 2001, it had probably been 20 years since I'd seen a 70mm film. I was a more critical viewer and for the first time could really appreciate what film has to offer. Too bad 70mm is basically dead now - people don't know what watching a film really means anymore. They assume it's all grunge and mouse droppings.
I'm now especially glad I included the 35mm mix - probably makes it a LOT easier for you to do these wonderful comparisons.
I wasn't expecting all of this intrigue over the sound mixes. I guess I just didn't pay much attention to them other than synching them up. This is what I meant by them having value as research material.
bilditup1 said:
Trooperman said:
Cold, digital clarity does not help you focus on the content- it draws attention to its perfectness.
- they represent an alternative and in some way much more authentic experience of viewing the films, at least if you're trying to approximate how it was experienced originally, which straight pristine video of course doesn't really allow you to do.
I actually disagree with both of you. The original theater experience was with pristine sharp clean prints, often in 70mm, and often with stereo or surround sound. That's how I remember seeing SW in the theater in 1977. The dirty look came months or years later, when the prints had gotten so worn out they looked like PG and PSB.
For me, Harmy's is the closest to the theater experience I remember, and the filmic look doesn't have anything to do with being dirty and scratchy. The PG and PSB are valuable as research material, since they are actual films from the year the movies were released, respectively. I'm still a bit surprised that people actually enjoy watching them, but that's a cool bonus.
jero32 said:
How would one go about obtaining a 16mm anyway? Like what are the going prices?
16mm what? Film? Projector?
There are tons of projectors on eBay. An Elmo 16CL like I used for the sound capture, in good condition, will run about $250. The 16mm Workprinter I used for capturing the video runs about $2000 new.
I don't know what the films are costing these days - haven't seen one on eBay for quite a while. Silverwook has a better handle on this. As for finding one, there's a great 16mm forum I watch now and then called 16mmfilmtalk, run by Urbanski films. Ask there and you'd probably get an answer. Although a film like ESB probably wouldn't be cheap there.
jero32 said:
So I'm looking at this, and the quality amazes me.
Puggo grande looked ok, but this is alot better imo. Did you improve the technical aspects or anything? Or was the print in a much better condition?
The process was pretty much identical. The print was in better shape and on non-fade film stock.
Harmy said:
Really? Someone just sent me a package from USA and it arrived in under a week (except then it got held up in the customs office for like two weeks).
Yes, I can send a package to France, Italy, Germany, even China faster than I can send one to England. I don't know why.
Thanks everyone for the very kind feedback. It was fun, abeit slow, to put together. Working in the little nooks and crannies of my time, this one took a year and a half.
Return of the Pug - watch the ROTP thread. It should come together similar to PSB. Adywan color correction is the next step; it's slow and a bit frustrating... the last copy of the capture that I sent him was lost in the mail! That killed a couple of months, because mailing parcels from California to the UK seems to take about a month - and that's airmail first class. Ugh.
Mavimao said:
I noticed that the mono sound kinda clips at times. Sounds like someone years ago did a poor job mastering the audio for 16mm optical (which has a piss poor dynamic range of about 20 dB)
I have two ways of capturing 16mm optical mono... using my Elmo 16CL or using my Eiki slimline. When capturing I set the output and input levels so that *I* am not clipping anything. However, there could be clipping in a myriad other steps I have no control over; the mechanism in home 16mm projectors for reproducing the sound is pretty crude. I also have to imagine that the process for printing the sound is also limited in accuracy by the film grain. They probably compress it sufficiently to produce good saturation and volume.
Now, you may have noticed that the level in mine never goes above about 75% of the available headroom. That's not because I clipped it there... I actually lowered the levels to that so that it wouldn't blast your speakers when switching from stereo to mono.