RU.08

Limited by my scanner: each frame takes 2 1/2 minutes to scan, frames need to be manually straightened if a restore is to take place. Because the scanner is only able to scan 22 frames in a single go, I need to be available every hour or so to place new film in the scanner, ensure it’s in the proper place, and hit “Scan.” This single thing alone makes this a full-time job, as it can take up to a full work day to scan a single long filmstrip. Archival-quality 35mm scanners are prohibitively expensive and little, if any, testing has been done with filmstrips on motion picture scanners to see if they’d even work with pieces of film this short.

You can scan still photography on a motion-picture scanner, but in order to do that you need to splice all your strips together into large reels, for example 1,000ft.

Acquire better scanning hardware: The sweet spot seems to be a BlackMagic Cintel at approximately $35,000, simply because every other machine in the market starts at almost a million dollars. However I have not specifically set this as a current goal because I still need to cover operating and household expenses, even if a Cintel were just to magically show up on my doorstep this afternoon. From the samples I’ve seen of Cintel transfers, it is able to register each film frame in exactly the same place, which would eliminate the crop-and-straighten pass for restores.

The other machines do not cost $1,000,000+!

Please don’t take this the wrong way, but you want a still photography scanner not a motion picture scanner. A BMD Cintel is not suited to you needs at all, and it would not be cost effective. Professional scanning on better machines than it generally starts at .20/ft, I presume your filmstrips are around 2-5ft in length each, so to put them through a motion-picture scanner you’re going to have to splice hundreds of them together just to make small reels - heck just a 300ft reel would consist of a minimum of 60 film strips. If you did all 3,000 filmstrips and they average say 4ft each then it would cost you about $2,400 to scan that way - although it would be an awful lot of work for yourself as you would need to: spice them all together, and then break them back down, check the scans are not clipped (ordinarily this would be checked for you - but you can’t expect 60 different “clips” spliced together to be individually checked - you’d need to do that yourself).

The still photography scanners cost a small fraction to purchase or build yourself compared with a motion-picture scanner.

The old still photography scanners (like Fuji Frontier SP3000) are not suited either. They were only designed to scan negatives, and you have positive print film.

If I were you I’d look into the Filmomat 135 Autocarrier. Setting that up perfectly to get the film as “square” as possible would require you purchase some SMPTE resolution film. You can DIY everything yourself if you prefer. There are significantly less challenges with still photography scanning compared with the motion-picture scanners. You can buy functionally the same camera that the Cintel uses for about $600 used, or you can buy something much better for not that much more and you’re not limited to global-shutter cameras which saves you $$.

The optical perf stabilisation you mention (that Blackmagic does in the Cintel’s hardware) can be done in Fusion.

I can’t speak to how perfectly flat a table-top system like the 135 Autocarrier can get the film. The motion-picture scanners have sophisticated film transport modules that provide constant even tension for the film, whereas still photography scanners load the film in as a strip with no lateral tension. Your best bet would be to get someone that already has one to do some sample scans for you. The geometric imperfections would be less important for you anyway, as mentioned it would be more about getting the frame as “square” as possible so that you don’t have to rotate the film digitally at all.

If you have strips that show excessive geometric distortion you always have the option to do them on a commercial motion-picture scanner, doing a few 300ft reels that way won’t break the bank - it’ll just be a lot of manual work on your end to do that.

I hope that helps!

The CGI is in the negative, but they did re-do some of the CGI ontop of the CGI (that is, there is some fresh CGI on CGI such as re-done Jabba).

Director said:

Well, it seems you have more questions than I can answer inside a thread, but yes, there was no release In 1996, but the film versions and reels that were used in 1997 release, were ready in the end of 1996. And the Swedish website was a torrent website, the user was using English for communication. The original scan file has been created in May 22, 2012, and last modified in 2013. I do not wish to use any TN1 scans due to their scans having bad colour that would require me to spend another 5 years. And the films “always being 480p”… did you even read the responses? that was a mistake I made.

There’s a few different things here.

