RU.08

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!

Ah right sorry for any confusion. The question of “can I still donate” comes up an awful lot.

poita said:

Oh, just to clarify, the $400 is just the cost of shipping the print.

Yeah I was almost going to edit that before. But done that now.

J0E said:

Yeah I was just telling RU.08 that I won’t be able to make good on it until about a week from now. Based off of those few frames, the print looks to be in decent shape. If the rest of the print looks like that and just has a “cigarette burn” or two It would be a miracle. The colours look pretty good too.

Yep, I wasn’t going to say what you were asking on the forum, but I know I get the same thing frequently with donations to my projects.

The green marks you see are base damage, but if the film has an IR matte I think it’s pretty much an automated process to remove them. You can see this damage in a few of the 35mm releases on the Spleen, including in the latest Ghostbusters release.

Yeah he sent me the PM. 😛

I also added some more info about donating to the OP, just to answer a couple of questions that keep coming up.

Quick answer: yes of course he’s still accepting donations! 😃

Here are the trailers that Laserschwert and TK-949 had transferred a while back:

They’re also on MySpleen with German audio (and English) and also on thestarwarstrilogy.com to download as well.

I don’t think that’s what they did for the 2011 version, it looks to me like they re-scanned the camera negatives and recomposed the digital effects.

The Rescuers Down Under (1990) was the first feature film to be 100% recorded to film from digital files. BATB, Aladdin, Lion King, Toy Story were also all done entirely digitally as were other animated films put out during that time.

I’m pretty sure they used a DI for the Phantom Menace, that pre-dates O Brother Where Art Thou by 1 year for a live-action movie.

I’m guessing not. But I am interested to see how the digital scenes look when scanned in 4K.

You should watch the trailer, not just look at the screenshots. 😉

Trailer added to OP.

Some screenshots:

Here’s a comment that made me laugh:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nPDdISVml8k

if anyone can help me get them as blu-rays that would be awesome.
I have a shitty dinosaur of a computer and no burner.
And I’m technologically impaired.
I know it’s illegal to buy them from someone but I’ll pay for the service/process and shipping costs.

I think whomever said the comment that we need to make it easy for people was right. There are people who pay $50-80 per month for 4G internet that has a cap of like 10-50 GB, for them downloading 3x BD50’s isn’t exactly an economical option.

Here are some Australian plans… A$50 gets you 25GB of data per month (although they also have a 100GB plan for A$70). Even on a 100GB plan though downloading a single BD50 would eat up nearly half your monthly data. Or looked at another way that data costs A$30… so not that economical.

That said, Lucasfilm can certainly litigate against the ebay sellers. I saw that one seller had literally sold about 200 copies or more based on their feedback “no longer registered” which means ebay probably kicked them off.

pittrek said:

Harmy’s work is basically a re-mix, re-mixes are considered fair use. https://boingboing.net/2013/04/26/fair-use-decision-remixing-is.html

I do not think that’s the case, not under US law anyway. There’s a lot more to a movie than just editing it, and everything automatically copyrighted as soon as it is created, and that includes all the individual shots, the sound effects created, etc. You would only have a fair-use case if you can show that your creation does not impede on the market of the original, and there you have a problem because the DE is a direct replacement for the official release.

If Harmy did have a copyright on the DE then he would still need to make a proper license to enforce, simply saying not to sell it isn’t enough. Have a look at the Carol Highsmith case, she tried to sue Getty for selling her photographs, Getty had the case thrown out of court on the basis that they don’t need a license to sell works in the public domain. Copyright Attorney Leonard French pointed out that if she didn’t want people commercialising her works she needed to make a license specifying that.

You can use poita’s paypal.me link, or his actual paypal email which is here.

Here’s a shot that looks pretty bad in AOTC:

The chroma in that shot is terrible quality. They may have zoomed that one. You can see they went ahead and denoised it for the Bluray wiping away some of the fine detail in the process. I remember there being a couple of pretty noisy shots on 35mm that never seemed to look that bad again.

It’s funny you mention DoF, I’ve noticed that objects/people in-focus often look perfectly fine, but those out of focus have a funny somewhat digital look to them as if the out of foucs blur is sharper then it should be.

It produces a native 4:2:2 picture, so I imagine the CCD has a bayer pattern as that is 1920x1080 green and 1920x540 red and blue pixels.

There is no question that the live action elements look inferior compared to TPM’s. On the subject of TPM there are actually a few digital shots in it, this is one of them:

The give away in this shot is the haloing on the contrasty parts of the picture. It’s much harder to tell on the DVD/HDTV version as the haloing is all throughout the film as it is, but you can see in that screenshot haloing on the umbrellas and other parts and that’s from the digital protoype camera Lucas tested on some of the shots he filmed in post-production (or after the principle photography anyway). This shot also looks to be digital as it has haloing on the Bluray:

Here’s another, very easy to spot on the bluray:

Note how the dark reds are really low quality, that’s indicative of the bayer pattern and when you see it in motion it looks really horrible. I’m surprised they didn’t digitally inpaint that for the bluray. There are other parts of this celebration shot digitally as well including possibly the last shot of the movie. Which makes sense as it looks like they used the same steps they used in those Tatooine crowd shots: