WXM

MXDash said:

WXM said:

… I’ll ask if anyone’s seen it? Thoughts?

Yes I have. I’m glad that it exists, and it probably is the best way to watch this film, but…

(Further) S P O I L E RS
I actually went out to watch it in a theater on Monday evening (Fathom event). I agree with pretty much all you said about the visuals. (The audio items you listed admittedly went unnoticed to me.) Bones in the lounge, yeah, what happened?

Also, the CG shuttle landing (in SF) jumped out at me as… unfortunate I’ll just say so as not to sound too mean as I’m sure everyone who worked on this whole version poured out blood, sweat and tears these last few years. Still…

I’m also not a fan of the sparkly credits. I saw a side-by-side reminder of the DVD DE version (which I saw only once a long time ago) and I would’ve (much) preferred them just taking that same route over the sparkly-ness.

I assume they didn’t have the budget for it, but some of the matte line issues (in the few shots they didn’t redo the compositing for)… I don’t know all the tools out there, but it seemed like those matte lines could’ve been taken care of or at least diminished much more than they were.

However, in the showing I went to there were only two other people, so I can imagine Paramount will feel they were correct to not spend more money on further clean up (I understand most people are seeing it streaming, but only two others for the event? 😦).

Still, the movie has stuck with me the last few days. Not saying I was blown away, but some things work for it for sure despite some larger issues in regards to the movie itself and a few small ones to be found in this 4k DE. At least that’s my little two cents.

The 4kDE has been showing for a few days now and no comments from anyone so I guess I’ll go ahead and ask if anyone’s seen it? Thoughts?

Bridger12 said:

Am I allowed to share a link here for contacting writer/director…

Maybe not so much a problem of not allowed according to forum rules but is probably not a good idea as this is a totally open public forum. Ya don’t even have to be a member here to look at posts. I would think someone who worked so prominently on a theatrical release film of this stature wouldn’t want his contact info so open, but perhaps he’s more a unique case and wouldn’t mind?

That b&w 16mm print of the original The Cage also was shown at a smallish sci-fi convention in San Francisco in 1985, “Creation Con”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creation_Entertainment

I was there; Majel Barret was there in person and introduced it herself. This was obviously well before ST:TNG so a slight irony thinking back to it is that this screening was really low-key compared to what you’d imagine. The room for this wasn’t huge, no stage or podium or anything (maybe even no mic? I can’t remember).

It was just her standing at the front of the room speaking to those who had showed up (not that many people there), telling what was about to be run in the 16mm projector, almost more like just a teacher showing a 16mm film before a class than a room filled with awe and reverence and electricity and applause; was kind of just one event of many in a room of the venue (as opposed to being rather being a centerpiece the convention was highlighting in the big room as would’ve been the case 5-7 years later).

This is NOT me saying it wasn’t cool, that no one there cared, but the relative low-key-ness just really sticks out at me now, prompting me to share that aspect.

She brought that print with her obviously, and from how she introduced it she considered it a rather special, cherished thing from their private collection that she wanted to share.

(Small disclaimer: this was obviously almost four decades ago, so there’s a chance some details are a little off, like maybe it was late '84 instead of '85, etc., so don’t take the above as solid as video/audio evidence of how it went.)

Ahmesi said:

Don’t think I am sorry, I am essentially describing a "Fan Edit " I am producing and posted it under the “Fan Edits” section here? lol

This site has a “Star Wars fan edits” area and a “for Other Properties” (other than SW/not SW) and you’ve posted in the latter with your SW project, that’s what Joshieboy’s referring to. Here

https://originaltrilogy.com/discussion/Star-Wars-Fan-Edits-and-Other-Projects/id/9

Venny said:

Yeah, sorry to hear your work might be going to waste now. Some things you might want to know is the scene where the PAL and NTSC DVDs have “ghosting” when the Lamp is dancing around is actually on this print as well and probably an error with an optical effect

Well, I’m going to stand a little behind Octorox (because of course I am!😃). Other than the opening (that I cleaned up) I think it’s a pretty darned good presentation and not necessarily so easily ready to be tossed in a rubbish bin in the future. Watching the rest of his release, all the dirt/specks combined could fit within one second of that opening section it was that clean. I know that dirtiness isn’t a be all and end all for this kind of thing, far from it, but…well, I just think/hope there’ll still be room for Oct’s version to exist when this one is done, just because. 😃 But maybe I’ll be proven wrong!

I’ll stop clogging your thread with this big biased-ness though.

Interesting about that ghosty bit. Man, I love the look of that aqua tile in the background in your frame there. Lots of nice artistry went into this movie!

Oh man, really? …only a few weeks after I nearly give myself carpal t from cleaning those 2309 frames in photoshop?! The universe is wacky and near cruel with this stuff sometimes! 😃

But seriously, that’s cool news. I’m too poor to donate though. And also, the time I put in on Octorox’s has me feeling I’ve paid the Brave Little Toaster fan release gods their due. 😃

Good luck with this! Hopefully donations come your way

Darth telly said:

You seem very knowledgeable about this so just one more question

Note that I don’t have any direct experience working in TV. I’ve been in TV stations and on TV, and once needed to provide my short film on one of those big formats for a movie festival (cost a relative fortune), but my info here is in the general realm, I do not have good hands-on knowledge of all this by a long shot. If others with more hands-on info had replied I would’ve kept my mouth shut for sure. 😃

I still do not quite understand what a broadcast master is, Is it a copy of the tape distributed to TV stations?

Again, I’m not an expert, but I’m guessing you really want to know here (unless I’m mistaken): The tape behind the EditDroid SW Holiday Special, was it a/the top master tape that was used to make copies for TV stations or was it one of the copies that was sent to TV stations? My guess is the latter as there were surely a LOT of those sent out in 1978 and with these kinds of things getting some highest tier master just doesn’t happen it seems.

However, I’m just guessing. I don’t know the ins and outs of how TV broadcast tapes were reproduced or the specifics of this tape we’re talking about. It just seems most likely the tape source for EditDroid was one that a TV station had as there were surely a good number of those put out into the world then for the airing. Hell, since VCRs were so rare back then, maybe there were actually more TV broadcast tapes of SWHS in existence at the end of 1978 than there were home recordings of it! 😮 It seems we’ll never be closing to knowing though, huh? It would be interesting if there was a record of info on this ala “There were a total of ____ tapes of SWHS sent out to TV stations during {timeframe} 1978,” but something like that is just lost to time I assume.

Darth telly said:

what is a Broadcast master?

In general/simple terms… TV stations used (much) higher end media (tapes) compared to home recording (VHS, Betamax). You’ve surely seen those bits of “reveal footage” from news programs and game shows and such where you get a glimpse of those HUGE studio cameras (which has always been the case). Those million-dollar monster cameras wouldn’t be recording to just flimsy little VHS tapes and their weak signals, right? (And that’s putting aside that TV stations were of course recording way before VHS or Betamax existed.) Yes, the resolution was still the same — NTSC in the U.S. — but there was much more detail packed into the signal over VHS and other home formats.

(Taking about after things switched from reel to reel…) These TV broadcast cassettes generally looked similar to home VCR tapes, but were larger, the tape wider, more inches of tape moved for recording, which gave them much higher fidelity (within the locked resolution) than their smaller home cousins. I.e., it was a much higher end realm of (video tape) media.

hermionegranger said:

Did you edit each frame for the entire movie, i’m imagining something like photoshop’s content aware fix tool?

I did only the first 1m45s or thereabouts, and my method was relatively primitive so definitely not the entire movie. (I don’t even know what that tool you mentioned is! 😃) Much of it was copying bits from the right or left of the problem spot to do patching, or when I was lucky (no gradients, grain, detail, etc. to worry about) I could just do airbrushing. But there were a number of spots with zooms where I had to re-size patches. Ugh to those cases and how long they take! (But they do look good when done.) I wish I had super software to make it easier, but I don’t. (My photoshop is old…but it gets the job done)

Largely what I did was stuff that most regular paint programs do: just load in a frame (image file), deal with the bad spot, save it…over and over and over…then eventually connect all the frames back together in an avi.

Beyond that damaged section (the in opening), Octorox’s up-scaled version looks GREAT! I’d almost say that any ten seconds of the part I worked on has as many blemishes as the whole rest of the movie combined, it looks that good/clean.

SnooPac said:

I can’t tell if you guys are serious.

I was being serious about suspecting CatBus actually doesn’t know what Star Wars is. If you showed him an image of an X-Wing he’d probably say “that’s just a Viper with four things instead of three.”

CatBus said:

Fact: Bears eat beets. Bears, beets, Battlestar Galactica.

But haven’t you been here long enough to know that this section of this site is about Star Wars, not Battlestar Galactica? I mean, it’s even in the title of this very thread.

AND this thread is about the (Star Wars) Holiday Special. I don’t even think Battlestar Galactica had a holiday special. But maybe they did and you meant to post in a thread at ColonialFleets.com about some Battlestar Galactica Holiday Special that exists but somehow clicked here instead? Did you have two tabs open and lose track of which one you were posting in?