The colour grading in Star Wars and Empire in particular is all over the place on 35mm. That was part of the creative process GL chose to follow: audiences are more forgiving of inconsistent colourtiming in a blackened cinema. He made other decisions as well that resulted in lower-quality scenes technically but allowed more of the effects scenes: lower spec matte paintings, shooting scenes for optical composition on 35mm instead of 65mm and so-on. Secondly, different shots fade at different rates based on the density of the shot itself. This is why, for example, all the optical-wipes had to be re-done for the 1997 SE - because those scenes had faded to the point that it was impossible to restore them to be consistent with the before and after scenes.

The detail in an average SW print is about 1.5K - not 480p (0.7K).

Could you answer your DMs please.

The scan will be done by the same people who did the manhunter & keep scans. Manhunter was our print & luke got it from us & they did a wicked job. We were very glad to help them out.

LG no longer uses that scanner as it isn’t very good for prints. For reference (as you probably aren’t aware of this) I quoted him $1,300 for a professional scan of Manhunter in 2020 however that proved to be a bit much for him at the time. If I wasn’t scant myself at the time I would have paid for it.

Tim Burton’s Batman is a very dark movie, you’re going to be loosing an awful lot of detail in the shadows doing it on that scanner.

I prefer this because I am give people content like 35mm emulation, the common scans & some rarities.

You need to stop uploading other people’s scans, public piracy is against the rules of this forum and against Patreon’s rules. Profiting from fanediting (“35mm emulation”) is also against the OT forum rules:

• If you are profiting from fanediting…
  If you are selling fanediting…
  If you are monetizing fanediting…
  If you are asking others to financially subscribe to support your fanediting…
  …you have violated this rule.

V

They’re called cutters. They take perfectly good prints and cut them up to sell for profit.

Please do not buy.

That link you shared is printed from digital anyway. But it’s from a print. So it was printed to a negative, a theatrical print was struck from the digitally printed negative, and then that seller has cut up the print to make those strips.

Or are they doing something to put maybe a Blu-Ray or dare I say DVD rip onto film stock?

There are services that allow you to do this, but I can tell this is cut up of a real print just from looking at it. There’s printed-through damage from the negative easy to spot if you know what to look for.

sebkarlbjork said:

I own the full 35mm Die Hard With the vengeance film reels. If anyone wants to do a scan of it and do a donations post with cost for shipping and scanning all the reels I’m would happily lend it out.

If you could send me a DM I’d appreciate it. I’m not personally a Die Hard fan but there are some big fans of Die Hard on my Discord server who’d most likely love to borrow your print and do a professional scan.

sebkarlbjork said:

I own the full 35mm Die Hard With the vengeance film reels. If anyone wants to do a scan of it and do a donations post with cost for shipping and scanning all the reels I’m would happily lend it out.

Are you on my Discord server?

Lat to the party, but yeah trailers aren’t color timed. Or, that is to say, they are made well before the final color timing of the final film is done so even the same shot can look completely different on a trailer compared to the theatrical release.

JRSSCPRKFAN said:

PS. I cant wait to hear the new audio. Sounds exciting!

The existing audio is perfectly fine, one is captured optically and sounds great the other is Cinema DTS so there’s no loss in quality from the DTS CD to what I gave you.

The picture quality on the other hand… the new scans are a lot higher spec.

Please check your DM because I sent you the audio for that scan. It’s the speech bubble at the top of the page next to your avatar image.

It is not Team Negative One’s scan. They were given it to work on but they never made the release from which you got it. I won’t go into the internal details, but it was an English language print and the restored scan you have had both optical audio and cinema DTS synced to it already in English. Somebody removed it and uploaded it with foreign audio. I’ve sent you a link to the audio so you can download it and sync it.

That said, the scan is old. It was done in 2014. The newer scans will blow that one out of the water in terms of quality.

JRSSCPRKFAN said:

A new year, a new Jurassic Park Scan! This Jurassic Park scan will be a free for all scan, meaning that anybody and everybody can watch it for free! It uses the new Jurassic Park audio in perfect sync with a (muted) french scan. Experience the colors, grain, and open matte of the original Jurassic Park as seen in theaters in 1993.

