Williarob

Sure - Send me a PM.

I did fill the gaps using the Bluray, but there were so many that I didn’t try to color match them, or “Dehance” them to make them blend more seamlessly. Hoping to one day use a scan of a second print to better fill the gaps.

Yes, but the print turned out to have 164 splices, so it’s a bit rough.

Perhaps what he means is that everyone is well within their rights to make their own backup copy of anything they bought - You can buy a DVD and make a copy, in case the original gets scratched or broken. That’s “fair use”. However, any kind of public distribution of that fair use copy is 100% breach of copyright. That’s not a grey area.

Copying prints should be the same way, since prints can also get scratched, colors can fade, or it can develop Vinegar Syndrome and become unusable, so making a digital backup so that you can continue to enjoy the film even if it gets chewed up in a projector, would be fair use, again, so long as it’s not publicly distributed.

However, unlike a DVD, which was licensed by a distributer and legally purchased from a retail outlet, 35mm prints were never supposed to be in our hands. The studios expected them all to either be returned or destroyed at the end of their theatrical run. Unless the studio (or the cinema) threw them in the trash and put them at the curb for pickup, in which case they are once again fair game. I’m not a lawyer, so I don’t know exactly how it would play in a court of law, but the FBI Warning at the start of every DVD and Bluray doesn’t mention “Fair Use” as an option, and makes it crystal clear that distribution, even without financial profit is very much against the law.

If I were a moderator on Reddit, I would want to remove all the links simply because by leaving them up, Reddit is clearly allowing the illegal distribution of copyrighted works, and it would be Reddit that receives the first DCMA takedown notices and cease and desist letters from concerned studio lawyers, not the people posting them, who are largely anonymous. You’ll notice that although we discuss all these projects here on OT, you won’t find a single publicly posted link to download any copyrighted works.

Initially I tried merging the two scans, but the faded scan was just so much nicer - much sharper with less noise and more detail. So in the end, I just used the new scan, cleaning it of dirt and dust and restoring the color by using the other, unfaded scan as my guide.

I spent many hours restoring it.

https://vimeo.com/841466994

The IB Tech does have the 81 crawl attached and it has great color, but the stars are pretty much invisible:

Believing it was important to be able to see the stars, we’ve never used this version.

We have actually scanned 8 more 35mm prints of Star Wars (and 3 x 16mm) since that IB Tech was scanned, and all of them have the original '77 crawl. It took us 10 years to find a partial reel on 35mm (which has just the '81 Crawl and Flyover, spliced onto some of Reel 6 - the rest of the print had such bad vinegar syndrome that it had to be trashed). Anyway, we had this new version of the '81 crawl scanned on an LG Scanstation at 5K. It’s faded, but the star field really pops.

One idea is to align and merge the two scans, so that the Luminosity and Star Field from the new scan can be used with the Color from the other one.

Just a few months ago, I also picked up a 16mm print that also has the '81 Crawl:

Interestingly, this is also almost devoid of stars, so perhaps that’s how the '81 Crawl was.

It is on our list of things to do…

In New Zealand, it’s 50 years. Here in the US I think it’s 75. So in New Zealand, American Graffiti should become public domain this year, and Star Wars in 2027.

Well I for one appreciate your efforts to set them straight. For those who still insist that this is just a laserdisc upscale, perhaps this will help:

It’s just a half resolution proxy file, but it clearly shows more picture information on all sides than any laserdisc, the optical stereo soundtrack, and the grey background of the soundtrack proves it is an IB Tech.

I chose “Unauthorized copies of media (music, movies…)”

Another eBay seller profiting from our work… Please report them if you can.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/224906436484?hash=item345d77df84:g:oCcAAOSwHHNiP2tp&mkevt=1&mkcid=1&mkrid=711-53200-19255-0&siteid=0&customid=&campid=5337618524&toolid=20008&mpt=6849332

Darth telly said:

here is what I am experiencing, it worked one time then suddenly went back to doing this again.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1GtoVpq3FI-4CqB-QLJbwZgcR14Pw275n/view?usp=sharing

After you pick a Test file and the preview window opens to show you the image, close that preview window. Do the same after you open the Reference image.

