DrDre- Yes he's a professional - he seems to have worked with film for most of his life.
Poita- Thanks for the very detailed information.
I put this reply into the correct on-topic thread. :)
poita said:
There is a definite drop in detail from 4K to 2K, quite a lot actually. Even going from full aperture 4K to DCI 4K native loses some detail.
There is still extra detail being resolved at 10K vs 4K, but not really enough to justify a full 10K scan, it is mainly just defining the grain better.
As it is scanning is being done at double the 'standard' 4K, over 14 Megapixels per frame, and with a huge dynamic range, so we really should be getting all the detail that is likely to be extracted from the prints.
This also allows things like stabilisation to be applied without the sub-pixel smearing that you would get if scanning at the lower 4096x2160 resolution, (or the much much lower 2K resolution)It certainly isn't a competition, a lot of sharing of materials, knowledge and techniques goes on behind the scenes that people don't see here. Mike V, Harmy, Adywan, myself etc. all help each other out and none of us work completely in isolation. Work done by anyone benefits pretty much everyone.
Yes, from what you've said before the detail resolves to higher than 2k but lower than 4k. Interesting you mention "not really enough to justify a full 10K scan" that implies you are selectively scanning some scenes at 10k, would that be correct?
And great news on the time-frame, like MikeV keeps saying I hope it motivates Disney/Fox to do an official release.
Spielrock said:
Hi all,Long time lurker. Thought I'd sign up and post as I think it is great what Team Negative1 are doing here.
I've noticed a lot of talk about comparing this to the Blu-ray, if you understand the technical process of how these films are transferred from their dirty 35mm camera negatives to what you see when you pop in that disc... you'd see that comparing this to a blu-ray for quality/detail is just silly.
A company by the name of Lowry Digital who were responsible for the blu-ray transfers for the James Bond films, run the films through a digital film scanner that runs at a cost of about $300,000. They have over 700 terabytes of local storage and huge server farms. Not to mention the team that tackles all the footage once it has finished. I don't have much detail on how Star Wars was restored but I doubt it was anything less than this.
Looking forward to it.
Team -1 as I understand it built their own film scanner, and have kept the exact technical details of it private. Poita on the other hand bought a used $450,000 Imagica film scanner (in fact there's another one on eBay right now that is being sold with a cleaner as well here). MikeV has access to an industry-standard film scanner as well due to having friends in the industry. And reportedly there are other people who will scan a film-based source for you without asking questions about copyright.
Your information that Lowry Digital's film-scanning cost is $300,000 seems inaccurate. It may have cost that much in total for MGM (or Eon) to have all 22 films at the time scanned (Skyfall was shot entirely in digital FYI) and prepared for release (cleaned). That would equal about $13,600 per movie or so. If I'm not mistaken, Lowy used an Imagica scanner for Bond - which is the same scanner that Poita bought (or a different model of the same brand film scanner).
For starwars the "official" restoration can be traced back to 1995. At this time several elements were cleaned and scanned by ILM at 2k. Not the entire films, but certainly the parts with the most generational loss such as the optical wipes. In order to do this those parts were scanned from an earlier source to the o-neg (eg the camera negative), and put into a computer so effects could be added. This was done for instance with all optical wipes, and any scene that ended up having a special edition effect in 1997. Ultimately the o-neg was then reassembled with the restored/special edition segments inserted.
Fast-forward to 2004, this time ILM reportedly used a Cintel C-Reality telecine. The main difference between a telecine (T/C) and a scanner is that a T/C produces a format intended for television, straight onto a digital tape that can be duplicated and broadcast. It seems to be all but a dead-format now. But in 2004 it was fast and cheap. You can correct me if I'm wrong, but in 2004 they didn't bother with the camera negatives again, they simply used their 1997SE o-negs and "scanned" (or more accurately they T/C'd it) it at either 1080p or 2k. The T/C introduced all that horrible noise and would have been grainy as hell before Lucas had Lowy degrain the movies for him. Had Lowy done the scanning in one of their film scanners then it would have been better quality. I don't believe that Lucas wanted to use Lowy though, I think what happened is that ILM did the "scanning", cleaning, and colour-correction, and came up short and then they sent what they'd already done to Lowy to see if they could fix the problem and make a release-quality product from their jumbled mess. They gave them a tight deadline too so they could get the DVD released in 2004.
Fast-forward to today. Poita and MikeV have both scanned prints of the film in 4k using industry-quality film scanners. On the other hand, ILM "scanned" it using a 1080p/2k T/C from the o-neg in 2004. In 2011 or perhaps 2010 Lucas had what we think is the 1997 SE o-negs scanned at 4k for a future release (probably to be the basis for his 3D versions and all future home releases). Despite these plans, the 2004 version was released on Bluray in 2011 (with some minor changes).
So far the film has never been scanned in a film scanner and subsequently released onto a home-video format - EVER. So that is what I would say is the major difference between James Bond and Star Wars!
poita said:
What is fun though is to overlay the X0/Laserdisc shot over the film scan, both of them at full resolution.
i.e. pixels in each being the same size.
That's the size of the scan though not the size of the detail. To determine the detail in your full 4k picture you resize it down and then back up and look for detail loss, right? Eg resize to 2k and back to 4k and see if any detail was lost. You could do the same thing to the X0 - it may have less detail than 480p(/480i since it's a T/C).
