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Neverar's A New Hope Technicolor Recreation (Final Version Released!)

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A New Hope Technicolor Recreation v2 is available on MySpleen.

V3, which is a slightly more compact encode of V2 but otherwise identical, is also available via PM.

All requests for further changes will be directed to the trash compactor, to be used as food for the Dianoga. 😉

Piece of Junk

Piece of Better Junk

Downloadable Comparison Gallery (in progress)

A lightweight V1 is also available on Myspleen.

Original Post Follows:

Here it is; a shot-by-shot color corrected and slightly despecialized version of the Star Wars ANH 2011 Blu-ray!

Old Sunset

New Sunset

The goal for this project is to correct the atrocious color of the blu-ray and adapt it to the look of a 1977 Technicolor film while at the same time using the 2004 German HD broadcast to remove the most baffling 2011 changes.

Old Garage

New Garage

In addition, using other sources, I am fixing hundreds of individual color and luminance issues throughout the film including crushed highlights, miscolored lights and lasers, missing gradients, and bad individual frames. Essentially this is the Special Edition seen in the best possible light.

Old Blast

New Blast

Delicious Dinner Old

Delicious Dinner New

Crappy Old Paint

Proper New Paint

One reason that I am not performing a full despecialization is that this project will be the basis of Harmy’s fully Despecialized Edition version 3.0, so it makes sense to have an SE version of the film for those who want it or want to make their own semi-despecialized versions of the film. I am also interested in seeing what the added footage such as the Jabba scene will look like with '77 color.

The despecializations involve reverting the 2011 Blu-ray to the 2004 edition using the German HD broadcast, with a few exceptions. The reversions are:
-Returning R2’s jump cut roll in the Tantive IV secondary corridor
-Recreating the SE mountain removal in the '77 version of the Binary Sunset, since the Blu-ray has extremely degraded color and detail.

Mountain Removal

-Removing the ‘Ghost Luke’ homestead artifact introduced in the Special Edition
-Removing the rocks around R2-D2 in the Tusken Attack
-Returning the color of the degraded SE shots to their original color

-Replacing the 2004 recomposited Lightsaber effects with '77 film versions (The SE lightsabers often have incorrect colors and clearly use degraded elements to the point that the lightsaber effect is just a misshapen blob, making them impossible to correct without additional luminosity detail)

2011 Blu-ray changes that remain:
-The gray escape pod door is averaged with the original blue version, since the blue is over-represented in the Blu-ray
-The Han/Greedo shootout, since unlike the 2004 version they both shoot at essentially the same time, and a fully despecialized version of this scene requires Harmy’s skill and resources

Sources for this project are the photos and video of the Technicolor Star Wars projection in the Senator Theater, screenshots that Mike Verta has made available on his website, the 2004 HDTV Broadcast, Team Blu’s GOUT, Team Blu’s '97 version, Team -1’s Silver Screen Edition, Technicolor frame scans, and numerous set and costume photos.

Current status of project as of 5-25-18: Version 1 is available as a 20gb encode on the spleen and a 34gb encode through PM.

Project status as of 9-20-23: Version 3 is available via PM. Note that I consider this project complete, so there will be no further updates or any use of the 2019 digital version of the film, which has its own issues.

Questions, comments, complaints, nitpicking, over-analyzing, opinions, speculation, and wild theories are welcome.

You probably don’t recognize me because of the red arm.
Episode 9 Rewrite, The Starlight Project (Released!) and ANH Technicolor Project (Released!)

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This are two screenshots from my projects - PAL laserdiscs as sources - top OT, bottom '97:

not the same frame, but I took them from the finished compressed file, as I was forced to delete lossless source months ago… (**/)

don’t know if this could be useful for some kind of comparison, though!

Sadly my projects are lost due to an HDD crash… 😦 | [Fundamental Collection] thread | blog.spoRv.com | fan preservation forum: fanres.com

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Thanks, I'm working on that scene right now, so it is useful. It's good to know that Luke had green hair in a version other than the Technicolor. Very cool. It would be good to have some version of the Special Edition and the originals (other than the GOUT) to compare.

New Screenshots: 1: Han Control Room, 2: Luke Control Room, 3: Final Shot.

http://screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/55424/picture:0

You probably don’t recognize me because of the red arm.
Episode 9 Rewrite, The Starlight Project (Released!) and ANH Technicolor Project (Released!)

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So here's how I'm thinking of tackling this monster: First I'll use the primary sources (the Senator pictures and video) to correct those shots, as I've started doing. I'll be able to use some of these photos to correct entire scenes (such as the control room scene above). However the majority of the film will have no primary sources at all, so it will remain unfinished until sources from a Technicolor print become available. There are several projects (such as the Legacy Edition) which should eventually provide excellent resources, so that work will wait.

