Star Wars goes to 4K

Filip Plesha · December 5, 2004

It seems that this guy John Lowry knows what he is doing.

His company scans old films at 4K for making DVD releases and the 4K files are restored and provided back to studios.

The recend DVD edition of the original trilogy of Star Wars had this same treatment, and it seems that Lucas is going to archive these files.

It is nice to see that 4K resolution is starting to be taken seriously these days,

even for older titles.

It's kind of vierd though that they scanned everything at 4K, even the new digital ILM negatives from 1997 SE which probably have less than 2K resolution in them.

December 6, 2004

It's kind of vierd though that they scanned everything at 4K, even the new digital ILM negatives from 1997 SE which probably have less than 2K resolution in them.

Well, atleast they can rest assured that nothing has been missed. I mean, if I were in that position I think I'd scan it in at 4k aswell.

As I always say, you can take things off but you can't stick things back on.

Edited December 6, 2004 by Daniel J. Ashley-Smith

Filip Plesha · December 6, 2004

No, I was talking about the digital effect scenes that were added in 1997.

They were done by ILM at 2K , and then printed to film.

And now they took the same shots and scanned them at 4K. There is nothing to miss really since those negatives were recorded at 2K.

They used some special technique to sharpen those shots done with optical printers back in 70's/80's. It is based on some kind of combining of detail from multiple frames to fill in the gaps in the grain pattern to reduce grain and

put more detail than there actually was in a single frame.

It is actually the same trick your eyes play with you when you watch a movie in cinema. When you play the film at 24fps your brain combines multiple frames into images and you see more detail than there is in one frame. Same goes for interlaced video, same method. And now they are using it to actually reconstruct

sharper files. It's like "deinterlacing" film frames. Very interesting.

I wonder if the new Jabba is rendered in 4K..

Filip Plesha · December 7, 2004

I should have known...

the reports have been false, Lowry usually does work on all restorations at 4K, but

not for Star Wars. Lucas didn't give him the negatives. Instead, ILM scanned the footage in HD resolution, and sent it to Lowry for restoration.

I wonder if Lucas considers the HD data to be "archival".

It would be a shame for historical films like these to be limited to HD resolution

for the rest of human history.

I have also read an interview with Lucas.

He said that the good thing about cinema is not the resolution but the size of the screen. He thinks that with a good SD DVD player you can get better quality than

with a cinema print (even in resolution). I have never heard a filmmaker say such things. He speaks almost as an ignorant layman (sp?)

SD beating a film print, I have only heard such things on fanboy DVD forums spoken by early-teen-age kinds.

John Pytlak RIP · December 7, 2004

Most facilities offering scanning and recording (Digital Intermediate) services have demos showing the differences between SD, HD, 2K and 4K. It's easy to see the differences if you are paying attention to image quality. :rolleyes:

As far as 35mm projection quality, the SMPTE 35-PA (RP40) projector alignment film used to only be calibrated to 80 line pairs per millimeter. The most recent version had to have even higher resolution charts to show the improvement with the new state-of-the-art projection lens designs used in theatres today. The projectable image area of a 35mm print is 20.96mm (0.825 inches) wide. So 80 line pairs per millimeter resolution on a 35mm print is 80x2x20.96=3354 lines of horizontal resolution on the screen.

Recent work by image scientist Dr. Roger Morton and his team at Kodak shows that higher resolution scanning is not only important for resolution, but even more for avoiding aliasing artifacts with the scanner pixels:

http://www.electronicipc.com/journalez/det...=45390011120508

An Introduction to Aliasing and Sharpening in Digital Motion Picture Systems

By Roger R. A. Morton, Michelle A. Maurer, and Christopher L. DuMont, SMPTE Journal, May 2003

http://www.electronicipc.com/journalez/det...=45390011120705

Relationships between Pixel Count, Aliasing, and Limiting Resolution in Digital Motion Picture Systems

By Roger R. A. Morton, Christopher L. DuMont, and Michelle A. Maurer, SMPTE Journal, July 2003

Edited December 7, 2004 by John_P_Pytlak

Max Jacoby · December 7, 2004

I have also read an interview with Lucas.
He said that the good thing about cinema is not the resolution but the size of the screen. He thinks that with a good SD DVD player you can get better quality than

with a cinema print (even in resolution). I have never heard a filmmaker say such things. He speaks almost as an ignorant layman (sp?)

I think George Lucas has some serious issues. He has always had a technolgy fetish, but this is getting out of hand.

Edited December 7, 2004 by audiris

Phil Rhodes · December 7, 2004

Hi,

I'm getting really depressed with having to shoot SD all the time. I'm probably not terribly good at it, but I have a half-reasonable component studio monitor here and it does show every last little glitch and blemish. A 16:9 frame is about 8" high on it, so carefully-mastered DVDs like "Swordfish" look pretty respectable. But that's on a screen 8" high!

Phil

Matt Pacini · December 7, 2004

I think that Lucas has made the complete transformation from artist to corporate businessman.

The stuff he says these days about film technology, have nothing whatsoever to do wiith quality, and everything to do with milking as much money as possible by stamping a "new and improved!" sticker on all his recycled ideas and already-seen-by-everyone-on-earth films.

We already got Star Wars with new FX added, now it's 4K, next it's gona be SD DVD's projected in theaters?

No thank you.

It's all just another way to get die-hard fans (which I'm not) to pay AGAIN AND AGAIN for the same thing, by claiming it's new and improved somehow.

I'm simply not interested in anything Lucas does anymore that includes the words "STAR WARS" in it, and frankly, I have no idea why anyone else is, except perhaps 12 year old kids.

Matt Pacini

Filip Plesha · December 7, 2004

Actually It's not 4K, it was a misinformation circulating the on-line communities.

It was HD.

SD DVD looks great at it's original resolution (if you view it in a 720 pixel window on a computer), but the compression actualy makes it look bad when it is

uprezed (like computer fullscreen or a plasma screen, or a projector).

Usually digital images that are uncompressed and pixel to pixel sharp, like CG renderings, or downrezed photos can withstand 200% enlargement (with antialiasing filter of course so that the pixels are not visible) and still look like

a bit softer digital image. But DVD has too much compression and is not pixel to pixel sharp in the first place.

You know a lot of technology consumers don't know ANYTHING about how electronic imagin works, and a lot of them seem to think that if they spit out enough money for an expensive huge TV set, that they will get a wall sized sharp image. Same goes for DVD's , they seem to think that the DVD disk is a magical

crystal with unlimited resolution in it, and that the DVD player determines the quality of the image. So if they spend enough money on the DVD player, they'll have a cinema quality presentation.

Now I understand that consumers may believe such a thing, but Lucas is

a man that has been sitting behind the camera for decades, and by now he must understand basics behind imaging both analog and digital.

And it's not that he is selling these comments to the audience only.

He actually has hist home cinema set around a DVD player, and he believes

that he is getting cinema quality out of it.

Matt Pacini · December 8, 2004

".... He actually has hist home cinema set around a DVD player, and he believes
that he is getting cinema quality out of it.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

I don't believe that for a moment.

Lucas knows better.

He's lying, it's that simple.

He always floats these kinds of statements about 6-12 months before he's going to release another "Star Wars" film in a new inferior format, that requires him to spread some PR BS about it in advance so everyone who doesn't know better will actually think it's gonna be better, not worse, and throw more cash in his direction.

Matt Pacini