poita

Just grabbed a frame by pointing my DSLR at the film.

I am paying a loan fee for both ROTJ and ESB, unfortunately they are not in the US, so shipping is expensive both ways, it is around $200 each way for freight.

The print has arrived, I’ll take some pictures tonight.

The print should be arriving this week, and scanning will commence shortly after.

Any extra help really appreciated, check my sig for donations, it is an expensive exercise, and I’m hoping to do Jedi once ANH is done.

I’m home again, if anyone has pledged but not donated, please get them in, and thanks!

That is my understanding, but it will be good to verify it one way or the other.

One thing that will be interesting to clear up is the conflicting reports that the SE went through a 2K DI before going out to release prints.
We will soon be able to tell once scanned.
Fingers crossed it was not the case 😃

I’m staying in Bathurst for the next two days seeing a specialist re my arm. Will be offline until Friday.

Possessed said:

Well I think it was at least before post production, I remember an interview with Mark where he said George pulled him aside before shooting the scene and told him so he would know to react stronger than expected.

Kershner pulled him aside just before they shot the scene, and told Hamill that George knows this, I know this, and now you know this. the implication was that if this leaks, it will have come from YOU.
On the set, David Prowse said ‘Obi Wan killed your father’, so the crew and other actors didn’t know the truth.
Even Harrison Ford only found out at the screening.
It was one of the best kept secrets ever, I can’t imagine them pulling it off now.

rodneyfaile said:

I can’t imagine parting with anything Star Wars related. I don’t like the prequels but there is no way I’d ever get rid of my Phantom Menace VHS even.

Just curious, what would a VHS look like on a 65" screen?

I don’t know, but I was playing VHS on a 140" screen last night.
A lot depends on what you feed the composite video signal through before it hits the television.

Running through a Teranex, it looks passable, but still soft.

Great, I’m going ahead with TPM, and the SE will start scanning soon, any help much appreciated.

Hahaha! I had the exact same thought.

The trailer images look great, much more like a movie than a soap opera.

It has gotten me excited about this project. Hopefully the print is in good shape, it is described as ‘very good’ but that is often in the eye of the beholder 😃

The Phantom Menace print is on its way to me, I’ll be going through and inspecting and repairing any damage once it arrives here, hopefully within the next two weeks. I’ll post some photos of the reels once it arrives.

Okay, I’ve decided to go ahead with this, there seems to be a lot of people who would appreciate the Theatrical Version being preserved.

Any help going forwards much appreciated, the level of cleaning and scanning we can afford will depend quite a bit on donations going forwards.

Thanks to everyone that has shown interest so far, I haven’t seen the film since 1999, will be interesting to see how it looks.

LHSmarchingredcoat said:

poita said:

Very much needed the total cost to me will be in the arena of five grand, so every bit anyone can chip in certainly helps.
I would love to contribute a little each month to a scan! What’s the best way to do that?

If you want to contribute each month or so, feel free to do so via paypal, or if you want to do something a bit different, you could download nicehash (https://miner.nicehash.com) and mine bitcoin now and again when your computer is idle, using the address in my signature, that would contribute a few dollars per month, and is kind of fun.

Thanks for the people who have shown interest so far, nice to see a couple of Aussies in there as well.

Everyone who has donated, if it all goes ahead, I’ll be sending details soon for the file-store, as I have anything to show, it will pop in there first.
I’ll be looking for people to help look for missing frames, and scanning errors etc. and will need help aligning the DTS tracks to the scans and other fun stuff.

I’ll be making a decision on Friday on TPM.

I still wonder why they don’t do an X-Wing vs TIE Fighter reboot.
With VR it would be many a young fan’s dream come true.

The DoF on that second shot would make me think it was not shot on HDCAM, though it could have been composited later to have the shallow focus plane.

RU.08 said:

Yeah I know we need to scan higher than 2K, just letting people know what we have. We’re not going to get 4K detail out of the print. Would they have produced prints straight from the digital files, or do they output a negative digitally to strike prints from?

Good question.

These days they do film outs directly quite often for prints, but with the large print run for TPM, and the technology of the day, then they would have had to have been striking prints from a neg.

All of the first unit footage for AOTC was recorded on (multiple) outboard recorders, the second unit often shot straight to HDCAM.

We.d be looking at around $10K for all three films, or thereabouts.

There is an old ASC article on all this is someone can dig it out.

ZigZig said:

Of memory, all scenes of TPM were analogically filmed with Arriflex lenses except for one scene shooted directly in HDCAM.

