If you never saw the prequels, you could give a chance to the official ones (try Schorman’s HDTV preservations)…
You’ll enjoy the fan edits more if you know what they tried to change.
But I can’t download them on my software
Why not? What is it about your “software” that prevents you from being able to download them?
The only computer I have is a horrible chromebook. It’s really only good for email.
That shouldn’t be a problem as long as you have an Internet connection and a large enough hard drive (which can be an external USB hard drive), right? Granted, I know next to nothing about Chromebooks, so maybe something else about them precludes being able to download large files…
I confirm that you can download a torrent or a Usenet file with a simple Chromebook. Even with a simple USB key…
You just need an Internet connection, but you have one obviously 😃
TPM introduced us to the first interactive CGI character
Actually, Casper was the first interactive CGI character…
It is a LaserDisc preservation, there was no subtitles on the discs that csd79 generously preserved…
JEDIT: Maybe the project Threepio would help you: https://originaltrilogy.com/topic/Project-Threepio-Star-Wars-OOT-subtitles/id/13794
Hi OldMateMatt,
What are the settings that you use (noise, blur, face refinement)?
I use GP a lot and I have found that the main problem in frame by frame processed videos is with the stars : they are “split” (GigaPixel redraws two sharpened stars instead of one blurred) and they move from frame to frame.It seems to me that you also have this problem in your video. Did you achieve to reduce or solve it?
I know exactly what you are talking about. I personally have found the best results are on low/low anything more than that just amplifies the mistakes Gigapixel is making. I’ve been thinking about doing a double pass, at low/low and then just a plain scale with no image improvement, and layering the two images to try and reduce the enhanced noise/small details that become distorted.
Hi riftamos,
Thank you very much for sharing your tips!
Did you try doing a double pass, or did you just think about doing it?
On my side, I tried to increase the original frame with a simple bilinear resizing (ia from 720x480 to 960x640) before upscaling it with GP (ia from 960x460 to 1920x1280): that reduces the distorstion of small details, but that reduces also the advantage of using GP…
Hi OldMateMatt,
What are the settings that you use (noise, blur, face refinement)?
I use GP a lot and I have found that the main problem in frame by frame processed videos is with the stars : they are “split” (GigaPixel redraws two sharpened stars instead of one blurred) and they move from frame to frame.
It seems to me that you also have this problem in your video. Did you achieve to reduce or solve it?
[Ronster said:]
The only thing which could be remotely interesting about that version is if George Lucus filmed Alec Guinness on Yavin Base before he decided midway through production to kill Ben Kenobi off on the Death Star. But even then if he was filmed on yavin that would still be left out the the cut you are talking about because there was only ever one outcome kenobi dies on the Death Star.
So no point guessing same film without any of the people who created Star Wars behind the scenes and made it what it is like any other film.
Mate, you are in a topic named “Star Wars The Lost Cut: Everything We Know About It”, written by a guy (13las) who made an amazing documentary about it, and you just say this is not interesting…
How dare you ?
Hi 13las,
I’m pretty sure you saw this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0p3f1o5ZSmQ…
Just in case, there is the link…
Also, this is a footage of the famous chasm, supposedly used for the Lost Cut :
(source: https://www.schnittberichte.com/schnittbericht.php?ID=4334040)
Hi csd79,
I love the idea of being able to switch from one version to another, it is soooooo niiiiiice! Thank you very much!
About the capture, is it still based on a CLD-2950, or have you upgraded your installation since 2014? What post-treatments (comb filter, IVTC, etc.) do you apply?
Cheers!
Thanks yotsuya for those explanations !
Ronster is coming from the angle that the cut that Ben Burtt was using for the main audio track, got edited in a few places AFTER some of the sound was laid down and is trying to uncover that cut. I can see the point to that.
That would be interesting (even if irrelevant with the Lost Cust matter), are there sources that confirm this theory?
My guess is that just reordering what we have will not achieve any of the previous cuts because what was cut is missing and not just moved around (…) The stuff you need to recreate it authentically is not there. It was cut.
Exactly. So true.
And if what you say is true…
Hi yotsuya,
I’m sorry, I don’t want to argue with you, I’m just reading and believing what ILM HD Supervisor Fred Meyers said about this matter, and I’m assuming it is true: “This chroma sub-sampling combined with spatial sub-sampling effectively reduced HD’s 1920 resolution to 1440 for luma and 960 for chroma.”
About the ideal scanning resolution, as I said before: even if the original master was shot in 6k, after going through a traditional Intermediate Positive, then to IN to release print stage in the lab, it wouldn’t go above 2K. Plus the weave and lack of pin-registration in most projectors, plus the less-than-optimum focus, you could easily wind up with well below 1080 resolution.
Believe me, I’m currently scanning The Phantom Menace in 4K: there is nothing to get more than in 2K (and Harmy seems to think the same).