But great work on the scans (the 35mm anyway, the 8mm had issues as you mentioned) - you'd clearly give MikeV a run for his money with that shot! *(not that it's a competition of course). Out of question though how many prints have you scanned for SW?
Um OK. I just typed in http://x0project.com. reminds me of all the defunct websites you see advertised in 00's TV shows lol!
Feallan said:
Wait. ~4K is only half res? :O
4K is full res, I think what he means is that the vertical resolution has been roughly halved because the 35mm frame is anamorphic. The frame provided was at 3984x1791, full res would be the flat scan whatever it is - 3984x3350 or something like that.
Have you tried running a media server on your PC and streaming it to your TV?
Drool - drool - drool - drool - drool. Forget more prints, that frame is perfect!
Poita, how's the 35mm version going?
I've put the script and previews back up in the op. I may encode it again, I was quite pleased with the results and the fact that it's an accurate representation of the GOUT with some of the issues corrected using the SE.
@Iddyplob you don't need Myspleen to get Harmy's SW Trilogy.
@Nplumb May the Fourth be with you too. :)
For the record I've said nothing bad about TFA...
Yeah, that's why no preservation based on the Bluray will ever be able to get back to what it should be. It is a commendable effort by Harmy to give us the best that is possible with present resources.
You should get him to have a look at some of MikeV's videos.
Legacy could likely be submitted to film archives, even if they can't distribute or show it they can safeguard copies of it until the copyright runs out, whenever that is!
There are three versions on the Spleen presently:
1. "Z VCD" (Theatrical Bootleg).
2. "TB release" (PAL broadcast to DVD)
3. althor1138's LD rip.
I've been working on a HD version, but I haven't had time to finish it yet, in a few weeks I'll finish it and release it.
He's so dumb I can't stand it!
at 8:45 or so... "I was shocked because I didn't know there was any black people in space .. and I don't think there were any black people in the previous movies" LOL - I guess he forgot about James Earl Jones and Billy Dee Williams.
Although he'd have had a point if he had mentioned that Lupita Nyong might be the first ever black woman in space - assuming she plays a human that is and not an alien like Femi Taylor in ROTJ.
Not that I'm aware of.
MrPib said:
Sorry about that. Guess the sarcasm didn't come through, and I guess he couldn't be bothered to take Danfun's advice.
LOL I got such a huge laugh out of it, it was totally worth bothering Frink for that!
Oh - by the way you can also get it on demonoid, and if it's low on seeders send me a PM.
A brilliant plan by Disney to have Christensen removed from ROTJ?
Not really no, they introduce analogue noise. Just that the grain structure on the digital tape is pretty much gone when MPEG2 compression kicks in. Have a look at ESB -1 grindhouse and compare it to the GOUT" DVD. You'll see that the grain covers the whole of the image, and it dances, whereas the DVD has some of it only in part of the picture because the rest is smoothed out with MPEG2 compression, and much of it doesn't dance like it should. DVD tends to present this unnaturally static grain.
Well as I mentioned before, grain is not retained by DVD to begin with. Take the vader and leia image we've been looking at as an example. On Leia's top there's quite a bit of grain, but over on Vader and the ceiling lights and the walls there isn't. DVD simply can't retain it, it's just not possible for MPEG2 video to do it. In any image you will only ever have the grain of the source partially represented. And remember the way that telecines scan mean that what you get is not necessarily a true representation of the finer grain structure on the film.
But there's nothing wrong with grain, it's the noise that's been introduced with your system that I dislike - all that haloing. And that isn't in the source, it's introduced. Vader's chest plate in your version looks great, if not for all that extra noise that comes with it.
That's the problem with deinterlacing using eedi2. Here's a better version (well I think it's better):
http://www.screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/122076
It's still degrained, but this time I left the residual grain in. No distortion on Vader's chest-plate this time.
And by proper upscale I mean a more complete upscale. You wouldn't use just spline64resize to upscale video to HD.
Here's a quick example of a "proper" upscale. I did this in 5 minutes by modifying my TPM upscale script. It is not fully optimised for the source. It is a somewhat complicated script, but it basically uses eedi2 and QTGMC for deinterlacing, then upscales by a factor of 4 using spline36resize, then downscales to the output resolution via ResampleHQ. There's some noise in this frame for some reason, it may be a bad DVD rip I don't know I can't be bothered re-ripping the DVD right now, and it's based on the NTSC disc.
http://screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/122056
Yours has more micro detail, but also a lot more noise overall.
Danfun128, yes the 1993 LD masters are 480i telecine's with the exception of ROTJ which is a 576i telecine (from memory I can't remember if the NTSC version of ROTJ was converted from the PAL tape or if there was a separate 480i telecine used for it). Back in 1993 it was more-economical to scan the film for each video format than to convert between the two. It's also what produced the horrible aliasing (happens when each filed isn't precisely aligned).
There are several ways to upscale video. To answer your other question, in order to do a clean upscale you need to fully degrain the source. You can put the grain back in when you're done, or generate film grain that is a close approximation to what was in the original source. As the source is DVD, there's no accurate way for the grain to be represented without being severely affected by the MPEG2 compression - so only a small part of a DVD image can ever hold the grain, and you can see this effect often in DVDs where grain seems to appear in static areas of the image and disappear over the more complicated and moving areas. Degraining is a delicate process - you want to remove as much as possible while removing as little fine detail as possible. It doesn't matter if you lose a little bit of fine detail, it's all about the balance.
