Info: GOUT PAL DVD Vs 'Pyramid' PAL LD - screenshot comparison

Today I finished the comparison between the GOUT PAL DVD (color corrected) VS ‘Pyramid’ PAL LD (with and without color corrections).

The GOUT PAL DVD was extracted and then color corrected; I decided to follow some hints found here and I took the “THX Wow” as reference, done “by eye”, because not all the scenes found in the “THX Wow” could be corrected using just one correction - about 8 on 10 of the selected scenes have now almost the same colors. The color correction was made with a VirtualDub filter, taking the red and green at about 110% and saturation at 125%.

The ‘Pyramid’ PAL LD was captured at 744 horizontal lines and then cropped to 720, to fill the screen; the height of both clips are set at 376 pixel, to allow the LD picture and titles to stay in the screen. The capture settings was the best match I could achieve, after tweaked few hours yesterday, but far from perfection.

To perfectly match the two clips, I added several black frames to the ‘pyramid’ capture at the reel join, but also added three black frames to the GOUT.

At the end I used the ColourLike AviSynth filter, so to make the GOUT the reference used to color correct the ‘pyramid’ LD. Sometimes the colors are very similar, others are really different.

The screenshots will follow soon.

DVNR affected scenes

Here you are some scenes affected with the infamous DVNR on GOUT, but obviously DVNR-free in the 'pyramid' LD.

COMPARISON 1

Two consequential frames - the robots seems "disassembled" in the GOUT but only shaked in the second picture's LD capture. The colors are not satisfactory to me here.

COMPARISON 2

This is the (in)famous "four-eyed stormtrooper" scene - as you could see in the GOUT. Colors in the ColourLike version is a bit better than the former, but not so much - it is really better in the THX PAL LDs.

COMPARISON 3

Another example of bad DVNR... Here the fourth picture has a good color compared to the color-corrected GOUT.

COMPARISON 4

Maybe the most known example of bad DVNR... look in partcular at the dude legs and the tower on the left. Another time the colors are quite different in this example.

Waiting for your comments, but please do not quote this post, to avoid an infinite lenght thread due to the pictures, but instead refer to the comparison number. Thanks!

Clipped white scenes

Many fans (I was one of them) are not aware of the fact that, apart the DVNR, the GOUT has also another problem, the white is clipped - too high level - and this fact "clear out" some details.

COMPARISON 5

Look at the GOUT: many details are lost, but intact in the untouched LD capture - but lost again in the ColourLike picture. Most of them are present in the last picture, and the colors are not really bad. I know this is only a frame and normally pass unnoticed, but now I *know* it has clipped whites, and you too ;-)

COMPARISON 6

Note the white droid's top of the head  - no details at all in the GOUT Vs the LD captures... the colors now are better, not really far from the DVD - taking in account the untouched capture.

COMPARISON 7

Another explosion, and this time two alive and one dead stormtrooper are "erased" from the GOUT. The last picture restore them with a nice color.

COMPARISON 8

This is a rare case where the GOUT is better than the LD, but the explosion this time is yellow and not white! Washed out colors on the ColourLike...

Waiting for your comments, but please do not quote this post, to avoid an infinite lenght thread due to the pictures, but instead refer to the comparison number. Thanks!

Other scenes

A selection of some other scenes to see the effect of the color filter and overlay.

COMPARISON 9

The last picture has the best colors of the three versions - not identical to the GOUT, but really similar

COMPARISON 10

Also this time the last picture has the better colors. The third is not bad, but too washed colors.

COMPARISON 11

This time the untouched LD capture has the best colors - then the ColourLike and overlay have both wrong colors.

COMPARISON 12

Here the GOUT clearly wins! I think the LD has these colors because the master originally has subtitles burnt on the image, and the processing used to take them away left the images like this... infact, the subtitles in this LD are out of the pictures, in the black bars.

Waiting for your comments, but please do not quote this post, to avoid an infinite lenght thread due to the pictures, but instead refer to the comparison number. Thanks!