mverta

PG Rating card restored.

Yes I avoid it doggedly.

Yes I have lots of options.  Grain is the second-to-last step before output, so there's time yet.  But there is something to be said for a unified, real film grain structure acquired during film out.  Dunno yet...  

More videos are in the queue and coming, don't worry :)

Grain is an ongoing and huge discussion; the short answer is yes, absolutely grain.  Very likely, the grain will come from having the restoration filmed out.  I just don't want the levels all over the place, so that requires some serious finesse.  Right now, between my tools and and an Absolutely Goddamn Miracle piece of software called Dark Energy Pro, I have extremely fine control over what's there.

_Mike

Yeah.  He made a bunch of changes to the original and then cashed out.

I'm more concerned about, like, should I paint the little kids out or not?  Do I keep his skin black or more white...

RU.08 said:

I found it very interesting that the opticals tend to degrade more than the body of the film, for some reason. I'm certainly not levelling any criticism towards Legacy, decisions like that are up to the restorer - no? Perhaps I should have said that before, I agree with Harmy but I also agree with you that some flaws are in the source and others are introduced in the print. :)

 Leveling criticism at Legacy is welcome and encouraged.  I think it's dangerous to be so deeply into a project for so long with no objective voices offering perspective.  It just also happens that what you guys are concerned with I have also struggled with myself for years and have no definitive answers to, which can be frustrating!

_Mike

I suppose the million-dollar question is whether or not Mr. Wicks, having discovered the huge, non-original discrepancies between opticals and the body of the films, decided to intentionally leave them mismatched or not.  I would be surprised to learn that he didn't balance them back to their original appearance, versus preserving the way they'd degraded while in storage.

_Mike

Absolutely, and of course I compare the prints constantly.  That said, if you're looking at the negative and you see misalignments, you know that's it.  It's the negative.  If you're looking at a print?  Especially a Kodak print? That's an IP/IN and a print stage all of which might've done their own thing, and you just don't know what's what.  No print can be held up as a definitive anything. Now, because of the shitty B&L lenses they shot Star Wars with, chromatic abberations (which look like misalignments) are all over the entire film, so you have to sort of know which is which, and sometimes that can be hard to tell, as well.

But you know what?  If this was a "proper" restoration being done from the negative, I'll bet you anything they'd align the channels, because when you're looking at this stuff on a 4k monitor and it's giant in front of you, it looks so obviously wrong you can't really turn your back on it in good conscience.  You'd have to have a dictum from on high that said, "warts and all," and...man...that'd be so rare.  Still, I have to work with what I've got, and I always follow my instincts.  At least I know nobody will see this or any shot and think it looks bad. And for sure, I'd be doing things differently if I had the negative.  Aligning the channels yields a sharpness without having to sharpen, for example; a sharpness the negative absolutely would have over a print.  So you gain some quality, you lose some purity?  This is all maddening.  At least it's not a CG flyby done in Electric Image anymore....

_Mike

Ultimately, the clip I just posted is as about as clear a demonstration of what this project's goal is as any.

Print preservation is a different project - sort of like preserving a cassette recording you made off the radio of "Beat It" in 1985.  It would certainly be no more representative of the actual fsource; it would just be a different kind of different - especially Kodak prints, which are not as detailed as a Tech print.  And no two prints are the same.  So which do you use? That said, my process here is labor-intensive but fairly straightforward.  I'm not creating any new elements, merely finding some detail in adjacent (and vertical) frames within a print or from other prints.  The goal is to get as close to the source as possible, and I honestly don't know how else to do that. I also know that there is absolutely no way in hell this project is going to make everyone happy; that's impossible.  But I do know that the final product will not draw attention to itself as a restoration save for the few of us who know every frame and will delight or bristle at the quality.  Rather, the goal is to see the film, take every frame for granted, and become lost in the experience of watching it, which was the film's goal from the very beginning.  Let that be preserved.

