Usenet users will be able to find it soon as well. I watched it last night and it looks fantastic.
Harmy said:
zeropc said:
at the end it's still a different thing what you see on set and what you see in the finished product.
Well, exactly - and what you're seeing in cinemas, through digital projection, is pretty much what is on what would be considered the equivalent of the o-neg in digital film making, so the fact that something is scanned from the o-neg doesn't mean that you have to get lobster-men and hoe makeup if the restoration is done sensitively.
The difference in this case is that the makeup crews and lighting guys are crafting the 'neg' with digital production in mind, the movies of the 70s were counting on the 35mm print and the generations to get to it to have certain properties.
If you scan the Star Wars neg, the makeup will look overdone and the matte paintings will stand out like dog's balls. This is a lot of the reason the BD needs to be despecialised in the first place.
A restoration from the neg in Star Wars would be quite a different procedure, and you would end up with a film in a way it had never really been seen before. So not really a restoration so much as a recreation. You could recover all the details in the shadows that are on the neg and remap them so that all that detail could be seen. But of course, you are then changing the directorial intent of that scene. For example, those areas may have been dark and relatively featureless to lead the eye to stay focused on the action in the scene that the director wanted you to focus on.
You could of course scan the neg digitally, and then use digital tools to get back to something that looked very much like a 'really good print', maybe a bit sharper and more detailed, but you would effectively be correcting to a print anyway.
This is kind of what Harmy's project would be doing, and there is nothing wrong with that at all, it is just yet another option for people to enjoy the movies they love in a different presentation, and currently still the *only* way to enjoy the original movies on a high definition screen.
The argument there was that you could scale up an LD and it would look as good as film, which was nonsense. A 35mm print could resolve more detail than the current BD, it is just that the ones printed in 1977 don't, and weren't meant to show that level of detail.
If you used the same neg elements that were used to make the BD, but scanned them at 8K and then printed to 35mm via a laser process, the 35mm would have way more detail than the BD.
The existing prints of Star Wars don't show some of the details that the BD does, it doesn't mean that any 35mm prints cannot resolve greater than 1080 lines.
Plus, as said before, the prints were always designed not to have that detail, it wasn't desired. Had they wanted to, even at the time they could have made a print that held a lot more detail.
But for Star Wars, the point is moot, the prints and the BD are all we have, no one is getting a hold of the negs any time soon. Which is just fine, if you want to see how Star Wars looked in '77, you soon will.
Joel said:
msycamore said:
Do you really want a film look like a 4k scan from the original negative, when nothing close to that was ever seen in theaters?
There is an assumption here that the print is the intended product, which isn't totally accurate. Just because people don't see the O-Neg in a theater doesn't mean that the print is the ultimate viewing experience.
The O-Neg is the intended finished product, not an unfinished product waiting to be somehow "corrected" by generational loss.
To make an audio analogy, HD audio releases come from the master tapes because that is as close to the original event as possible. They don't come from a recording of the released vinyl or cassette whether those were the intended release formats or not.
So to answer your question: Yes - I, personally, want to see the O-neg scanned in 4K because I want a document that is as close to the original event as I can get and that has suffered as little generational loss as possible.
Actually, the assumption is correct.
This is why Leia looks like she had the make-up gun set to whore in the bluray releases and why we have lobster-men and other weird colour anomolies.
In the 70s and 80s when working on film, we were conscious of what film stock we were using and what stock was expected for the theatrical prints and how many generations down they would be.
So makeup had to 'overdo' the makeup by a known quantity (talk to any makeup people from that era and they will now all about exactly how that red colour rouge will end up looking like pale peach on a release print), the costumes were chosen for how they would look on the release print, not how they would look on set, as was the lighting and props and everything else.
The good crews would know that everyone in this shot needs to look a bit candy coloured to achieve the required colour pallete on the theatrical print. They also know what detail will be lost, so where detail is important, where extra detail is required and where it can be softened down.
The answer print was often what they were working towards, but good DoPs and crews would often work towards the theatrical print as being how they wanted the film to look, and shoot accordingly.
