I’m surprised a 70MM mag print hasn’t surfaced. Nor have loose reels in a number of years. I came upon reels for Empire and Return of the Jedi once upon a time on Ebay.
I just have a feeling they would be faded all to hell, be warped or even have vinegar syndrome.
oh no, it’s been found, albeit fairly recently
It is done.
In all, 2 minutes of opening and closing titles, plus an additional 47 seconds within the film proper, had to be taken from the tape source. The rest is in HD. Audio is a straight rip from the tape; there is negligible quality difference between the tape and BD in terms of audio, plus it meant no audio editing. 😃
A fairly basic project by this site’s standards, I intend to re-edit the HD BluRay transfer of the Italian film ‘Il ladro di Bagdad’ (1961) to conform to its original English release, titled ‘The Thief of Baghdad’, and supposedly in other parts of the world as ‘The Blue Rose’, though I’ve not found a poster or title card to support that theory.
Long story short, the complete English version only exists in very poor pan-and-scan VHS transfer.
Whereas the German Blu-ray version, which only came out in 2019, is of the longer Italian version. There is an English track, but any extra footage only has Italian with English subtitles.
Easy, I thought, just cut the extra stuff, replace the title cards and credits and done.
Wrong.
Instead, scenes have been re-arranged, single extra frames that need to be cut, shots missing from the Italian version, shots that crossfade into missing scenes, and I’m working with KdenLive. Joy.
V1 will be out when it’s done. Currently up to ~42 min mark of the film.
Would only consider a V2 if by some miracle someone can find and scan a print of the Eng. ver. of the film. Y’know, Unicorn stuff.
Is something like this what you are after?
Here we go with my first post. So I decided I wanted to make some new bluray sized covers for my discs and wanted to make them feel like the VHSA tapes I had as a kid. So I made these:
Then once I had my template all set up I decided, what the hell, let’s make everyone look better.
Are there covers with John Alvin’s art for Star Wars and Return of the Jedi.
The images that appeared on the Japanese Laserdisc.They weren’t made specifically for the 4Kxx series, but I did make these a year or two ago.
If I can find the old .psd files I should be able to mod them if you so desireHere’s some '95 International style BluRay covers. I’ve tried to make them as generic as possible, so they can be used for whatever version of the unaltered original trilogy you may have. Having said that, I believe these covers should fit the standard 12mm spine cases, as opposed to the 14mm cases used in some countries e.g. Australia. If anyone wants me to modify them for the wider spine or to add some classification markings, just let me know.
Can you send me this without logos so i can make german versions of it?
I’ll do you one better
Can you upload or send me a version without logos so i can make an german version of this?
That won’t be necessary.
Well, well, look what I found on the Heritage Auctions via Google Image search.
Doubt we’re gonna get higher quality versions of these John Alvin beauties!
The color data IS all there, it is just a real pain to finesse it out.
I’m not 100% certain it’s ALL there, but you’re right about trying to pull it out of the print. Took a lot of trail and error, but this is as close as I can get in terms of one-size-fits-all correction.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/191697136@N07/50816245731/in/dateposted-public/
So this is the pic I worked on for a few minutes. Still not sure how to get it to show on here though.
That’s not TOO disimilar from the non-faded video version.
Might take a swing at that frame as well.
Gonna use the ColorMatch tool to try and match it up with the same frame from the video
Well, this is the result.
Not bad; skin tones look a little redder than the video’s yellow tinge, and not much can be done to recover the blown out highlights (the lights on the top left and camera man’s shiny head), but imo a great result to get from pink city to near full color in a few clicks. Btw, Williarob, I assume you did a single pass on color correcting the print? Just curious as the shot of Han and Leia @ 3:32 looks WAY different than the TV print, wheras the others look sort of in the ball park.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/191697136@N07/50816245731/in/dateposted-public/
So this is the pic I worked on for a few minutes. Still not sure how to get it to show on here though.
That’s not TOO disimilar from the non-faded video version.
Might take a swing at that frame as well.
Gonna use the ColorMatch tool to try and match it up with the same frame from the video
benduwan said:
will there be release of the SPFX: making of the empire strikes back too?Yes, I’m working on that right now actually. It will be a bonus feature with 4K80.
