poita said:
Your monitor is off because the cave is green, Luke is an Oompa Loompa, and Yoda is CRAZY green.But the question is Poita… how do you REALLY feel about it? 😃
My monitor’s not too far off the snow is green there for me too. But it’s blue a few frames before! I purposefully cranked the saturation to see if that snow would change much, and it really didn’t. I have a conspiracy theory that there were two color timings made in film for ESB… which explains why the home release and the grindhouse are so different than your scans and the 16mm release (which was CRAZY blueberry blue!) but I got no real proof. But the other reason I cranked it so hot was I wanted to see just how much color was in that print. Quite a bit.
The colors are NOT consistent from shot to shot, but I don’t currently have the skills like you and Neverargreat to do a shot by shot adjustment, but I still feel like I can get a big enough improvement make it “worth it” overall. Honestly, with time it’s obvious some better releases are going to hit in the future, I am really looking forward to your new scans! Just playing while we wait for the best that’s yet to come.
No, definitely not two timings made on film.
However the home releases were done on a real time telecine, and that is colour corrected in realtime by the telecine operator. It is extremely likely that the telecine operator decided to try and ‘neutrally balance’ most scenes on the fly, it is what many would do, and that would leave you with something closer to greys in the snow etc.
The 16mm is a crapshoot, the blue on that is just a lab problem.
As for the grindhouse, it was from a very faded print, and colour corrected to their personal taste, doing the best they could with the faded material, and a scanner that doesn’t have as good a dynamic range. Their light source is also spectrally notched, and is missing complete wavelength bands, so they were up against it.
I’d be willing to bet my left nut that if we had the grindhouse print rescanned, with the light offset to deal with the fade, that the colour would be basically the same as the UK print.