Does anyone remember vividly watching Episode 4 in the theater during the SE release? I have a reel 1 of the film in 35mm and the interior scenes on the ship had a slight bluish/purplish tinge to the frame to where Vadar's black didn't really look like "black" black. I'm told by several other people who have prints that a lot of prints had problems like this.
Knightmessenger said:
SilverWook said:
They never learn, do they? Seems like an awful waste to destroy a perfectly good print. Do the studios require proof of destruction?
Now I'm having visions of some crazy person concealing old film prints in their house, like a scene out of Fahrenheit 451. Or maybe it's just someone I know...
Has anyone else seen the restoration documentary on the Gone With the Wind 4 disc dvd edition?
They talked about how even technicolor prints could turn out differently and that sometimes people would get excited about finding a technicolor print from a middle of nowhere theater. And it turned out to be one that was a bad printing so they sent it somewhere not important.
I'm pretty sure that was also the documentary that mentioned how for the 60's rerelease, the studio wanted it to be in stereo because that was all "new" and "better." And they wanted whatever source of the mono mix tossed.
However, somebody kept the print hidden and tucked away knowing it would be worth saving and it would have been very hard to present the original audio mix on dvd if that source had no longer existed.
Yeah this is true... I've had 4 prints of Thunderball in the years I've collected film, all were IB, and only 1 or 2 (I forget) had excellent color timing. One had that weird reddish tinge to it, which I assume is not fading but just bad processing. That's not to say the print was unwatchable, it was just a little noticeable.
Here are a couple examples of how Technicolor can look when made from a print. Keep in mind it's youtube, compressed, etc, etc, but with care, it can provide pretty good results.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3AScEBynwJc&list=PL0382C69360AB812F&index=6
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EfhCcFDAdYs&list=PL0382C69360AB812F&index=4
(both of these I lent to TFH for transfer)
dlvh said:
Hey, thanks Mike,
They appear to have a very warm pallette, and are very vibrant. Do they project that same way as seen in these pictures, or do they differ at all, due to the back light or camera settings?
I haven't had a chance to project it yet, just the 4th reel. It'll probably be another couple weeks. The colors are fairly accurate in the photo capture, but of course there may be some slight differences.
Here is a link to an imgur album from snapshots of reel 2. Unfortunately they're upside; I couldn't flip them inside imgur for some reason.
poita said:
I have also seen IB prints where the masking area is darker, especially where a print played at one cinema for a long time, the projected area has lightened compared to the area that stayed behind the gate-mask.
But anyway, most well preserved IB prints look fantastic, if a little contrasty and have great colour.
That can possibly be attributed to arc burn maybe? I've seen the same thing on some old 50's drive in prints in the past.
dlvh said:
Hey Mike, did you get to those reference prints yet? I'd like to see how yours may differ from some others.
Not yet, sorry... hopefully in the next couple days.
poita said:
Every cinema experience would have been quite different depending on the print, film stock, the size of the screen, number of foot lamberts, the type of screen, its colour, its reflectivity, the amount of ambient light and even where you sat in the cinema etc.
In the 70s in Australia, nearly all projectors were carbon-arc projectors. That is, they work kind of like a welder, two carbon rods are held near earch other and the 'arc' of elecrtricity between them provides the light for the projector. You had to keep slowly winding the carbon rods inwards towards each other as they burned away, and replace them sometimes in between reels. Carbon arc rods have a pretty fixed colour temperature, this is easily catered for.
This is true. You have carbon arc, incandescent, and Xenon. I've never seen a carbon arc presentation, but incandescent gives off a warmish hue, while Xenon gives off a blu-ish hue. The difference to me when I converted was night and day.
poita said:
We are lucky there is an imbibition print of Star Wars at all. Star Wars would have been the last big release to get an IB print I would wager.
Technicolor had already stopped producing IB prints at all in the early 70s, All Star Wars IB prints were produced at the one remaining facility in the world, in the UK. They shut down in 1978 and sold the gear to China. Had that happened a year earlier, there would be no IB prints of Star Wars for us to try and find.
I'm not positive, but in the States I believe the last big title was Godfather 2. In the UK, most likely it was Star wars. Would be interesting to hear for sure though.
Actually, Technicolor had a lab in Italy I believe, that remained open until '79 or '80. I've heard there is actual IB prints of Empire Strikes Back in Italy, but whether this was a one off test print for Lucas's archive or not, I don't know. I did have a trailer for Grey LAdy Down (79) that was IB and had dutch subtitles, so likely that was from the Italy lab.
poita said:
Every cinema experience would have been quite different depending on the print, film stock, the size of the screen, number of foot lamberts, the type of screen, its colour, its reflectivity, the amount of ambient light and even where you sat in the cinema etc.