Enter film scanners and computers that can extract *all* of the data from the neg, and change its characteristics endlessly and deliver that colour gamut and sharpeness directly to a digital screen, and what the original film-makers intended to be seen vs what *can* be displayed changes immensely.
It is exciting in some ways to see detail that has never been seen before, and interesting. It is also not what was seen at the film's release or even in the director's screening room.
This leads to interesting problems, leia looking like a hooker, Luke looking like a wax dummy, some effects shots looking dodgier because you can now peer into the shadows etc.
It is difficult from a restoration point of view, that information was on the negative, so should be preserved, but it may never have been intended to be seen, or at least seen that way.
Much like Jurassic Park which was shot open matte. The effects shots are all in wide, but the live action is full frame. The film was never meant to be viewed that way, but if you scan the neg, that is what you get.
It is interesting to watch, but it isn't how the film was shown at the time, or intended to be.
Both are great to have, but for me personally, the best viewing experience of Star Wars would be a scan that was cleaned up to the point that it would be equivalent to a first day screening on a really great print.
As Harmy said, in some ways the BD has more detail, but it is also missing a lot of detail from the original movie, the grain, the correct colours, the correct gamma and the 'look' that the original movie was designed to have. There was a resurgence in the late 70s to go for that softer 1930s look in film, the crews on Star Wars were trying to achieve that look (it is mentioned in many crew interviews) and that 'detail' is totally missing from the BDs.
I'll be offline for about a week or two, if anyone needs to contact me please use my direct email.
drngr said:
poita said:
At 4K you are looking at about 20TB per film, minimum, the storage alone, even at the end of 1995 when prices dropped to $300 per GB it would have cost around 6 million dollars to store a single 4K scan of the film, and the computers of the time would really not been able to handle it.
Snow White was restored in 4K in 1993. I believe the Cineon system relied heavily on tape storage.
Yes it was, I was at Siggraph that year for the presentation, I remember Disney stating that the storage alone (5TB) was just over 10 million dollars.
And that is 1993 dollars, which is 16million 2013 dollars, and that doesn't include the cineon and operator costs.
http://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=10000000&year1=1993&year2=2013
It is a shame that they didn't do a 4K scan of Star Wars at the time, but understandable, the total scanning cost alone would easily have been tens of millions of dollars, a big spend. It doesn't seem that long ago, but in 1993 VHS was king and DVD didn't even exist yet...
Thanks Gomu.
There is very little difference in resolution between 2K and 1080P.
I think the restorations and SEs were just done 10 years too early.
Remember the 2K scans were circa 1995, and a 9GB HDD was $2400.
At 4K you are looking at about 20TB per film, minimum, the storage alone, even at the end of 1995 when prices dropped to $300 per GB it would have cost around 6 million dollars to store a single 4K scan of the film, and the computers of the time would really not been able to handle it.
By 2005, storage was down to 70c per gigabyte, suddenly that meant storing a film at 4K was 'only' $14,000.00 worth of storage.
So in 1995, it wasn't so much being short sighted as not really being possible to do much more than they did from a cost and practicality point of view. In march 95 the Pentium 120MHz processor was Intel's fastest chip. Think about the processing power of that beast for a few minutes :) Most people were running Windows 3.1 or DOS in 95, the big boys had Silicon Graphics workstations, but they weren't drastically faster than the Pentiums by this point.
There is a good argument for Disney going back to the negative again and commisioning a new scan, it costs peanuts today compared to 1995 and the quality is so much better.
Heck, I just shelled out $3000 for storage , and I earn $28,000 a year. Disney could afford the time and money to get an archival quality scan of the three original films.
I no longer have that clip, perhaps someone can repost it that downloaded it.
170KY=19TB for anyone doing conversions.
That is correct, it is precisely one Yowza per frame.
Which makes each film around 170 kiloyowzas, which is a lot of hard disc space.
There will be some coming. Each frame comes in at about 110MB so sharing video is a bit of a problem online with my upload speeds.
I am away for about a week or so, but will hopefully be back after that and be able to get back into it again. A good friend of mine contracted meningitis, and unfortunately went into a coma and isn't coming back out of it. I will be away dealing with it for a while.
