RU.08

FrankB said:

Would have loved to watch this about Christmas. Any chance?

Unfortunately not, however as a donor you do have previews of all 4 reels you can watch and that covers the entire movie. Although not release quality it is 1080p and quite acceptable for a casual viewing. Just a reminder to people though that the previews are not to be shared with non-donors, so if I see them shared it will mean I will be less generous with previews from future scans.

Jurassic Park isn’t TN1’s scan, it’s poita’s. There is always a different grading done for home video or broadcast, here’s a good video on the old telecine process if you’re interested:

poita said:

It’s amazing how much the CGI additions stick out.

Yeah that Green-cast thing was a dead give-away for all kinds of films, not just the Special Editions! I always wondered why they didn’t correct the colour before compositing the images…

I have about €200 in donations so far, from three four donors. Thanks go to all who’ve donated!

Yeah it’s clear they wanted it make it look more like Aladdin and Lion King on Bluray.

poita said:

Yes, the SE print is worse shot to shot than the IB prints.

That’s very interesting. It’s not a complete surprise though given they were working from brand new freshly shot camera negatives in 1977, and in 1995 (or whenever work started on the SE) they were working with o-negs that were not in great shape, and other lab elements that were problematic as well. I had the impression that they didn’t replace the entire o-neg, but rather they cut out all the scenes/shots they thought had problems and then struck new o-neg by doing new composites or working from the master positives. It’s funny actually that they wasted time on doing re-composites for the space shots that probably benefited the least from it!

Love it dbear! Lots of people criticised the BD WIP as well and felt the LD WIP was more authentic, it’s not perfect of course but it’s actually pretty close and I think its limitations are mostly due to the SD telecine transfer, not because they intentionally fiddled with it. Thanks again for sharing it!

Ah who knows, but my work must continue!

Can I ask, I think this might be an acetate print rather than polyester, someone was of the opinion that late 90’s acetate prints retain more details in the dark areas/shadows, could you let me know your opinion on that?

The print would have been professionally cleaned before scanning.

Thanks for posting the Bluray screenshots. As you can see they bluray looks nothing like the 35mm, and no home video release looks authentic which is what I said here. Belle’s hair being black in the night scenes was in my notes when I last saw the movie projected from 35mm about this time in 2014 (THREE years ago now)!

All films undergo some changes for home video viewing. And that generally involves boosting the colour/saturation so it looks acceptable in a brightly lit room… in a darkened movie theatre you don’t notice the lack of colour in a print, and your eyes are more forgiving of inconsistencies with colour and brightness. But in a living room you have household objects around that are illuminated and give you a stronger basis for comparison. For that reason alone darker films are made quite a bit brighter, but also the poor dynamic range even of bluray to resolve dark details results in banding if some brightness isn’t applied.

It may be a few weeks before I can post more previews, when I can I will. If you want to help speed things along feel free to send a donation for the Alien scan, once that’s done we’ll have access to the hard drives which also hold the BATB and Face/Off scans.

Okay, looks like we’re finally ready to scan. If you offered a donation now would be the time to get in contact with me!

Here are some sample frames:

At long last we have some samples from the scanner:

Synnöve said:

Why should he? He isn’t arguing for SD capture/presentation or any nonsense like that.

Well the artefacts are certainly still present in HD resolution as well.

He mentioned the IMAX and 35MM being the same stock. In any case, I’m quite content to trust that this guy, who…

-has shot 13 features on film,
-is been somewhat nerdy about his tools,
-is part of the AMPAS Science and Technology Council,
-had their conclusions endorsed by the president of the ASC,
-is lensing the new SW film,

… probably knows enough about what he’s doing such that the question of “if he used the right film stock/scanned it correctly” isn’t one worth asking.

It doesn’t change the fact that he didn’t tell us what film stock he used, he just said 4-perf and 15-perf negative, he never specified what stock it was. There may just be one standard Kodak colour negative used at the moment, I don’t know, but we don’t know what he used.

We have access to a print, yes.

poita said:

No, you can see the ribbing quite clearly when projected, unless the projector had very sloppy registration.

But Mike also completely de-grained the image first, and that made fine details more apparent. Perhaps we could see what this looks like before any degraining was applied?

