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StarWarsLegacy.com - The Official Thread — Page 39

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Yes, the original compositing must be preserved. (I do wish there was a good film source of the early version with the different optical composites. I heard someone say the Cineavision 8mm had visible cement splices at every shot change, so maybe it was a reduction off of that element? Doesn't someone here know someone who has a Cineavision print?)

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TServo2049 said:

Doesn't someone here know someone who has a Cineavision print?

I do! I do!

A picture is worth a thousand words. Post 102 is worth more.

I’m late to the party, but I think this is the best song. Enjoy!

—Teams Jetrell Fo 1, Jetrell Fo 2, and Jetrell Fo 3

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I'm not moving my offtopic conversations over to this thread until my check from Harmy clears.

Project Threepio (Star Wars OOT subtitles)

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CatBus said:

I'm not moving my offtopic conversations over to this thread until my check from Harmy clears.

This whole problem could be solved with a chat/shoutbox at the bottom of the page.

A picture is worth a thousand words. Post 102 is worth more.

I’m late to the party, but I think this is the best song. Enjoy!

—Teams Jetrell Fo 1, Jetrell Fo 2, and Jetrell Fo 3

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 (Edited)

OK, we got off track, sorry for that. I'll find other existing threads to continue to ruminate on variations and element survival and the like.

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AntcuFaalb said:

The JSC is so much sharper than the Technidisc SWE, as expected. It's crazy.

The sharpness of the JSC feels very artificial to me, and the chroma shift gets really annoying.

Every transfer has pros and cons =(

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Asaki said:

AntcuFaalb said:

The JSC is so much sharper than the Technidisc SWE, as expected. It's crazy.

The sharpness of the JSC feels very artificial to me, and the chroma shift gets really annoying.

Every transfer has pros and cons =(

Are we sure it's real chroma shift? I thought the chroma problems were linked to the laggy comb filter in Arnie.d's Pioneer HLD-X9.

A picture is worth a thousand words. Post 102 is worth more.

I’m late to the party, but I think this is the best song. Enjoy!

—Teams Jetrell Fo 1, Jetrell Fo 2, and Jetrell Fo 3

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AntcuFaalb said:

CatBus said:

I'm not moving my offtopic conversations over to this thread until my check from Harmy clears.

This whole problem could be solved with a chat/shoutbox at the bottom of the page.

 I don't know, look what happened at the NNRRPPB! when that feature was enabled.

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How come that frame looks nothing like this shot does in the technicolor references I got from you?
There's way more green in those and the colors there are much more saturated and warm.

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 (Edited)

Because the references I sent to you are essentially raw scans, sRGB colorspace.  These images are graded in DCI-P3, and balanced for neutral whites and blacks.  When scanning, you want to maximize the information per channel so there is the most data to work from, and sometimes this means that the raw scan ends up with more color in a channel than the "actual" image looks like.  Green carries a lot of data, so it's usually extra prominent in scans (digital sensors too, for that matter) so that has to be balanced out.  Just because it's Technicolor doesn't mean it's 1-click, done.  It means that all the original color is still in there, and if you're just screening it on a projector, sure it looks normal, but when scanning, you want a nice saturated data set.  Getting back to the neutral tone of the source is fairly straightforward.  My first pass on Legacy sets neutrals and internal balances, and this next pass does things like scene-by-scene overal tone grading, as would be done to the original film - things which yield the warm orange tone of the Tatooine canyon stuff, when in fact the footage as shot didn't actually look that way.  I grade to the "as shot" look, unify everything, and then grade all of THAT back to the Tech or whatever.

I'll do a grading video so you can see the process! :)

_Mike

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So what you're saying is, that the colors in despecialized are essentially completely wrong? Because I remember I thought this may be the case and it may be an uncorrected scan, so I asked whether the colors in those scans looked close to the print itself when projected and you said they did.

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I didn't get that impression. I think he's saying he's grading the whole film to how it was shot, and then will be putting back the Tech timing when he's finished?

From what I recall, the Senator print apparently looked just as green when projected, no? Wasn't timdiggerm at the screening?

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 (Edited)

I'm not using the Senator print so I don't know, but let me explain a bit more.  A proper scan doesn't just hit Record and let the film run.  You look at each scene and adjust the channel gain and/or exposure to get the most out of the print.  So let's say you had a shot of green grass; there would be little information in the blue and red channels, naturally.  So you may want to boost the capture gain on the red and blue channels to make sure you get every last bit of detail in there.  Ultimately, in grading, you will return to the original look, and you will have the cleanest, most accurate colors as a result.

