TomArrow

If I may chip in my two cents, that seems like a mighty steep price to me for an incomplete fading print of a movie that doesn’t seem to have much going for it aside from being an obscure meme with 370 ratings on imdb that average out at 4.6/10. I might be wrong, but I doubt this would go away for more than 100 bucks on ebay.

Don’t have any HDR hardware myself, but, if you have the raw scan in a form that can be converted back to linear light (for example with only gamma applied), you could probably easily convert this into the Rec2020 PQ HDR color space, simply taking advantage of the naturally high dynamic range of the film. This could be done with AVISynth for example, or with LUTS, I think. Iirc, the brightest spot I’ve seen on the German trailer is that little inserted sunlight in one of the shots of Spiderman swinging.

I know that’s technically not a proper grade (in the sense of having an actual HDR preview and adjusting parameters on-the-fly) but it might be something to try in the meantime until someone can do a proper grade.

If anyone knows where to get the full DVD version of this, a PM would be appreciated. Only could find a DVDRip so far.

Nobody had bitten, it’s now relisted for 230 EUR (240 before). I figure the seller will just go down a little bit each time until someone takes it.

Copy on ebay: https://www.ebay.de/itm/35-mm-Spiderman-6-Filmrollen/323955202604

Would anyone here be interested in donating some money to get this bought and scanned? I can take care of the logistics and getting it scanned, but I can’t afford to finance it myself. Would need whatever the cost to buy the print and some 200 EUR to get it scanned. Could probably cough up the money for the scan myself but it would take longer to get it done.

Scan would be in HD, with the optical audio from the print, with a bit of luck the German Dolby Digital from the print and a synced English track or maybe even the English Cinema DTS if I can get hold of it.

I strongly believe that this copy is flat/Open Matte. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0145487/technical says OAR is 1.85:1, so it can’t be scope and I believe I saw pictures of a print of this movie in the past that were Open Matte. So you would see way more than on the official releases, at least in a lot of shots. Of course VFX shots might have the normal cropping.

Would make both a cropped and an open matte version, so you could pick your flavor.

Anyhow, thought I’d give this a shot, let me know if there’s any interest.

Edit: I of course mean the 2002 movie. Got it confused because of the trailer still lingering in my head.

Thanks for sharing with me!

I personally think it still needs quite a bit of work to be watchable. Which is perfectly okay if this is your first cut and to be expected.

Here’s my thoughts/suggestions:

• Most of the cuts lack audio transitions. This is the bare minimum you should always do to make it seem more smooth.
• Not all of the cuts properly take the flow of the movie into consideration or aren’t quite timed ideally, resulting for example in a sweeping camera that almost reaches its target and then is cut off, or abrupt music changes that change the mood unorganically and such.
• The WMV Codec isn’t the ideal choice for good quality, I’d go with an x264 encode. The image looks pretty soft at the moment and has lots of compression artifacts and is overall not very enjoyable to look at.
• Possibly related to the codec choice, the black levels and overall contrast and colors don’t seem quite right.

Sounds like a good concept! I def. wanna see this.

yotsuya said:

And a lot of us don’t agree and still can’t understand where you are coming from.

But this is supposed to be about TROS, not rehashing TLJ. I’d be curious to see how opinions change in the next 10 years (or just after TROS is out). For a long time TESB was considered the weakest movie of that trilogy and now it is considered the best. I’m hoping that TROS has a solid ending that die hard and casual fans love. If it goes how the supposed leaks are leaning I think it has a good chance.

Fair. If you enjoy the sequels, I don’t mean to try and convince you otherwise. I just didn’t think anyone would, that’s all. 😃 And now I should really stop derailing this thread.

SilverWook said:

Clearly some of us do, or this site has little reason to exist anymore.

I should have phrased myself better, my mistake. I meant whether anyone still cares for the sequel trilogy. There’s of course no reason to stop caring for the OT.

OutboundFlight said:

I must ask, why do some claim “The Last Jedi is one the worst films ever”? I’m not attacking this opinion by any measure… but I don’t understand it at all. As someone more negative than positive towards TLJ, I must admit it creates a fun, cohesive narrative with masterful visuals. Are you that angry about Luke? Because you might argue the same has happened to Obi-Wan and Yoda, two legends who were reduced to a life of shit. I think some moments are flat-out “bad” (Luke trying to kill Ben, etc) but are those moments really worse than Jar Jar stepping in poop?

I just don’t think it’s a good movie in any way. It ignores everything that TFA set up, deliberately subverts reasonable expectations without being original while doing so, introduces very unlikable characters (imo) out of nowhere who make terrible decisions but are presented as heroes, has no world building or explanation of TFA’s world building, the main villains are turned into a giant goofy joke, highly illogical and boring main plotline, illogical character behavior, an entire illogical side plot that ultimately adds nothing to the story, no character arcs worth caring for … I could go on and on, but I’m sure it’s all been said before. Add to that the arrogant and condescending way in which the media and the filmmaker reacted to criticisms.

