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Macs Do Star Wars Dirty Work
bfl writes "The BBC is running a story about Lowry Digital Images and how they used 600 dual G5s and 400 TB of storage space to clean the dirt off of the old Star Wars reels, and upgrade the resolution to get them ready for their DVD release."
Movie dirt is a special kind of "noise" in images, from a statistical point of view. Thus special filters can be applied.
Apple has it on their own web site here.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
The MACS made Greedo shoot first!
Most people don't realize, much of the primary CG work done on the Star Wars films are done on Macs. But ILM signed contracts with SGI which prohibits them from acknowledging the contribution of any system other than SGI. Inside ILM, this contractual obligation is known as "the Jedi Clause." So the contribution of Macs and Mac users to these films go largely unrecognized.
Most films shot now are digitized, or shot digitally in the first place.
"Hey, you know what would be cool?"
"What's that?"
"These G5s are pretty cool...we should make a beowulf cluster of them!"
"Well, we're obscenely rich, so..."
"Yipee!"
Dude, that old article about the 378TB is so Sept 12. Now it's 400TB. Ergo: new article.
No, it's a conversion rate thing. 378TB American = 400TB UK.
Amazon has a list made up by Chuck Kahn of movies that have been cleaned up by Lowry.
l is t-browse/-/1X2DZ42QS8OVB/103-1368633-4717431
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/listmania/
I've picked up THX1138, Once upon a time in the west, North by Northwest, The Ghoul and of course Star Wars.
The results are INCREDIBLE. Except for some obvious dubbing with sound, Once upon a time in the west looks like it was filmed yesterday. So does THX1138!
I've tried finding the Lowry Digital Web site. But INCREDIBLY it seems like they don't have one! Seems strange. You would think they would have a web site telling people the films they have done so people might go out and buy them.
If somebody knows it....PLEASE post it!
Can someone elaborate on how shot noise applies to optical systems, specifically, cinematography? Since the original source material is conventional 'analog' film, at what point is the noise introduced? How is it introduced?
Well, it's all explained in the article. And you've got half the answer yourself. But I'll try to explain further...
(Yes I realize that film is not a pure analog format; the resolution being limited by the grain size of the emulsion - but at the same time, it's not what we consider digital.)
Film grain itself is a noise component. Film grains are nothing more than crystals sensitive to a particular light wavelength. In commonly used 35mm film stocks, there are three layers of emulsion - one red, one green, one blue. Think of the grains as "pixels", although they're somewhat randomly distributed, they're not all of a uniform size, and they're not all uniformly sensitive to light. The end result is that the minute differences between adjacent grains makes them easily discernible on a theatrical-size screen, and somewhat visible on a large TV set. They appear as noise.
Optical effects also involve compositing several layers of film on top of each other. According to the article, the light saber scenes were the worst. I'd imagine at that time, shooting a light saber duel probably involved three layers of film; the master shot and one optical shot for each light saber. Obviously this triples your noise and also softens the image. It can also introduce color casts because the light is being altered through each layer of film.
As films age, chemical reactions also cause color shifts in the grains. This can lead to even more noise.
Films also get just plain dirty over time. The Star Wars negatives have been handled a lot, so they're probably dirtier than most. 35mm not being very big, when you blow it up onto a theater screen or even a TV set, a small layer of dust or tiny particles of dirt will add a lot of crud to the image.
The software they used to clean up these films apparently works by comparing each frame of film to the frame before and the frame after, to see what's picture information and what's noise (random noise will be easy for a computer to pick out, because it will not match at all from one frame to the next). It should have no problem removing both film grain and dirt, as well as other types of noise.
I'd imagine they must have manually isolated each individual edit in the film to reduce errors, but this wouldn't have been that big a deal in the grand scheme of things. There's probably only maybe a couple thousand cuts per film (assuming a high average of 5-10 cuts per minute), so it wouldn't take more than a couple days for one person to do this.
The original versions of the films also didn't have the new editing, new scenes, new shots, all of which greatly diminished the pacing and believability of the film.
There's a reason they give Oscars out for editing. --It really doesn't take much to ruin an otherwise good work. A single nail standing up on a water slide can make the whole ride a lot less enjoyable. And the re-release versions of Star Wars had a whole hardware store's worth of junk added!
Every three minutes while watching that thing, I felt, at best that I was having to deliberately overlook stupidity, (like those new digital droids floating around Mos Eisley which it was clear from the actors' body language, were not really there and thus created a discordant effect), to my feeling like I was being stabbed when Luke Screamed while falling down the throat of Cloud City.
So yeah, if I was a kid today watching those lousy re-release versions of Star Wars, I'd also think my elders were doddery and out-dated for raving about them; that they needed a patronizing pat on the head and a, "There, there, old timer; I'm sure they seemed like nice films in your day."
The wide-screen, color and sound restored, but otherwise un-adultered LD copies from the mid nineties are the best versions available of the original trilogy. --There are yet to be any pirate copies of those ripped to DVD floating around, but there damned-well ought to be!
Some of you out there have the capability to create these. DO IT. Star Wars is a vital part of our culture, and what Lucas is doing to erase it is as insidious as any 'terrorism'. --If Phantom Menace hadn't sucked, there is a good chance we could have avoided being in Iraq today.
-FL