poita

Fantastic!

Which country is the print currently residing in? It is usually cheaper to get the print scanned on the same continent that it is in.

As a first step, all broken perfs and dodgy splices will need to be repaired before it could be scanned, and yes, a clean would be in order.

Looking at the print, scanning with an IR damage matte would be highly recommended.

If you watch it on loop for a while you get an idea of the damage, that is the least damaged sequence, but we are very lucky to have found this print.

Here it is:
https://we.tl/DGoJ000BWW

I’m uploading a cleanup sample now, with my internet connection it is going to take 2 hours for the few seconds of footage to upload.

This is just a test, I’m establishing the best workflow for getting this done in a timely manner, the sample is about 80% cleaned up. There is some funkiness around the syringe movement, but I’m only seeing it in the compressed output, so I think it is a quicktime issue, I don’t get the artifacts when outputting uncompressed.

Anyway, this is not really how the final output would look, but I thought I would share some W.I.P. mostly on channel alignment and flicker/noise management. Colour hasn’t been touched much. The final will have more detail, the test scrubbed a bit away, hence the need for tweaking and testing.

I’m still waiting on my new CPU to turn up, currently I am stuck rendering on a much slower laptop, so am mainly working on the workflow at this stage so I’ll be ready to hit the ground running once the rest of the reels arrive.

Any donations more than welcome, I need to buy another 3 HDDs to back this up, and the replacement CPU was a US$540 cost, but the 12 cores should speed things along.
Processing requires a lot of grunt, this small sample is over 60GB (i.e. bigger than a dual layer BD for just these few seconds) in the raw scan format that I work with, so processing, or even just moving the files around is painful on a laptop, it is much, much better on the workstation, so I am looking forward to having it up and running again next week.

I’ll post a link as soon as my snail powered internet finishes uploading it.

I have it on HD-DVD but haven’t checked it out yet. Have been waiting for my kids to get old enough to watch it.

I watched it 16 times in the cinema and don’t remember seeing the rotating monkey animation. I haven’t seen it on home formats yet.

It truly is a masturpiece. I am so appropriating that word from now on, Mr Ranger.

Thanks to our trusty scanner, here is a quick sample, with some colour correction applied (the print is mostly pink).

http://tinyurl.com/thshinning (Shhhh… Ya wanta get sued?)

As usual the damage is worst at the start and end of each reel.

silverwheel said:

I wonder if Coppola was thinking something like “why oh why did I decide that this was going to be Zoetrope’s first project?”

According to Murch:

In November, Coppola came by to collect the final product. After I screened a reel for him, Coppola shrugged, saying: “It’s either masturbation or a masterpiece”

Studio execs often feel the need to change ‘something’ to justify their existence and exert control, it is often arbitrary.

Here is a sample at 1080P of probably the cleanest scene in the scan, it gives an idea of the condition of the film. A lot of the damage isn’t visible once you downsize and compress to NTSC rez like in the previews.

https://we.tl/ZPYsFjpozs

I have been suspicious all along about Lucas’ claims that WB ruined THX, which was why I have been so keen on finding the 1971 prints, as no one , including Lucas has ever stated exactly what the changes were. Having no record of what was changed, when the story has become such a big part of film-making folklore always really bugged me. I often wondered if the changes were small, but Lucas blew them up a bit after the film was not a success, or if the changes really did make the movie different enough that it wrecked the entire narrative.

It looks like they were small after all, maybe the proposed changes were a lot greater, but the theatrical releases look like they were only slightly different to his later Director’s Cut release after Star Wars. I guess we won’t know until I get the other reels, but going on the 16mm and the first two reels of the 35mm it certainly looks that way.

So the scene of THX being messed with by the doctors and convulsing is not in the 35mm but is in the home releases? Supposedly that scene was Lucas expressing his horror at the doctors who treated him after his near-fatal car crash as a youth, so I imagine he would have hated taking that out.

