RU.08

I already have access to a much better print of Pinocchio.

CatBus said:

I’m guessing 1985-1993, which roughly matches up with “cold storage for 25 years until present”. So basically it was approx five years of unknown storage, eight years of cold storage, another couple years of unknown storage, and then another 25 of cold storage. So maybe six or seven years of fade, depending on how it was treated during those other years… which from the looks of it, was pretty good treatment as well.

17C isn’t cold storage. So basically - 1980-85 unknown, 85-93 in archival storage, to a collector for a couple of years, and then into cold storage until it was sold.

@CatBus it’s not a reprint, it’s an original 1980 print! 😄

poita said:

An IB Tech print cannot block 100% of the projector light at normal projection light levels, there are no true blacks in a cinema, so if you feel that adjusting black levels to be lower than the black levels in a cinema, then pretty much all restorations I’ve seen so far would be revisionist under that definition.

Good masking in the cinema compensates for this. The experience I have in my favourite cinemas is a world away from what I get at the “everyday cinemas”. It’s difficult to classify them, as some of the cinemas that have no screen masking and letterbox their projections are chains, and some are independent. In any case though, when the cinema is properly darkened with proper screen masking the black level being a dark grey is no longer an issue. I’m sure you agree, but I want to point that out to others here.

When it comes to colour, unless you are sitting in a cinema with the print, and doing your colour adjustments based on that, and revisiting them again by watching the print etc. then the grade is going to be revisionist, from a certain point of view.

And it really depends on the movie too. Some films are consistent with their black level and colour timing throughout, and others aren’t, and others are 95% consistent and there may be just one or two shots that are noticeably different. That’s my experience anyway.

And not only that, but some films look GREAT on 35mm, and others looked shocking. To give an example, I recently saw Batman 1989, and, The Untouchables 1987. I was absolutely stoked to see both. Batman was amazing - it looked great, and if memory serves me right what I was saying about consistency it may have had just 1 or 2 shots that looked a little off in colour timing/contrast levels. The Untouchables looked like utter shit, flickering throughout the entire movie. Yellow skin-tones. It was horrible, I never in my life want to see the film look like that again - it well deserves a better presentation than the 35mm theatrical prints afforded it. And yes, flicker is present in most films - but sometimes there’s none at all, and usually there isn’t a lot of it, and usually it’s not very obtrusive. (edit to add) and in case anyone is wondering this was in cinema with proper masking, and both films I saw in the same cinema.

Trying to get to the original theatrical presentation colours is a very tricky exercise.

I think that’s in vein. It’s not what people want, they want the film to look and feel the same, but they certainly don’t want flicker and other inconsistencies inherent in the original prints. And they certainly don’t want to see what The Untouchables prints looked like transferred to digital - you would definitely need to de-flicker the film and then do some modest colour timing to makes the presentation more palatable. It only makes sense to talk about 100% theatrical accuracy when the film’s theatrical presentation itself was 100%. Which is often the case actually, but just as often there are issues like colour timing, inconsistent black levels, flicker, and with IB prints as they are dye-transferred channel misalignment.

Yep they would have been contact prints made from the film-out negative.

I reviewed that section myself, and while it’s unbelievably grainy I saw no evidence of ghosting. 😃

poita said:

One thing to remember is that Star Wars was a rush-job, with budget problems and a lot of people working in the SFX crew that had never worked on a feature film before, and in some cases, doing things never attempted before.

I don’t know if I would agree that it was “rushed”. GL made the decision to use a lot of really short special effects shots, matte paintings in particular, and made the creative decision to get a lot of mediocre quality matte paintings for short shorts where “no one will notice the bad quality” instead of ordering just a handful of really great quality matte paintings which is what every other film-maker would have done at the time. No one else would have ordered matte paintings to use for just one shot lasting up to 4 or 5 seconds. I’m sure the artists hated it, after all matte paintings are an artwork and good ones take quite a lot of time and effort to get right.

