Hmm, I don't know. I think that blend still has its own issues. Bit of greenish still there, which he tried very hard to look out for and get rid of.

Hard to tell in context of one frame. Aside from a possible difference in monitor, and the interpretations of it, the aim is still for what the film looked like, minor imperfections included, using his best estimations, his eyes, and (probably) his "gut feeling" (aka - "the force") where he wants ;)

It has to be difficult to balance that with the source starting out at such a "crushed" level, designed for over-brightened playback.

Either way, I still like the latest changes. Much nicer than the 2.0 take on this scene.

Hey does anyone, including Harmy, know what the font is that's used for the 'Despecialized Edition' title in the picture from the first post?

AntcuFaalb said:

Harmy said:

No.

Damn! I was hoping you knew of some proprietary and/or commercial color-matching magic.

I've spent a lot of time searching for Windows-based software capable of histogram matching (video) and haven't had a lot of luck.

MatchGrade available for NukeX, Avid DS and Final Cut Pro seems very good but probably not much help to you unless you have a Mac.

If you search around the net, there are many interesting papers proposing methods for matching colours between (mostly) static images and I think if you had some scripting ability, and could also translate the math, you could achieve excellent results with video. More so in this case as you'd be matching frame-for-frame and the distribution of colour between the sources would be very similar even if the colours themselves are different.

@snicker: There is an avisynth plugin called HistogramAdjust, which can adjust a video using another video as reference, but I've tried it on some various clips and the result never comes out perfect, and it only seems to adjust the RGB gamma curve together, not separately.

So far, Colourlike is the best plugin I know for this, but I wish it would have a mode for video and not only stills. Right now to get the most out of Colourlike, one has to split a video shot by shot and then let it analyze each shot from each version and re-color them separately. There's gotta be somebody with enough coding talent to write an updated plugin based on this.

Thanks, You_Too. I remember reading about the experiments with ColorLike and the results being hit-and-miss. Disappointing, but as you say, there has to be someone out there with the skills to modify the script to compare frames in a video sequence and match individual RGB channels.

Did you test ColorLike with a raw Blu capture? If so, the Blu-ray clipping would play havoc with an automated process and maybe more so with one that operates on combined RGB. Did you notice whether scenes with minimal clipping produced better results? The Blu-ray colour clipping can be easily fixed to test if this is the case.

Another option would be to create an image sequence from the Blu-ray capture and colour match (a reference set) in Photoshop. Perhaps the colour matching algorithm used by Photoshop would offer up more consistent results.

This was related to colormatching discussion, and not Harmy's thread. I'll take it to PMs.

@g-force: Very interesting script! I'll make sure to try that out.

EDIT: I tried it right now, since I have frame-synched ANH 97 SE to the 2004 SE it was the perfect test-candidate. It looked like it worked quite well, except I noticed in lots of parts the script raised the black level.

So is there any way for you to change the script so the black and white levels are locked in place but the colors are still changed?

Haha sorry! Maybe g-force could start a thread about it.

Sorry.

hey- i've been trying to get ahold of the despecialized editions that harmy has done so i can properly introduce my 7 year old son to star wars. 

damned george lucas has tipped my hand  by seling to disney, and with them planning a new one they will start showing up on the little tykes radar sooner rather than later. 

Me and my wife had a laugh when we realized we have put more thought and effort into protecting him from the new special edition versions than we had put into protecting him from hard drugs and strangers!

Thing is, we've only got standard definition here at my house, but i am having one hell of a time finding ay of the despecialized editions as non blue-ray versions. I even tried to message the user mentioned in the version 1 release threads as having generated them, but he says he put them up on usenet as binaries months ago and i've been unable to track them down via that route.  I'm ok with having to fiddle a bit to master and burn them, but down converting to NTSC and making sure i get a all the file formats and settings right seems a bit daunting.

if you could help me get my son introduced properly, i'd be very grateful.

Rob Hodge

Jedi Knights Scooter Club