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DrDre

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16-Mar-2015
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5-Mar-2024
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Post
#1530179
Topic
<strong>The Mandalorian</strong> - a general discussion thread - * <em><strong>SPOILERS</strong></em> *
Time

I don’t know, if I will be watching much more of this season. Mando was never a series with great writing, but I thought the lone gunman approach for S01 was effective, for S02 it still worked although the memberberries became pretty intrusive, but ever since TBOBF the entire Mandoverse feels like a directionless mess with questionable writing. Like Boba Fett in his own show, the Mandalorians act like morons. Given that they’ve been in this situation before, you’d expect someone to be on the lookout for (flying) monsters, and why would you use your jetpacks for a chase knowing full well you don’t have enough fuel to continue the pursuit? Are Din Jarin and Bo the only Mandalorians with space ships? Why did they wait for a day to rescue the kid? Did the monster of the week have him in his mouth all that time just waiting for the moment the Mandalorians arrive? Why was the kid so clean coming out of that thing’s mouth? I have a bad feeling about this…

Post
#1530019
Topic
The Lord of the Rings - The Two Towers - 4K Dremastered (Released!)
Time

Wuschel said:

This is amazing! Are you planning to offer this as a fully authored BD/UHD BD with all available audio tracks (including the new Atmos tracks) that can be added to the original BD/UHD BD sets?

The 1080p version was bluray compatable, but sadly that version has been lost due to a mistake in syncing the files. The UHD version is an mkv file. If someone wants to create an authored UHD BD from it, they’re welcome to it, as long as it’s not being commercially sold.

Post
#1529823
Topic
Lord of the Rings - The Fellowship of the Ring - Extended Edition - 4K Dremastered
Time

Ronster said:

DrDre said:

I’m oke with the new HDR grades. They look fine to me, but I prefer the original look for all three films.

Ok but what about the sudden swap from Day to Night?

We see the big tree roots at the base “Daytime” when pan up the bigature model of the winding stairs around the trunk it’s night.

How about grading the first shot as night for continuity?

This feels a quite choppy otherwise…

That’s beyond the scope of this project. The aim is to get the colors close to how they looked originally. In any case the sun goes down pretty quickly in countries closer to the equator. I was in Spain a while ago, and it was light when I entered a building, and dark by the time I exited the elevator on the 12th floor. They were walking pretty slowly, so if it was sunset at the time they reached the tree, it would be dark by the time they reached the top.

Post
#1527549
Topic
<strong>The Mandalorian</strong> - a general discussion thread - * <em><strong>SPOILERS</strong></em> *
Time

Personally, I would be happy to see Disney finally moving away from the legacy characters. The first season was quite effective in its lone gunman approach, although even that season had its filler episodes of varrying quality. The second season had way too much fan service for my taste, but generally the season was entertaining enough. Like many here I felt TBOBF completely removed the stakes by undoing the conclusion of the last season. This in my view was made worse by the fact that this show doesn’t have much story to begin with. The entire second season hinged on little more than Mando finding a Jedi, such that Grogu can get back to his kind. Putting Grogu back in the mix in two episodes of TBOBF felt cheap and pandering. Now IG-11 will be resurrected lowering the stakes even further. I think The Mandalorian had potential, but it would have been better if they had moved on from the character after season 2. Either that or hire a great team of writers to really flesh out the characters and a story for multiple seasons.

Post
#1526537
Topic
<strong>The Mandalorian</strong> - a general discussion thread - * <em><strong>SPOILERS</strong></em> *
Time

I watched the episode, and it felt very formulaic to me. It wasn’t terrible, but the writing is just so mediocre and it’s still a video game plot. After Andor showed what real character development and world building looks like, Mando’s characters are very two dimensional. There’s very little going on beneath the surface. Just one example of what bugs me about this episode and the creators’ approach to this series without going into spoilers:

Mando goes to visit a character from the past. He enters the person’s HQ. The HQ is totally deserted and the person is sitting in a chair. The person spouts some exposition and off Mando goes. The person just seems to be sitting there waiting for Mando to arrive for the person to do their thing to move the plot. It reminds me of those conquest games, where the screen is black in the area where the characters haven’t been yet. There’s nothing there until the characters need something.

Post
#1524916
Topic
How to Watch Star Wars, Part Two: The Special Editions Are the Movies, Get Over It
Time

I watched the video a while ago, and thought is was pretty moronic, and clearly created with an agenda. In other words it is biased as hell. Anyone that can’t distuinguish between altering a sound mix around the time of release, and adding in CGI effects decades after the fact, I’m not going to take too seriously. I personally believe it is actually not that cheap to recreate the OOT. The negative is conformed to the SE, and the original pieces of negative as well as the original elements that were replaced are likely in pretty bad shape. So, I would say restoring the OOT would likely be similar to the Coppola restorations of the Godfather trilogy. It would be a restoration based on many different sources of varying quality and would require a wealth of expertise including the people involved with the creation of the originals to get it right. I also don’t believe releasing the OOT would be hugely profitable. The market for physical releases has shrunk considerably, becoming a niche market for videophiles, and the group of people that grew up on the OOT are going the way of the dodo. So, the main motivation of restoring the OOT is to preserve the original 70s and 80s film experience for posterity. These films in their original form were hugely influential, and it’s a shame, that it can no longer be seen in the best quality warts and all.

Post
#1522396
Topic
I wish someone would ask Kathleen Kennedy about the original versions of the movies
Time

ken-obi said:

Stardust1138 said:

ken-obi said:

Interviewer: “Sorry, I mean like the… the vision of George’s final cut of the film that he left us with? Like whether that might be altered over time?”

Kathleen Kennedy: “You mean the themes and ideas in the six movies he has made?”