That looks like a two-color print, as opposed to a faded full-color film.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but is there much you can do with that sort of film? Reds and skintones should be easy to fix, but either the green or blue is missing or maybe even mixed together?That’s after some color correction - it is faded to pink:
Oh wow, I didn’t realize. Great job pulling as much of the color back as you did then, kudos!
Such a shame the print was already that far gone; the best looking copy on YT has good colors, but is blurry, has major telecine wobble and is cropped on all four sides compared to yours.
I suppose someone could use DrDre’s tool and use the YT version as a reference, but it would have to be shot-by-shot; doing a quick-and-dirty run now, what fixes one or even multiple shots in your pic messes up others due to the missing color/s.
By the way, was this on multiple reels or was it all taped together?
benduwan said:
will there be release of the SPFX: making of the empire strikes back too?Yes, I’m working on that right now actually. It will be a bonus feature with 4K80.
That looks like a two-color print, as opposed to a faded full-color film.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but is there much you can do with that sort of film? Reds and skintones should be easy to fix, but either the green or blue is missing or maybe even mixed together?
I was looking at my old posts and I noticed all my images are gone! That’s no good, I thought, I’ll reupload them to somewhere more permanent and edit the original posts so people can see them again.
One of those was my John Alvin BluRay covers. They are ‘generic’, in that they’re not for any specific version of the OOT, nor are they specific to any country. For whatever reason, I felt compelled to redo them, based exclusively on the last Australian VHS release of the Original Trilogy. I guess I wanted something that, if I ever burned the films to discs, I could put them in something that looks nice but also isn’t out of place with the rest of my movie collection.
Be warned, this is based on the AU VHS covers to a fault; the runtime is PAL based, copyright is 1995, the rating markers on all 3 sides and the legal text mentions CBSFox Video and ‘video cassettes’. Only thing intentionally missing is the catalog # on the spine; I drew the line at that for some reason.
Are there covers with John Alvin’s art for Star Wars and Return of the Jedi.
The images that appeared on the Japanese Laserdisc.
They weren’t made specifically for the 4Kxx series, but I did make these a year or two ago.
If I can find the old .psd files I should be able to mod them if you so desire
Here’s some '95 International style BluRay covers. I’ve tried to make them as generic as possible, so they can be used for whatever version of the unaltered original trilogy you may have. Having said that, I believe these covers should fit the standard 12mm spine cases, as opposed to the 14mm cases used in some countries e.g. Australia. If anyone wants me to modify them for the wider spine or to add some classification markings, just let me know.
That wouldn’t happen to be the one frame at the end of Reel 5 I mentioned, would it?
It is, but the frame is not a DVD/BD exclusive – it’s a theatrical frame. It’s mentioned in this thread: https://originaltrilogy.com/topic/Whats-missing-from-GOUT/id/6725/page/1
While I’m sure you’re correct, that thread isn’t as helpful now with all the dead image links 😕
CatBus said:
No, Star Wars GOUT sync isn’t the same as theatrical. 4K77 isn’t theatrical sync, they decided to GOUT sync that one. It’s only one frame different.
That wouldn’t happen to be the one frame at the end of Reel 5 I mentioned, would it?
CatBus said:
If we go with theatrical, we’re breaking sync for 4K77 and all of Harmy’s projects (and countless minor/derived projects). And we could even opt to break sync for everything if anyone entertains my crazy ideas about how to implement the theatrical frame standard. Which is kinda why I want the project leads to get together and hammer out some sort of agreement, because it has the makings of a giant cluster if each project just decides to just do its own thing.This illustrates why the GOUT standard had such staying power – it’s been used since 1993 (a decade before the GOUT it’s currently named for existed), so all kinds of projects gravitated to it for mutual compatibility. You could take an audio track from a 20-year-old Laserdisc preservation project and drop it onto Despecialized released yesterday and it would sync perfectly. Changes to this frame standard should be done in a careful, considered, coordinated manner.
Completely agree, if there’s gonna be this big shift, which I think should happen, it’s needs to be done right.
I think we need to move forward to theatrical sync. GOUT sync was a flawed system to begin with, however useful it was. ESB and ROTJ have different frame counts/missing frames depending on if you used the NTSC or PAL versions, and the audio was off by two frames half way through the Jedi NTSC GOUT, which is the one everyone decided to sync to. Theatrical sync has every frame and proper audio sync based on actual film prints, GOUT sync was based on cheap-and-nasty LD->DVD transfers. It was the best we had back then, but not anymore. It’s time to retire GOUT sync imo.