CatBus, can you explain this path to your confusion? (Maybe you don’t even really know what Star Wars is, never really watched it except in the background on CED disc one day in the early '80s, just taking guesses here)

My only tiniest nitpick (with the imgsli compare) might be that the saturation is a little too high and brightness reduced a tad too much? Archer’s blue top looks like it’s losing a smidge of detail in your upscale. It’s hard though because everything other than archer looks great in regards to saturation (and even he doesn’t look bad or anything really).

For the video, I’m not able to watch 4k in any kind of native-ness so I’ll just say it looks good from what I can tell (putting aside the bit mentioned above) but, yeah, I’m just watching it 2k which kinda defeats the point so 😦

Good stuff, Black Alert! Pretty soon you’ll be qualified to march into Paramount’s main office and demand they allow you to produce a new Trek series from scratch! 😃

No, you weren’t too general. I was being a little silly there as… well, the remasters speak for themselves, and I knew you were referring to the DVDs being the bane. Just making a little conversation I guess. 😃

I’ll let you get back to your work then…after a last

Black Alert said:
thanks for the link, Tobias Richter is a real artist - saw examples of his work at conventions.

Neat! I’ve only seen his stuff via the web. I’ll sign off here with a short animation he posted way later in that thread if you didn’t see it, which again looks pretty great for just one person (to have done everything on his own)

https://forums.scifi-meshes.com/discussion/comment/537371#Comment_537371

Black Alert said:
It’s a shame that Trek-sources always have quality-issues.

I’m going to ask in half silliness but half seriousness in response to that. The re-mastered of STTNG… I assume you’ve seen piles if not all of it. Do you find it to be all “amazing and perfect!” (as one would expect) or were there some things done by the restoration teams that aren’t as awesome as they could be in your opinion?

One interesting thing I saw/learned from my being into hobbyist sci-fi CG was for that STTNG HD remastering… They couldn’t find a couple of pieces of Enterprise-D footage (a real model used back then of course) and the restorers actually reached out to a (very talented Trek) FAN named Tobias Rickter to model the ship as accurately as possible so they could “film” (render) it to replace the lost footage. I guess Paramount/CBS couldn’t CG-model it themselves back then for some reason (cost/time surely).

What’s even neater (to me anyway) is that this fan — without having told anyone — worked on and was getting feedback in a regular ol’ hobbyist modeling forum he frequented (so as to milk everyone’s nitpicky expertise). He was making a model before their eyes that they didn’t know was destined to be in the official ST:TNG BD release! (But at least one of them had a suspicion.) The beans were spilled eventually, with Mike Okuda talking about it in at least one interview. EDIT: Found that modeling thread! Cool this (and its images) are all still up after over a decade. Wow, despite this work being “old” it still looks great. Page 4 here of what ended up being 13 for this thread…

https://forums.scifi-meshes.com/discussion/comment/527348#Comment_527348

As always, thanks for the explanations behind your efforts…and for your great efforts (and output) to begin with. 😃

I want to respond to something else you said, but I’ll do it in your Trek thread where it’s more relevant

Your Enterprise images… To my senses, the first one has a wee bit too much artifacting, ala introduced halo’ing: note the light band at/around the front of the saucer. Also, the still-glowing torpedo port looks akin to being slightly too-compressed or similar. Nothing terrible at all, but does look like something’s being a little degraded from reaching a little too far with settings in a way I don’t see with most of your other work

(such as the second image, which looks groovy…although you’re no doubt going to tell me the same settings on the second on are used on the first one as well 😃).

Ah. Then I’ll say your results look great then! 😃

A lot of it looks great, but the “chorus shots” of our boys, their faces, sometimes look over-processed…

https://youtu.be/yfBIsug4XOw?t=37

But I don’t know the source so perhaps that’s to be expected with those shots? (Is this an artifact of de-noising…?)

Mango said:

I finally found a good blend of denoise that retains the detail.

Is noise really that much of a problem in the source?

I’m not out to poo poo on your results. They do look good! 😃 Just throwing out thoughts from looking closely at things as you seemed to say you wanted.

Ah, okay. I would say go even farther on the de-greening then.

This is your output, put quite a bit toward “auto levels” and with sat reduced a little. Looks a little more StarWars-y to my eye (the bg control panel stuff to the right), but others might disagree?

My casual two cents FWIW

Darth telly said:
I am waiting for people’s feedback.

