WXM

Ryrhino, here on this site in this forum you will find only actual movies/videos edited, never someone offering just a screenplay re-edit (that I can recall anyway). The semi seed for this site’s ‘Star Wars Fan Edits’ and ‘Other Properties Fan Edits’ forums was The Phantom Edit decades ago, an anonymous editor’s release of a fixed version of The Phantom Menace. That fully watchable Star Wars movie edit was the first wide-spread case of fan editing released to the public, became rather famous, and this website/forum was on the heals of that, with other people doing their own Star Wars movie edits…leading to other fan edits of other properties/franchises such as Alien as you see here with Broom Kid’s Romulus edit. (That’s a simplification, details might not be 100% correct.)

Probably more info than you needed, but it felt like it wouldn’t hurt to say it out so, so there you go. 😃

Ryrhino said:

How can I watch your edit?

Broom Kid might see your post above and contact you, but if he hasn’t soon and/or you don’t want to wait for such then click his user name above and start a private topic to him making your request. I PM’d him a while back and he’s a great guy as far as I see and seems eager for people to enjoy his great fan edit work so you should go for PM’ing him 😃

MiDKnighT said:

It looks like this edit doesn’t trim anything right? It’s the entire series just in order?

The main/top post by the author says this edit has “taken out” material, especially in the second paragraph (just one quote of several along those lines: “Roughly 25% of the series has been taken out”).

Even though I’m not a known fan editor, I’ll dive in to give my thoughts, which I’ll keep broad enough so that it should be of (introspective) use.

First, your wanting to do THIS project is biting off a lot. Before anything, you may or may not know that many people hate the straight disc releases of LotR (and I haven’t read the books, but I doubt they said everything was tinged in green everywhere all the time). So, right off the bat you’ll probably want to edit (color) someone’s restoration (ala Dr. Dre’s or one of the similar…) This is a bit perilous in and of itself in my opinion. What if you are almost finished with your edit and Dr. Dre releases a new version of his color revision release that you and everyone loves more than the one you used? You might be able to just swap the master file for your edit work, but maybe not, and if the latter then the image of all your work might suddenly nag at you in a way forever after after you put all that work into your edit(s). 😦

I’ve been helping a new fan editor who took on a big project, and it’s actually been going well as the guy is quite talented, everything he went to address, I agree with, etc. Still, he’s spent and ungodly number of hours on his project and he still isn’t done yet. I think it will be worth it when he gets to that finish line, but I’m bringing this up to roundaboutly ask: If the edit you dive into a) doesn’t turn out well enough because you’re too new to this b) it does turn out well but you ended up spending piles and piles of time over months/years to finish it, would you be okay enough with either of those being end results of your work?

Lastly, I know that people have done some “closer to the books” edits of LotR. Sadly, it’s pretty hard to get a lot of older edits, or even newer ones, so I can see from that viewpoint it might just be better for you to try to do yours yourself and learn about editing and more in the process instead of getting on the begging wagon…but just in case you think 100% the ONLY way you can see a LotR trilogy is do to the edits yourself, I’m pretty sure that’s not true (but maybe those edits, you believe you could do better, and maybe you could!😃).

If after reading all the above you’re still wanting to dive into it then your big step will need to be to pick editing software that fits your needs/style/budget/equipment. Da Vinci Resolve is rather the rage right now. I haven’t used it, but it has a very good free version, and it’s very powerful, but if you have only an old Win 7 machine then you won’t be able to use it. There are many other editing programs out there, but…

I’m going to stop now as I think that’s enough to have you ponder more deeply what you want/hope to… It could be that others will chime in to disagree with one or more things I’ve said above, and that’s fine, I’m eager to hear such myself (as I’m not some super master at all this who knows everything).

This is related to your post above rather than being about your edit work specifically. Just wanted to say I sent that deeper-look post to some film buddies of mine it was so funly insightful (“Romulus does this to Ian Holm in real life.”)…one of the better things I’ve read with movie analysis lately!

That’s all for this. Have a fun Halloween!

My camp watched it and a big thumbs up! Even if you didn’t/don’t care for the 2018 Halloween trilogy, you could well have a very good time with davey’s edit here he did that good a job 😃

Trystero said:

If there are any particular parts of the movie you’d like to see comparisons of, let me know.