In the 70s in Australia, nearly all projectors were carbon-arc projectors. That is, they work kind of like a welder, two carbon rods are held near earch other and the 'arc' of elecrtricity between them provides the light for the projector. You had to keep slowly winding the carbon rods inwards towards each other as they burned away, and replace them sometimes in between reels. Carbon arc rods have a pretty fixed colour temperature, this is easily catered for.
Actually, regardless of how they are stored, IB prints do fade, all film stock fades no matter what it is. A 30+ year old IB print will look a lot better than other prints, but will still have shifted somewhat, and it depends how it was stored, how many times it was shown, if it was lubricated correctly etc.
There have been times that restorers have had to go to the IB print. For example The Battle of Britain, when they went to the colour separations to make the DVD they found they were in appalling shape and not fit for use. So they found a truly prisitine IB print and Ted Turner used that for the transfer.
I recently stumbled across that actual print of TBoB that was used to make the DVD, it was up for sale for $5000, and is the best quality print I think I have ever seen.
You can get very good results scanning a good IB print, it won't have the dynamic range of the original negative, but if it was printed well then you can get close. These days it is not usually necessary to do multiple scan passes if scanning a print, the dynamic range and SNR of current sensor technology, especially those from Sony is so good that you can get it all in a single pass by using the correct gamma curves, or scanning in high bit depth and using a LUT. As the dynamic range of a print is already compressed, you can usually get it all in one go, unless it is unusually dense, which would only be the case if you shot extremely underexposed.
With a neg the dynamic range is so high that it may in some cases still make sense to do a multiple pass scan.
I've never heard of an IB print fading; I've had trailers from the 50's that look perfect, and there's stuff dating back to the 30's on nitrate that's supposed to look outstanding. IB matrices can widely vary though. I've had 3 or 4 prints of Thunderball over the years, and only 1 had perfect color registration. The others were off. I don't think that was due to fading, but more due to processing.
poita said:
There are a few reasons why that wouldn't work, Apart from whether that scanner would work for cine film at all, which I doubt, but assuming it did, it takes around 17 seconds per frame, that would equate to 816 hours to scan 2 hours of film.
So at 8 hours a day, it would take around 100 days, assuming you did nothing else.
Even time considerations aside, I personally wouldn't put a valuable print anywhere near something like that, and I doubt the internal software would identify the frame boundaries etc. correctly.
I looked up that scanner and I don't think it would work, I mean you could set the scanner in between the rewinds and slowly do, but that scanner doesn't look very high quality at all. And I have a feeling that it would take much much more time than that.... however, I assume once the training session is over (or if you're already a pro at it), one could reasonably make a scan that quick.
Reddit stalkers? Just don't comb through my history and claim I'm the third boston bomber ok? :) I put it on reddit under my throwaway but I'm the same guy.
skyjedi2005 said:
This is not the same print that was shown in Baltimore is it? With the platter damage on the sides.
No this isn't that print. I heard that there are two excellent prints out there, one of which is the one used in Baltimore (no clue who owns it but I know it cost them $$$$$$), but I'm told those two prints have some issues. I know of three other collectors who have prints and each one says theirs are choppy or messed up to varying degrees. I know of two other people who may have them, but I don't know the condition of those. One collector and I were trying to figure out how many were struck originally, it couldn't have been that many. The prints were reused for the 1980(?) re release, so they took a further beating then.
pushad said:
This could get interesting for sure. So far i do like Harmy's version (minus a few things.. sue me I'm a grumpy old man), but getting to see this would be extremely exciting.
Hope mikeaz123 is the real deal, no offense but this is the Internet after all. My two cents, getting it professionally transferred is surely possible despite the legalities. Lets face it, there are Star Wars fans everywhere... just need to find one in the right spot.
Good luck getting this done, and if there's a safe way to contribute any monies to help I'll be the first in line for sure (this is the Internet after all).
A friend projected my reel 4 and then I watched Harmy's version after, he did a pretty good job IMO. I think there's less grain in the video than there is in the print though, but that's one of those subjective areas you can debate about. I did notice a couple color issues, but that may be the fault of my iphone camera.
Spaced Ranger said:
mikeaz123 said:
If there's any thing you want me to check and possibly take a pic of, let me know.
Well, actually, if you can make a best-you-can-color-accurate snapshot during the Deathstar conference room scene, preferably with fleshtone faces (too bad for Darth Vader), at about 36 minutes into the movie (11 minutes into reel 2?), that would be great ... and should stir the pot some, here, at Original Trilogy! :D
I'll see what I can do! That actually sounds like it'd be near the end of reel 2.