There is something that I'm sure someone here could help with. My library of reference photos is lacking. Does anyone know where I could find color set photos, such as of Sir Alec Guinness or Harrison Ford in costume for example?

You probably don’t recognize me because of the red arm.
Episode 9 Rewrite, The Starlight Project (Released!) and ANH Technicolor Project (Released!)

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Thanks frank!

There are some projects made by OT members which should help this project along, but which ones to use? I'm thinking AntcuFaalb's Pre-ANH Star Wars Bootleg for the original colortiming. Thoughts?

JEDIT:

Here are the last three screenshots from the control room scene which correspond to the Senator photos:

http://screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/55562/picture:0

Almost every shot in that scene had to be isolated and corrected separately, but that scene is practically done...for now!

You probably don’t recognize me because of the red arm.
Episode 9 Rewrite, The Starlight Project (Released!) and ANH Technicolor Project (Released!)

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WOW, this is very cool Neverar.

I decided to rewatch Harmy's 2.5 so I could compare You_Too's colour correction to yours, and I must say, I think your colour correction is superior to You_Too (no offence meant here), not only because it is a lot closer to the IB print, it pretty much looks like it was scanned directly from the IB print. The colours are so vivid, the contrast has improved exponentially, and even though some minor details have been lost the movie has never looked better and much more alive than ever.

Now just imagine, Harmy's Despecialized Trilogy using this and team_negative1's scans as a source, it would be the ultimate restoration.

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Actually, before I left the blu-ray alone I made some settings that looked pretty similar to this. Looks nice so far! The only problem with the blu-ray is that there's the pink flashes and magenta tones all over the place that's not supposed to be there, so it's tough to really make a 100% correct color correction. They've messed with this one way too much.

And actually for Harmy I made a correction that removed some of the worst downsides, then he did the final color grading himself like he wanted, looking at a scan of an IB print.

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fmalover: What details have been lost? Nitpicking is necessary in order to keep me on my toes! ;)

Having just worked through a (almost) shot-by-shot correction of the control room scene, I begin to appreciate the effort it took Harmy to do his correction. And that's only 1/30th of the film! I just compared my version of the scene to Despecialized, and they're not all that different. I bumped up the saturation on the Despecialized playback, and they were quite comparable in many ways. The saturation levels may be the biggest difference between them, other than a slight bluish-green tint on Harmy's version which is very characteristic of the Blu-ray and is remarkably difficult to remove. I may be overzealous in removing it as some of that could be accurate.

You_Too: This project has a similar history. I spent the better part of a year, on and off, working with the problems in the DVD in preparation for the comprehensive work and getting to know the film. Everything has the same seven layers of correction even before I work on individual shots.

You probably don’t recognize me because of the red arm.
Episode 9 Rewrite, The Starlight Project (Released!) and ANH Technicolor Project (Released!)

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I noticed something. It seems to me that the 2004 master made the skintones too dark. This, plus the excessive magenta tones, is what makes the "lobster men" effect. Everybody seems burned by the sun.

Using the "Selective Color" tool in After Effects I was able to light it up the reds a little bit. Neverar, I used your color corrected screencap to do it. I also made a few adjustments to remove the magenta tones. Please analyse my constructive criticism.

Here it is:
http://screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/55604

Now, comparing my attempt with the Senator:

http://screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/55605

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Neverar - your pics look great, except one thing - lots of detail is lost. Just look at Han's armour in the first pic, or Chewie's fur in the last pic.

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bttfbrasilfan: That looks almost spot on to the photo in my opinion. I wouldn't want the skin tones to get any greener than the photo however, looking at the skin tones in the rest of the scene. The contrast is probably too high in my version though.

pittrek: Is this in reference to the last three screenshots? Han's armor is quite bright, but on my monitor all the detail is still there.

Here's what I see in the last three pictures: In the first one of Han and Chewie, the lights behind Chewie are blown out, obscuring some of his fur. This is probably the most severe visible loss of detail that I can see. Some of the colors are blown out in the histogram though, now that I look at it in Photoshop. I really wish Premiere Elements had a histogram function!

You probably don’t recognize me because of the red arm.
Episode 9 Rewrite, The Starlight Project (Released!) and ANH Technicolor Project (Released!)

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@pittrek & NeverarGreat: There's a very little amount of clipping in the white areas, just like pittrek says but it's not much. Should be easy for you to adjust.