Anyway, I disagree with Steve, he is a capable guy, but he is a DP, and has only really been once since 2002, his experience with actual film is very little.

Yep, I just clicked-through his 1hr second video and he never compares how they look in motion, all he compares is how they look zoomed in on a screenshot. But in-motion is way more important. For example, audiences and critics reacted badly to The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey’s 48fps cinema presentation, even though that should 2x technically superior to 24fps.

Steve never mentions the problems of aliasing or other strobing artefacts caused by lower digital resolutions, for example stripy or patterned shirts. Set and costume designers even took these considerations into account at the time of 35mm filming, for example on the commentary for Scream (or one of its sequels) the late Wes Craven notices the artefact on the DVD version and says something about it noting that the costume was not right, and that the strobing was still a problem at DVD resolution. He also doesn’t specify what film stocks he used, or for that matter how he scanned them (did he do them with a bayer sensor, or with a mono sensor), there are certainly modern stocks he could have used with a very fine grain and razor-sharp image, and I’m not sure that’s what he did for his comparison. Especially given that he had 4 different types of digital sensor, but only one type of 35mm film.

Yes but the question I have about that door-frame is: is it still a blur when projected in a cinema? I think it would be, even if it’s visible on a scan.

We think most of the Special Edition was a photochemical restoration, and that only scenes with optical compositing were remastered digitally. It still needs to be scanned at 4K even if it is a 2K digital film-out, as the film-out is to negative anyway and the pixels will not align perfectly to the camera either. The 2K film-out resolution (2048x1556) includes the soundtrack area, once that is taken out it’s more like 1828x1556 or something (I forget the exact size), the soundtrack area is typically left blank and added separately. There’s also blank-space above and below the picture in the samples poita posted, however those are not digital scenes, so it’ll be interesting to see how the digital scenes look by comparison. Hopefully poita can post one for us soon!

poita said:

No, I do not think they were, I think it is a common misconception but we will soon find out. (I could be wrong, but I am pretty sure they weren’t)

The new CGI sequences would have been done in 2K full aperture, but the rest of the film was done traditionally, and even the new wipes were done optically, so apart from the new effects, it should resolve well above 2K.

That’s a good point about the wipes, I’m interested to see about the rest of the re-compositing as well, although I imagine they were also done optically in the main.

EDIT…

Actually they may have done more work digitally than just the CGI, as I understand it these “burn marks” are a tear in the camera negative:

Here’s the same two frames from the 1997 SE (“TB release” of a Scandinavian DVB recording):

They’ve also removed the motion blur in that shot. I could be wrong, it could be the tear was to the o-neg and not the camera negative, but it doesn’t explain why they didn’t just make a replacement section from the master positive (or the camera negative) for the original 1977 release. I’m interested to see how the scan of this shot looks!

Oh yeah, there definitely is, and the 4:2:0 compression brings a lot of 1080p scenes (speaking generally this is, not specific to SW) down to DVD quality as well. It’s a pity the UHD Bluray specs are still limited to 4:2:0 subsampling actually.

I think he means the resolution of the print, not the scan. Not surprising really as you can see the grain particles, and each grain particle is the print’s “pixel”. The blue layer has the lowest resolution/largest grain as per usual:

Yeah there are a few issues with the LPP, the biggest being that the wider perfs and soundtrack area causes it to be cropped to 2.35:1 from 2.55:1. It also doesn’t contain as much detail in the dark areas as a Technicolor print. And then yes the colour will not necessarily look identical to the Technicolor version, in fact I would expect some significant differences. There is one print I know we can scan, and another I’m hoping to get access to.

It certainly is!

The Lady and the Tramp LPP had no involvement from TN1. The scan looks good but it has multiple issues starting with the off-centre cropping!

Hello everyone! Just a reminder that scanning is not cheap, and without new contributors I won’t be able to organise scanning of everything I would like to.

There are three new projects I would like to pursue:

1. Fantasia (KOSTAL) from 2 prints (1 Kostal print, 1 IB print).
2. Sleeping Beauty.
3. Lady and the Tramp IB/Technicolor from 2 prints (plus the LPP already scanned).

If any of these interest you and you can help please get in contact!