It’s more that I’m just really fed up with these modern recolorings in general than knowing this movie('s coloring) enough to want/request comparisons. Like, I have The Driver on BD and it’s just piled with teal. Ugh, I hate that kind of thing. So, in my case I’m supposed to spend a pile of time re-grading my BD just to make it not look strange? You know what I mean, obviously (via this thread).

You’re new here it seems, so do you maybe want to tell people generally what you use? DaVinci R, or Avisynth, or ???, ???, ??? (If you want to keep that kind of thing your secret, totally fine of course 😃)

Wow just wow to that recent “thing.” Doesn’t need saying thanks to your compare images but, yeah, a million times better with your even-just-WIP results so far. Thumbs up, sir! Don’t lose this work in a HD crash or something after getting this far!

Venny said:

I don’t think these forums are fit for my projects anymore with leaks, people begging me for scans when they aren’t finished, etc. I respect the community that has helped me in the past and now, but with this forum being open to everyone it makes it hard to get support without bad actors taking advantage of that kindness.

Thanks for the reply to that, the info, the feeling…

May the BLT print be all you want and more when it arrives 😃

[venny said:]
this will likely be the last project I put out on Original Trilogy but I thank all the people who have helped me with my projects on these forums and supported these scans.

If it’s not prying too much, can you tell us why you’re putting this behind you (is it here only, or other places also)? I can’t help but wonder if it’s akin to TVArchive and a few others leaving out of some form of being fed up with being nagged too much or similar, or maybe it’s more like you’ve personally simply done all the projects you wish to do—are sated—and that’s that?

stwd4nder2 said:

I donated years ago and still don’t have them

Aw, I’m a little bummed to hear you say that. You are such a giving part of these communities and to hear you gave money to something and… :sadface:
Hopefully the OP will re-surface for you and other donators. The plus side is that the starting post of this thread isn’t thaaat old, and this whole project is easily something that can still just be being worked on in the shadows at the moment, so :?

Nokes said:

… i need to see the best possible version…

The two versions on this site, they’re likely both as done as they’ll be. I believe the 35mm one hit some rights issues so its version on YT is probably as final as that one would be because getting slammed with a C&D likely took a lot of wind out of that restorer’s sails. However, you can contact that restorer to learn…

This version here in this thread, I’m biased (I’m the one who manually cleaned up over 2000 frames of print damage from this version), but I think it looks and sounds great. If you want to see this version, PM Octorox. You can find his posts in the previous pages. The detailed info on Venny’s 35mm version is of course in the thread that GregZ just provided a link for.

These are two different-looking “end results” that I think cover most bases of what someone would prefer to see at this point in time where there is still no HD disc release.

(SpacemanDoug beat me to posting as I was putting this together, but for kicks anyway…)

What I read was additional footage was shot by Spielberg very soon after the TV airing to “upgrade” the movie to a theatrical experience. Obviously, this new footage was not intended to be 4:3, it was shot only intended for theatrical viewing for a wider screen experience. (I’ll let other people state what that exact TR ar was.) So, yeah, it could be said that if nothing else, that new footage was intended to be non-4:3.

Another piece of the puzzle is that it would appear the master film elements for the TV version were lost in a big fire at Universal, so the additional-footage theatrical version is the only version that’s in great shape for modern viewing.

All of this together points to the answer being: the original TV — 4:3 — version is NOT the definitive version, the TR is. And for anyone who wants to adhere to the orig TV version instead, they have to unfortunately settle for resolution in the SD realm. This is why the new 4k disc has a very nice image of the TR, but the orig TV version in that same set looks horrendous (part being the atrocious attempt at AI upscaling).

At least that’s what I’ve gleaned from reading around, but I’m no authority. Maybe someone else will correct what I have above. (Edit: SpacemanDoug has some more detailed info, beat me to posting this)

I saw Star Wars about 25 times in the same theater first run, and the two previews for all of those viewings are burned into my memory: The World’s Greatest Lover and Damnation Alley, 100% those showed before SW in its initial run in at least one theater in '77-'78.

frendon said:

…the only thing I noticed was that in some portions there are 4 corners of the frame that show some type of blur, hardly noticeable but I thought I’d mention it.

The 4:3 version isn’t full width and the 16:9 isn’t full height, so that means the corners lack a little information because neither version can supply everything (because if one of those had all the information then there’d be no need for hybriding like this 😃). The blurred material in the corners in this hybrid version is filling that’s intended to make the corners’ missing information not as obvious as solid black (boxes) would be, is a “best that can be done here” trick as it were to make the viewing a little smoother.