Here is a beginning of reel sample @ UHD resolution so you can see all of the damage detail. The heads and tails tend to be the worst areas of a film.
https://we.tl/ClDZjBS7sd

The film was nowhere near as popular, so probably wasn’t run anywhere near as many times. It is plenty beat up though, the hi-rez sample will be up in about an hour (which is how long my internet takes to upload 2 seconds of compressed UHD footage)

For its age, it isn’t too bad, but the low resolution and heavy compression of the samples I uploaded hide a lot of the dirt and scratches and other damage. I’ll upload some higher resolution samples so you can see what I mean. However, for all that, the print was an excellent purchase and as good as we are likely to ever find for a 1970s small release film!

I did a basic white balance and black level adjustment, and a slight tweak to get the skintones in the ballpark.

Here is a preview of Reel 1 & 2 in very low resolution.

https://we.tl/0rQDDckxbQ

A longer sample is uploading via my snail-powered internet, should b up in two hours or so.

Mavimao said:

poita said:

Here is the segment for Spaced Ranger:

https://we.tl/QqRu36MOrd

This is heavily compressed and in 720P the original files are much, much grainier 😃

Thank you for the sample, Poita! Indeed the color registration is pretty bad… But I can’t imagine it being very difficult to fix. They used tools for the Wizard of Oz restoration to ensure that all the channels lined up perfectly - but then again, we probably don’t have access to those tools.

On the bright side, the print looks clean and the colors intact.

I’m actually using the same tools pretty much, but they had the 3 strip seps, so it was a piece of cake, extracting the layers with no ghosting from a print is more tricky, but it certainly can be improved a lot, and in most scenes you wouldn’t notice it in motion. Just is more fiddly as the colour varies from frame to frame, so getting the layers perfectly extracted then adjusted and recombined it a lot more work than if working from a 3 strip scan.

Mavimao said:

Well, if I’m not mistaken (and I very well could be), the raw scan would have the different color layers separated already since it scans each frame’s red blue and green channel. You’d just have to take those different layers and recombine them more precisely.

Well, if colour filters and light were perfect, then yes.
However the real world isn’t as kind, so separating out a layer perfectly, with no crosstalk between the other layers is very difficult from a print. You can do it ‘well’, but doing it perfectly is a lot of fiddling around. Then you have the problem of when to do it in the chain, if you do it before dirt and scratch removal, then the dirt and scratches become harder to repair, if you do it after, the separations are harder to isolate, so it takes a bit of work.

Here is the segment for Spaced Ranger:

https://we.tl/QqRu36MOrd

This is heavily compressed and in 720P the original files are much, much grainier 😃

Laserschwert said:

I think that’s pretty much what poita did all the time, right? Buying a print and then selling it off again afterwards, so there’s no money lost.

There was often money lost, but it means you do recover some of the print costs.

It probably doesn’t take much to get people to throw in $10, and you might find some that will throw in $50 or more.
There are people who will scan it for you affordably, so you don’t have to buy or build a scanner.

How would you find them? Get creative. Write a blog, post on various forums, find collectors groups online and sound them out, see if there are film groups in your town, have a bake sale etc. etc. It takes a bit of perseverance work and dedication, and sometimes a bit of luck.

Yes.

It definitely is not there, sorry.

SilverWook said:

I only realized yesterday the bill is folded into the shape of a dendrite, which is the small object characters in the film labor to earn credits to buy, only to flush it when they get home so they can go buy another one. 😃

Yeah, I noticed that, it is a fantastic card, with lots of ‘easter eggs’.

I might be wrong Mr Ranger, I’ll post an image tonight, but it looks to me like actual skintones on the arm, and I think I have the correct sequence.

The channel registration is terrible on the print, like a lot of IBs, we should be able to minimise it, but probably not eliminate it entirely, and of course, it is a grain-fest coming from Techniscope. I haven’t had a close look, but it appears to be the same cut as the US sequence in the opening minutes, and not the weird ‘end at the start’ version, but I don’t currently have audio, so don’t know if the narrative is there.