It's a reminder to make the most of every day.
A lot of people are working really, really hard, and investing a lot of our own money to get Star Wars on 35mm preserved.
It takes enourmous amounts of (personal) time and money, I can't count the hours and don't want to count the dollars that have been put into 35mm preservation of these films.
If the wait seems too long, then one can always start up their own effort, you just have to track down and buy some prints, build or buy a film scanner, somewhere around 80TB of HDDs (say around $3000 worth), build a computer that can handle working with 100MB per frame and dedicate most of your free time to it.
Then you need to go through all 173,000 frames (for each film) make sure none are missing and match the colour to the print, and fix any bad damage. Then sort out the sound track and synch it, and then sort out the best way to get the 30TB or so of film down to something that someone could watch on their home TV. And all that is just to be able to deliver a very rough watchable print, not a cleaned up one.
Anyone can do it, and perhaps someone out there could do it faster, so by all means give it a shot if you want a faster result.
I'm not being harsh, anyone really can have a go at doing this sort of thing themselves, but if you haven't then criticising the time it takes is not really all that productive. It takes more time than you could imagine. Just moving a capture of one reel from one hard drive to another can take many many hours to simply just copy the file. Waiting for anything can be frustrating, but it is even more frustrating working on something huge and it taking longer than you would like.
Puggo - Jar Jar's Yoda said:
That is extremely clever! I'd have to think about how to automate the sync, but it's a great idea.
Aw shucks....
As you fully appreciate, the pain with trying to get an audio capture to match the film frame capture is greater than.... well, more pain than you can imagine!
I figure as long as we have one 'tick' per frame, we could automate the audio stretch/shrink in some way to align them, as long as we keep the start-frame the same, and don't have any dropped frames.
Puggo, with the audio, I popped a hall effect sensor and a magnet on the main drive of the projector, and made a simple circuit to have a 'sound pulse' with each frame trigger, recorded onto another audio track at the same time that the main audio was being captured. That way I would have a 'click' per frame.
I figured I could then use that click track to adjust the audio automagically to match the film capture as there would be a reference track for adjusting the audio.
I never got around to testing it out though on a finished capture. The clicks are in the audio file, I just never got onto working out how to then adjust the captured audio to sync, but it might be an idea that could work.
negative1 said:
russs15 said:
606 days old in the newsgroups.......
any non newsgroup links out there?
can't do those... more like spleen or
file sharing would be good..
thanks..
later
-1
Send me a PM, I can help you out.
Oh absolutely, at any given screening there would have been extra dust and hair for all to enjoy :)
A full aperture 2K scan is 2048 × 1556, but it depends on the AR on the film as to what you get out the other side. If it is flat/scope/super35 etc. changes how many pixels you end up with, as does whether you are capturing sprocket holes and soundtrack in the frame which reduces the picture-area resolution.
A bayer filter does have that 50%/25%/25% split of GRB, but in practice the resolution is better than that for each channel because of the overlapping of the bayer mask over multiple photosites. It can lead to false colour sometimes though.
Unfortunately there is often dirt and hairs that was in the *original* print that got photographed onto the Super8 print it was taken from, so the wetgate doesn't help much with that.
Cleaning the film physically and then running a wetgate does reduce the scratches and clean off pretty much everything else, but doesn't help with emulsion scratches (the green ones) or photographed dirt :)
It doesn't really matter, there would have been different gate weave on every projector that ever showed Star Wars, once gate weave is removed, it looks dead/non-film to me, but it is a personal preference thing.
I personally wouldn't remove any gate weave. I'd track it, stabilise the footage to do any cleanup etc. and then put the gate weave back at the end using the tracking data.
One more before I go to bed.
AntcuFaalb said:
Hey, it's me. said:
AntcuFaalb said:
I can think of many sillier films that deserve preservation as well.
I just have trouble understanding why someone would enjoy ROTJ less. It's a popcorn-flick just like TESB.
Four words.
Sy Snootles, Max Rebo.
1983, the way it was supposed to be:
Nope. Something else.