I thought I did - but my RARs only go up to part 17! I guess they are not the original RARs then.

Ultimate Shield said:

I have a friend that wants to see ESB for the first time but he wants to see the non Lucas humped up version.

Hehe - until now I thought "the deshitified edition" was my favorite name.  This may have that one beat.

Harmy said:

That's very nice but that doesn't really help with the issue - the files there are already unrared and even if they weren't, I'll get banned from my internet connection within seconds if I as much as start a torrent program.

Spencersage is trying to get ESB. He couldn't get part of the RAR to download, so I suggested the torrent. It may not help you in getting a hold of that piece of the RAR, but it might help him to get the film by another method.

He might have to re-download most of it, but it's still an option.

OK, lets talk color references, because this time around, I'll be doing a 1st pass color correction before anything else. I'm sort of still inclined towards saturation boosted GOUT with red balance compensated for as a main source. There's Puggo Grande of course but I looked it over and I'm not sure I really want to use it as my main color reference. Was the original film really THAT blue? Are there any other reliable references?

Harmy said:

OK, lets talk color references, because this time around, I'll be doing a 1st pass color correction before anything else. I'm sort of still inclined towards saturation boosted GOUT with red balance compensated for as a main source. There's Puggo Grande of course but I looked it over and I'm not sure I really want to use it as my main color reference. Was the original film really THAT blue? Are there any other reliable references?

The 1985 CAV P&S LD of The Empire Strikes Back might be a good color reference.

I know that the 1985 CAV P&S LD of A New Hope has surprisingly-accurate colors, as it was pressed from a 1982 master.

AntcuFaalb said:

The 1985 CAV P&S LD of The Empire Strikes Back might be a good color reference.

I know that the 1985 CAV P&S LD of A New Hope has surprisingly-accurate colors, as it was pressed from a 1982 master.

Would it be possible to see some screencaps of both?  i.e. using the Star Wars caps, we could see if there's any global problems to that master/transfer (such as desaturation, weak yellows, poor contrast, etc) because we have such good references there.  Then we could look at the Empire screencaps and see if it could possibly be that we could apply the same global fixes there.  Just a thought.

That sounds like a good idea but the problem with it is that the level of deterioration could be quite different between the prints used for SW and ESB, so it would only solve problems caused by the telecine machine used and could introduce a whole new set of problems.

Oh I know.  There's definitely going to have to be some sort of sanity checking of any adjustments, but I thought it could be a good first step.

So we could just average out what all the transfers have in common?

Don't the Negative1 team have several sources?...

I guess but I think they're all faded to various degrees.

Mavimao said:

So we could just average out what all the transfers have in common?

Don't the Negative1 team have several sources?...

We do have several prints as mentioned in the 35mm thread. We also have a fully color corrected version of our first print. However, we will have to cross reference it against the other ones.

We haven't really looked at them in awhile due to our concentrating on our main project.

There are no unfaded prints of Empire as far as we know. We seem to have to found the best ones though. And that is more than enough of a reference for us.

Team Negative1

I'm still hoping for a more detailed explanation about PSB as a reference - I know Ady is using it as a pretty literal reference (although he is taking some liberties but I think he believes those to then be different from theatrical color timing) and I'd like to know if there's some proof beyond "it looks like it's not faded" that the PSB is the closest color reference. You know, I'd really like to know whether I can trust PSB the same way as I did with the IB print for Star Wars - i.e. not keeping 100% perfectly faithful to it but keeping very close to it. Because at first glance PSB looks a bit wrong to me in some scenes but it could be for the same reason the IB print did look wrong but in the end we accepted it as a good reference and got used to those colors, even though they were differnt from what we were used to watching on discolored video releases. But in the case of the IB print, that was conclusively proved to be non fade material, plus there were several of them and the colours were the same (or close enough) on each of them - is there any such empirical evidence of the PSB colors being similarly correct?

Rycast said:

Does anyone still have part 28 of Harmy's ESB DE HD v1.0? The link for this RAR file is dead over at tehparadox, and a bunch of people - including myself - are trying to download it (see the latest posts in the topic).

It would be greatly appreciated!

I'm going to see if I have it, but I suspect I only have the movie now and no longer the rars.

I just checked, and while I do have the AVCHD files, I don't have the original rars.  Sorry.

I believe that V1 of ESB Despecialised is time-synced to the GOUT (2006 DVD) also, so if you manage to find subtitles for the GOUT version, they should be fine with this.

So it turns out I'm one clever idiot. Clever, because I kept all the rar files from the ESB and ROTJ uploads and idiot because I forgot I did. So anyway, part 28 of ESB's been re-uploaded...

Regarding the correctness of the colors in PSB... there are two relevant issues.  First, there is the issue of whether the print has faded.  I believe that it wasn't faded.  Second, there is the issue of whether the color timing on the capture is correct.  For that I am less certain.  There is no such thing as just grabbing the colors with a camera, you always have to make judgement calls with respect to white balance.  Cameras just don't work like our eyes do - even top photo houses prefer to make prints off of negatives if they also have a positive print to use as reference.  This is also why I think using the colors in a video shot at a showing in a theater as the basis for color timing a restoration is inherently unreliable.

The bottom line, I think that the colors of the elements in PSB are correct relative to each other - that is, for example, if something is a certain blue in two spots, I would be confident that they really are the same color.  (as opposed to PG, where a number of different colors have faded to the same pink).

I know you are concerned about the blues.  I would say that if there is something that is a certain blue and you are confident it is correct, then seeing that same blue somewhere else, it is probably correct too.  But whether or not everything is too blue, that I don't know.  I do know that as I watched it, it did look a little bit more blue than I was expecting.  My capture was certainly overly purple, which Adywan corrected nicely.

Thanks Puggo. I think I'll do the preliminary CC based on color boosted GOUT and probably make some judgment calls of my own and then in the more detailed 2nd pass I'm see how it compares to the other sources and maybe make some adjustments based on that.

And I guess that the fact that the print isn't faded doesn't necessarily mean that it is a perfect representation of what the official 35mm and 70mm prints would have looked like, does it? Because I AFAIK it's a pirate copy, so it probably wasn't copied under lab conditions on perfectly calibrated equipment, right?

What did you do for 1.0, Harmy?

EDIT: First post says you used color-boosted GOUT then too, so what do you plan to do differently this time?