…but not your enemies. 😉

it’s probably something like host news.free-usenet.com and port 443. They’re probably not the best free provider, I suggest you do a search for a good free provider.

Bobson Dugnutt said:

Isn’t that on Usenet? Which is a paid thing? I’ve heard it come up every now and again and I still don’t understand how it works

You can use a free provider like free-usenet.com, the only catch is the download rate is limited to 1Mbps so it will take a while to download.

ChainsawAsh said:

You’ll probably have to wait until it makes its way onto public trackers, at least as far as the apparently-forever-closed-for-invites MySpleen goes.

I’m pretty sure someone will upload it to alt.binaries.starwars soon, so just keep an eye on that if you aren’t on the Spleen.

Nice to hear those updates, but they belong in this thread. 😃

He must have been auditioning for Terminator 2.

Greedo and Han!

I think it’s still on track, the main delay was the scanner malfunctioning and needing repairs as talked about in the Special Edition thread. The new ESB print isn’t going to be scanned right away. But its purchase has likely reduced poita’s spending money for a while meaning more donations will certainly help to get this done!

To poita:

To everyone else: If you’re reading this but haven’t donated - please do!! Here are the donation links:

https://paypal.me/poit
bitcoin:13QDjXjt7w7BFiQc4Q7wpRGPtYKYchnm8x

little-endian said:

Will be interesting to see what they do with any official Blu-ray* release if Cameron ever cares to get it done instead of planning half a dozen Avatar sequels.

That’s the least of your worries… Cameron is about to defile the Terminator series with yet more sequels that will likely make Kingdom of the Crystal Skull look like a decent Indy film!

little-endian said:

Well, while I am confident that the 35mm print was professionally captured as good as possible and probably virtually shows everything what the LPP film print had to offer, considering that the video releases (from whatever source they come from) show a lot more detail in dark areas, I think it’s fair to consider the blacks to be “crushed” compared to some original negative which must be lying around somewhere - at first independently of where that happened (during the film to video transfer or from film to film).

“Black crush” generally refers to either the dark details being lost due to the capture device (i.e. the camera in the film scanner, video compression, or because of the contrast setting on the display device. My point was simply that the detail is not in the print, it’s already gone. We see the same thing with Lady and the Tramp - if we get to scan an IB Tech print there will be much more detail in the dark areas.

In other words - I didn’t mean to say that any dark detail was crushed on purpose within the scan project, all I am saying is - given the original negative - it should be possible to have all the grainy and cinematic look the current scan has plus the details in the dark areas (which would be nice). After all, one has to have dreams, right? 😉

Yes that’s possible, just not theatrically accurate for this film. 😛

little-endian said:

Compared to the 35mm print, the SD and HD video versions have way higher detail in dark areas/scenes but on the other hand a little lower resolution and - risking to highly speculate here - probably not the color timing which was originally intended. Hence overall, the 35mm print of course provides a rougher cinematic experience, but at the cost of quite some severe black crush, a fact which can’t be embellished either.

Yes that’s correct that the 35mm print doesn’t have much detail in the dark areas, but it’s not correct that the blacks are crushed. LPP film prints do not have much shadow detail.

I’m pretty sure one of the project members owns the D-VHS.

Yeah they released it just before Christmas. It’s one of their best releases so far. The print appears very undamaged - when you compare for example to Ghostbusters.

2022 Update: PLEASE DO NOT SEND ME ANY PMs ABOUT THIS SCAN. - A number of users have done this and I know they’re well-meaning and don’t know better, but 1. this is not my scan as is made clear in the original post below, and 2. Times have moved on - I do not have a download link to this to share any more. It was good scan quality in 2018, but it’s 2022 and compared to what can be done now it’s average at best.

