Yes, I’m not worried about the aspect ratio, these are pre-scans to just look for damage/missing frames etc.
Yeah, sadly they are, but it is not too late, yet.
This is the faded German Reel5 after a basic colour adjustment to reduce the red fade. The heads and tails are pretty beat up, and the film is pretty grubby.
https://infinit.io/_/3eCmTZT
Cool. I am also very interested in if any of the frames missing from the UK print are present in the German-Red print. I really appreciate the help.
Once I get the German print scanned, it will be immensely helpful to have the community involved in checking for lost frames etc. between the UK print, the German print and the GOUT, as my time is really limited and the machines are usually tied up with long render or file transfer jobs. The OT community is the best!
Thanks so much!
If anyone likes it in red, here are the 16K of frames.
https://infinit.io/_/37HdmGq
If people could use the frame# it really helps me find the relevant frames quickly as it is in the filename of each Frame.
That would be my fault, the time-coded segment I posted has been fairly extensively worked on, I am about 60% through an initial restoration phase on it.
The original looks like the red segments in the sample I posted, i.e. a bit of a mess 😃 so I imagine you would be able to see the jump pretty clearly in the print itself.
I’ll post a ‘raw’ version as well.
A post is fine. Thanks!
I will be archiving it as blue as it is, but to watch it I’d be tweaking some of the blue away 😃
I was working on an ESB sample from the German Reel2 before I headed off. Something weird happened converting it from P3 colourspace, and it was a work in progress, but I thought I may as well post it here anyway.
The colours (including the original red) are all screwy, but you can see the damage before and after, if nothing else it is a bit of fun.
If someone wants to go through the 16000 frames of the German reel I had partially scanned and look for missing frames vs the GOUT, feel free to do so 😃 That file is here: https://infinit.io/_/7yRkSxj
Nothing posted here has been properly graded yet, the UK print is actually pushed slightly towards red, the green tint you are seeing in the samples is just the rough colour balance done to assess what colour is left in the print.
The UK print is the least faded, but still a bit pink, the German print is very, very pink, but it looks like the colour is recoverable for the most part. The darkest scenes are always the problem, as there is very little blue to begin with, so once it fades it is hardest to recover.
As for Jedi, it looks like nearly all the first run 1983 prints have the blue cast, I have seen many prints now and they are all blue in those scenes. I have seen an intermediate print that is not blue, so it looks like it was either a decision to try and get a ‘look’ for the release, that ended up leaning too far into blue, or more than one lab had the problem, which seems a bit less likely.
Either way, Jedi will need to be re-scanned with the light source catering for the blue to let us get the most out of the scan. Keep in mind though, that the original theatrical version of Jedi had very dark scenes, and the was intentional to hide some issues with the ‘puppets’ and effects, as well as to set a very gloomy mood in the Jabba’s palace scenes. The scenes are darker than a modern audience would expect/accept these days I feel.
The other film?
As far as costs holding things up, the German print will cost around $2000 to clean and buy enough HDDs to store it on.
Hey guys I’m new to this, can someone just give me a quick summary of everything that has happened?
Hard to beat Towne’s post…
Basically as far as The Empire Strikes Back goes, we have cleaned and scanned a UK print @ 4K full aperture that had good colour, but unfortunately has mould which shows up as red flashes in many scenes.
I have purchased a German print of Empire that has more faded colour, but no mould, and am hoping to have it cleaned and scanned at some point in the future once I can afford both the process costs and the 20+ TB of storage that the scan takes up. To clean, and store 6 reels (which Empire is, Jedi is 7) costs around USD2000 (cleaning and HDD costs) plus the cost of scanning (and the scanning can cost up to USD15K)
We are currently going through the UK print to see what frames are missing, and checking against the German print to see if they are present, and if the mouldy frames are okay on the German print, with the hope of creating one complete print.
I’m away from home for a while at the moment, so you won’t see much in updates for a little bit, I did have a few segments of the German print scanned, without cleaning, as I was about to lose access to my favourite scanner, so wanted to get as much done as I could. I was working up until then on cleaning up some of the more damaged German frames to see if the colour can be recovered and the damage repaired, i.e. to see if the print is worth the enormous cost of scanning and cleaning it.
I have scanned one Return of the Jedi LPP, another is awaiting scanning and cleaning, and multiple Star Wars prints have been scanned, but another IB Tech is awaiting scanning and cleaning, and I’d like to rescan the LPP at some point.
We also have an 8mm print taken from a 35mm French print of Empire, that is useful for a colour reference, as the print was in good shape colour-wise when the 8mm version was taken from it. I need one of these to be able to transfer it for scanning (http://www.ebay.com/itm/ELMO-ALUMINUM-Super-8-MOVIE-REEL-1200-ft-360-m/381889385828)
The focus has been on Empire as all available prints of it are fading rapidly, so it was most important to get it done as a matter of urgency, Both Star Wars and Jedi are on film stock that doesn’t really fade, so the urgency for them is far less.