PM sent.

Sadly 4K80 will not be ready in time for Christmas. The two guys working on Reel 2 had some serious real world issues to deal with over the last few weeks and were unable to finish cleaning that reel yet, but I’m sill hoping we can wrap up this project early in the new year.

Meanwhile, we already have a scan of another Fuji print of ESB which might make for a good v2.0. Previews of this new scan, a grindhouse version of the 4K80 print, and a grindhouse version of Poita’s German print, and several variations on the original ESB Grindhouse scans are available on my site (https://forums.thestarwarstrilogy.com).

Still working on SPFX - just scanned a second print of it actually.

That’s a really short shot - you might be able to fix it in Photoshop using the repair tool.

We’ve scanned 2 complete '97 ANH prints and a '97 ESB print. A '97 ROTJ print has been located, just haven’t had a chance to scan it yet.

I usually listen to soundtracks while I work. Right now I’m listening to the Lord of the Rings Soundtrack.

Reel 6 is remarkably clean and complete, so it’s going much more quickly than I had anticipated, based on the other reels.

When I’ve had enough I walk away. On the days where I don’t feel like working on it at all I just don’t. Luckily it’s not my day job so I don’t have that “get it done or you’ll lose your job” pressure. There are also plenty of other things to work on, for example the 16mm SPFX doc, or 4K77 2.0, or even just other aspects of 4K80, such as sourcing the missing frames: Inserts from other prints must be color matched and cleaned and aligned, all of which takes time, but also provides a change, however small that helps keeps things moving but also breaks the monotony.

For anyone who has never worked on a film or animation, frame by frame, working for hours at a time it’s probably difficult to imagine how long it all takes, and how disappointing it can be to count up your frames for the day, whether it’s a dozen or 300 or 1000, and converting that into real time, only to realize that your “wahoo!” moment of “1000 frames!” equates to just 41 seconds of a 2 hour movie. It also means that you end up spending weeks and weeks looking at the stark whiteness of Hoth, or the dunes of Tatooine, or the forests of Endor. That moment when the action shifts to another set can be so refreshing that you can keep going for another hour!

The progress wheels help me a lot. Not only do they keep you informed of my (slow) progress, but it’s psychologically helpful to me - like crossing things to do from a list. It helps me see that there is an end, and every time I can move the wheels I can see I’m getting closer to it. 1% of a reel is about 12 seconds of film or 288 frames, so if I clean less than that in a session, I can’t move the wheels. I like moving the wheels, even by only 1%, so that gives me a goal to hit every time.

CatBus said:

Wait until you hear about the spoon.

Wish this site had a Like button - Made me laugh!

jordy said:

Well, it seems this place also is as toxic as reddit…

Hmmm. If everywhere you post (OT, Trilogy Forums, Reddit, for example) instantly turns toxic the moment you start typing then perhaps it’s not the people already there who are creating that environment…

Here we are, six pages deep into a thread that’s nearly 3 years old, and there wasn’t any toxicity before you arrived.

Luke: What’s in there?
Yoda: Only what you take with you.

Just sayin’. Food for thought, no?

jordy said:
You know that you’re posting/updating 4k80 to two forums?

Yes, because you are asking the same question on two forums and I’m the only guy in the entire world who has answers to your questions, because it’s my project.

jordy said:
(I really do not understand why you post about your Star Wars projects to a forum, instead of something like a blog.)
That main 4K80 page I linked you to is on a blog site, and yet here you are anyway, asking about it.

It’s done when it’s done because there are too many variables. If you actually take the time to read the post you quoted with your original question above, it explains what is happening and why it is taking so long.

jordy said:
Also, if you do not want people to ask ‘stupid questions’, then how about telling people not to ask for a completion date, or any questions on period of time to complete?