Original Post

Shortly after Aladdin, the team with no name released True Lies to MySpleen and Blutopia. If you’re not a member of those sites please don’t ask for invites, however I do have an alternate link that can be shared privately if you would like to access the release. 😉 I am not involved, but a recent discussion with another member alerted me to the fact that the release wasn’t widely known about outside of those torrent trackers. So here is its OT.com discussion thread!

Screenshots:

Info (from Myspleen):

True.Lies.1994.35mm.1080p.Cinema.DTS.v1.0

Sourced from a 4K scan of an original release theatrical print

MD5 checksum of the .mkv file: 58F1568B7ED673EA7470DAC162547F31

Size of the .mkv file: 27 621 105 041 bytes

(read this before asking any questions)
________________

Are you still waiting for the True Lies blu-ray to come out? You don't have to anymore, here's something better.

Following our tradition of the "v1.0" releases:

- Only some mild cleanup was applied
- The print is LPP, so no color fading here
- The encode is blu-ray compliant
- The release is NOT synchronized to official BD (certainly not in the case of this movie...)

Before you ask "Why is this movie so blue???": because that's how it looked in the theaters. You may have seen a D-VHS rip of this movie, but that one appears to be a scan of the original negative, or interpositive, without any color timing applied.

Audio track #1 (default) is the cinema DTS track ripped from the discs used in theaters. It's recommended to watch the movie with this track
Audio track #2 is a capture of the optical Dolby Stereo track present on the print. It was played in theaters without DTS system, included in this release for completion only

Example frames:

https://postimg.io/gallery/2ey3b0qck/

________________

FAQ
(I mostly just copy-paste this into nfo of every release, but sometimes I add new answers)

Q: Do you have a website, or some other place where I could send you spam e-mails/PMs?
A: No. We kinda have a certain "home tracker" (at least for now, it can change anytime), where I upload all releases and respond to PMs and comments. ALL other torrents, warez etc. found on the internet were uploaded by someone else and could have been modified. Our releases always include a BD-sized encode, .nfo file and the donation picture. Since these files end up in many different places on the internet, I will not disclose the name of the tracker I upload to.

Q: Why are colors in some of your scans so different than those in official releases?
A: Because sadly very few studios care about having their movies properly presented on home video. They often make quick, cheap scans of the negative, slap it with some automated dirt cleanup and push it out for easy money. Color timing was a difficult, chemical process that many don't bother to recreate, and the result is always a dull image without any distinctive traits.

Q: You said the file is sourced from a 4K scan, why don't you release a 4K version?
A: I won't go into details here, basically we think that it's too early to dive into 4K encodes. Don't worry, the original scan files are safe and all movies that we have will get a 4K release at some point in the future.

Q: Why do some of your audio captures contain obvious errors?
A: Sometimes the audio capture from the print is supposed to be the main track for viewing - in which case we give it the attention it deserves. On the other hand, very often the 35mm track is inferior to a Laserdisc capture of the same mix, because of damage, missing parts and other problems that can't be completely fixed. Movies that contain cinema DTS tracks also have the optical 35mm track included only for completion, with minimal amount of work done with it.

Q: What does "open matte" mean?
A: A standard 35mm film cell can hold image at about 1.37:1 aspect ratio. This is similar in shape to old CRT TVs, obviously not many movies were shown in theaters like that. There were two general ways to get widescreen image from film - some were shot with anamorphic lens, which basically "squeezed" image with 2.35:1 ratio to fit on film, and then theater projectors used special lens to stretch it back out. The other way was just cropping top and bottom parts of the image, leaving image in e.g. 1.85:1. Some filmmakers used "hard matting" technique, which came down to attaching two black bars to the camera lens, restricting some of the light from going in and thereby forcing a certain aspect ratio. Others either didn't care, or simply decided against it, leaving the cropping to projectionists at theaters. An "open matte" version in our slang means that the image from the print is shown in its entirety, complete with parts that were never intended to be seen.

Q: What does "LPP" mean?
A: LPP is a low fade film stock. It was introduced in 1982, and all movies produced after that year have used this type of stock. "Low fade" means "really, really low fade". The color on a properly stored LPP print will outlive all of us.