I have spent years scanning photos and you always want to go higher and then reduced after the scan. A movie is just a series of 180,000 photos. The post scanning image handing tools are much more sophisticated than the scanning tools. It just pays to get more and then reduced to what you really want. It also helps during the repair process (removing dirt and scratches). I’ve had to repair a number of old photos with missing corners and enlarging them 2x, doing the repair, and then shrinking them back to the original size helps hide the signs of the repair and results in a better end product. So scanning at 4k and then fixing the dirt and scratches will give the best final product rather than scanning at 2k or HD.
It depends on the quality of the 35mm. My guess, based on what I see on the 35mm of TPM, is that you’ll get something far below the sharpness of 1080p.
As for the resolution, it appears to be a recording device limitation, not the camera.
It is both a limitation of the camera (read carefully: it had to be cropped at 800x1440 due to the lack of the promised Panavision lenses) and the tape format.
Anyway, it confirms that the original shots are limited to 1440x800.
Great job you did!
Thank you!
And if what you say is true…
Hi yotsuya,
I’m sorry, I don’t want to argue with you, I’m just reading and believing what ILM HD Supervisor Fred Meyers said about this matter, and I’m assuming it is true: “This chroma sub-sampling combined with spatial sub-sampling effectively reduced HD’s 1920 resolution to 1440 for luma and 960 for chroma.”
About the ideal scanning resolution, as I said before: even if the original master was shot in 6k, after going through a traditional Intermediate Positive, then to IN to release print stage in the lab, it wouldn’t go above 2K. Plus the weave and lack of pin-registration in most projectors, plus the less-than-optimum focus, you could easily wind up with well below 1080 resolution.
Believe me, I’m currently scanning The Phantom Menace in 4K: there is nothing to get more than in 2K (and Harmy seems to think the same).
@yotsuya: Again, I respectfully disagree.
AotC was definitely shot in 1440x800.
I think the important part is this:
Since SW2 was to be displayed as 2.35:1, and Panavision were not able to come up with the promised Anamorphics to work with a Prism-splitter 3-CCD camera, the movie was shot letterboxed, so the master images were only 1440 x (about) 800.
Lucas didn’t plan to use a HDW-F900, but a ‘Panavised’ one (HDW-F900F). But Panavision didn’t deliver in time, so Lucas had not other choice than cropping his shots.
Furthermore, HDCAM SR tape format was not yet available, so he had to use a ‘bastardized’ HDCAM 4:2:2 (instead of 3:1:1, but not SR) limited to 1440x1080.
So the final cropped shots were in 1440x800 (which is still HD).
Some other interesting quotes:
this meant that, unfortunately as is the case with digital masters in general, 1440x1080 would remain 1440x1080 until the end of Time
According to Wikipedia :
The actual resolution of Attack of the Clones is not 2k, but just 817x1440 pixels. This is because the HDCAM format subsamples the 1920 horizontal lines to 1440. The 1080p aspect ratio of the camera only applies when the 16:9 aspect ratio is used. To produce the 2.39:1 aspect ratio, the top and bottom of the image are cropped, reducing detail. This cropping is why Spy Kids 2, (shot with the same camera) looks better then attack of the clones. Spy Kids used the native 16:9 aspect ratio and thus used all the pixels of the camera. (Anamorphic lenses could have allowed the full 1080 lines to be used, but were not available for the HDW-F900.) . --Algr (talk) 19:17, 27 June 2019 (UTC)
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Star_Wars:Episode_II%E2%80%93_Attack_of_the_Clones)
And the final word to ILM HD Supervisor Fred Meyers himself :
With the earlier equipment, RGB color from the camera was converted into 4:2:2 YUV format when it was recorded. This format effectively slices the color bandwidth in half because one color value represents more than one pixel. The result is fewer chroma (color) samples than luma (luminance). This chroma sub-sampling combined with spatial sub-sampling effectively reduced HD’s 1920 resolution to 1440 for luma and 960 for chroma.
JEDIT: ChewieLewis is right, most of the movie is CGI, not related to HD cameras.
IIRC, CGI was rendered in 2k (so really no need to scan AotC in 4K, which is the main question here)
Again, I respectfully disagree… the resolution of AotC is definitely 1440x800.
His choice of format caused many a sideways glance among those who actually understood these things at the time: It was the Sony HDW – F900; a ½” * 3-CCD EFP camera which captured 3:1 compressed 1440 x 1080 component video in “SR”, a bastardised “segmented” Tape format. That basically means each progressively scanned frame is converted into a pseudo-interlaced format, and each “field” is recorded as two separate JPEG-like images, (which does NOT give the same result as storing the whole frame as a single image).
Since SW2 was to be displayed as 2.35:1, and Panavision were not able to come up with the promised Anamorphics to work with a Prism-splitter 3-CCD camera, the movie was shot letterboxed, so the master images were only 1440 x (about) 800. At the time, Cinema video projectors were very thin on the ground, which meant the vast majority of punters wound up watching a 4th generation film print, struck from a master video image with considerably less resolution that a 4th generation film print struck from 35mm negative! And there weren’t no Arrilasers then either, just a lot of rather dodgy CRT video printers.