I don’t mean to burst your bubble, but you don’t have a French scan. What you have is this scan with the English audio removed and the French audio synced by someone and uploaded somewhere. I’d have to check how the scan was paid for, but the guy that loaned the print for the scan doesn’t mind if you have a copy so if you want the original Prores just say and we may be able to give it to you.

That said, the colours are not right at all because the scanner used had limited dynamic range. No amount of colour correction will make it as good as the newer scans that are currently being done or worked on. It’s not actually a 4K scan either, it’s Bayer UHD … which is fine for 1080p finishing, but there’s a lot of detail lost. Don’t get me wrong, for 2015 the quality was acceptable.

Anyway, I remember someone uploading the scan somewhere with French audio synced a few years ago (a French blog I think), so I’m 99% sure that’s what you have.

timdiggerm said:

Or Disney finally told the IA to take it down. Or the IA is upping their enforcement in light of their recent lawsuit issues.

The Internet Archives themselves has a strict proactive anti-piracy policy. The lawsuits were their own fault for not loaning 1:1 copies, had they just done that the lawsuits would have ended in their favour.

This print is gone long gone guys, if you want to scan HA2 you’ll need to source another print for scanning.

imsorrydave2448 said:

I’ve seen much worse, and I’m far more worried about the quality of the actual film itself than the color fade. Also I’ve never seen a full print of the original Planet of the Apes. Only people selling an incomplete version with a few reels, and other Planet of the Apes films. Do you have an archived link to the sale of that print?

It may be too badly faded for the color to recover even with the best possible scan. Even the best scanners in the world cannot cannot get full color separation because it’s just not possible with today’s technology. This is what the spectrum looks like with unfaded film:

Once that yellow peak has faded below magenta it can’t come back, not at the moment anyway and quite possibly never.

Lots of faded films can still scan though and recover good color, it just all depends on the extent of the fade.

And yes I can show you the ad send me a private message.

There is no way that a print that badly faded is worth $1,000 even if it’s in otherwise perfect condition. The last faded one I saw come up for sale was priced at $125 plus postage (from the US).

Send me a PM I’d be interested to know where you got quotes from and what you were quoted. 😉 With scanning price and quality does not always go together…

…

Bino08 said:

Well, can you refer me to someone who owns a print they would lend for scanning?

I believe so. Scanning would be about $950 I think plus postage.

Why not just re-scan the print that we already know is good? Yes it will be more expensive, yes the dye-layers are misaligned and it will need to be done R/G/B to do it right but literally EVERY Technicolor SOTS print is like that and it will scan far, far better than a faded Eastman print.

DarthWasabbi said:

Burnt bridges on purpose because that place was toxic, and vile. There’s a reason why I deleted every damn message there, and bounced the fuck out. You’ll never know.
Good riddance.

Toxic and vile?

It is not. I won’t stand for you slagging off my server. It’s got a good, positive vibe and it’s been for the most part attracting good people. There’s a reason you don’t see me spamming and promoting it everywhere - people who are interested find their way there and I don’t want just random people joining for the wrong reasons.

I had no ill wishes against you AdmiralNoodles. That said you decided to purposefully burn your bridges and that’s on you. You should own up to your own behaviour and apologise. I actually apologised to TGR97/Wedge over your behaviour so please take some personal responsibility of your own and make your own apology.

Here is what you claimed:

This project seems dead in the water, and the project host ran off with the funds.
Nothing new, nothing lost.

1. The project lead is here. 2. One of the scanner’s representatives is here. Both HERE on OT and over on my Discord. 3. One of the Moderators of OT knows the scanner rep that I’m talking about and has many years of relationship. Same with me I know and trust this man. So claiming that there’s fraud is outrageous. TGR97 Has done nothing wrong. Scanning can take longer than expected, it’s happened MANY times before it’ll happen many times in the future. Case in point I thought I had a scanner for a print a couple of months ago, but he had retired suddenly without my knowledge and turned the business over to someone else.

TGR97’s scanner will only scan if the results are perfect, that’s why it’s taking a while it has nothing whatsoever to do with what you claim.

DarthWasabbi said:

A Discord Server. How quaint!

