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BOOK OF ELI RE-COLORIZED
DESCRIPTION
The desaturated look of Book of Eli is absolutely not my thing, so I decided to push the colour out a little more.
Played around for a while to get a good compromise with a blanket 3D LUT until I was satisfied.
Here’s a screenshot comparison (also included in subfolder of the files): http://screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/128273
Since the saturation is so low in the original, there’s lots of obvious chroma blocking when raising the saturation, which is why I applied a grainplate for each RGB channel separately. This results in some extreme grain/noise in some areas where there is strong chroma contrast, which I kinda like. Looks better than the blocking, anyway.
Audio is the lossless 5.1 DTS-HD MA audio from the Blu Ray transcoded to FLAC 5.1. On top, you get a FLAC 2.0 Dolby Headphone track rendered from the lossless 5.1 soundtrack, with amplification set so that there is no clipping. This track basically simulates a 5.1 surround setup on your headphones.
ENCODING & FILES FOR YOUR OWN RE-ENCODE
Final encode is done by applying the 3D LUT through ffmpeg in 16-bit, then piping into and encoding with 10-bit x264. If someone wants a blu-ray compatible encode, I have included the .avs-file, grainplate, 3D LUT and a .bat script using ffmpeg for the LUT application and piping into x264 (that took some tinkering to get it to work), so you can just make your own version with your own encoding settings. I personally don’t have a Blu Ray player, so I don’t care about compatibility much.
I know that not all the choices I made with the 3D LUT may be to the liking of everybody, so feel free to adjust the 3D LUT any way you like for your own encode to make it more to your liking. An example of this may be the intense red tones, which I chose because I liked the look and also because there are some red elements in less saturated scenes which otherwise don’t pop nicely. Another may be the dark yellow patches on the skies, which were originally green and brighter. I like it this way, but maybe you don’t. Partly the choices were also dictated by scenes that would have looked bad if I had done it differently, but you can figure that out for yourself.
TRAILER
Also included is a trailer which I created to give a sneak peak at the colors and picture quality. For this I recreated one of the movie’s trailers (I think it’s called Trailer #2) with scenes from the Blu Ray, then applied the same processing and LUT as for the movie. Shots that were trailer-exclusive were first regraded to match the Blu Ray as best as possible, for example by creating a conversion LUT for other shots of the same scene that do exist on the Blu Ray, using DrDre’s ColorMatch software, then also had the same final LUT applied.
Since the best quality trailer source I could find had an Apple logo, that one was patched out with a Youtube trailer. That one had slightly different color, but I was able to fix that with two passes of the ColourLike plugin (Planar & RGB).
The best audio I could find was a 318kbps 2.0 English DTS track from the German Blu Ray (despite the video only being in letterboxed SD there). I retimed it from 25 fps to 23.976 fps by interpreting sample rate as 48000*23.976/25, then resampling the result to 48000 with a good SRC. Normalizing was applied before resampling. Result was saved as 24-bit 2-channel FLAC. That one I ran through the Dolby SDU4 Hardware decoder using a good audio interface, from which I created a 5.1 FLAC track (BC minus 3dB, split to SL and SR, LFE created from low frequencies of all resulting channels, without removing them from those). From that 5.1 I also created a Dolby Headphone track, which is a FLAC stereo.
So the trailer comes with 3 audio tracks:
- Original DTS 2.0 retimed and resampled and saved as FLAC
- SDU4-decoded 5.1 FLAC
- Dolby Headphone 2.0 FLAC
Video encoding process is the same as for the main video.
This was a funny undertaking in general. Many of the scenes in the trailer were unfinished, missing matte paintings and VFX. For example the original trailer was missing an error arrow piercing someone’s throat and a head being chopped off. The remade one has all these … beautiful things.
I did not recreate the title cards (is that what they’re called?), so their quality is as good as the original trailer allows.
RELEASE
This project was released on Blutopia. As far as I am concerned, feel free to share it anywhere you like.