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RU.08

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Join date
5-May-2011
Last activity
21-Jun-2025
Posts
1,367

Post History

Post
#1122321
Topic
The Phantom Menace on 35mm (* unfinished project *)
Time

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.

Post
#1120836
Topic
1997 Star Wars Special Edition 35mm Project (a WIP)
Time

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.

Post
#1118205
Topic
Dealing with People Selling Fan Projects
Time

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.

Post
#1118199
Topic
Dealing with People Selling Fan Projects
Time

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.

Post
#1116732
Topic
The Phantom Menace on 35mm (* unfinished project *)
Time

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.

Post
#1116380
Topic
The Phantom Menace on 35mm (* unfinished project *)
Time

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:

Post
#1116346
Topic
The Phantom Menace on 35mm (* unfinished project *)
Time

AOTC was filmed at 1.4K, not 2K… or at least much of it was. The HDCAM tapes could only record 1080p at 3:1:1 subsampling which is a luma resolution of 1440x1080 (which was cropped to 1440x818), and a chroma resolution of 480x270. It was also only 8bit, so not a lot of dynamic range to play with. I believe they had to hand-draw the mattes on many greenscreen effects. Not all of the film is that quality though, sometimes they would have reduced the size of the live action which means that it may as well be 4K (luma anyway), and sometimes they may not have used the HDCAM and instead recorded using a different data recorder capable of 4:2:2 sub-sampling, but it’s unclear how much was actually recorded at that rate. In any case you can see from the film many scenes where the chroma resolution is quite low - doesn’t always matter because they don’t have sharp contrasting colours on the live action, but I can make some examples of that sometime.

Post
#1116320
Topic
The Phantom Menace on 35mm (* unfinished project *)
Time

Does anyone know did the entire film go through a digital intermediate? Because if so it would have be done at 2K (2048x1556 if it was done anamorphically). For any effect shot the resolution will not be higher than that, and it’s possible they rendered some of them at lower resolutions if they were particularly complicated CGI scenes (the entire Toy Story film was rendered at 1536x922 for example).

Post
#1115589
Topic
The Phantom Menace on 35mm (* unfinished project *)
Time

Money is one thing that determines what projects go ahead and what ones don’t. As ZigZig has (I think) already send a hard drive specifically for this I can also just put in the $270 towards the costs instead of buying an 8tb, if need be. We only need 10 people to go in for an amount in that region and the whole scan will be funded - or we could get 7-8 people who can afford $200-300 and probably make up the rest through smaller donations. The small donations do add up quickly actually.

As for the film, it’s the first SW film I saw in the cinema. It may not be a great SW film, but hey it followed on from the relative silliness of Jedi, and at least it had a story to tell unlike the more recent Disney iterations. It’s also a glimpse into what might have been if Lucas hadn’t given up on directing to focus on merchandising.

Post
#1114789
Topic
The Phantom Menace on 35mm (* unfinished project *)
Time

Well in any case I can get an 8tb drive for this project, so storage is sorted at least for a single-flash scan. If someone else wants to contribute the remainder of the storage we can get it triple-flashed.

We will need some substantial donations to get this done though, so let me know if you’re willing to donate to this and how much and we’ll see if we can raise enough to scan or not. I’ll just take pledges for now and if we get enough then move to donations. 😃

Post
#1114108
Topic
The Phantom Menace on 35mm (* unfinished project *)
Time

clutchins said:

Interesting that you prefer Seagate. I’ve had two Seagates fail on me in the past few years.

Yeah it makes sense, the drive needs to be fast enough not to choke on the data rate coming from the scanner. The only issue I have with the Seagate is that it only has a 3 year warranty, WD Gold drives have a 5 year warranty. Still though on price comparison it can’t be beaten.

Ironwolf drives are on special this week:

https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?item=N82E16822179003

Are they better then SkyHawk?

Post
#1113681
Topic
The Phantom Menace on 35mm (* unfinished project *)
Time

Yes, although you purchase a hard drive to loan if you wanted (you’d have to send the money of course). Poita will let us know soon precisely what we need, if we can use some external drives then storage would already be sorted.

On the other hand, with the cleaning that gets done we may not really need the IR damage matte anyway (we would only need it for damage, not for dirt).