The fact is that the original elements are now damaged enough that nobody could say definitively that any frame could be "restored" to its exact original appearance. How would we ever know what that is? That's the beauty and drawback of photochemical processes.  And as such, people can cherry pick what should or shouldn't be as they see fit.  I try to be as sensitive and respectful as I can, as a lifelong fan, student of the aesthetic, and professional restoration artist.

Well we all want a proper restoration, don't we, Petr?  So I'm curious, if you were me, and you know two things:  1) Not all of the channel misalignments are on the negative, and 2) It is impossible to tell which is which... which ones would you fix?

Fix none of them, and you don't have a "proper" restoration.  Fix the wrong ones and you don't have a "proper" restoration.  This goes for all the other elements in the frame which can't be determined as print or negative as well; a simple color adjustment is not a proper restoration, either. Ditto not recruiting data from adjacent frames, when we know each frame of a print is incomplete compared to the negative.  I struggle with this every day.  How would you have handled it?

Regarding the primary difference being resolution, I'd certainly have to agree that's a large factor, given that 4K is 25x higher resolution than DVD. :)

As for the blue-green tint, that's part of what's going on in this next pass - globabl color adjustment.  The X-Wings were not painted blue, nor intended to be blueish - that's straight from the horse's mouth - though the effects of lighting and compositing were anticipated.  The original TIE fighters, for example, were painted a sort of medium blue-gray, knowing that they would blow out to gray in the filming. The most likely culprit for the blue-ish tint is the overall blooming of the blue channel in composites.  It's why the stars tend to have a blue tint - it's just a photographic anomaly; the blue channel bloomed more in the photography than the others. But of course, it could absolutely have been color grading, too.

_Mike

God I really don't know.  It was spread over months because whenever I feel fatigued on a shot and ready to make some sort of compromise to get it over with, I leave and move on until I'm ready to finish it right.  But also, this shot needed a lot more than most!

My favorite Before/After so far - X-Wings in formation:

Red 5 Standing By

Enjoy!

_Mike

That's funny...  throwing out the entire EU gave them credibility in my book.  Though admittedly I thought their press release, "Sorry, nerds, glorified fan fiction does not count. Love, Disney," was kinda harsh.

Well first of all, photochemical processes being what they are, it's pretty safe to say NOBODY knows what the colors truly, definitively are.  Even if it was 1976 and you just took the negative out of the camera and developed it twice, both prints would vary slightly.  So any argument about color has to be tempered with that fact.  Secondly, all the IP/IN and print processes change the colors as well, as different stocks have different response curves as well.  It's just not like today's digital world where we can track an absolute color from beginning to end, and even then that happens about 1% of the time.  Chances are that in your arguments, you were probably right, most of the time, but again, it's kind of relative.

I am fairly confident that Legacy will ultimately be the most accurate representation we've seen, but remember this: you've done like 3 versions of Despecialized and Legacy only just finished its first pass.  The reason it takes me so long is because I do so much checking against so many sources and references, etc. in addition to performing the work itself.  I have pages and pages and pages of stuff just on the goddamn color of the Rebel Troopers' shirts.  Ultimately, I put all of that stuff together and see what it points to in terms of color of the characters/costumes, sets, etc.  It just takes forever.  

I'm not using the Senator print so I don't know, but let me explain a bit more.  A proper scan doesn't just hit Record and let the film run.  You look at each scene and adjust the channel gain and/or exposure to get the most out of the print.  So let's say you had a shot of green grass; there would be little information in the blue and red channels, naturally.  So you may want to boost the capture gain on the red and blue channels to make sure you get every last bit of detail in there.  Ultimately, in grading, you will return to the original look, and you will have the cleanest, most accurate colors as a result.

Now, not every scene needs individual exposure or channel gain adjustment; it's context dependent.  So in a raw scan some scenes may be almost exactly like the original, untouched, and therefore accurate.  Others may look tweaked until they've been rebalanced.  

Grading is the second-to-last step in a restoration process, so while obviously it would be really useful to you for me to have finished Legacy and sent you it for reference, that was not the case :)  Instead, you got raw reference scans, a good percentage of which happen to have "as seen in theaters" colors, and some which needed to be balanced. 

