.: LeeThorogood's Original Trilogy Replica Technicolor Project :. (Released) — Page 5

Thanks for the feedback. :)

I have had a look and as far as the Death Star being blue and Luke's skin tones go there is nothing I can do. Both of these are inconsistencies within the GOUT master itself and not something I can fix with an all over correction like the one I am doing. ;)

The Cantina being overly dark is an unwanted side effect of fixing the washed out blacks. That said it's an unwanted side effect I am willing to live with in order to get rid of the inconsistent and washed out blacks of the GOUT.

Update time. :)

So I rendered out the latest colour grade over night Sunday and through the day Monday. Overall I was rather pleased with the results, and the render time I might add! :D There was only one big thing I was unhappy with and that was the blacks.

There was some serious crushing going on in places. :( I am 99.9% sure this was being caused by the Luma curve I had set up to increase the contrast and darken the washed out blacks. Initially I tried playing with the Luma curve but this wasn't giving me the results I wanted. To cut a long story short I found I could use the Master Lift control to lift the whole wave form up so that the blacks were at the 0mV/0IRE line rather then below it (The blacks were only shown as below this threshold when I had broadcast safe turned off, when turned on they would appear crushed.) However as I said this lifts the whole waveform up by the same amount so now the whites were above the 700mV/100IRE line so to bring these back to within broadcast safe I used the Master Gain control which squishes the whole wave form down to get the whites just under the 700mV/100IRE line.

The only other change I made was to completely de-saturate anything in the bottom 1/8 - 1/6 of the Luma scale as I had noticed that the blacks had taken on various colour casts. I set this updated colour grade off rendering before I went to bed so with a bit of luck it should be done by the time I get home from work. :)

ChainsawAsh said:

I haven't been following too closely, but I'm surprised that you used the Master Lift and Master Gain controls last.  Those are always the very first things I touch when I do color work.  Adjust lift so the blacks are at or very close to 0 (but not below), then adjust gain so the whites are at or very close to 100 (but not over).  Of course, if nothing's pure black or white in the particular shot, I don't go all the way to 0 or 100.

And I wouldn't do the desaturating-the-bottom-portion-of-the-luma-scale thing you were talking about.  Instead, I'd use the far left color wheel (shadows) to get rid of the color cast in the dark areas.  It'll yield better results.

You're using Color, yes?  Are you using just the Primary In room, or are you using some Secondaries as well?

I'm not sure I follow you Jetrell Fo?

Ah ok, still not sure why you posted it here though seems kind of random to me LOL I would have thought it more appropriate to post about it in your own Jedi Archive thread. ;) Personally I have no experience with Proc Amps so I can't advice your either way. Sorry. :(

Ah ok, fair enough, no need to apologise, no harm done. :)

I remember the color being really nice on the 1997 Jedi and empire.  It is sad that neither of the originals got a Technicolor print.  But they could still be done if the labs existed.

There was a short revival of technicolor in the 1990's being used in restorations.  But not necessarily new technicolor prints made.  As far as i know there were none.

The seperation masters should be still good as far as i know for a new release.

Lucas just wants digital versions out there, even the new 3-D will probably be the newfangled fake imax with no film.

I am hoping to have the MKV work-print uploaded by the end of the week. I've never encoded an MKV before as I prefer to use M4V instead. This being the case I was wondering if anyone could recommend what settings I should use in Handbrake to encode the MKV?

Many Thanks

Common audio/video format for mkv is the same as mp4 (most of mine are h264/aac).  You could even make it as an mp4, then just feed it to mkvmerge.

I can't wait! I know it seems like simple work at first, but this project has me nearly as excited as Puggo's film transfers do.

I think this latest grade is the one! :D Not to worry I am still going to upload the work-print MKV, but unless there's a big problem that's present throughout that I have missed, I don't plan on rendering Star Wars again! ;) The reason I say this is that I authored up a DVD earlier and I have been testing it out on my 26" LCD TV and IMHO I don't think I could make this look any better then it does now! :D

I will probably start uploading the MKV tomorrow evening. :)

The MKV is on its way up to the newsgroup. :)

If there happens to be an alternative method to attaining this please let me know! Very interested.

Sorry guys I have no plans to upload the work print to anywhere else. Speaking of the work print so far I have had no feedback, if I still haven't had any feedback by the close of play Saturday then that will be Star Wars finished and I will move onto Empire. ;)

Sorry about the compression problems I did try to encode the MKV straight from my ProRes HQ master but unfortunately this was a no go and not wanting to spend too much time on it I decided to use handbrake to encode the MKV from the DL-DVD I had authored for previewing purposes. As for next time, there wont be a next time :p I only plan to release this in DVD format, the MKV was just a way of putting a work print out at 1/4 the size of a DL-DVD.

As far as the DL-DVD I authored up for previewing goes, I used the highest possible bit-rate my MPEG2 encoder supports 7.7mbps VBR with a max of 9mbps.