As a few of you know, I have health issues, and I am away from Monday through Friday for treatment, so may or may not be able to answer PMs etc. until the weekend, depending how hard it all hits.
I’ll be back online Monday week at the latest, so don’t take radio silence in-between as me ignoring anyone 😃
I agree with David if you are talking a really fine grained negative in great shape, that was exposed well. For anything else, 4K full aperture really doesn’t look any different to 8K in the tests we have done.
Scanning a fine grain negative at greater than 4K is sometimes worth it, but for a release print, 4K already exceeds the resolution of the print in nearly all cases.
Also, 4K scanning is not what people generally think of as 4K or UHD i.e. 4096 x 2160 or 3840 x 2160
For a scope print, a 4K full aperture scan is 4096 x 3112, and there is image in over 3000 lines of the 3112 vertical lines captured, unlike a 4K Blu-ray of a cinemascope film, which would have around 1600 lines of vertical resolution.
So there is nearly double the pixels in a 4K full aperture scan of a scope print vs the resolution of a UHD Blu-ray.
The blotchiness on the SSE isn’t because it was scanned in ‘only’ 4K (I thought it was done @2K, but I could be wrong) it is mainly due to a combination of most of it being sourced from a dupe print, not an original print, plus they used a scanner that suffered from digital noise and had a less than ideal dynamic range, which means the image had to be pushed more, the image processing done on it, and the final compression.
This is not to diss the efforts on the SSE, but they were up against it from the beginning, and did a great job with what they had to work with. A lot of what people think of as grain in that release is actually a combination of sensor noise, dupe grain and processing issues.
I disagree with Mike re timing, we always do a primary grade early in the restoration process and then a final grade at the end, so whilst I disagree with a lot of what Lowry does, the placement of the grade I think is about right.
For release prints, even 4K full aperture is likely overkill, but if anyone turns up a negative, I will happily scan that at the full 10K of the sensor 😃
These are from the print that is for sale (and missing Reel 4)
Maybe someone should offer $300 on the incomplete print with better colour on that ‘other’ forum. I think $620 + shipping is too much for a print missing Reel-4.
I don’t know re the image area, the sample I posted is everything out to the edge.
Here is the same scene with the colour over-saturated to see what is there, the main problem is the lack of contrast left on the print.
I must say even the raw, faded print has a certain style to its colour timing, even if it is all horribly wrong.
Yeah, it has a spooky ‘old photo’ feel to it.
The ProRes file for that exact seqment is 8GB, if anyone wants to take a crack at colour recovery, PM me and I can send you the 8GB file to play with.
Here is a 16bit TIFF image if anyone wants to try.
Unfortunately the fade is severe, the colour and contrast have mostly gone, if we fed it through a scanner with an adjustable light source and better dynamic range, we could get a bit more out of it, but not really enough to warrant it. We would need a less faded print to start with.
However, the open matte lets us see a lot more, and there is just enough colour to know what colour things should have been, like this shot for instance…
Boosted a bit:
I thought someone had already restored these files?
It would be a lot easier for me if I had the entire source clip, rather than the crop.
Oh man, I would love to hear you talk about the quad!!
Don’t tempt me.
It’s 5am, I probably should get some sleep, kids will be awake in an hour.
I am after some people to view the complete scan, to give feedback as to missing frames and frames that are so damaged as to need replacing. Anyone who wants to help with that, please bounce me a PM.
The quickest way to do this would be to isolate the white text, and create a matte from it, then feed that back into restoration software as a damage matte.
I’m a little confused by the format, it looks really low resolution, and do you want both the left an right images restored, or just one or the other?
But I have a question - why does the level of grain change from shot to shot?
Scenes with optical effects have more grain, this includes scenes with optical wipes.
This is completely correct. To do optical effects in a pre-digital age, it required physically stacking pieces of film into an optical printer.
So for the asteroid sequence for example, some shots had 25 separately filmed elements that would be combined optically into a single shot.
