Well, I'm no expert on optical compositing, but I've read the 80s ILM coffee-table book, Christopher Finch's tome "Special Effects: Creating Movie Magic", and Ray Morton's book on Close Encounters, so I have a basic understanding. (Which is why I also could also come up with a theory on that weird Biggs frame You_Too found.)
What exactly are we supposed to be looking at?
I do see that in the second frame, the Death Star footage doesn't look like it was fully exposed in the composite; it gets darker and more blue as it gets closer to Biggs.
I know about blue spill, where the glow from the blue backing spills around stuff in the foreground, but I can't recall ever seeing blue from the bluescreen footage spilling onto the background element. (Sort of a reverse blue spill?)
There's also a smudge out the window near Biggs' nose. The way it looks semi-transparent makes me think it's on the DS background element, and shows up semi-transparent because it's in that weird blue-spill zone.
I checked Puggo Grande, and the background "blinks out" on that frame there, too. Even with the fading, you can make it out:
And here it is in the Moth3r boot. You can faintly see that smudge, too:
It's nice to see definitive proof that Luke's saber was blue. Since the scene looks a little too cold on that print, it may have been a little more cyan, but it was definitely not the shade seen in those JSC screenshots. Not aqua, not seafoam, and definitely not green or white.
How does it show up in your Technicolor scans, Harmy? Does your latest DeEd workprint reflect those?
Yes, notice that the color of the bright edge garbage is basically the same color as the saber glow. That's why I think it was burned in with the glow itself.
Here's another cropping comparison, this time of the binary sunset wide shot.
Green is 0%, blue is 5%, red is 10% (thanks msycamore); cyan is GOUT, magenta is JSC, and yellow is Technidisc. (Sorry, I forgot the 97SE and '04 DVD/ '11 Blu-ray. There'd be too many colors to keep track of, anyways...)
It's interesting to note how open both the GOUT and JSC are for this shot. They're both around 5%.
The Technidisc, however, crops more than 10% off the sides - but as it's more like 2.25:1 than 2.35:1-2.40:1, it has more on the top. A LOT more. It seems to come very close to the edge of the frame.
Not sure how much this reflects the cropping of the transfers as a whole. We already know that some scenes in the GOUT are dramatically "zoomboxed."
Maybe I'll try one of those lightsaber shots next.
My guess is that it's some kind of light spill from the saber glow element - that is, the film frame was just slightly larger than the opaque black Kodalith, so the animation stand backlight leaked around the edges. Then, during optical compositing, this backlight spill would have been burned into the darker, less exposed edges of the live-action element.
I believe this sort of "backlight spill" also occurred in the electricity animation when the Jawas knock R2 out. It was brought up in the thread for DJ's project - here's the picture that was posted there:
All in due time. I'll be doing more comparisons when time permits.
Yeah, I agree with msycamore. 5% cropping seems like the golden mean. :)
Here's where my estimate of the Senator cropping fits into that diagram.
Good grief, look at how much they took off the right! (I'm willing to bet that's the edge where the worst platter scratches were...)
OK, I took those GOUT cropping examples from the speeder shot, and compared them to the video clip of that scene at the Senator. The green box is about how much was cropped in the Senator screening - it's only an estimate, as there were no "landmarks" at the bottom of the frame (just sand), and this isn't accounting for the curvature of the screen.
As you can see, there's either a little more or a little less at the bottom than the GOUT (not sure which), but a whole lot more is cropped off the sides. Here's one more example of the Senator cropping vs. the raw frame:
That is too much off the top, and WAY too much off the sides. As I related before, Mike Verta says this print had platter damage on the sides, so the projectionist had to crop closer to hide them. Also, my guess is that the Senator's screen was closer to the standard 70mm ratio of 2.20:1, so more would have come off the sides anyway.
However, that is probably far more cropping than you'd see in any normal theater in '77. You definitely don't want to crop off that much in your version.
