poita

Spaced Ranger said:

Oldfan said:

I think considering that 3D is doing somewhat well out there, ... this was a missed opportunity by the studio to use 3D to create the true curved feel of the Cinerama format. They could have mapped out the "smilebox" type of screen, but in 3D, requiring the viewer to use their 3D glasses.

That is an excellent idea, Oldfan! Long Live 3D!
But let's not stop there. I say, as the Cinerama screen of necessity reduces the movie's size, fill in all that new black space with (for example) ... the Vinterpalatset Cinerama (Stockholm) or some other opulent cinema of your choice, viewing from the seat of your choice:

[16x9 sized example would fill your widescreen TV]

Sounds like a great application for Microsoft's new illumiroom technology.

They can fade in a number of ways, particular stocks tend to have particular issues.

The 'red' prints you see are usually a result of the Cyan and Yellow dyes in the film fading away, leaving just the magenta layer, which is why they look 'pink', that layer is the only one left with any information in it.

Sometimes all layers fade leading to a brown looking print (easier to restore) and other times the magenta layer fades out leaving you with a greenish looking print.

So the prints don't usually 'become a different colour' as such, i.e. the cyan layer doesn't drift towards being orange or anything like that. It is usually one or more dye layers fading which changes the look of the film as the other dye layers have more information in them (have faded less) than the ones that have faded. So when you get a very Magenta looking print, the other colour information has often completely faded away, making restoration close to impossible (i.e. you have to find other potentially lower quality sources for the other colour layers)

The imbibition process leads to very stable dyes, so typically an IB print will have very little fade.

I've never heard of an IB print fading; I've had trailers from the 50's that look perfect, and there's stuff dating back to the 30's on nitrate that's supposed to look outstanding.  IB matrices can widely vary though.  I've had 3 or 4 prints of Thunderball over the years, and only 1 had perfect color registration.  The others were off.  I don't think that was due to fading, but more due to processing.

They definitely fade, just nowhere near as fast as other stocks. in 1996 I had  two IB prints to work on for a restoration,  both struck one after the other in 1972, one had faded noticebaly more than the other. One had been kept in a temp controlled film archive, the other in the general office area in a desk. If kept well, the fading over a decade or three is pretty minimal, but eventually all things chemical change with time.

You also get considerably colour differences between prints done at different times, so they are not the be-all and end-all of colour references. You could have three different people print from a neg and get three different results. IB prints tend to be more contrasty too.

However, for Star Wars, an IB print will be the closest we can get to knowing roughly what the colour was like back in 1977. If kept well it won't have changed much. It would have looked a bit different at every cinema anyway, but it is a great starting point for colour restoration. I'm very excited by the prospect of getting to know those colours again after the odd colour pallete of the bluray releases.

We are lucky there is an imbibition print of Star Wars at all. Star Wars would have been the last big release to get an IB print I would wager.

Technicolor had already stopped producing IB prints at all in the early 70s, All Star Wars IB prints were produced at the one remaining facility in the world, in the UK. They shut down in 1978 and sold the gear to China. Had that happened a year earlier, there would be no IB prints of Star Wars for us to try and find.

Chicken Boo said:

I thought Mike Verta's version was from a tech IB. If he can scan it, there must be a way.

I think I remember someone quoting it was costing him about $40,000 a scan. You can always find a way if you have enough money (e.g. book out the whole suite for private usage if you can operate the equipment). Plus, he has vowed to never, ever release the full scan at any resolution, and has shown that he is as good as his word in the past re this.

But there is no *legal* way to do it in the US, and scanning houses are *big* businesses usually attached to bigger businesses. They also are part of the movie industry and companies using a scanning house need to know 100% that their intellectual property is being protected when they send their film there to be scanned. They want *no* chance of their scan ending up in someone elses hands.

Doing a bootleg scan and having it found out would completely kill their business even if there was never any legal action. If legal action was launched, the fines are unbelievably huge and there is room for gaol (jail) terms in the legislation.

Not many people would be willing to take that risk with their business, their employees livelihoods and their possible removal of freedom to pick up a dropped bar of soap without fear.

Every cinema experience would have been quite different depending on the print, film stock, the size of the screen, number of foot lamberts, the type of screen, its colour, its reflectivity, the amount of ambient light and even where you sat in the cinema etc.

In the 70s in Australia, nearly all projectors were carbon-arc projectors. That is, they work kind of like a welder, two carbon rods are held near earch other and the 'arc' of elecrtricity between them provides the light for the projector. You had to keep slowly winding the carbon rods inwards towards each other as they burned away, and replace them sometimes in between reels. Carbon arc rods have a pretty fixed colour temperature, this is easily catered for.

Actually, regardless of how they are stored, IB prints do fade, all film stock fades no matter what it is. A 30+ year old IB print will look a lot better than other prints, but will still have shifted somewhat, and it depends how it was stored, how many times it was shown, if it was lubricated correctly etc.

There have been times that restorers have had to go to the IB print. For example The Battle of Britain, when they went to the colour separations to make the DVD they found they were in appalling shape and not fit for use. So they found a truly prisitine IB print and Ted Turner used that for the transfer.

