I think most people are aware that the recent Silver Screen Edition of Star Wars created by Team Negative One is technically a breech of copyright. Nobody is disputing that 20th Century Fox holds the legal copyright to the original film. But consider this. That same copyright law which prohibits the public from preserving the original version of the film is designed to last not only beyond the lifetime of people who were around when the work was published, our lifetimes, but also beyond the life expectancy of the film stock it was created on. In other words, by the time the copyright finally expires and the film enters the public domain, there may be no film stock left with which a preservation like this one can be done.
Monthly Archives: February 2016
70mm Empire Strikes Back in 4k
Download our raw scan of The Empire Strikes Back 70mm in 4k right here:
Yes, you read that right, But before you get too excited, I should point out that we only have about 5 seconds of the film.
Actually we may have a few more seconds from other parts of the film too, but only fragments. However, I wanted to post what we do have for a number of reasons. Firstly, it shows that we now have the equipment to scan a 70mm print (including the magnetic and optical audio tracks) so if you happen to have a 70mm print of Star Wars sitting in your garage that you don’t know what to do with, please let us know!
Tutorial, Stabilization with PF Clean
In this video, we use the Personal Learning Edition of PF Clean to demonstrate some of the ways you can stabilize footage using this software. If you watched our “How to clean up Team Negative One’s Grindhouse Empire Strikes Back” video, you may recall that I simply dropped the auto stabilize effect into the stack and boom, the clip stabilized. It’s important to realize that it’s not always going to be that simple:
Ordinarily, we would crop the soundtrack and sprocket holes before beginning any clean up, but by leaving it all in place it allows us to easily demonstrate some of the issues you may face in your real world usage. For example, after adding the areas and doing the manual stabilization, having the soundtrack in place makes it very obvious what is wrong at the end of the clip because it is a bright white line moving across the screen. If we had cropped it off, the same thing may still have happened, but black on black would make it harder to see. (I have seen the same sort of thing happen in many scenes in the film, but this just illustrates it perfectly.)
