Thanks guys!
First a brief preamble: it is NOT possible to restore perfect colors from a black and white image (or video). Period.
Said that, and as I’ve written before, I’m not going to colorize by hand thousand frames (this is the only way to achieve a great, almost perfect result). So first I used the only avisynth filter that tries to guess how to colorize a b&w picture; it’s a nice filter, but, as this is a simple one, that could rely solely on its own, results are usually quite bad. (this doesn’t mean I don’t like the filter, at the contrary; and the author did a good job, you know that…)
The only other logical way IMHO is to use neural network; here results are better, but dependent on many factors; I used one of the websites that offer this service for free; unfortunately, I have first to export each frame as a picture, then load it in the website one by one, by hand, wait for the conversion, save the colorized one, rescale at the proper size, and use it as a chroma plane. Now you know why I wanted to make a test clip first, using just few frames as reference…
I guess if there is some software (now available) that accepts a b&w picture, and a color picture for reference, and tries to recolor the b&w following the reference… I don’t think so…
About quality: I’m aware that’s pretty bad, but you have to trust me that this result is the LESS WORSE… all the others were so ugly in comparison, so now you can understand a bit better.
So, this is one of the options we have for the b&w scenes. I wrote about those before, but I’ll refrain them again here:
- leave it untouched, in b&w - don’t like this option at all
- recolor by hand, good to perfect results - the best, but, until some volunteer wanted to make the job, it could not be considered
- recolor by automatic software, bad to decent results, like the following one, used for the test - at the moment, I think it’s the best option, a right compromise
- a “trick” like the one used by TMBTM in his War of the Stars II - where the frames have big shades of one or two colors - of which the following is the best one - I can see the point of his choice, and it worked pretty well in a way; still prefer less-than-perfect recolors, though!
- other ways like simulation of Biocolor or KinemaColor is out of question…
- do further options exist? If so, please let me know!
The fact is, there are many edits around with the b&w scenes inserted untouched (AFAIK all not even cleaned); the only attempt at recolor them is TMBTM’s edit; yes, better than the b&w version, but still not what I aim to.
At the end, until a crazy fan would step in and declares that he/she could recolor them by hand, or using a NASA-kind of supercomputer that will guess almost perfectly the colors, or some sort of miracles, I guess the less of the evil is to continue with the path of automatic colorization.
Last words: pick all the deleted scenes, shots, outtakes and so on, and throw them in the films as they are is quite easy. But it’s not what I’d like to achieve. A perfecly inserted version with all the shots cleaned as film? An impossible task for fan users like us. The right compromise, that’s what I would like to obtain. Is restored blue screen shot like “Bail Organa” perfect? Nope. But is good enough to be used. Is the Dooku extended duel (a mere 3 second shot) perfect? Far from it! But it’s the best version available, so it’s OK. Are those colorized scene perfect? Of course not. But should work better than an out-of-place b&w version. Again, everything IMHO.
Ideas, opinions, critics?