Having said all that, isn’t theatrical sync the same as GOUT sync for Star Wars anyway? I don’t recall any dependencies with Ep 4 other than one frame at the end of reel 5 that was on the DVD/BD but not on any prints or the GOUT so it was omitted.
Not sure Harmy has been asked this yet BUT…
Will the blue screen shots of the Falcon Cockpit be sourced from 4K77 or the UHD? I only ask because I believe they are the only re composited shots that weren’t replaced with the originals in previous version of Despecialized, for whatever reason. I’m only nitpicking that because previously he’d go to the effort of replacing stuff like the remote or entire shots of Darth Vader on the bridge because they were recomped, but nothing was done about the Falcon cockpit shots which as far I’m concerned have the same ‘problem’.
At this very moment, I’d say the 4Kxx versions, mostly because the quality across the whole feature is basically the same throughout, whereas Despecialized varies from 1080p to barely DVD quality. Having said that, if Harmy can pull off what he’s trying to do with Star Wars Despecialized 3.0 and beyond, his versions would become my preference, especially since I’m still watching stuff at 1080p so any minor differences between the sources at 4K would become negligible.
For this color grading I quite deliberately didn’t want the colors to “pop”, since most like Broom Kid, who have seen Jedi on the big screen have stated, that it always seemed a little duller and flatter than the other two films in the trilogy. Consequently I’ve attempted to go for a film like color grading with the extra caveat, that Jedi wasn’t that vibrant to begin with.
That’s fair. I guess I’m just used to all home video versions where Jedi was roughly as colorful as Star Wars or Empire, and just expected it as such. Probably not the only one. I’ll take someone like Broom Kid’s word over mine, since he’s actually seen it on the big screen back in the day.
I’m not at all sure how ROTJ is ‘supposed’ to look, but to my eyes it’s very low on the red/warm tones to the point that the skin tones appear ghostly. Obi-wan looks good though 😉
Yeah, I’m getting that vibe too. Maybe it’s because places like Jabba’s palace are already quite red, and pumping in more red to the skintones turns Jabba’s palace into a volcano? Not sure, just didn’t seem to be a problem with 4K83 V1.0.
I’ve been going back and forth on this question for a little bit.
On the one hand, it’s the last time the Star Wars trilogy had a big theatrical re-release, it’s the last time a big effort was made into changing the film (imo), and it’s the version that the O-Neg’s conform to.
On the other hand, it’s neither the original version nor the latest edition, which with Lucas gone will most likely stand as the final version of the trilogy, for better or worse. Basically it’s just a stepping stone that only those who saw it at the pictures when they were young care about.
Thoughts?
Williarob will be using Dre’s new correction for an update that will also replace many of the patched-in Blu-Ray frames with new 4K print scans (some from an LPP print, some from a 1997 SE print).
Will there be any frames used from the 4K Disney+ version or have they got all the frames from prints now?
In some instances, the bluray frames could not be color matched to the print. If there are no print sources for a frame and the D+ frames match better, then they will be used. But the goal is to minimize the amount of footage from non 35mm sources used in the 4Kxx projects.
Oohteedee already partially “despecialized” the D+ versions of ANH and ESB using 4K77 and 4K80 sources. (Most of the 4K80 footage he cleaned himself, since that’s not done yet) if that’s what you’re looking for. He calls them “D+77” and “D+80”. Hopefully a D+83 will follow in the not too distant future, and all three D+ projects will quickly be upgraded to use the physical media when that becomes available next month.
Interesting. Didn’t even know about the ‘partially despecialized’ D+ versions.
I only mentioned the streaming 4K versions because, to me at least, that would be the next best source to use if for whatever reason you can’t find the necessary frames from a 35mm source, which would of course be preferable. Not to mention the CC on the Disney+ versions is leagues better than the 2004/2011 versions, so it should be less of a problem to color match to the 35mm material.
Williarob will be using Dre’s new correction for an update that will also replace many of the patched-in Blu-Ray frames with new 4K print scans (some from an LPP print, some from a 1997 SE print).
Will there be any frames used from the 4K Disney+ version or have they got all the frames from prints now?
Found a nice article about the first short, and was surprised to find it contained a video of the often mentioned trailer for the short! Anyone know if they did anymore or if it was just this one?
https://cartoonresearch.com/index.php/the-first-fleischer-superman/