Don't worry, Petr, Despecialized is still the #1 restoration available :)   Ultimately,  you will have screen caps from every shot in Legacy to use as reference if you want to do a version 3 or 4 or whatever you're on.

_Mike

Because the references I sent to you are essentially raw scans, sRGB colorspace.  These images are graded in DCI-P3, and balanced for neutral whites and blacks.  When scanning, you want to maximize the information per channel so there is the most data to work from, and sometimes this means that the raw scan ends up with more color in a channel than the "actual" image looks like.  Green carries a lot of data, so it's usually extra prominent in scans (digital sensors too, for that matter) so that has to be balanced out.  Just because it's Technicolor doesn't mean it's 1-click, done.  It means that all the original color is still in there, and if you're just screening it on a projector, sure it looks normal, but when scanning, you want a nice saturated data set.  Getting back to the neutral tone of the source is fairly straightforward.  My first pass on Legacy sets neutrals and internal balances, and this next pass does things like scene-by-scene overal tone grading, as would be done to the original film - things which yield the warm orange tone of the Tatooine canyon stuff, when in fact the footage as shot didn't actually look that way.  I grade to the "as shot" look, unify everything, and then grade all of THAT back to the Tech or whatever.

I'll do a grading video so you can see the process! :)

_Mike

Grading Comparison Video

Oh, okay, then 85% of the way there.  That's not bad, and I don't necessarily think the wipes are absolutely essential keepers, personally.  I am, but that's my source.

Well consider this:  About 95% of the Special Edition is the original film.  We've all spent seasons "patching" restorations with varying materials.  It's a helluva lot easier to patch 5% than to do the whole thing end-to-end, take it from me.  The issue with patching the Lowry restoration is that its such a disaster it's like having to do the whole thing anyway.  So if they get the look right, if they get the tone right, if they get all the little details right, we'd be a long way towards Nirvana.  The only thing I know is that even with the negative, the film needs a giant heaping fuckload of work. 

I'm pretty much counting on the very day I finally finish Legacy, they announce a 4K restoration of the original.  That would be just about the way shit goes.

Not restorations, per se, but we regularly scanned film at 4k then.  The scanners weren't what they are today, though.

Having worked in 4K for a long time now - 10 years+ - I think I would be a hard sell on a 1/4 of the resolution 2K, personally.  There really is a large difference in detail.  But honestly, there's almost no way if a restoration is being done that it's not being done at 4K.  No matter how they release it, that would just be silly at this point.

_Mike

Thanks for the sentiments, guys - much appreciated.  You know, garbage in/garbage out.  I am amazed with what, given enough time and love and effort, we can pull out of prints.  But every single day I work on Legacy I think, "Damn, if only I had the negative."  I know it's severely damaged; I know the color separation masters are incomplete, but if you're willing to put enough work into it AND have those original sources, I can only dream of the results one could achieve.  

I've said many times that I know what goes into each frame of Legacy is not sustainable or reasonable for a commercial restoration, but what I HOPE is that a "reasonable" restoration PLUS original materials will yield something better than I could do.  I see serious potential in those Reliance clips.  I'm so rooting for that.

There have been many restoration efforts over the years; I am on record many times for having said that we never knew what the future could be, and should hope for the best but prepare for the worst, but I don't think ANY of us could've imagined Lucas suddenly cashing out of Star Wars altogether and selling to Disney.  There is money to be made in a commercial 4K release of the original Star Wars; we all know it.  There was almost zero chance before now; there is a chance now.  But again, until we all have that perfect, pristine 4K original in our grubby little hands, we gotta keep at it.  

Personally, viewing this entire movie frame by frame at 800% has given me more respect for the film, for the medium, and for the amazing tools we have at our disposal.  I've learned or discovered dozens of image processing techniques which I now use daily in my other work, and it continues to be a lot of fun.  I just can't imagine regretting a second of it!

_Mike