@bttfbrasilfan: While you may be right about skin tones being slightly darker, using selective color to just make reds brighter will ruin the strongest reds in the movie that are supposed to be dark or very saturated. If making reds brighter while keeping the saturation it will make everybody look like lobster-men! This is an unfortunate downside to the otherwise amazing plugin that selective color is. It would be nice to find an alternative to be able to accurately do what you intended there.

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Even though the second pass is more accurate I must confess I like the first one better, I just like Chewie's fur colour not being drowned out by the surrounding green cast, otherwise I am reminded of the ESB Blu-Ray in which the Hoth scenes have that annoying blue tint that is so intrusive it drowns out colour palette.

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Yep, that's one reason why I didn't want it to be so accurate. Not to worry, I'm still in the process of setting up a workflow, so everything will probably get another pass before it's all said and done. I realize now that I need a histogram in the editing program, so the software will change soon. Incidentally, working in 1080p is sloooow!

I probably won't switch to this program, but has anyone here tried Davinci Resolve? I would have downloaded the lite version to test, but it's incompatible with my system.

You probably don’t recognize me because of the red arm.
Episode 9 Rewrite, The Starlight Project (Released!) and ANH Technicolor Project (Released!)

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So here's where I go a bit insane. Is it too much to ask for Lucasfilm to do as good a job on their high definition release as they did with their standard definition release?

I worked so long on the DVD version of this scene, never even suspecting that the Blu-ray would be worse. So here's what I did: The negative1 video has the most detail here, so I placed that into the shot, color corrected the whole thing, and rendered the whole shot in 1080p.

http://screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/56007

JEDIT: 2nd pass at this shot: http://screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/56117

You probably don’t recognize me because of the red arm.
Episode 9 Rewrite, The Starlight Project (Released!) and ANH Technicolor Project (Released!)

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The first pass of the burning homestead is more accurate IMO, the second pass seems to have inherited the problem of beind too dark on the left side and too light on the right side, plus I see the pink shift reemerging in the second pass. Stick with the first pass.

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It's another case of every source being different here. The 35mm print is green, the GOUT is purple, the Blu-ray is pink. And the Senator is red, as far as I can tell:

This is a still taken from the video which is very dark from the outset, so I'm not sure how much to read into this. But it does seem that it has a very strong pink or lilac shift in whatever case, with the shadows remaining quite greenish yellow. I'll post a third pass, but it'll have pink in it for sure.

JEDIT: Here it is.

http://screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/56174

It's kind of a cross between the GOUT and the Senator coloration. That's quite enough hassle for one shot.

You probably don’t recognize me because of the red arm.
Episode 9 Rewrite, The Starlight Project (Released!) and ANH Technicolor Project (Released!)

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I've obsessed over the scene of Leia in the Tantive corridor for a long time, but it's because it's never been right to my satisfaction compared to Mike's superb example. Of course there's a reason for that, as is apparent now. The DVD and Blu-ray have crushed the gradients so much that there is now no discernible color difference between Leia's dress, the Stormtrooper armor, and the walls of the corridor. I've pulled as much blue out of her dress as I could, but I don't believe that the colors can be any more precise with this source. So here it is, as good as I can get it, and it's not going to change any more:

http://screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/56460/picture:0

There will be different scenes soon, I promise. :)

You probably don’t recognize me because of the red arm.
Episode 9 Rewrite, The Starlight Project (Released!) and ANH Technicolor Project (Released!)

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NeverarGreat said:

There are some projects made by OT members which should help this project along, but which ones to use? I'm thinking AntcuFaalb's Pre-ANH Star Wars Bootleg for the original colortiming. Thoughts?

I.M.O. I now think I would use Mother's version of PRE-ANH Bootleg as it now seems the most accurate to me to use as a base line. Then using its source bootleg for more saturated parts and the PS78 for a general feel of the light and dark levels as projected. In fact forget that: I would just use everything back and forth (!)

Once I'd gone back and forth between the things with the most colour information like the 70mm stills, the technicolor, quality set photos etc etc and seen how how things change when they get lit/saturated/tinted differently and how skintones look in different lighting conditions and THEN when I'd decided on the look I'd want THEN decide what I can get from the values Ive got. Do I want to get skintones as right as possible but then make everything else look green? Or do I want to get the best overall compromise for the whole picture. In this sense I wouldn't stick to any one source but find the best source for any scene and bring the Blu Ray up to the best level possible.

I think this is the way you are going to offer something different from Harmy's DE because I think he was sticking to one reference print. 

That said I think using the technicolor media as a main guide for a palette is what I would do to decide between directions.

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Awesome, keep up the good work!

I forgot to mention in my previous posts, but judging by your  screenshots, Star Wars now looks more photographic than ever.