RU.08

poita said:

I agree with David if you are talking a really fine grained negative in great shape, that was exposed well.

Ah yes of course. I was enjoying reading all those threads too much I forgot about that. Does the old nitrate stock Wizard of Oz was struck on have a fine grain too?

The blotchiness on the SSE isn’t because it was scanned in ‘only’ 4K (I thought it was done @2K, but I could be wrong)

Yeah 2K, I didn’t mean to say it was scanned at 4K. Have you seen Deep Red 4K by chance? That restoration looks stunning, even better than Robocop 4K in my opinion! Robocop seems to have more of that blotchy grain in the darker areas.

had a less than ideal dynamic range,

Yeah I’ve noticed that issue. The 2002 Telecine also had many color issues, and has those warped film distortions which the SSE doesn’t. The distortions are relatively minor, but a new transfer on modern equipment would eliminate them entirely.

A lot of what people think of as grain in that release is actually a combination of sensor noise, dupe grain and processing issues.

What’s interesting is that the grain on release prints, at least from what I’ve seen, when projected in a cinema is really faint and when more visible usually indicates an optical effect.

I’m not even dissing the 2002 Telecine, I was reading this thread on Home Theatre Forum and everyone in it seemed to love the new transfer when it was first released on DVD. It just an old out of date transfer now, intended for home video and broadcast, not for DCP/film-out. I don’t understand how they were happy to slap that onto the 2011 Blu-ray while every other watershed film gets a new pristine 2K or 4K restoration, and even less important Giallo films of the same age now look better than Star Wars!

poita said:

As a few of you know, I have health issues, and I am away from Monday through Friday for treatment, so may or may not be able to answer PMs etc. until the weekend, depending how hard it all hits.

Ouch, I hope your treatment is going well and you stay safe with all the travelling that must be involved. 😃

EJones216 said:

That would be the 1993 restoration of “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs”, scanned and output at 4K (I believe 10-bit Cineon). No idea if Disney has since done a new digital master, and it wouldn’t surprise me if they have. First new-release 4K DI was 11 years later with “Spider-Man 2”, though VFX were done in 2K.

Interesting, what’s the bet that after their 4K restoration they did what everyone does and did a 2K output to film instead of 4K? Well, if we can find a print from the 70’s/80’s we can do our own 4K scan.

We should also talk about the mess that Lucasfilm made with all of this as well. What we’ve ended up with can really only be described as a mess. They haven’t done a restoration on these films since the 1997 Special Edition when the o-neg was upgraded with newly struck film to replace the aging stock (aside from the unused 4K version done by Reliance Media in 2012, but until it get used it doesn’t count any more than Legacy does). We were then told this made restoring the theatrical versions impossible, which isn’t true because even if the o-neg is now different there would still be internegatives or interpositives that can be worked from, or the camera negatives that are still stored, or of course prints, or the parts of the o-neg that were removed as well.

The 2004 DVD was just a high definition video transfer for home release. The surprising thing is that’s the version that was screened in a 2014 cinema marathon. The 1080p transfer done in 2002 we would not even call a scan by today’s terminology, we’d call it a telecine. Don’t get me wrong, it’s certainly good by telecine standards, and Lowy did a decent job at digital clean-up given the short turnaround time required, but the limitations of the technology are quite obvious. For example, there’s a scene where Luke is in Ben’s hut - 36:11 on the SSE and 36:32 on the blu-ray - watch that scene and look at the wall above and to the right of 3PO. It shakes! Yet there’s no shaking at all on the SSE, it’s an imperfection in the 2002 telecine. Or the film is warped (which modern scanners are designed to cope with, and 2002 technology wasn’t). That unsteady image can be seen all over the 2002 transfer actually, it’s just a particularly good example of it.

One of the major differences with what poita is doing is that he has an IR damage matte - that didn’t exist for the 2002 home-video transfer, it was a 10-bit RGB telecine. In their press releases they did call it a restoration, but restorations should produce a theatrical quality result, and we know Fox/LFL’s policy until very recently was that screenings of these films had to be the 1997 SE prints, not the 2002 home-video transfer as confirmed on Film-Tech and also Home Theatre Forum. So I’m not sure what happened in that instance, but my guess is they got permission from Fox/Disney to run the BDs through DCP-o-matic, or they were directed to do that because it was cheap.