Again, I return to my 0%-5%-10% diagram, which I derived from an SMPTE framing chart using the .839 x .700 aperture that, from what I can find, was the Panavision standard in '77. Here's the same frame above - the green box is 0% cropping, the blue box is 5%, the red box is 10%.
For your final cropping, try to stay near the blue box. Something around 5% will remove all the rounded edges and gate fuzz, but preserve as much of the usable image as possible.
This is true - there were two telecine masters of the first film made for NTSC. There was the one used for the VHS/Beta releases (later used on the non-time-compressed LDs), and the one used for the time-compressed LD/CED releases (also seen on HBO - and it was time-compressed there too).
The only NTSC video masters to be made after 1982 were the widescreen transfer for the Japanese Special Collection in '86 (from the same film source as the earlier transfers), and the new widescreen transfer in '92 to fix the "shrinking ratio" issue, from the same picture element that would be utilized for the Definitive Collection (seen on the '92 widescreen VHS set and the '93 Technidisc pressings of the Special Widescreen Edition LD).
One of the reasons that the "digitally remastered" THX releases in '93-'95 looked so impressive back then is because we had been watching old 1" analog transfers for over a decade.
As for PAL, right now I think there was one pan-and-scan transfer done in '82, and a widescreen one done some time in the late 80s (which appeared on the pre-THX French and German widescreen LDs). There needs to be more research done on the PAL transfers; that's why I keep suggesting preservations of pre-THX PAL laserdiscs, widescreen and fullscreen.
Thanks, I didn't know that.
Don't crop too much. Certainly don't crop as much as the GOUT. 5% would do (like the area in the second green box in my diagram above). Maybe something close to the small amount of cropping on the Blu-ray?
I think most theatrical screenings would lose a minimum of 5% around the edges anyway. I just feel that as much image should be retained as possible.
It's from Galactica.tv, a Battlestar Galactica fan site.
Oh, those? Just to let everyone know, those are actually manipulations I did of SE screenshots msycamore took from that THX documentary.
I just did a bunch of tweaking in MS Office Picture Manager. They were mainly to see if I could make the images more accurate. They're probably a little too bright or too contrasty.
Glad you liked them, though. :)
I'm not sure it was meant to be THAT dark. Mike Verta's photos from the private Technicolor print screening certainly don't look that dark.
msycamore said:
Where comes that "vaseline on the lens story" from, was it from Lucas in the SE documentaries?
Precisely. He said something like, "The best we could do was put some vaseline on the lens and kind of fudge out the wheels." Even in '97 I was confused, because vaseline is clear and wouldn't make an orange blob like that. Then, at some point I also realized that a "vaseline on the lens" trick wouldn't work with a tracking shot.
Not sure if it was George's fuzzy memory, or part of the "talking down" of the original effects when promoting the SE. The shot may not have looked that good compared to the virtually seamless mirror effect used in the California pickups, but it took a lot more work than smearing vaseline on the lens.
The official 2006 comparison got it right: "The original 1977 version of this shot suffered poor image quality from repeated optical compositing to obscure the wheels of the landspeeder with a hand-animated haze." Still, the vaseline explanation has been become part of SW lore over the past 15 years, even though it's total BS.
And I found the quote about the effect. It was a Richard Edlund interview from 2010:
How do feel about George Lucas going back to the old Star Wars movies and replacing some of your old special effects with new computerized improvements?
When I went to the premiere of the Special Edition at the Fox Village Theatre, George was there. I told George: "I've heard you changed a lot of things and there's all these rumors about reshooting the opening shot... It's your movie and you can do with it what you want. It's not like someone coming around 40-50 years later, colorizing Shirley Temple." and he said: "You know Richard, there's that shot of the landspeeder..." and he didn't have to say anything else, because there's this one shot that's such a stinker in Star Wars and I can't stand it. Gary Kurtz shot this plate of the landspeeder taking off in the desert and you could see the tires under it. We had to get rid of the tires. This is pre-digital and I tried to rotoscope the tires underneath it and tweak the animation of the rotoscope so it didn't vibrate. Then I very carefully repositioned the sand area adjacent to where the tires were supposed to be and put that in the area. I almost had it perfect. If I'd done two or three more takes it would have been perfect, but George had sent it to Disney and had them rotoscope it. They tried doing a color match but didn't quite get the match; it was a little on the pink side, but that's what wound up in the movie. I'd nudge anybody who I'd see the movie with at that point, so they look away from the screen.