Now, not every scene needs individual exposure or channel gain adjustment; it's context dependent.  So in a raw scan some scenes may be almost exactly like the original, untouched, and therefore accurate.  Others may look tweaked until they've been rebalanced.  

Grading is the second-to-last step in a restoration process, so while obviously it would be really useful to you for me to have finished Legacy and sent you it for reference, that was not the case :)  Instead, you got raw reference scans, a good percentage of which happen to have "as seen in theaters" colors, and some which needed to be balanced. 

Don't worry, Petr, Despecialized is still the #1 restoration available :)   Ultimately,  you will have screen caps from every shot in Legacy to use as reference if you want to do a version 3 or 4 or whatever you're on.

_Mike

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Thanks, Mike. And it's not so much about Despecialized being the #1 restoration available, which I never even claimed it was but about the fact that I tried to stick to those scans pretty religiously a waved them around as an argument whenever someone came up with some criticism of the colors in Despecialized and now it seems that I may well have been completely off base in some of those arguments.

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Well first of all, photochemical processes being what they are, it's pretty safe to say NOBODY knows what the colors truly, definitively are.  Even if it was 1976 and you just took the negative out of the camera and developed it twice, both prints would vary slightly.  So any argument about color has to be tempered with that fact.  Secondly, all the IP/IN and print processes change the colors as well, as different stocks have different response curves as well.  It's just not like today's digital world where we can track an absolute color from beginning to end, and even then that happens about 1% of the time.  Chances are that in your arguments, you were probably right, most of the time, but again, it's kind of relative.

I am fairly confident that Legacy will ultimately be the most accurate representation we've seen, but remember this: you've done like 3 versions of Despecialized and Legacy only just finished its first pass.  The reason it takes me so long is because I do so much checking against so many sources and references, etc. in addition to performing the work itself.  I have pages and pages and pages of stuff just on the goddamn color of the Rebel Troopers' shirts.  Ultimately, I put all of that stuff together and see what it points to in terms of color of the characters/costumes, sets, etc.  It just takes forever.  

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Mike: A big thanks for the excellent work you're doing on this preservation/restoration project. The quality of the source, combined with this meticulous artisan-level craftsmanship, is going to pay off big in the final result. :) May it one day see the full light of day, and in the mean time serve as an important source/reference.

As for Disney, they've already lost any credibility with Star Wars, but hopefully we'll at least get a good restoration of the original trilogy out of the whole mess. What should be done is a Lawrence of Arabia sort of restoration (the gold standard, and if you haven't seen it on Blu-ray yet, get it, simply fantastic, I wish every movie on Blu-ray looked that great :) ). Whether fans will get that is highly questionable, but we'll see.

The Star Wars trilogy. There can be only one.

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Dunedain said:

As for Disney, they've already lost any credibility with Star Wars

Why? How?

A picture is worth a thousand words. Post 102 is worth more.

I’m late to the party, but I think this is the best song. Enjoy!

—Teams Jetrell Fo 1, Jetrell Fo 2, and Jetrell Fo 3

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I was going to ask the same thing - they have lost credibility generally speaking, and I guess they've lost some SW credibility by announcing rapid development with "spin off" films. But rapid development isn't always a bad thing either, for instance Dick Donner shot much of Superman 2 at the same time as Superman 1.

[ Scanning stuff since 2015 ]

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RU.08 said:

Dick Donner

 You call him Richard Donner, doll!

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RU.08 said:

...I guess they've lost some SW credibility by announcing rapid development with "spin off" films.

They also may have lost just the teeniest, tiniest, smallest, most insignificant amount of credibility when they threw the Holocron into a blazing furnace meant for biohazard waste, and maybe just a fraction of a fraction of a percentage of credibility when they kicked LucasArts in there with it and slammed the door shut behind them.

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Asaki said:

RU.08 said:

...I guess they've lost some SW credibility by announcing rapid development with "spin off" films.

They also may have lost just the teeniest, tiniest, smallest, most insignificant amount of credibility when they threw the Holocron into a blazing furnace meant for biohazard waste, and maybe just a fraction of a fraction of a percentage of credibility when they kicked LucasArts in there with it and slammed the door shut behind them.

 But I'm glad that you're not bitter about it.

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:

 But I'm glad that you're not bitter about it.

Me? Never :)

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That's funny...  throwing out the entire EU gave them credibility in my book.  Though admittedly I thought their press release, "Sorry, nerds, glorified fan fiction does not count. Love, Disney," was kinda harsh.

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