According to that Lowy press release they removed up to a million of pieces of dirt from some single scenes in the movie, such as the desert scene. “We’ve cleaned up more dirt on these three movies than we have on any movie we’ve ever worked on, including Citizen Kane – and that was almost impossible” (Lowy). LFL color timed the movie prior to sending it to Lowy, whereas MikeV said that color timing is the last thing you do in a film restoration.

That whole process would be much simpler today, just look how clean and gorgeous the reels poita had scanned came out after ultrasonic cleaning, I believe telecines picked up more dirt than modern scanners as well. Plus just the fact of having a 6K or 8K sensor - even if downsizing to 2K - means that the image and grain structure is of a much better quality as talked about in that cinematography forum thread where DavidC says 35mm needs 8K even though the detail resolved is around 3K to retain the fine film grain.

If it’s scanned at lower resolutions the grain can block and smudge together and you get that blotchy look that the SSE suffers from. As noted before, everyone seems to think that Wizard of Oz was scanned at 8K when the restoration video makes it clear it’s being scanned on a Spirit 4K scanner, and I think people are confused about the exposure resolution vs the resolution on the hard disk. I’d be interested to know if these prints are being scanned directly at 4K or at a higher exposure, and if poita agrees with the benefits DavidC on cinematography forum argued for.

13hm13 said:

Actually, (and as i noted in the OP), the LDs from 1993/95 were pretty good and lossless. I have no problem in Legacy/4k77 re-using that source for audio.

Those mixes are not theatrically accurate though.

Here’s an interesting topic on the issue of scanning. The preference with restoration is to scan at 6K or 8K even if outputting to 4K as it resolves the information better. Although poita hasn’t said, his 4K scans may be captured at 6K or 8K and then outputted at 4K, according to the thread that’s actually standard practice. It probably explains why everyone seems to think Wizard of Oz was scanned at 8K when it was done on a Spirit 4K film scanner that has a maximum output of 4K according to these specs!

I just popped in my 2009 Wizard of Oz bluray and had a look - the most disappointing thing is they used the inferior VC-1 codec rather than AVC (Sirius Pixels) and the movie is only 21GB. For comparison, Deep Red 4K is 37GB and AVC (x264 encoder) its film grain looks better than Wizard of Oz. But WOO still looks amazing, and it was scanned on a Spirit 4K (according to the restoration video) which is now an older obsolete/inferior scanner compared to what ESB is being scanned on. The technology going into this project is incredible, on par with top commercial film restorations, and even better than what was done for Oz!

althor1138 said:

It occurs to me that I don’t know what an “irreparably damaged” frame is. I did not annotate all of the red splotches or emulsion scratches but these are the ones that stuck out to me. I guess it really boils down to how much motion is in the frame and how much time you want to spend trying to fix it.

Those “red splotches” are the mould. By the sound of it they will either all need to be replaced with another source, or you’d need to stack the print scans and erase the damage. That may be possible, they are digitally pin-registered/aligned to the sprocket holes, but I’d be guessing they won’t align themselves perfectly without further work as they’re in two different languages, hence made from different inter-negs.

MikeV stacked his scans to erase damage without needing to resort to interpolating the damaged areas, I think poita’s got the same strategy in mind. It must take incredible computing power to do that! Then again, I guess 4K is only a rather recent thing anyway - what was the first film scanned at 4K does anyone know?

pittrek said:

But I have a question - why does the level of grain change from shot to shot?

Scenes with optical effects have more grain, this includes scenes with optical wipes.

ESB was released during a dark time in-between Technicolors and LPPs. Almost all prints have faded brick-red including the ones poita is scanning. A handful of prints were struck after release on LPP as mentioned by poita.

How did they turn up in the first place? It costs quite a lot of money to ship prints around the world, so studios often didn’t care to have them returned after their theatrical runs. So they would be either disposed of or kept by cinema staff turned collectors.

TN1’s “Silver Screen Edition” (Star Wars, not ESB) was based mostly on a Spanish LPP which was a dupe made from a print. So no it wasn’t the best available, but that was a different project to poita’s.

dahmage said:

back in the CD burning days, you could usually try to do an ‘overburn’ if it wasn’t too far over capacity. not sure if that would be a good idea for this. it has the possibility of ruining your dvd drive if you burn past the edge of the material on the disk.