Q: Why do some releases have "LPP" in their name, while others don't?
A: We include the stock in the release name only for movies from before 1982, that were reprinted on LPP stock.

Q: Why is it so dark/shouldn't black levels be higher/is the detail lost in dark areas?
A: Dark areas on 35mm prints hold very little detail, what is present there on the negative (which most commercial blu-rays are based on) never makes it to theatrical prints due to generational loss. Increasing black levels is a matter of preference and doesn't actually reveal any detail. If you feel the movie is too dark, you can simply increase the brightness setting on your TV/video player and achieve the same effect. Keep in mind, that this is not necessarily bad - filmmakers made their films knowing that dark areas would look really dark on the prints. What you're seeing on blu-rays is often not what was originally intended to be seen.

Q: Why does this release has less detail than blu-ray? I thought it was supposed to be 1080p?!
A: Commercial blu-rays are most often sourced from negative scans, which hold more detail than theatrical prints, and there is nothing we can do about it. The image on prints, because of analog nature of print production process, is softer, has less detail and is more grainy, but most of the time has better contrast and colors. Our versions look just like they did in theaters, there are no missing scenes, added scenes, changed sfx, changed color timing, DNR scrubbing or any other revisionist changes.

Q: When will you release a cleaned up version of X/open matte version of Y?
A: When it's done. If it's being done at all.

Q: Why can't you release more often?
A: Because we don't have as much time and money for it as we would like. If you want to see more from us, consider donating to the bitcoin address. Prints, hard drives, and other materials we use cost money.
________________

List of our releases (chronologically):

Jurassic.Park.1993.35mm.1080p.Cinema.DTS.v1.0
The.Matrix 1999.35mm.1080p.Cinema.DTS.v1.0 (flawed, do not download)
The.Matrix 1999.35mm.1080p.Cinema.DTS.v2.0
Star.Trek.III.The.Search.For.Spock.1984.35mm.1080p.Dolby.Stereo.v1.0
Raiders.of.the.Lost.Ark.1981.35mm.LPP.1080p.Dolby.Stereo.LITEMAKR.v1.0
Lady.and.the.Tramp.1955.35mm.LPP.1080p.Dolby.Surround.v1.0
Jurassic.Park.1993.35mm.1080p.Cinema.DTS.Open.Matte.v1.0
Jurassic.Park.1993.35mm.1080p.Cinema.DTS.Superwide.Open.Matte.v1.0
Jurassic.Park.1993.35mm.1080p.Cinema.DTS.v2.0
Ghostbusters.1984.35mm.1080p.Dolby.Stereo.v1.0
Aladdin.1992.35mm.1080p.Dolby.Stereo.v1.0
True.Lies.1994.35mm.1080p.Cinema.DTS.v1.0

Very well done to the team behind this release, it looks and sounds GREAT!

Keep in mind this was from a regular scan. It is possible to get audio transferred using specialist equipment, and that should get you results that will match digital quality. It’s also possible to get audio transferred directly from a projector’s output and that would be similar quality to what you get from scans.

Hi guys work is continuing on this, the first print has been scanned and previews are available for donors. We have access to TWO more complete prints! The second print will be used for a few sections, including the section in the preview where there are audio issues due to splices. The third print (not in English) will be scanned entirely! Anyone interested in donating please get in contact. 😃

little-endian said:

@Superrayman3, RU.08, ScruffyNerfHerder

Since some of you keep mentioning the LD, can you please be more specific about what LD release you mean? There are plenty different ones including the 1662 CS which according to DiscLord is supposed to have the unaltered far field mix as PCM.

However, your mentioning of 48kHz suggests AC3 as this is the only format on the LD which uses that sample rate.

Yes that’s the LD the rip is from, it was a bit-perfect rip of the PCM track and up-sampled from 44.1kHz so should have no loss in quality.