Due to how well it’s turning out, I can’t help but show this bit I’m working on for stwd4nder2/his project. I’m HD-re-doing the SD/VHS credits…

MonkeyLizard10 said:

Using After Effects takes ages to load in the DNGs and to render out to a video file compared to … it seems like maybe PP just assumes TIFFs are sRGB and doesn’t look at TIFF metadata … Anyway, I’ll see.

I have the best solution advice for all this that you’ve ever heard. You are dealing with all kinds of big digital picture things it seems. Well, I recommend you:

1. turn all the picture things into 240p resolution
2. save them all as jpg with quality slider moved down to “3”

and finally, erase every other frame and set the frame rate to 12 frames per second.

All these steps will make the file thingies much easier to wrangle, will save you 8% hard drive space, etc., yay! 😃

Big j/k of course. Your work/efforts here are over my head in a number of ways (I’ve never had/come across a DNG file in my life). Thanks for sharing your trials and tribulations, 'tis interesting and informative! May these bumps all smooth out…without you having to do the steps I suggested above 😃

I’m sure I speak for everyone when I say…

Thank you very much for everything, Jay! Don’t stress or beat yourself up at all. We appreciate everything, all good, thanks a million for all your efforts and for this site! 😃 😃 😃

DJPitaB said:

Unless I can get a better source than the DVDs, can anyone direct me to the best tool to use for the deinterlace/detelecine process so that I can avoid the jaggies? I’m using a Mac, and the best results I’ve gotten so far have come from Handbrake, but no matter how I adjust the deinterlace/detelecine settings, I always seem to get artifacts in the same parts of the episode.

This isn’t a direct answer to your request, but the above reminded of this thread (link). Doing something similar for the first seasons of The Simpsons, Chewielewis found there was a mishmash in the episodes as aired that made it such that one couldn’t do a blanket pass to end up with full/nice de-interlacing. If you’ve already seen/well know of this thread then my apologies, but especially since Simpsons and Futurama might have taken some similar routes in productions of their first seasons (but maybe that’s an incorrect assumption!)…

https://originaltrilogy.com/topic/The-Simpsons-Embiggened-Edition-on-hiatus/id/55848/page/1

undefined said:

So, does anyone know if a full scan of either the original camera negative, or the 35mm prints exists?

Regarding the OCN, from what I’ve gathered that has never been released in any form because the movie has so many digital effects that its master is in the form of a 2k or 2.5k digital file, which is what the 4k UHD was made from. If you don’t know, when the 4k was coming out someone announced all the original elements were newly scanned (and effects recomposited, etc.) but this turned out to be false…which makes sense: to redo all those the digital mods to the image would probably be very cost prohibitive.

At least that’s the picture I’ve gathered from reading around the 'net regarding the OCN.

Maleficent said:

That sounds interesting! But if these are prints that were used in cinemas, isn’t there a risk that the quality of these prints has deteriorated due to frequent use and/or their age and/or poor storage?

Yes, and this is why some of these fan scan projects take a long time to be released. Prints are beat up, faded, missing frames where some magic needs to be done to replace them, and other.

To try to be short-ish answering about OCN…
The select takes are all carefully spliced together (by a negative cutter) after the editor (somewhat to very likely with input from the director) finish all the editing decisions (which could take months [to edit a feature film]). The OCN and a 35mm release print will be identical in regards to the number of frames and those frames’ contents because “the OCN” of the movie is the raw camera footage turned into one long print that is now the movie. (I reiterate, this is all very general and not always the case. And I’ve never worked in a big film industry on these sides to see any of this in person, so…)

All the excess you’re talking about is “cutting room floor” stuff. Okay, that stuff is all also OCN, but that’s not usually what people are referring to when taking about THE OCN of a film. They’re talking about the final edit of all the carefully-picked takes that have been carefully edited down to the frame then assembled by a negative cutter. The excess ala alternate takes, bloopers, etc… I don’t want to pretend I really have good knowledge of what happened/happens to all that, but the general paths seems to be: a) thrown in the garbage b) stored on purpose/just in case c) weren’t intended to be around but somehow survived.

I obviously like talking about this stuff, 'tis fun for me 😃 but this thread is about Disney films so, Maleficent, I guess I recommend searching around for these kinds of answers on the 'net, in other threads, etc., so this thread can get back on track, eh? (If you really want to hear more of my blab specifically you can PM me, but again I’m not some super at-the-source fountain of this kind of knowledge.)