I recently stumbled across that actual print of TBoB that was used to make the DVD, it was up for sale for $5000, and is the best quality print I think I have ever seen.

You can get very good results scanning a good IB print, it won't have the dynamic range of the original negative, but if it was printed well then you can get close. These days it is not usually necessary to do multiple scan passes if scanning a print, the dynamic range and SNR of current sensor technology, especially those from Sony is so good that you can get it all in a single pass by using the correct gamma curves, or scanning in high bit depth and using a LUT. As the dynamic range of a print is already compressed, you can usually get it all in one go, unless it is unusually dense, which would only be the case if you shot extremely underexposed.

With a neg the dynamic range is so high that it may in some cases still make sense to do a multiple pass scan.

I'll have to grab a copy of How The West Was Won, and take a look at the doco on it.

There are plenty of 2001 film prints available as a colour reference.

That is an interesting idea, I'll try creating a cinerama 3D depth map and simulating it. I think it would look odd on a 3DTV, but on a 3D projector it would be interesting.

Slenderman!

I know there is a good quality 16mm print available as well.

Check out Match Point, probably his best film.

The intesity of the light flash for each colour is fully adjustable, this is true whether using the mono sequential flash or the colour single flash, as the light source is made up of an array of high intensity Red, Green and Blue LEDs.

My brother will be over there at the same time, I may get him to drop something over as well.

We should have the first Prague OT Fest.

Screencaps or video clips?

If you scan in mono you get RGB separations that have more resolution per channel. If you scan in colour you get 1080P luma, but the colour resolution is split up between R-G-B.

It just means that in theory you get more colour detail if you scan each channel separately in mono, but it is extra work as you have to recombine each frame.

Unless you are running some heavy duty gear, I would probably stick with the colour scans, it probably exceeds what is there in this print anyway.

There are a few reasons why that wouldn't work, Apart from whether that scanner would work for cine film at all, which I doubt, but assuming it did,  it takes around 17 seconds per frame, that would equate to 816 hours to scan 2 hours of film.

So at 8 hours a day, it would take around 100 days, assuming you did nothing else.

Even time considerations aside, I personally wouldn't put a valuable print anywhere near something like that, and I doubt the internal software would identify the frame boundaries etc. correctly.

BTW, does anyone have the Disney Singalong Songs Laserdisc that has the SOTS clip on it?

If you would prefer, I can scan the film in sequential mono, i.e. the scanner captures three images per frame to a mono sensor, pulsing the RED, GREEN and BLUE lights separately to give you a separation transfer.

This gives the highest colour fidelity possible, but means you do have to reassemble the colour so to speak.

Let me know, it takes longer obviously, but I can scan it that way.

nightstalkerpoet said:

Starting to worry about the legitimacy of this - I definitely believe the original Reddit stuff, but is there anything indicating mikeaz123 is in fact the owner? (I mean no disrespect, but am simply trying to apply some cautious scrutiny.)

The original poster there was: http://www.reddit.com/user/Mustacheafficianado who appears to have materialized and vanished in a single day or two.

There IS a person on reddit with the same username as here who seems unconnected: http://www.reddit.com/user/Mikeaz123

I've also seen no direct acknowledgement in relation to Poita's offer, which seems quite strange to me, considering it is a realistic potential option. 

I hope that there is something going on behind the scenes here that I'm not privvy to, but... I'm slightly unsure. Would rather be cautious than get my hopes up too high.

Jeez guys, don't be such Negative Nellies, and be nice!

If Mike wants to unspool his print and wear it as a hat, he can. It is his print. Mike did get back to me, and is the real deal, either that or I am also part of the conspiracy and the print is actually footage of alien autopsies we have been doing down in area51 when we aren't trolling SW fans ;^)

nightstalkerpoet said:

Poita, has he contacted you yet? REALLY excited for this :)

Not yet, maybe he doesn't have PMs turned on?

Dunedain said:

Which is why it's best to handle it with a private scan using the best equipment possible. So a 1080p or 2k scan with maximum color precision using either film guard or a wet gate is the best option. That way the prints are in the hands of dedicated Star Wars fans who will handle them with the greatest care and scan them as well as can be done on equipment that doesn't cost $100,000+ (that 4k machine for $350,000 is nice :) ).

It would be one of the most important events ever in the history of Star Wars preservation to get these prints scanned in at 1080p or 2k with high color accuracy in an uncompressed file format for the best quality possible. I really hope this can be arranged. I'd be willing to kick in some to help cover costs. :) Any donations should all be handled through private communications and low profile.

I have upgraded my equipment this week.

Who needs a car anyway?

I have one of those cards here, had no luck under Windows7 64 bit and virtualdub, it bluescreened me everytime I hit capture. Maybe you could drop me a PM as I would like to try the card without having to drop back to XP.

If anyone wants to discuss options with me, please drop me a PM.

Mavimao said:

Poita! You're awesome! Not to derail the thread or anything, but I've been curious about those 8mm prints you won... (that was you, right??)

Yes, but send me a PM if you want more details, let's not derail the thread :)

I'll see if I can hunt you down an SE print.