Sorry to report this (and perhaps it’s just me) but I don’t see gains personally. A 240 line source, that’s just so brutal to try to squeeze something from, not your fault.

I’m still mad at that whole era where people were saying, “VHS, just capture it at 240, zero point in capping at 480!” This here appears to be a casualty of that kind of thinking. 😦

(For anyone interested in this kind of thing, this post is just my blab and pics of clean up of…)

I’d never seen this movie and thanks to Hal 9000’s posting the above screengrabs I decided Octorox’s new version seemed like an “It’s now time” opportunity. 😃 Octorox was nice and gave me his version…but in an above post you see him say “As for the dirt and scratches, I think that would require some level of manual cleanup, which is beyond my time and abilities right now.”

When I started watching the film, I found what this was referring to, and it was a shame. The opening of the movie (but NOT anything after!) — the first almost two solid minutes of this print — was afflicted by damage ala a dancing line, and it was definitely an attention magnet, rather ruined the opening of the movie for me, which is a bummer because this film has a quite neat, atmospheric opening. 😦

But I can see why Octorox didn’t try to fix this damage. Indeed, it would have to repaired by hand, frame by frame (photoshop or similar) and it turns out we’re talking around 2400 frames!!! Who would subject themselves to that kind of insanity?

Long story short, I told Octorox I would dive in to take a shot at this crazy task, as both a challenge of sorts and to give full life back to this movie’s opening that was being robbed of its cinematic artistry/immersion. Could I actually do this whole thing without burning out? I gave myself a week and a half or thereabouts to see how much I could get done. Perhaps I’d end up only finishing the most crucial bit (the first minute), or maybe I’d pull off some miracle.

A big difficulty was that most of the the work required patching. I’d initially hoped I could just quite quickly airbrush away the dancing line in each frame, but that turned out not to be possible without looking terrible. So except in a very small percentage of the frames, I had to add many steps to each frame’s clean up to get something that had a chance of not being just a different kind of attention magnet.

Here we are a week and half later and I’m finished with everything (even if all is not at Hollywood-level perfection). I can’t believe it really. 2309 frames photoshopped in ten days. 😮 (Note that in addition to eradicating that #&^%ing dancing line I also cleaned up hundreds of obnoxious specks, as in things that are present for only a frame or two: dirt bits and white spots/blotches.)

Thanks for reading if you made it this far. I obviously wasn’t paid for this work and it was a lot of effort and I wanted to let the world know about it in this little spot, even if in the grand scheme of things in the world this is rather a nothing accomplishment.

Thanks to Octorox for making his fantastic home release version of this film, surely the best one ever available on home video to this point in time. 😃

Images to show…

One of the more grungy frames, before and after… (Grab/slide center bar left&right)

original vs. end result compare 1

The frame with the most specks in the project…

original vs. end result compare 2

Short vid if anyone wants to see a compare of the things in motion…

https://mega.nz/file/30AnzSTa#1fr8aPFR5fgSsTL4l3vpGPsknxk4zUkkER3YZuVvb4U

Wow, weird. I was just thinking about Earth - Final Conflict a couple of days ago out of the blue, hadn’t thought about it in years, and suddenly this mention of it…!

(Upscaled to 4K from DVD)

I can’t help but ask about that huge leap (to 4k). You surely have good reasons as all your results thus far have been great and well thought-out…but to 4k from a DVD, wow! Does the DVD source have some extra clarity (not present in your others) that benefits using up that extra time processing power?

I don’t have an answer for your main query, but

PsyKovic said:

I heard The bad things About The 4k Transfer.

It appears the 4k is a case of too much DNR and edge enhancement applied, to the point his skin here looks like it’s peeling all over the place and the subsurface scattering is gone (giving a “waxy look”) as you can see

https://caps-a-holic.com/c.php?a=1&x=614&y=302&d1=16927&d2=16944&s1=185107&s2=185498&l=0&i=16&go=1

Around and under her ear here doesn’t look right, does it?

https://caps-a-holic.com/c.php?a=1&x=147&y=295&d1=16927&d2=16928&s1=185109&s2=185147&l=0&i=13&go=1

Also in that last compare and this one you can see a brownish dinge to the 4k, which is another mark against if for some people…

https://caps-a-holic.com/c.php?a=1&x=531&y=179&d1=16927&d2=16944&s1=185169&s2=185505&l=0&i=8&go=1

You likely know about/tried such, but did you try a scan with un-delete software such as Recuva? If not, remember you need to do so immediately, before you start overwriting things.