[EDIT: Moiisty beat me with his nice and concise answer, but for those interest in a more blabby reply here it is 😃]

Maleficent said:

I am interested in the topic, but unfortunately I know too little about it. What exactly does “35mm scan” mean? I assume that it means that an original camera negative is scanned and not just any copy of a copy of this negative?

Incorrect (99.9% of the time). The following is simplified a bit; research if you want more solid/detailed info…

When ya see fans doing a 35mm scan, they are scanning one of the many prints that were out in the world showing at theaters back when that was the way the industry operated (pre-digital). There’s pretty much no way in h$## a fan is going to get the one-of-a-kind OCN for a film.

However a STUDIO making/releasing a BD quite likely WILL use OCN. DVD was a different ballgame. A good number of DVD’s did not go back to the OCN. They used prints a lot, which is why some people on this site and FanRestore.com cherish their special DVDs of certain films: they have the correct THEATRICAL color/contrast look of the film as seen in theaters. (Again, these are all broad strokes of example and explanation.)

There are some disadvantages to some fans when it comes to watching OCN scans (used for BD/UHD releases). “How could that be possible? That’s THE best image source, right?” The answer is that color (correction) work was done for releases after the OCN was put together. So… Well, my fave example is The Road Warrior/Mad Max 2. In theaters the (color-timed/changed) release prints had the post-apocalyptic setting looking dingy, dusty, brown-ish. However, the OCN — what the cameras captured — did NOT have brownish sky. The cameras captured nice blue sky (and sometimes nicely green plants), looked much more like a nice postcard than the release in theaters…because the filmmakers knew they didn’t have to spend all the time to shower every location with brown dust while filming. In post they could just brown-it-out a bit and wallah (and it DID work, the recoloring looks much more post-apocalyptic in the theater release prints than the scan of the OCN you can get on BD).

SO, a fan who scans a mere print of TRW/MM2 that showed in theaters will have a movie that reflects the post-apocalyptic haze that the filmmaker wanted, a re-coloring that helps the setting, helps the vision…whereas if you get a BD with the straight OCN scan, you’re getting something a little too pretty looking, which would also be the case if a fan somehow got the one-of-a-kind camera negative to scan. By getting/using a 35mm release print instead, they rather automatically get the color work that we all saw in theaters and don’t have to start from scratch re-doing the color of every shot in the film (to match an old LD or DVD they’d use as a reference).

Maleficent said:

However, I would be cautious not to get too excited, as it is possible that other scenes have been distorted by the use of colour filters or similar. Perhaps someone already has this UHD and can report on it? By the way, I’m not a fan of this film either, but if this release is really perfect and shows the film as it was made, then maybe there’s hope that the other Disney films will also get proper releases.

Tone can’t be carried over into words on a screen well and with what’s ahead I’m urged to say that I’m casual with this, not aiming to jab/poke with a pointy stick…

This seems to be a case where if this area (good releases of classic Disney animation) is your bag then this release should be a “vote with your wallet pick,” seems quite unlikely that celluloid this old is going to be a “perfect” (or near) release on home format at this point in time. As seen above, many of the hardcore people here say this release is very good and worth rewarding the efforts of, which is something I never thought I’d see from a D release of their older films. Even if some comparisons reveal scenes where something doesn’t quite match original cel colors (which is a whole other rabbit hole ala “you should not expect things to match”) I’d still say show Disney that THIS restoration crew is the one they should hire again, reward, and of course ya do this via a certain purchase. 😃

Yeah, it will be sweet when some fully automated thing can do the 100% likes of what I/we accomplish with our most careful cleaning/patching. But until then, Phoenix is one thing you 35mm scan guys are using, right-o to that.

Thanks for the replies, DoomBot. 😃

DoomBot said:

Using this software https://digitalvision.world/products/phoenix/

Not doing every single frame in the film, just making it less distracting…

Ah, thanks for that info. What are your thoughts on this. Alleycat had this in a thread of his over at FanRestore

“…was then taken into Topaz for some further cleaning”

Do you have any thoughts or experience using the AI stuff (ala Topaz) for de-specking/de-scratching? Is it good for only certain situations maybe? Or do you really think Phoenix would be/is better?

TGR97 said:

We finished JP3 and are in the midst of cleaning it.

Curious the method(software) currently used for such cleaning. What do you use? (And I assume this cleaning is getting rid of specks and scratches?)