A few years before this epoch-marking event we’d already been told that the then-new HDW – 750 was already a “Replacement for 35mm film” and we laughed hysterically, so hence we were left wondering what had been done to the aforesaid 750 to give us the F900.
Well … apart from adding 150 and an “F” to the model number … not a lot….Well anyway, Boy George went on to produce exactly the sort of results we said he’d get, and nothing daunted, he then proceeded to sever all ties with the aforesaid Panavision and pitched woo to a new upstart startup called “Plus8 Digital” (nee “Plus 8 Video”) to equip his next instalment: SW3 “Revenge of the Sith”.
This time he used Sony HDC-F950 cameras - still 1/2” prism jobs, * but with true 1920 x 1080 recording, which produced noticeably better pictures than Episode 2, (by now the Arrilaser had become available which also helped) but still crap compared to Episode 1, which was still shot on film….
(Plus8 Digital then proceeded to go broke and were eventually bought by Panavision, ROTS apparently being the only feature of any significance to be shot on their brace of expensive new cameras…)
And HD is not 2k. The 2k format is slightly higher resolution.
About 2K vs. HD, I never wrote something about HD, I just said that it wasn’t shot in 2K.
I respectfully disagree.
Even if the original master was shot in 6k, after going through a traditional Intermediate Positive, then to IN to release print stage in the lab, it wouldn’t go above 2K. Plus the weave and lack of pin-registration in most projectors, plus the less-than-optimum focus, you could easily wind up with well below 1080 resolution.
Furthermore, considering that the master was digitally shot at only 1,5k, there is really nothing to get at 4k, but dust and film grain.
It was shot with a 2/3 3-CCD EFP camera, which captured 3:1 compressed 1440 x 1080 (= 1.5K)
AotC was digitally shot in 1,5k… So there is really no need to restore it in 4k.
There is nothing solved, and the conclusion is: what you are seeing or hearing is just the final result of general editing. It has nothing to do with the Lost Cut.
This
Interlaced means that every 60th of a second, half the image is shown. The first 60th shows the odd lines of the image, the second 60th shows all the even lines. So basically, you have 30 full images a second. But you know that already.
As the movie was shot at 24 fps (not 30 fps), the “trick” to transform 24 fps into 30 fps (so that it can be carried on NTSC) is by doubling (pulling up) some frames, which you can easily remove (“pull down”) with IVTC (in AVISynth or even VirtualDub).
You won’t get additional information, image or quality by keeping those pulled up frames.
You can use AVISynth to IVTC the 3:2 pulldown 29.97fps back to the original frame rate, or at least the original frame rate when telecined. The true original is 24fps.
Just for kidding… if you want a perfectly exact experience, don’t use the official blu-rays: they are encoded at 23.976 fps, not 24 fps… Otherwise you’ll loose about 1 frame every 6 minutes (that makes an entire second on the whole movie… the same kind of inaccuracy as 2.35:1 vs 2.39:1)
I guess you have no other choice than buying a 35mm projector and the original 35mm reels if your goal is to perfectly match the theatrical experience 😃
JEDIT: AFAIK, the original Star Wars (1977) was supposed to be seen at 2.3942856:1. But the SE has another ratio (2.3913042:1).
When digital intermediates were made at 2K in 1997 (and reused for each version since 1997), they were supposely done at 2048x858 pixels at 2K (or 4096x1716 pixels at 4K) according to the DCI specification for the Scope picture container. That ratio is 2.38694639:1…
So for the same movie, you’ll get 3 different ratios. Good luck with that 😃
And don’t forget that the SMPTE standards changed the lens aperture ratio in June 1976: it is pretty obvious that most theaters didn’t get this change in 1977 when SW was shown (see http://www.widescreenmuseum.com/widescreen/apertures.htm).
Some interesting articles here:
https://wolfcrow.com/is-scope-2-4-2-39-or-2-35-to-1/
https://www.widescreen.org/aspect_ratios.shtml
https://www.widescreen.org/examples.shtml
https://www.panamorph.com/which-home-theater-screen-aspect-ratio-is-best-2-401-2-351-or-169/
http://www.widescreenmuseum.com/widescreen/apertures.htm)
Although the traditional anamorphic format utilized an AR of 2.35:1, the AR of most 35mm anamorphic movies since 1970
is more accurately 2.39:1. Often, this is rounded up to 2.40:1. In many areas the “2.35:1” moniker has stuck in the
same way that “scope” is still used by people in the industry for films made with anamorphic lenses even though
CinemaScope has not been used since 1967.
And you do realize that the difference between 2.35:1 and 2.39:1 is basically unnoticeable, right?
I didn’t dare say it …
I pm’d the user, maybe we could work it out if he still had the recording on his dvr
Thank you!
I think that many of us have already PM’d him… and he is no more active for 5 years… But maybe you’ll be luckier 😃