They were using positive separations (equivalent to Red, Green and Blue channels) so this would mean 75 separate passes through a traditional optical printer, with the grain getting multiplied on each pass.
Now Edlund and his team had developed a new kind of optical printer (the Quad) which halved the amount of passes required, but it is still a lot of passes, and each pass adds another layer of grain. (The Quad itself is a fascinating beast, and I could talk about it for an week and bore anyone to tears…just ask any of my friends).
Also, a lot of Empire is dark, and with 1980 film speeds, less light = more grain, and the film was shot on a variety of stocks, each with its own grain issues, so the film does vary a lot shot to shot.
No you would digitally grade and match the shots to be less jarring for an audience, and even in 1980 it was possible to do a better job of that aspect than was done for Empire, but as with Star Wars, they were under extreme time and money constraints, so the final grades and composites left a little to be desired.
At this stage Harmy will be using it for despecialised, he isn’t planning on releasing a ‘grindhouse’ of Empire.
I am working on fully restoring all 3 original movies from multiple prints, to create versions that are faithful to the original release prints for archival purposes. The aim is to have them restored to the point that they could be recorded back to film for archiving, to preserve the original releases, the way they were seen in cinemas.
If anyone wants to see work in progress etc. on that, bounce me a PM.
It is an incredibly time consuming process, and really requires checking and repairing every single frame of each film, so progress will be slow, but I feel it is worth it to preserve these films.
I don’t think in terms of ‘public releases’ of finished products, or talk on open forums about releasing any complete versions, so you might notice those questions keep not getting answered by me here 😃
I’m sure once the films ae restored to archival level, that I or others might use that as a base for restoring the film completely, removing composited-in dirt and scratches, minimising and matching grain between shots etc. to get back to an ‘ideal negative’, but the archival versions will be done first.
All reels of the UK print are now scanned and with Harmy. Thanks again to everyone that helped make that happen.
You’re welcome! So, all 6 reels are cleaned and scanned? Also, you mentioned it taking many thousands to have someone scan a film. Were you able to rebuild and use your own scanner?
Unfortunately with this print, I had to use a scanning service in the USA. The good news part is though, that it is a better scanner than mine, there isn’t a better print scanner than what this print was scanned on, so the scan is as good as was possible to extract from the print.
Long term yes, it takes quite some time to do the restoration at 4K, but yes, restoring film is my day job anyway 😃
Thanks to an old friend…
I don’t have access to vimeo, if someone wants to upload it for me, send me a pm.
Spoiler alert 😉
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x54r1ix
password is ‘empire’
All reels of the UK print are now scanned and with Harmy. Thanks again to everyone that helped make that happen.
I still have the German print here to get done, as well as some other prints of Star Wars and Jedi, but it is a huge relief to have the UK print scanned, and I’m sure Harmy will make good use of it.
If anyone missed out on one of the linked files that have since expired, PM me with your email address and if I still have the render I will sort you out 😃
I agree, I have purchased the trilogy on every damn format, multiple times.
I think if you are going to watch it in hi-def, then at the very least go buy the Blu-ray.
You also then have a case to keep your disc in 😉
Thanks Darth, send me a PM with your email and I’ll fix you up 😃
Grainy as hell, and faded badly, well all the ones I have seen so far, anyway.
There might be some out there somewhere in better shape, but I haven’t found any yet.
I’d love to do all the German reels, but I don’t currently have the extra 15TB or so storage available. I’m currently running without a backup of the ESB UK reels, prints are annoyingly large lumps of data once they are scanned.
Do you have a HDD brand of choice?
WD Black, the 5 or 6TB models, or Toshiba 7200RPM drives are the only ones that haven’t given grief so far, all the other models I have tried have crapped out on me one way or another.
For SSDs, the Samsung drives have so far been the most reliable, although I’d love to try out WD’s new SSD, the 8TB Ultrastar SN200!