90% of the film was processed digitally, which leaves still 10% of “natural” scenes, but the entire film was processed through a Digital Intermediate at 2K (but Poita’s remark is quite relevant).
Eventually, there were 2 final masters : one Kodak 35mm and one TI at 1280x1024.

The first LD/DVD/HDTV master was made from InterPositive ; the last BR master was made with a new scan directly from the 35mm master, fully scene by scene color-regraded.

On the other hand, AOTC and ROTS were digitally filmed with Sony cams at 2K.

I’ll try to find the exact information tonight.

I don’t know about the DI but TPM was shot on Arri 435ES and 535B cameras, the lenses were mostly Hawk anamorphics, shot at a 4.5 aperture when on set. Yet again, George wanted a soft look, like that on Star Wars where he shot often through nylon stocking (old school even at the time), so they shot a lot of TPM through a Tiffen ProMist soft filter, to try and achieve a similar look. They shot on Kodak 320T 5277, which is categorised as a low contrast stock, but it depends how you shoot it. Out in the desert they used EXR 5248, which is a slow stock, but light is rarely an issue outside in the desert sun.

Which scene was shot in HDCAM? That is really interesting.

So no matter what, the image is going to be a little soft, so scanning as high a resolution as we can will capture all that is there and any softness will be in the original, not as a result of the scanning.

The shoot was only 65 days, and then nearly two years of post production.
With that level of work, I would say most if not all of it went through a DI.

I see what you are getting at, however, we still need to scan at at least 4K as we aren’t just transferring a digital file directly from their servers, we are scanning a print.

If through some miracle the ‘2K grid’ that the print ‘originally’ was created from happened to perfectly line up with every CCD pixel on our scanner, well, umm… you see what I mean.
If we scanned at 2K we would end up reducing the resolution of the print to way below 2K as the ‘pixels’ as laid out on the film could not possibly line up perfectly with the pixels on our scanner CCD.

If that seems confusing, I’ll draw up a graphic to show what I mean.

Great stuff.
As mentioned, I’m trying to gauge interest, so anyone interested in seeing this happen, please throw in one or two dollars or something.
If another 20 people made even tiny donations, it would help it feel like there is an audience out there for this.
I, and others will be throwing hundreds of hours at this just for the scanning and transferring, backing up etc. even without any restoration, so it is good to feel like the work is being done because people want to see it.

To go through the process, first the reels are loaded onto a set of rewinds and inspected by hand to look for any splices, broken perforations, or any damage that might cause a problem in the scanner, and then any damage carefully repaired.

Each reel then has leader attached, and is taken to a clean room for ultrasonic cleaning. The technician will load the film into the cleaner, and again supervise the film as it moves slowly through the cleaning bath, buffers and is dried out the other side.
It is transferred onto cores, and then each one is loaded into the scanner one at a time. The hard drive array is initialised, and the reel and job numbers, timecode start points etc. are keyed into the control panel.
The film is then tensioned, the stock analysed and the density set.
The film is then focused and a test scan done.
Any last minute adjustments are done, then each frame is exposed 10 times onto the CCD. 3 passes each of Red, Green and Blue, to ensure that the full latitude is captured (at 16bits per pixel), and the tenth pass is infrared to capture any dust, hair or scratches so that they can be more easily repaired digitally.

Each frame is around 120MB, there are about 172,000 frames, and each are exposed 10 times, and after each is written to the disc, the next frame advances. At each scene change, the film stops momentarily, focus is re-done as on older prints the film tends do drift a bit from the focal plane, and the process continues until the reel is done, it is then rewound back onto its core, and packed away, and the next one loaded.

Each reel takes around 10-14 hours to scan, depending if there are any issues, and a two hour feature has around 6 or 7 reels.

Then the files have to be backed up, they are 20-23TB in size, so this takes many, many hours even with fast drives, and then transferred to HDDs to send out to be worked on.

Cleaning, scanning and transferring the files is over 100 hours of work on its own, on equipment that comes in just under eight hundred thousand US dollars.
This is why commercial scanning is so expensive, typically a commercial scan at this quality will run between $15-25K.

We are so lucky that scanning prints at truly archival quality has come along and that we are able to get this kind of thing done. With some films fading, they would be lost forever if we didn’t take on these projects ourselves.

Anyway, that is a bit of an insight into the process, in case anyone is interested in what goes into it, and why I like to be fairly choosy about which films get archived, we have limited resources, both in time and money and need to try and allocate it to the ones that are most meaningful/important to the community.