Not really true, CD-R’s had a generous amount of space in the lead-out area of the disc, and that space could instead be used for data by shortening the lead-out that gets burnt. It was space already on the disc - there’s no such space to be used on DVD-R or BD-R, the specs are much tighter.

supes38 said:

A question though… How does one get access to the spleen? Looks like we are not accepting invites at this time.

I think they wanted to put the breaks on people signing up just for SW stuff with no interest in their “bread and butter” content.

Or whoever wants to sponsor the cleaning for one reel. 😉

Stryder said:

Are you able to send invites to myspleen? I have no idea how I can get one.

Just register on rutracker - that requires no invite. Plus it has a bunch of great stuff you won’t find on myspleen or piratebay there. There’s an english portal too @ en.rutracker.org…

So it’s the UK print being scanned at the moment, and then later the DE print is that right?

When I was in high school I had a friend who was really into that kind of stuff. I was interested in it too, but even then I knew it was never going to offer a career path sadly. You don’t need to be a genius to do it though as Louis Rossmann has proved on Youtube (all he does is diagnose and fix circuits, not modify them to do other functions). Although to do what poita did from scratch you’d need a lot of knowledge about how every aspect of the electronics involved in it worked.

It’s a shame that Pioneer and others didn’t make their high-end players NTSC & PAL compatible in the first place really.

ESB Grindhouse is on: myspleen, piratebay, a.b.starwars so you can take your pick. I think ROTJ is on myspleen & a.b.starwars, I just did a search and it wasn’t on tbp.

Yeah I have nothing to add which is why I haven’t asked to see that stuff. I made mirrors of the 1080p reel samples poita posted here, and anyone is free to PM me for access to that (a small number of people already did).

Yep. Well done again. I certainly couldn’t do it from scratch I’m far too ignorant of electronics. If you post the details of the mod sometime though others could follow it. And they’d end up with a player that is better than anything else for PAL LDs.

poita said:

I converted my X9 to PAL after a lot of dicking around, it was noticeably better than the 2950, but replacing the power supply components with better ones in the 2950 improved its picture quite a bit.

Oh wow! That’s awesome. You should post the details (on Fanres that is). With my limited knowledge of electronics I’d believe (in fact I’m very certain) that the player would no longer play NTSC - unless you were willing to connect up one switch per modified circuit like this:

All up PAL, all down NTSC.

Yep, a cheap splitter like this will work fine to remove the HDCP.

Ha! The sooner this get scanned the better. I haven’t seen any bootlegs, but from every single release I’ve seen world-wide going back to the VHS it does not look right! This project will show you how it should look. I can’t really say anything about the sound since it’s been more than 15 years since I’ve watched this film on home video or TV.

Swift S. Lawliet said:

Yes, you’re right.

Anyways, can we try not to derail this discussion?

Yeah sure of course. BATB is my favorite Disney movie which is why I can’t bring myself to watch the BD. All I do is look through it at paused scenes and digress. 😦

Swift S. Lawliet said:

And AOTC was a different version on the 35mm version rather than the digital cinema version (which is also on DVD).

Well I can tell you because I saw both AOTC and ROTS on film on release that some scenes were quite grainy! For example, the battle in ATOC on Geonosis had some scenes which were quite grainy. Anyway, I doubt they would have outputted 1280x1024 to film - the standard going all the way back to the early 90’s was to output 2K to film - does not apply to 3D like Toy Story (rendered at 1536×922). If we ever get a chance to scan AOTC/ROTS I am very confident they will be higher quality than the original digital versions, but lower than the BDs.

Swift S. Lawliet said:

Also, the lack of grain is actually the thing everyone should’ve done with the Star Wars prequels as they were shot digitally (at least for AOTC and ROTS, TPM should’ve had the grain).

I assume you’re kidding? If you’re going to go down that path then the resolution should be 1280×1024 since that’s what you saw in a digital cinema in 2002 or 2005. Most people, like I did, saw the movies on 35mm in higher quality.

People probably read the book after the movie and it gave them that idea. When you read a book and then see the film it’s actually really easy to tell where the movie differs from the book - but the other way around is less obvious. Words have a more fixed value in the mind I guess.

jedimasterobiwan said:

really no one has an answer i don’t mean to be pushy at all i’m really serious. but anyway what about adywans edit of star wars saga? can they use this or the google raiser upscale method to go to “4k” please answer this i’d really really appreciate it.

The simple answer is yes. As g-force noted SR really works best with telecines, and the chip in your TV will probably do a job that is just as good if not better anyway with Adywan’s edit.