The only thing I question is Edlund's claim that the effect was sent to Disney. I'm pretty sure he got mixed up; work was outsourced to several optical and animation houses including Van der Veer, Ray Mercer, Modern Film Effects and DePatie-Freleng, but definitely not Disney. Harrison Ellenshaw was working at Disney when he did the matte paintings for SW (but even so, he painted the SW mattes in Van Nuys).
Mavimao said:
If one were looking for a high quality source, perhaps Laserdisk? Was the Mexican dub used for all of Latin America?
I'm just a gringo, but from what I've read, I believe that the Mexican dub (actually done in Los Angeles) was indeed used for all of Latin America.
As for high-quality sources: You'd think that the Latin American Spanish dubs would have been released on video...but you'd be wrong. From what I can gather, all of the pre-SE Latin American video releases were in English with Spanish subtitles. Why, I have no idea.
RU.08 said:
They removed a lot more than just the "offensive" vaseline blob.
OK, this is something that has bugged me for years. I'm not buying the "vaseline" story. If there were really vaseline on the lens, the blur would be in the same place on every frame.
Don't quote me on this, but I've always assumed that animation department had to take every frame and create a piece of fake ground where the wheels were, then maybe blur it so it would blend in with the live footage. Unlike the mirror in the Death Valley pickups, it did not show up the same color due to the flaws of optical duping.
Then, after that pass, they had to dupe it *again* to add the shadow under the speeder. The problem is that this was on regular 35mm stock, while all the effects scenes were 8-perf VistaVision with twice the image area. Thus, the grain buildup and generation loss was much less noticeable, and the effects blended in with the live scenes once reduced to 35mm. Not so with this scene.
Therefore, the amount of duping this poor 35mm footage endured resulted in this extreme amount of grain. Combine with the extra grain from the negative to the actual theatrical prints, and this scene did almost look like blown-up 16mm.
According to Mike Verta, this shot always looked like garbage. Even with his tools, it's probably going to look natty even in Legacy. (He also identified other shots that look bad on every print; off the top of my head, they were the long shot of the Sandcrawler rolling over the dune, and the shot of the Rebel ships coming at the camera before they approach the Death Star - the second part of the two-shot reveal that was replaced with that CGI flyby in the SE).
That said, I am amazed that Darth Editous was able to sharpen the scene, but the main version of this transfer should have it looking like crud because it always looked like crud. It will look both better than the old transfers (sharper, higher resolution, no DVNR or artificial sharpening like the GOUT) and worse than the old transfers (extra grain due to being from a print and not an IP), but still crud compared to the adjacent shots.
I have faith, I think -1 and his partner already said they're going to try to preserve as much of the printed-in dirt and damage as possible (as opposed to the dirt and damage that this specific print has accumulated). Again, don't quote me on that; I'm sure -1 can clarify.
Yeah, the squashed credits confused the heck out of me too. They never looked like that before.
Someone's offering a flat 16mm print of ROTJ on eBay.
http://www.ebay.com/itm/16MM-FEATURE-FILM-RETURN-OF-THE-JEDI-THEATRICAL-LPP-ESTAR-PRINT-/190651839704?pt=US_Film&hash=item2c63bc34d8
It's basically useless for preservation, since it's cropped, but it's still interesting because not much thought is given to the original color timing of Jedi. I've always assumed that ROTJ had the most consistent color over the years; do these images look different from how the film looked on video?