You weren’t banned from my Discord, you quit and burned bridges with everyone you knew who gave you a chance.

I have a print here, but I can’t use my preferred scanner for it. So just waiting until I can figure out how I want to scan it. 😉

AwesomeJ said:

Agreed, however, when you compare both the Laserdisc and the DVD, if you overlay them both over each other in a side by side comparison (something I did in iMovie as a test), the laserdisc goes out of sync with the DVD very quickly. So yes you are right, the film was not “slowed down” or “sped up”. The film just gained and lost some frames in some shots on the film out. So yeah, it was rendered frame by frame for standard 24fps projection, its just that when Pixar were processing the film for celluloid, the Avid Video Composer caused the movie to gain and lose a frame in all of the shots.

That’s not how it works, the digital format doesn’t have a frame rate. You render it out to a series of images which has no frame rate, it’s just 0000001.dpx, 0000002.dpx, 0000003.dpx and so-on, there’s no way for it to gain or lose frames in that process. The printer doesn’t know about frame rates, or for that matter audio - all it knows is that it prints frame after frame to a negative that then gets processed, and then a colour-timed interpositive is made later to strike prints from. The DVD and Laserdisc won’t be a definitive source, they are many reasons they may not have the same frame counts as they may have been edited on tape (they probably were) we’re talking about editing together a 10 reel movie, potentially adding subtitles or text over the image especially for 4x3 where credits or other text may be cropped out, potentially doing a scene-by-scene colour correction and editing it back together as well. Plus I don’t know what print they used when they made them, for all we know there were random lab splices in it that had to be removed physically, or it had other repairs made with frames removed.

There’s no “speeding up” or “slowing down” of film, it’s shot how it is. You can run the camera slow or fast and get the result that when played at 24fps you get fast or slow motion. Toy Story was rendered frame-by-frame for standard 24fps projection.

AwesomeJ said:

Considering the movie was rendered out at 23.97 fps (my source is Craig Good, who was the Supervising Layout artist for the film), the scanned film is most likely going to be the former frame rate.

I don’t know what you mean by that? Toy Story is 24fps it doesn’t matter how it was rendered in the computer before film-out. An example might be if you run a camera at 120fps for slow-motion footage, it was captured at 120fps but the film is 24fps.

AwesomeJ said:

I have some screencaps of a laserdisc copy that I color corrected a while back, so I don’t know if this is 100% accurate to the original theatrical presentation but I hope these help when the thing is finally scanned:

Laserdiscs are colorcorrected for the living room by the telecine operator, aka the colorist, like this:

So basically it has its own colortiming. The telecine prints are more expensive to make than projection prints, although they’re usually 16mm not 35mm, and they’re printed low-contrast so that they can be transferred for broadcast and/or home video (you can also transfer off the interpos or a dupe negative as those are also low-contrast film that will transfer acceptably on a telecine). For a bright film like Toy Story it may not look too different, but for films with many dark/night scenes those in particular will look nothing like how they look theatrically. Beauty and the Beast for example is really ruined by the home video colortiming. BATB is an example of a film that probably shouldn’t have been released to home video, but we are where we are and today everything now goes to home video eventually. Certain decisions are even made for both home video and broadcast at the time of filming, for example in Hollywood they shoot alternate scenes for broadcast where they know that something will have to be censored for US domestic TV.

For the theatrical prints the way it works is that the interpositive is colortimed and then when theatrical prints are struck the printer is fully calibrated for the film and the print is struck reel-by-reel. So for example if you’re printing 200 prints you print 200x reel 1 and then 200x reel 2 and so-on. Some prints will be intentionally printed 2 stops brighter and those are Drive-In prints (prints for outdoor projection). The interpos is struck off the original negative or off a dupe negative, in this case the original negative would have been a digital film-out (there may be more than one “original negative” if they made more than one film-out). Now the resolution Toy Story was outputted to wasn’t 2048x1556 so I don’t know if they upscaled it for the printer, or window-boxed it and then did an optical enlargement off the o-neg - either is possible and we should see if there was any attempt at “filmizing” it when it’s scanned.