poita

Are they 16mm reels?

Ah George, you old cyborg you.
https://youtu.be/iQrplFGlGFw?t=48s

Not really, but I guess you could say it is similar in as much as there is image training occurring.

I will write up an overview of the software next week if I can get onto it.
It is using deep learning, basically I am training the software with thousands of dirty/noisy images and clean images and then utilising the deep learning algorithms to clean up the shots.
There is a ton of prep at both ends before the algorithm kicks in, I’ll try and put together an explanation of how it all works that will make sense to people. I’m working on this on behalf of the company, so I won’t be able to share the code, but hopefully I can give enough detail to let others develop something similar themselves if it works well enough for production use.

The speeder shot is probably never going to look much better than Harmy has done with it, but if it proves the most popular, I’ll do it.

I am trying out some new software that we have written, and in my spare time (hah!) I am going to be testing it out on a few scenes, so I thought I may as well do something people want to see.

What scene from the original 1977 Star Wars would people most like to see restored?

Cast your votes here and I’ll pick one or two to use as the test and get everyone’s feedback as to the results.

Reel 2 is on the scanner now, so if all goes well, this reel will finish in about 11 hours time.

Reel-2 of ANH is on the scanner now.

Okay, I’ve gone into a bit of debt, but the Empire print has been purchased.

In other news, a very rare opportunity has come up to secure an unfaded Empire Strikes Back print, but I will really need help on this one.

It all looks a little soft due to the compression, but yes all of the original crawls are softer than the 1997 and onwards digitally created crawls.

The colour has not been done yet, just a basic black and white points adjustment to get it in the ballpark, and the flicker has not been adjusted yet either, it’s just as flickery as it was in the cinema in 1980.
Basically nothing has been done to that sequence I uploaded other than roughly adjusting the exposure. It will look quite different once restored, but I hope the sample gives you a good idea of how the print looks. I did have the print ultrasonically cleaned, so as prints go, it is very clean, but there is always still some dust and dirt and hairs that are wedges into the emulaion. Some are clearly in the negative, so I’m in too minds about cleaning that dirt digitally.

What are the file sizes of the two pieces you downloaded?

AllAboutThatSpace said:

Many thanks for your help, but I’m just getting a notice that the archive file is incomplete.
No worries, I’ll wait for future previews 😃
Wishing you all the best, poita!

I think it was the Director, I remember an interview where he talked about wanting it to look like the 1977 film, I think with the SE having the additions that look decidedly 90s, they wanted to get back closer to the original design and look of Star Wars. Or he just really wanted to watch the original on film and had the perfect excuse!

Looking forward to it.

Lucasfilm does have a 4K restoration of the SE, and tons of elements, but they had to send out for an IB print back in 1997 as well, so they may not have one in house, and all the others have faded to pink.

Very cool stuff. You should add some text in the video descriptions as to what you are up to.

BTW, I stumbled across your Vimeo page, there are some interesting colour experiments going on over there!

Lowry Digital Images hasn’t existed for ages now, since 2010 I think?
I do know that Disney did get a print when making Rogue One, they wanted it as reference to make sure they matched the look of the original Star Wars. It may have come from the LoC.
If the request was more recent than Rogue One, it might be for some other purpose though, which would be interesting.

Sorry, I hope it didn’t come off as a whine, or a sympathy pitch or something. I enjoy working on this stuff, it is my passion and the reason I got into the industry in the first place.
I was hoping to really just let people know why it takes ages.
I’d love to get 50 grand per movie then a restoration would take about 3 months, start to finish, but with it being the part-time third job that costs money instead of making money, it sometimes has to take the back seat.

Progress is happening, just a lot of it isn’t sexy ‘check out the pictures’ type progress. It is often just boring stuff like finishing and backing up a dust-busting pass, or finishing a backup, or working out a new Nuke script that can semi-automate finding artefacts created by the cleanup and removing them, that kind of thing. I tend to only post if there is something nice to look at, but it doesn’t mean nothing is happening during the quiet times. Progress is slow, but it is progressing.

Yes, it goes quiet here from time to time 😃
Sometimes a month or two can go by without an update, I try to only update if something worthwhile is happening.

My personal life can get a bit chaotic, I have ongoing health issues (which is a bit of an understatement) , I have 4 kids ranging from 5-17 years old, and the 12 year old is permanently at a cognitive age of around 18-24 months old, so free time is challenging, as is earning a living, as I am the primary carer for the kids.

Currently, I’m out of time and money, I have some paid restoration work this month that is eating around 16 hours a day, which is good to pay the rent, unfortunately restoration doesn’t pay very well, even at the commercial level, and the work is gruelling.

The last month or so has been particularly busy.
I’m recovering from a mild heart attack, and this month has seen the youngest need a tonsillectomy and adenoids removed, and the hospital is a 3 hour drive away, so it meant extra nights away, and the recovery was rougher than I’d hoped. I also do casual work to make ends meet, and I’ve had to take a few shift the last two months to feed the beasts.