Chicken Boo said:
If anyone wants to read up on the legal or logistical issues with regards to transferring the film, read through this thread. It covers just about everything you can imagine!
I read some of the replies there, and it's not technically legal to own a 35mm print, but nowadays they don't care as much as they did back in the 70s. Prints are occasionally left at theaters; I worked at one for 10 years and we had about 4 left there because of shipping disputes with the delivery company, and we never heard back from the studios about them. Also, film labs and depots go out of business, theaters close down and each of those locations have film and may sell them in auctions, etc. So there are entirely legal ways prints get out to the collecting community. As for transferring it, it is definitely copyrighted and you cannot transfer in that way the guy explains the laserdisc analogy. I have transfered many exploitation trailers and have lent materials out to Shout Factory and Synapse for various discs, the copyright of those materials are dubious. Often the exploitation companies went out of business, or the rights to the titles have swapped hands many times, so it's tough to track down ownership. Also, the amount of sales of the trailer discs are so small, it's not worth the companies time and money to sue. But with SW, there's no question about that one for sure!
Spaced Ranger said:
I knew it ... I KNEW IT! There never were green Deathstar interiors!!
WHO is responsible for this outrage?!?
"I am your green daddy!"
If there's any thing you want me to check and possibly take a pic of, let me know. I'm not a fanboy of SW (no offense whatsoever meant by that term), just a regular fan, so you'll have to be specific with any requests (reel location and possibly even a reference frame would be nice)
dvdmike said:
poita said:
I can't do 4K but it would cost me about USD$6000 to upgrade my current rig to 2736x2192 @ 48bit colour, which is about 6MP per frame.
But with a new gate and a few other adjustments I could do 2K now.
I seriously think we should do a kickstarter or the like, I think between us we can make that and if we get an uncompressed file for fast connections and a BD 50 it would be with the investment
Puggo - Jar Jar's Yoda said:
Mike, you should pass on the SE reel... the mono reel is far more valuable.
This is now officially my favorite thread.
100%, easier to colour correct the mono than re-edit the SE
Thanks to the guy earlier in the thread for posting the comparison shots, I had no idea it was THAT bad! As for the SE reel 1, I want it just to complete my print so that when I watch it, at least the color is consistent but I agree the mono reel makes more sense for preservation purposes.
poita said:
Wet Gate is a process. In simplitisc terms the film goes through a chamber filled with liquid, this minimises some scratches at the expense of a slight loss of contrast. The gate is quite literally 'wet'.
You can get similar results by using multiple passes of filmguard (it takes 4 or 5) to work as a pseudo wetgate, the filmguard liquid coats the film and does a similar job. A true wetgate is better though.
I am currently saving up for a real wetgate for my system, it is about $500, but is worth it. Currently I use the filmguard method if a 'wetgate' transfer is required.
As for log vs lin, 8bit vs 10bit, it is a complicated issue, but this intro from QVO isn't a bad place to start.
http://www.qvolabs.com/Digital_Images_ColorSpace_Log_vs_Linear.html
Film Guard is awesome, I love it. The BBC uses something called Timol as their wetgate for transfers. The guy I got the print from sent me a FG/Timol concoction to use to remove some of the lines and the small amount of fungi on some of the reels.
Hey I'm the guy from reddit with the print. I'm down for helping out with a preservation scan, however, as someone else posted above, 4k is ridiculously expensive, and 2k Would cost about half that. That's not even taking into consideration finding a lab that would do this on the DL. I've helped out with trailer discs before and the labs have no problems transferring those, but the copyright on 70's exploitation trailers isn't as big of an issue as it would be with SW. From a film collectors standpoint, the print is nice/good. I've only had a chance to project one reel, and there was only 1 small skip in it of a couple frames, and based on what I was told there's not too many splices in the other reels. It has dirt and lines here and there, but that's not really an issue with wet gate transfers. I've found a reel 1 from the mono american release, but have not received it yet. I'm trying to track down a reel 1 from the SE release, but I'm told there were several changes in that reel from the original version.
Had a 35mm print of Conan at one time, although it was mostly faded. I do agree that the blu ray is off, but I'll be curious to see the final results. The screen cap of the snow seems a bit warmer than it should be.
I was thinking of doing a fanedit of Death Wish 2, as the blu ray is still cut, while a foreign pal DVD is fully uncut. I'm on a Mac, and was wondering what would be the best way to upscale and convert the Pal DVD to 1080p, so that I could splice in the footage from the upconverted dvd to the HD source?