Personally, as someone who likes Star Wars, but isn’t really a fan, I could probably forgive a couple of things, like Luke, but it’s just a terrible movie in every other way too imo, even as a standalone. Except, as you said, the visuals. Disney of course has masters of the visual craft at its disposal, and John Williams’ score is naturally also always on point. It’s sure somewhat enjoyable to watch a single time, but that’s it for me.

Not saying it ruined Star Wars for me or anything dramatic like that, just that I find it hard to care about this sequel storyline after it.

About Jar Jar … well, I was a kid when I was watching the movies, so maybe I’m more forgiving out of nostalgia, but even so, that was just one part of mostly decent movies imo.

Does anyone still actually care for Star Wars after Last Jedi?

Edit: I meant care for the sequel trilogy. My bad.

I also saw this, I think it was the entire movie, wasn’t it?

Either way, yeah, it could be bought and scanned for a nice Open Matte preservation. Was also playing with the idea, think I might have even pitched it to a few people, but there wasn’t much interest. Actually, none.

There are places on the internet with a lot of different vinyl rips of Beatles albums, I would wager that the proper ones are among them. I could be wrong though. Would love to give this a listen in any case. Personally I’d release in 96kHz/24bit. Even if you can’t hear the difference, at least it allows some more editing for those who want to do it. It’s supposed to be a kind of archive after all.

This is just an idea, I’m not working on this, as I have enough other stuff to do, but thought I’d just throw it out there, if only to remember it.

The idea is to structure all Marvel MCU movies into one single movie with individual chapters, but everything extremely abbreviated. It would have a narrator and would be narrated in the form of a father reading a story to his children before sleep, with each chapter in the book being maybe 10-20 minutes, and all leading together into the finale.

Character’s voices would either be kept, or replaced by the narrator’s voice, or a combination of both.

Each movie would effectively turn into a short story, basically. Each little story would serve to introduce a hero to the eager listeners.

This would require a few things:

• Well-written narration, ideally by a talented writer
• Well-recorded, fitting and well-executed voice
• Maybe a few scenes recorded of a father/grandfather reading to his children to showcase this, however it could also be just done with title cards, I think it would be good enough and maybe even have more charme than making it too concrete

The entire thing would be a few hours max, meant to be consumer over the course of a few days without too much time investment - each night before sleep. 😉

I’m not really a big MCU fan at all, and I dread rewatching any of the movies, mainly because (in my opinion) there is a big lot of filler and generally not much depth in it, but I think such an abbreviated condensed retelling might be charming and could also be made a little more consistent in terms of plotholes and such. Some story arcs could even be changed, since the voice is actually telling what’s happening, so one doesn’t necessarily need actual footage of an actor saying or explaining or doing something, the narrator can do it.

Anyway, just an idea. If anyone should want to steal the idea, feel free.

Sounds great in theory. Any progress on this?

I have to admit I’m not a fan of the picture with the lady in red, the contrast seems too extreme to me, although high contrast in general ofc isn’t a problem, but here a lot of highlights are blown out, and, to be honest, the red + black and white look is kind of an overused cliche at this point.

Just my 2 cents.

emanswfan said:

TomArrow said:

I’ve been recommended by a smart dude something that may be even better: ESRGAN/BasicSR. It’s an AI-upscaling algorithm just like Gigapixel, but you can train it with your own datasets, so if you have a representative dataset of what you’re trying to upscale (you need high res and low res reference for training), you can get really incredible results.

I’m currently playing around with it, and while training is very slow (we’re talking many days), it’s impressive what it can do imo.

I’ve tried some pre-trained ESRGAN upscalers, and I’d say it is a more natural looking upscale than ai gigapixel, but I’d still say ai gigapixel wins in the detail, even if it looks a bit too sharp. And I’d still say in terms of noise reduction ai gigapixel and waifu2x are better at removing compression artifacts. Of course waifu2x doesn’t try and add or recover detail, but simply a high resolution upscale that retains all the original detail.

All three are really good tbh, and all have their purposes. I’d say a mix of them is ideal.

See, that’s where your own training data comes into play. Gigapixel is trained on a generic dataset you know nothing about. Of course they have probably put lots of effort into a good curated dataset for a good product, more work arguably than people working for free have done for ESRGAN. Gigapixel may be good at noise reduction, but it’s not perfect, because it may not apply perfectly to whatever dataset you yourself have. To give an example, I’m currently training ESRGAN to upscale old roq game videos (Quake 3 engine). For that I took a video I have in high quality (Prores) and made roq encodes at similar bitrates to the game videos. Then I put that into the training. I’m not far into the training yet (only 2 days or so), but it seems promising. I tried a screenshot from one of those videos in Gigapixel and while it was sharp, it misinterpreted a lot of the artifacts as detail, and I think that with enough training, ESRGAN will be much smarter about upscaling this particular kind of source.