My eldest is sitting her HSC exams this year (similar to the SATs or GCSE A-Levels) so a lot of the remaining spare time is spent helping her study and with assignments and essays, and the youngest needs stories at bedtime and isn’t at school until next year, so parenting takes up any non-working waking hours.
My 12 year old is fully-grown, so is the size of a fully grown woman, but has the temperament and abilities of a toddler aged 2 years or less in some areas. This is immensely challenging and time consuming, and creates a lot of safety issues for the 5 year old as you can imagine. When a ‘grown-up’ has a tantrum and lashes out if you take a toy off her, the results can be literally deadly to a small child, so managing them all can be, well, interesting to say the least.
She needs help toileting, bathing, with stairs, getting in and out of cars, pretty much everything you have to do for an 18 month old, and it will be that way forever sadly.

So my work on restoring films here comes in fits and starts. There are times when I am out of paid work, and can throw a reasonable amount of time and energy into it. Sometimes I get some better paid work and can sink some more funds into getting prints, getting them cleaned and scanned, so that stuff tends to happen in chunks as well.

Lately, equipment has been a real PITA. High end scanners are temperamental beasts, and the main unit had a focus motor problem, which took a while to get fixed, then the focus motor blew completely, which required the whole optical assembly to be removed and sent away. This creates a backlog on the commercial jobs and pushes the stuff here back a bit until the backlog is cleared.
Then sometimes the scanner unit is available, but physical exhaustion kicks in and you just can’t drag yourself to do it that night. (it all happens from midnight till dawn typically).
Cleaning a reel costs around US$200, and freight is annoyingly expensive as well, purchasing or renting the prints is also costly, and you always take a bit of a punt as to what condition the film will be in.

Scanning a reel at triple flash, with infrared at 4K full frame takes about 12 hours per 20 minute reel, and is around 4TB per reel, (and another 4TB to back it up) so it is a big undertaking of time and resources, and then sometimes the film will unspool due to a dodgy splice, or some crap will get in the gate and you have to rescan, or the scanner will just decide to be a recalcitrant old fart and not co-operate, and you have to wait for another night to scan that reel.
The restoration work once the scan is done then takes a huge amount of time and resources, just moving the files around can take ages. I’m currently waiting 12 hours for a file transfer to finish - backup two reels from my server to another hard drive so that I can clear enough space to load up the next scanned reel to start work on it.

So that is a long way around of saying that best laid plans sometimes go a bit off track, and that sometimes life and money get in the way, and things go quiet for a while.

At the moment, I am waiting on scanner access again to get the ANH SE scan finished, and I have five reels of a commercial restoration due in 3 weeks, and I’m going to be struggling to meet that deadline, but it will pay the rent, so I am working mostly on that. In the background I am transferring files around to make enough space so that I can get back to ESB as soon as that job is out the door.

Don’t expect to see much from me until May is done, then hopefully ANH might be scanned and I’ll have some time to get some progress on the original ESB.

Jedi Master Skywalker said:

Do you remember, when Disney requested a print of the original cut from Library of Congress why would they ask for it if they say “oh we don’t care about the OUT” so clearly something is happening is not why ask for the print. Here is a quote from reddit:

“For those unaware, the only thing Disney didn’t get when they bought Lucas Films back in 2012 was distribution rights to Episode 4. According to insiders, Disney has a 4k copy of the original cut of the film but can not release it. Now that Disney has bought all of 20th Century Fox, they now have full control of that movie and can release it to the public.”

Disney has all of the original elements for the 1977 Star Wars and has scanned all of the elements in 4K for archival purposes.
They would have absolutely no need of a LoC print, do you have a source for this?

Lucasfilm did at one stage try to retrieve the LoC prints and replace them with the Special Editions, the LoC refused.
Also when making the SE release, Lucas did dig out an IB Tech print and showed it to the colourists as reference for the SE, saying that the IB was the look he wanted to achieve. I’m wondering if these events may have gotten confused into the “Disney requested a print” story, as I can’t see a reason that Disney would need one.

I’m not saying the story is definitely wrong, but I’d be interested to know what the source is.

I’ve spoken again with people inside the Disney archival and restoration team, and they still say there is no interest internally in releasing the original versions, but that they have digitally scanned all of the elements that they have. There is talk internally of a 4K SE release however.

For MacOS, install "The Unarchiver:
https://theunarchiver.com

Then right click on the last part of the archive file (e.g. in this case, the second file of the download from wetransfer) and choose “Open With” and then choose “The Unarchiver”

Depending on the folder the RAR files are in, it might warn you that it doesn’t have access to the folder. Just click on the “SEARCH” button at the bottom right, and it should then work.
It might ask you for the folder to extract them to.

I have just tried this now on my old 2009 macbook, running El Capitan and The Unarchiver V3, and it works perfectly.

The CGI scenes in the SE were rendered out at just above 2K resolution, and then a film-out was done. The starfield in that shot would have had less resolution than the original shot.

However the stars may just have been eaten by the compression and lower resolution of the sample I posted, but in theory the CGI scenes are lower resolution than the rest of the movie, and less than the original.

I won’t be using any DNR as such.

Oops!

Fixed.

If you can get to Los Angeles, Cinnafilm is putting on a free film and video restoration event that is well worth attending.

It has a great session of restoring video ready for publishing on Netflix and other 4K streaming platforms, and Mike Verta will also be there to talk about his techniques for restoring his Legacy edition of Star Wars.

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/remastering-for-the-future-a-cinnafilm-image-processing-workflow-event-tickets-45318879990

The presentation from Ernie Sanchez will be good, he really knows his stuff.