Damn, I knew Zion was slacking off again....wink wink




And shoot me for going off topic here but....I would like to offer a little encouragement to the X0 team by saying,
I swear that happy monkeys would fly out my butt if I could watch the X0T on my 56" Hitachi during Christmas break.....come on guys you can do it....

WELCOME TO THE FORUMS!I know I'm no expert, but I can see clear image flaws which have resulted after your combination - with ghosting as the main problem. Here are some examples:







Interesting results nonetheless.

Boris, the problem is with the warping of each version. When you overlay one on top of the other, they never line up exactly right. That's what all this morphing talk is about. It's not just some crazy Power Ranger business.


LOL

boris: Thanks! I thought I mentioned it clearly in my first post, but I am fully aware of these alignment errors, and the only way to remove them is to do a proper warp of one of the elements. That's the next thing I will try when I find some spare hours one evening.

Thanks for the comments everyone, looks like this is a very popular issue

cbaka: the link to my website is in my signature

Marvolo: I'll look into a After FX comp as well. You will need the Color Finesse plugin that comes with After FX to do an auto correction, otherwise everything should be standard AFX filters.

ADigitalMan: Yoda, eh? I'll take a look at that as soon as I get my GOUT DVDs Thanks for the fan-edits by the way!

Darth Lars: Substituting the loaders with one or several HD sources are no problem. Fusion is pretty much resolution independent, which makes it nice to switch back an forth between different sizes. By the way, is there any HD material available from the old trilogy? Trailers, anything?

THX: I'll give you some screenshots where the dark aren't kept as black. The noise has a horrible compression-like pattern, but since I haven't seen it in motion yet it might not be that bad when playing. However, there's not much extra detail in there. The subtle dark grays in Darths cape are lost forever in the new SE colour grade...

Laserman: Is it really necessary to do a tracked warp? I would imagine the warp to stay coherent within each shot, otherwise there would be a wobble, right? I reckon it should be enought to do an initial warp on one shot, and then tweak it on a per shot basis, offsetting the image before feeding it into a warp node. But of course I haven't got the bonus of experience here, so... But Fusion is great, by the way One of the reasons I picked it instead of Shake is because it runs After Effects plugins, which is a great bonus. It could be a little better on memory handling, but at least it compensated by being fast.

I will bring you an update when I get back from Berlin after next sunday.

Cheers,
Rune

Looking forward to seeing what you come up with next Rune.


For reference, here are some preliminary shots I did about four months ago. No warping or color correction here, just a straight crop and merge of the X0 DC chroma and DarkJedi SC luma (merged image is on bottom):


http://img146.imageshack.us/my.php?image=merge14ku.jpg


http://img127.imageshack.us/my.php?image=merge28gl.jpg


http://img139.imageshack.us/my.php?image=merge39kv.jpg


http://img139.imageshack.us/my.php?image=merge43ws.jpg

As you can see, the alignment is off. But this technique has the potential for some outstanding results if done properly.

As I said, these were PRELIMINARY shots I made before I had access to the X0 capture of the SC. Of course our SC capture looks much better. And cleanup of the SC is a major part of our work right now as well, so don't read too much into how "dirty" the SC looks here. What I wanted you to notice in these shots was the increased level of detail, the recovery of stars, recovery of overblown whites, and the elimination of ghosting - all flaws apparent throughout the DC and GOUT versions.

What if the 2004 version was digitally stabalized reducing camera wobble, and the OUT wasn't?

MoveAlong - I've been thinking about your TV caps and I think I may have figured out what they've done. They've squashed the picture for 16x9 so that people who watch it in 4x3 mode (and lets face it, so many clueless viewers will do this) have about the same picture distortion! That's the explination, I'm sure of it.

Sorry about my explanations, english is not my first language.

With wobble I mean that the information within the frame is shifted in relation to each other, like distortions under water, and that this relative shifting differs from one frame to the next. If the movie was doing something like that it would be very obvious. That's why I questioned the method of tracking several areas of the frame, instead of a single location (the stabilization you need if the frame is just shifting). I would assume the warping that is in the frame to be lens-distortions from the old telecine (at least that's what I think I see), and perhaps some corner squeezing in order to get more of the image inside the safe frames.

Some noise-reduction routines and DVD compression can produce an effect similar to wobble, making the dark areas lag one frame behind the rest of the image. But I haven't examined the movies enough to confirm that particular effect.

Rune

And now what I saw in my mind is shown to you all:





I can't believe they'd do such a shoddy broadcast!

In photoshop you can record an action (I forgot how but it's very simple). Then you can choose file > automate > batch and select the recorded action and apply it to a whole lot of images.

EDIT: Recording an action:
Make sure the action window is visible (select window > actions).
Open the image(s) you want to correct.
Create a new action

Record the action/correct the image.
After that you can use this recorded action for the batch option.

Some pretty bad burn marks visible on those frames...

DE are you just messing around with this just for the heck of it or are you trying to figure out a good way to use it for your release?

You could probably automate it on a scene by scene basis using a combination of curves and B/C.