Thanks for the input benduwan!

Today I tested further the RaiTre regrading, and I discovered some things… first, as noted before, its contrast is off, but not for every shots; some are perfect, many are not; so, using the HD luma is the best compromise. Meanwhile, I worked a lot at the color matching script, and now the revised one should render around 90/95% of the scenes almost exactly; in the other cases, I should switch to another type - which works bad in the previous cases, but it’s optimal for the few exceptions.

An example of the last version - top new regrade (type 2), bottom HDTV:

I worked also to a “patched” version, where the HD luma is merged with RaiTre chroma; it is the perfect solution, because the colors are not recreated, but they are the original ones; it’s a pity RaiTre is missing images all around the borders… so, when I overlay the HD luma/RaiTre chroma on the regraded version, the borders have different colors… I spent many hours testing this option, just to decide to not use it: I prefer to have a, let’s say, 98% matching regrade on the 100% of the image, instead 100% matching on 90% of the image, and 90% match on the borders, where the difference can be easily spotted.

I started also to work to scene cleaning, desert storm, in particular: it’s really difficult to get rid of all those big scratches without losing details… I must find the right compromise, not an easy task. Treadwell is worst, the first shot is really hard; but I guess it could be easy to reuse previous/next frames (or part of them) to remove residual dirt. Now, if someone has cleaned some deleted scenes, and would like to share them, it will be a great help for the project!