I am currently hamstrung by storage constraints, cleanup is slow as there is not enough free HDD space, so things are constantly being copied on and off the RAID which is very time consuming.
That pretty much wraps it up to where I am at (if you ignore THX and a bunch of other non-trilogy projects that are also underway, but those are a story for another time), hope that helps bring everything up to speed!
TLDR Version. UK ESB Print scanned, German ESB Print not cleaned, some reels partially scanned.
I just found out about Carrie as I was working on the scene with her rallying the snowspeeder troops on Hoth, trying to ensure the light in her eyes was not lost.
Devastated.
It is Xmas eve over here, and for the first time in months the entire family is home, about to take the kids out to see the lights, then tuck them all in soundly, while visions of sugarplums…
Thanks again to everyone, I hope you all are in a good place. I will be offline for the next week, and I will chat to you all again in 2017.
And no, 2016, you can’t have Carrie as well!!
The two prints were aligned, then the IR matte was used as a guide to paint through to the other image, but with an algorithm to keep the grain pattern from the master print. Then an analysis was done of the remaining damage, and that corrected, leaving out the main vertical scratches for now as they require a separate pass.
That print is not quite as the seller has described it, to say the least.
I do really love Space 1999, and we can thank that series for the design of the Millennium Falcon, the film would have been so different without the hamburger.
I’ve been asked about the condition of the German print and if it is salvageable.
I did have some of it scanned, even though I couldn’t get it cleaned. I’m uploading a few seconds of how it looks mixed in with how it looks with a very basic restoration done to it, as a quick test of how much work would be required.
The print is very red, but it looks like a reasonable colour balance could still be achieved, it is quite battered and dirty, but a lot of that can be worked around.
A very quick sample, with some basic adjustments can be grabbed here:
She is coming home today 😃
Unfortunately my daughter has been sick for the last 24 hours and she has been transferred to Randwick Children’s Hospital, so I will once again be out of touch for a little while.
Hopefully it is something that will respond to antibiotics and we will be home again for Xmas.
You haven’t hung around with film collectors 😃
Some are extremely against all things digital, they see it as an evil that killed cinema as they know it, and can’t stomach the thought of watching anything digital, including a near perfect scan of a print.
Others see scanning as jeopardising the already grey area of print ownership and fear it will bring the ire of the distributors and copyright holders down upon the entire 35mm film collecting community, and still others see a digital copy of a print as reducing the value of their rare 35mm print that they paid a lot of money and time to find and own.
There are many issues around it, the takeaway is that we have to treat very, very carefully when talking to print owners.
Also, this print has already been scanned, and sending people to this forum can cause all kinds of problems. Surprisingly, many print owners are fundamentally against having prints scanned, and report people doing it.
For the record, the cave is blue on this print, it is the auto white balance of the camera taking the photos that makes the snow appear white.
Reels 2 and 4 have red splotches. Improved particularly when the falcon is being chased through the asteroids by the Tie fighters and between when Vader accepts Captain Neda’s,apology and when it cuts to Luke and Yoda. The fist Cloud City shots have dark blotches all across the screen. The red slotches return when Luke is leaving Dagobah. Reel 5 starts off with red splotches. The red splotches return when Chewy is in the cell and starts putting C-3PO tigether and continue. They don’t show up in the lighter scenes, but they do in the darker scenes. But overall, the colors in reel 5 are the best in the transfer. Perhaps a bit under saturated. Reel also has good colors, but all the reels except 5 are dark. Reel 6 also has some red splotches, but not as many.
I also observed that while reel 3 is still reddish, the overall colors and levels look better.
Throughout, the black levels change. Some scenes are darker and some are lighter. Most are consistent.
The black levels are very inconsistent on the print itself, and they often change from shot to shot.
I’ve been a bit tied up with Empire, but I am rendering out another pass of THX now, it will be finished in around 30 hours.
Basically this is the last of the automated scripts to run on it, then it is a matter of going through it and looking for any problems created by the scripts and reversing any artefacts caused.
It is faster to use semi automated tools, and identify and undo any problem frames caused by them than to not use those tools.
Once that is done, then it is time for manual repair on a frame by frame basis.
I’ll be looking for people that can help identify segments that need work so I can prioritise my time.
Some samples once the render is done.
Send me a PM and I can help you out with the Italian 35mm version.
What’s interesting is that the grain on release prints, at least from what I’ve seen, when projected in a cinema is really faint and when more visible usually indicates an optical effect.
Mostly because projection is really soft, the lenses aren’t particularly sharp, the screens are ‘rough’ and the image is ‘flashed’ multiple times due to the shutter and the film moves slightly with each ‘flash’, our brain does a bit of temporal processing on that - the grain is much more prominent in the screening rooms at work with really sharp optics, a smaller smooth screen and a film projector without much slop in the mechanism.
To view on a TV is a much different thing, so I believe for a home theatre release, you do need to reduce the grain slightly, to get the same effect as viewing film in a commercial cinema.