If you bothered to read any of the threads here or on TSWT forums you’d know that we have told people this. Repeatedly. So clearly doing that doesn’t prevent stupid questions.

jordy said:
(Also, I don’t see a point in saying ‘it’s done when it’s done’. Like, it just keeps things as vague as without saying such. If the case is that there’s no idea on period of time, weeks, months, years, it doesn’t make that clear by saying ‘it’s done when it’s done’.)

We’ve been working on this project for at least two years already. If I tell you it will be done on July 23rd 2023 at 7:25 pm will that make you feel better? It’s not at all accurate. It could be done by Christmas this year or in May of next year. The fact is that I have no idea when it will be done. It’s not my day job, it’s just something I work on in my spare time and the amount of spare time I have varies from day to day, week to week. So it will be finished when I finish it and not before.

If you visit the page with the progress wheels regularly you can see progress as it happens, and get some idea of how long it will take. For example, in the last week I’ve cleaned another 15% of Reel 6. I could be doing more clean up right now, but instead here I am patiently explaining all of this to you.

Also, if you are unhappy with the way I’m handling the project feel free to buy your own prints of Empire, get them scanned in 4K, clean them up frame by frame, color correct them, encode them, and create torrents for everybody to enjoy them.

Status is updated here whenever there is news to report:

https://www.thestarwarstrilogy.com/project-4k80/

It is still being actively worked on (as was actually explained in the post you quoted), if you check the last updated date, the status wheels were updated yesterday.

It’s done when it’s done, and frankly everytime somebody asks me “When’s it going to be done?” - which is no different to asking “how long is a piece of string?” because nobody can know the answer to that question - you only make it take longer - I could have cleaned another 24 frames of 4K80 in the time it took to answer this stupid question. Again.

There are several reasons why 4K80 is taking so much longer than the others:

1. There’s only 1 person working on it right now
2. Most of the prints are in pretty rough shape, compared to those we have for Star Wars and Jedi
3. We keep getting more prints of Empire to play with and we want to use the best parts from each:

Currently we have the 16mm dupe, a 1980 Fuji print, a 1980 German print, 1 reel from a British 1980 print and a complete '97 Special Edition print, as well as the older scans we made for the Grindhouse. That’s a lot of film sort through, color correct and clean up. We also bought an Italian print of Empire back in June which still hasn’t arrived from Rome, and we know of at least 2 other prints we may be able to scan.

But 4K80 isn’t the only thing we’ve been working on. We also scanned some more prints of Star Wars this year: an Italian print, a low contrast Eastman print with good color, a Mono print with terrible Vinegar Syndrome but hopefully we can salvage the sound, 3 x 16mm prints, Another 97 Special Edition print.

And that’s not all, we scanned another original '83 print of Jedi (which turned out to be pretty beaten up) and we should be getting a '97 SE print of Jedi soon too. We scanned a Czech print of Phantom Menace and a Spanish print of Revenge of the Sith.

We also scanned two more 16mm prints of The Making of Star Wars, 1 more SPFX this week and 1 more From Star Wars to Jedi a few months ago.

Right now, I have over 200 TB of raw film scans backed up to LTO tape, most of which is Star Wars related.

If all of this is news to you, then you should probably head over to forums.thestarwarstrilogy.com to learn more and watch some previews. You can use this code to register: OT-21wceCpKFdYgD1FgHEkjSw4K77-80

Atom-88 said:

That guy with no name said:

I have finally finished tweaking Adywans colour graded Blu-ray. To match the Gout.
Here are some pics: http://www.framecompare.com/screenshotcomparison/F29BFNNU

They look really good ThatGuy, good work👍.

Yes, it really does look good. Having scanned at least 10 prints of Star Wars at this point I have come to accept that the colors of the GOUT are not always representative of the theatrical look of the film, however, I spent the 80s and 90s watching the VHS tapes over and over so this is how I remember the film looking and I’m very glad that you are preserving that look in such high quality. I will definitely enjoy watching it.