The fact that it was easy to correct the Jedi1 image seems to affirm my theory that these cells actually have more accurate color than it seems from the Jedi1 images. As I said before, I think something must have happened with the scans. That yellow-green one I tried to correct a couple posts above was actually a snapshot from eBay; the photos I've seen on eBay often feel more vibrant than the Jedi1 scans.
More ruminations on the 70mm film cells. Here is a frame that looks too yellow-green:
I noticed that the colors of the packaging (cropped out here) seemed off compared to another photo under natural light, so I began adjusting the image - reducing the contrast, trying to fix the white-balance. Here are two attempts:
Seems closer to me - I still think that these cells have more accurate color than we've assumed, but those very greenish images on Jedi1.net just weren't scanned or balanced right.
The lack of sound striping on these cells makes me wonder about the origin of the 70mm element used to make them. ESB and ROTJ are striped; most of the ESB cells seem to come from a low-fade copy, while ROTJ is definitely not low-fade. But as I said before, the SW cells have no soundtrack on them - you can clearly see 2.5 inches of blank on the left and right of the sprocket holes. I don't think the striping deteriorated/flaked off; there's no visible evidence of it ever having been striped at all.
The packaging copy says they are "hand-cut from a master print taken from the original internegative" - I wonder if they had to make a new 70mm print of SW just for these cells, or if they had an un-soundtracked 70mm print with relatively intact color just lying around. The world may never know...
That's one of the weird things about the print used in Moth3r; there's also the "Red Leader, we're right above you" shot that inexplicably is tinted orange. (GRANDE, Catnap and Starkiller/MeBeJedi instead have an orange splice flash at the top of the first frame.)
It's a bootleg brought to our attention a couple years ago by an OT member with the handle "catnap". It was a telecine of a 16mm print incredibly similar to yours (except it was done back in the 80s, so the color is intact).
http://fd.noneinc.com/Theater_Performance/1977-Catnap-1.html
I'll do some screenshot comparisons of this vs. Puggo Grande later.
I was just watching PG again, and noticed something interesting. PG and the 16mm print in the Catnap telecine share a ton of the same dirt, scratches, and other damage. I played them in sync, and a lot of the same stuff popped up on both at the same time. I did this after I noticed the same splices and emulsion scratches in the Tatooine pan-down on PG that are on Catnap (but without audio splices because the audio in PG is not from the same print as the visual).
I have a wild theory - perhaps the print used in PG is the same print used in Catnap, only after an additional 25 or so years of fading? The only other possibility is that they are just from the same print run, and the damage was in the 16mm reduction internegative, but I can't imagine that Fox or whoever would have continued to make prints off an IN that was that damaged. And I thought green emulsion scratches mean it's the print itself that's scratched, rather than the scratches being printed in from the previous generation; wouldn't negative emulsion scratches show up almost black on a positive?
Could that print have made its way from whatever person made the Catnap transfer (presumably in the UK, judging by the speedup and PAL color bars), down the line to Jaxxon, and eventually to Puggo? What are the odds?
EdFarmer said:
Okay, took some extra time to look a bit more closely at the Lucasfilm logos, and it does look like a different font. But it was helpful to take a closer look because it looks to me like the SW Lucasfilm may be using the same font (though capitalized and more rounded) as the ALTA.
I doubt it - as I said, the LFL font looks to be Univers, which (to give one example) has a completely different shape of lowercase "g" than the ALTA font.
Apologies if I'm restating known information, but the ALTA font (which seems to also be the credits font) is a customized version of News Gothic - it's not the same as the current commercially-available version for computers. (In fact, I'm not sure if the official version of News Gothic at the time was same as the modern digital version, either.)
If you look at the hook on the top-right of the "g", the current commercial version is different. Also, Mike Verta says that the "x" is horizontally flipped compared to the official News Gothic. (The current News Gothic has a lowercase "x" with equal sides - apparently, the News Gothic of the time had an asymmetrical "x", like the one in the modern News Gothic Condensed.)
There's still some more work that has to be done to get your version to match the original, but you're doing a great job so far. I'll PM you about it.