Puggo - Jar Jar's Yoda

jero32 said:

On a side note: I once saw this documentary on scanning film. I think they projected from within an emulsion. The emulsion had aprox. the same "thickness" as the emulsion on the film. This mean that alot of the emulsion scratches were physicly filtered. Is this something worth looking into?

A "rank" transfer is when the film is passed through a thin sheet of water, and the water fills in and mitigates many of the scratches.  There are a few transfer houses that can do rank transfers for a fee - but you aren't likely to find one that would touch a "Star Wars" print with a 10-foot pole.

jero32 said:

The reason I brought up the backup/archiving thing was that whilst I feel that this will be great for having a digital version of the movie to compare changes etc to. It's not neccesairly the best version to watch in terms of quality. (on acount of the 32mm film simply being somewhat dirty. It stil looks very good though.)

This is what I originally thought when I started doing my 16mm transfers, but was surprised to discover that many people enjoy, even prefer watching them to the DVDs/BDs.  There is some inherent appeal to an authentic film look, and not everyone likes the ultra-scrubbed waxy sterile modern look, especially when watching an older film.

You might want to peruse the lengthy Blu Ray thread.  Restoring a classic film means just that - restoring it to its original Academy Award winning form, no more and no less.  -1's work is at the very leading edge of this effort.

Reel 3 is done and looks great.

Starting on reel 1.

I think "Mirror, Mirror" is my favorite TOS episode.  Evil Spock gave me the willies.

I would assume that the theater is under contract to show the credits, no?

A low-priced external TBC that is easy to use and that I have had good success with is the AV Tools AVT-8710.  You can probably find one on eBay for cheap.

AGC pumping may not be helped with a different TBC.  You could try mitigating it in post with the Virtualdub deflicker filter - that doesn't always work but sometimes it does.

Reel 2 looks great on DVD playback.  One minor fix but I can do that later.

Reel 3 rendering.  Another couple of days for this one.

Finally, rendering of reel 2 is done.  Encoding a test .m2v now.  Already synched the audio (I hope... you're never quite sure with the pulldown), so at long last there is light at the end of the tunnel.

I consider the original Star Trek television series a masterpiece. And if you're looking for characters, they don't get much better than Spock and Bones.

Holy moly, that is awesome!

50% of the way through...

And just to be clear, this is just reel 2.  I still have to do the same for reels 1 and 3.

Ok, I put together a straight-sided mask with little round corners that match the film pretty closely, and I think it looks really good.

But now, between all the resizing, brightness leveling, and complicated masking, it's going to take 3 days to render this beast!  83 frames in 5 minutes, yowza!  See you folks on wednesday!?

It is further complicated in that my first release will be a DVD5, with anamorphic flag set.  So it has to be vertically squeezed just enough so that when the anamorphic flag stretches it will turn out correct.

When you say "see the curves", do you mean see the original curves, or crop them with curved borders?  The reason I find the exposed curves a bit distracting, is that the created border is hard, whereas the curves in the film corners are fuzzy.  The combination of hard and fuzzy borders is a bit distracting.  Also, one jiggles and one doesn't.

It looks as though a curved mask won't be necessary for PSB, and I'll be able to use a straight one.

However, I have two questions/requests related to this step:

- Should I be able to squeeze/stretch PSB identically as I did for the PG?  Although the two movies may originally have been different aspect ratios (were they?), I assume that shouldn't matter, because the 16mm versions would have been set up to look correct through the same scope lens. So I should be able to use exactly the same strech as PG, right?

- The ESB 16mm sources have curved corners (you can see that on the frames posted on my website), whereas PG did not.  I can leave them exposed or mask them.  Any preferences out there?  I suspect it may be easier on the eyes if I mask them, but I'd like to hear the opinions of the learned folks here.

Cleanup of reel 2 done.  Will resize and apply curved matte next.

<deleted> - sorry, wrong thread.

The more he tinkers with it, the more it exposes the flaws.  I've always believed that SW was a great film primarily because of the masterful editing.  The more changes, the more it upsets the original editing that turned a mish-mash of potentially corny scenes into a perfectly paced masterpiece.

I remember reading somewhere that the editors chose to edit based on the performances rather than on the original planned timings.  That may be why the performances seem so good in the original, and get gradually worse as Lucas re-edits around his ideas, rather than around the performances.

GWL said:

I still don't understand why people would want the older quality versions when the better versions are on Blu-Ray now.  The tapes are still out there if you want to see the earlier versions.  If an artist puts his name on something he wants it to represent his original vision because he has to answer to criticism of that art. Then everybody calls you a terrible person for it.

Troll alert.

One of the things I did before putting a tape in, was to remove the top cover.  That way, as the tape threads, I can watch it to make sure it is threading properly and so I can catch it quickly if something goes wrong - before the tape starts bunching up.

Lots of useful information and opinions online about using the 1980.  There aren't really that many settings; it's pretty easy to use.  The good thing about the 1980 is that it is pretty conservative with its noise reduction. So you don't have to feel guilty about using some of its features.

Yes there are built-in head cleaners, but I opened it up and saw them - they didn't really impress me.   I find it hard to believe that they would actually clean the heads.  Personally, I'm so used to cleaning video heads myself that I feel more comfortable doing it than having someone else (or a machine) do it.  I guess it's because I work with all those old reel-to-reel formats that come from the "sticky-shed" era where you have to bake tapes and clean the heads even just halfway through a tape.  It's really not that hard if you're a careful, detail-oriented type of person.  Don't use Q-tips.

Also, go online and learn how to clean the heads.  It is a delicate operation and you have to be careful or you can damage them.  But if the heads are dirty it affects the quality of the capture.  And don't use one of those clearning tapes -  with some research, you can learn to clean them properly.

Are you sure that the blue is in R2's panel, or is it in the sparks and lightning bolts?  Not that it necessarily matters...

You mention "flicker".  Do you mean the type of flicker that happens when you videotape a screen and the frame rates don't match?

TServo2049 said:

 (If it's 16mm, a good amount of picture will be chopped off at the bottom.)

A 16mm print can be chopped just about anywhere.  Comparing my Puggo Grande versus my Stjarnornas Krig, both are from 16mm sources and are both equally and heavily cropped, but one is cropped more at the top and the other is cropped more at the bottom.

Very exciting find!