I’ve been recommended by a smart dude something that may be even better: ESRGAN/BasicSR. It’s an AI-upscaling algorithm just like Gigapixel, but you can train it with your own datasets, so if you have a representative dataset of what you’re trying to upscale (you need high res and low res reference for training), you can get really incredible results.

I’m currently playing around with it, and while training is very slow (we’re talking many days), it’s impressive what it can do imo.

Amazing, thank you! When you release the raw file, can you release it in Open Matte as well? I worked a bit on a scan of the German trailer and noticed there’s lots of additional image information on the top and bottom on many frames. Would be worth preserving imo. 😃

[removed it bc I’m stupid]

Great news! I’m gonna assume your print is Open Matte? Could get some extra picture.

Chewtobacca said:

TomArrow said:
x264 is a DCT-based codec, so everything always gets converted into the frequency domain on a per-block basis, which of course can introduce rounding errors in theory, especially at 8 bit. It’s possible they have ways to avoid this, but it’s something to keep in mind.

Yes. This is why I’m not convinced that x264 is truly lossless.

Yeah, me neither. But it’s certainly good enough for almost any scenario imaginable, except maybe some scientific uses where it really needs to be bit-perfect.

Just a few notes about the (hypothetical) sharing of lossless masters, if it’s of interest to anybody:

• crf 0 is the wrong way to do lossless x264 afaik, the correct way is -qp 0 (as crf is conceived to achieve variable bitrate with varying qp (quantization parameter) across blocks/frames. QP explicitly sets it to 0 globally.

• x264 only encodes YUV values. A conversion from RGB will automatically lead to rounding loss and thus not be 100% lossless anymore (but still good enough practically). ProRes also works in YUV.

• x264 by default encodes in 4:2:0. Compare to RGB, which naturally is 4:4:4. So you automatically lose half the color information. The solution is to encode in the 4:4:4 mode of x264, which has to be explicitly stated.

• Normal x264 only has 8 bits, whereas ProRes has 10 bits (or even more with a proper Apple ProRes encoder). For sharing a master for proper color correction work, a higher bit depth would be highly beneficial. This can be achieved with the 10-bit version of x264.

• Lagarith as well as normal lossless AVIs only support 8 bits as well, therefore are not useful for sharing lossless masters, especially not if further color work is to be done.

• Lagarith has 3 modes afaik: RGB, RGBA and YV12. YV12 is a 4:2:0 mode and tends to produce significantly smaller files than RGB. RGBA includes alpha channel, should be irrelevant for most cases. RGB is default. The mode can be changed in the codec settings (for example in VirtualDub when selecting Lagarith).

• x264 is a DCT-based codec, so everything always gets converted into the frequency domain on a per-block basis, which of course can introduce rounding errors in theory, especially at 8 bit. It’s possible they have ways to avoid this, but it’s something to keep in mind. Same applies to ProRes by the way, also DCT-based; but ProRes is not meant to be lossless to begin with, so that’s okay.

• ProRes, unless you use the 4:4:4 mode, also is 4:2:2 and thus not ideal for anything that will require further color work imo.

• Currently the only way (known to me) to have a truly lossless master with high bit depth is an RGB 16-bit TIFF/PNG/(some other formats) sequence or some exotic AVI codecs that support higher bit depths, but aren’t widely supported or maintained.

Of course it’s still possible that x264 it’s not 100% lossless, because it was never really made for it and who knows what it does to the signal behind the scenes, but some people have evidently achieved losslessness in x264, see here: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6701805/h264-lossless-coding

Either way, it’s certainly good enough, if you use the 10-bit version, in addition to qp 0 and 4:4:4 color setting. But at that point the bitrates will quite likely even exceed those of ProRes (as I believe ProRes in High profile has the equivalent of qp=4 if I’m not mistaken, at least that’s what ffmpeg shows), and come at the cost of being several times more inefficient than ProRes when it comes to editing. Most editing software doesn’t even support importing x264 10 bit, so you would have to convert it back to ProRes or the likes anyway in order to edit it.

With that said, I think that if you drop the strict “lossless” requirement, we could share very high quality masters (comparable to ProRes) suitable for color grading & VFX if we just set the qp to values above 0. Again, with 10 bit x264 in 4:4:4 mode. As a starting value, I would probably try qp 4, but maybe it’s possible to go even higher. To test the quality of the result, you’ll need to do 16 bit screenshots (as PNG/TIFF don’t support 10bit), for example using AviSynth+ & VirtualDub, and then I typically load that stuff into Photoshop and play with the Levels to blow up dark areas to see if any artifacts become noticeable.

I think this way there could be a notable size improvement over ProRes, which would help with transferring. The recipient could convert back to ProRes then for his own work.

Probably wanted it to look like the shadow was showing some color from the little lights above lol.

I can confirm the iTunes copy doesn’t have shifting aspect ratio (I have a copy). Can’t be shifting, because it’s cropped to the OAR.

What is so interesting about this version? Is it the new master, like the iTunes version?