Interviewer: “Just the Edits… he has changed over time… like the Special Editions and that sort of thing…”

Kathleen Kennedy: “Oh! I haven’t touched those. (laughs) You kidding? Those will always remain his.”

It’s good to see full context after like you said a clickbait website misrepresented what was said to an extent but this part of the exchange I quoted I find is key to the whole discussion as the interviewer asked about the edits and clarified for her to give an answer. Like she said she hasn’t touched them as they remain George’s and they’ll always remain his. This I think alludes to changing them back to the unaltered state. I wouldn’t put it pass them after the whole Sequel Trilogy fiasco and adding part of the Holiday Special to Disney+ but I don’t think it will happen either. If anything not mentioning Jason Wingreen in their Boba Fett special proves they have no intentions to release them.

Again:

ken-obi said:

Kennedy said she wouldn’t make more changes to the films, and nothing at all about the unaltered theatrical versions.

 

Stardust1138 said:

She gave her answer in an interview at Celebration 2017.

So, no. Kennedy did not give her answer to the OP’s question as you claimed.

If you want to now take Kennedy’s comments from that 2017 interview to somehow now be “alluding to changing them back to the unaltered state” then that is up to you, but you likely shouldn’t misinform others like that, especially with the facts at hand.

It depends on how you interpret her words. If she means, that by not having touched those, that any changes to the final cuts of the films are out of the question, even changes to revert the final cuts back to the theatrical cuts, then she did answer the question. It is the fans who insist, that the unaltered versions carry some special kind of reference point status, and any changes should be viewed in relation to that reference point. However, to Lucas his final cuts are the reference point.

Post
#1522390
Topic
<s>The inaccuracies in &quot;How Star Wars Was Saved in the Edit&quot;</s>
Time

I watched both videos, and I can’t stand either of them. One video follows from a trend, which takes the in my view valid criticisms of the prequels, but then uses those criticisms to create a narrative (which gained traction in the 2000s), that the OT was a success in spite of Lucas rather than because of him. The other would treat Lucas’ stool like they are nuggets of gold. My view is quite simple. Lucas was and is a creative genius, who in his early days tended to be more collaborative, and more open to criticism. However, even that Lucas could create a turd, like Howard the Duck. The Lucas that created the prequels initially wanted similar collaborations, but many of the people he approached turned him down, finding the task to create another Star Wars film too daunting. So, he did it himself, rusty has a was. Despite all of its flaws, and the fact that Lucas became too enamoured with the technology, TPM is still the most Star Wars prequel of them all in my view, and clearly a labour of love for Lucas. My theory is, that the wave of criticism, and hate, that followed TPM made Lucas dig in more, and he became more isolated, more controlling, and less receptive to criticism. To him fans demanding changes to the prequels were not much different from studios trying to meddle with his movies, and so that set the stage for Lucas sticking to his guns, and cemented Lucas’ refusal to release the OOT. That’s my theory anyway.

Post
#1521081
Topic
Lord of the Rings - The Fellowship of the Ring - Extended Edition - 4K Dremastered
Time

I ran the whole film. I haven’t seen any issues with artifacts from different shots with the latest versions. For the EE I created by own custom combination of upscaling settings, which is now possible in the last two versions, because I want to retain all the film grain in the original source, whilst adding detail and deblurring the frames.

Post
#1521044
Topic
What will be the next physical home media release of the Original Trilogy?
Time

That guy with no name said:

HDR (wich always f***s with film colors), and finally the price: $74:99 (USD).

This is actually not correct. Film is inherently HDR, meaning that film has a much higher dynamic range than what SDR is able to show. Most films benefit significantly from HDR color grading if done right, and aside from the technical superiority (higher dynamic range, and a wider color gamut, which allows for more realistic colors), the colors tend to be closer to what is seen in cinemas.

With regards to Star Wars, while it is definitely not perfect, the HDR color grading is the closest to how the movies looked in cinema’s we’ve had officially. The old laserdiscs looked nothing like film, and the DVD’s and Bluray were clearly intended to be revisionist.

Post
#1520927
Topic
Color matching and prediction: color correction tool v1.3 released!
Time

TiredEditingGirl said:

I have a couple questions:

  1. If you were to match an HDR source to the color grade of an SDR source, and the intended final product will be rendered in SDR/Rec 709, would it be best to an HDR->SDR conversion before using the color matching tool?

It would be best to first convert the HDR to SDR and then do a color match.

  1. When matching a source with little or no film grain to the color grade of a highly grainy source, should you apply noise reduction to the latter source before using the tool, or would that not affect the results either way?

The grain will not affect the results, unless it is chroma noise, but even there the effect will be quite small.

Post
#1518414
Topic
Color matching and prediction: color correction tool v1.3 released!
Time

That guy with no name said:

DrDre said:

Hal 9000 said:

I’ll do that. I was erring on the side of more smoothing only because I assumed it mattered how closely the test and reference images were identically aligned.

They should be cropped the same.

If I understand correctly, I could shuffle the pixels of both images into a random order and get the same result.

Exactly this.

Why’ll you’re here Dr, why do sometimes weird colored pixels show up in the highlighted areas and never seem to go away on any settings?

It’s an artifact. If you find an example, please let me know. Usually it can be fixed.

Post
#1518361
Topic
Color matching and prediction: color correction tool v1.3 released!
Time

Hal 9000 said:

I’ll do that. I was erring on the side of more smoothing only because I assumed it mattered how closely the test and reference images were identically aligned.

They should be cropped the same.

If I understand correctly, I could shuffle the pixels of both images into a random order and get the same result.

Exactly this.

Post
#1518314
Topic
Color matching and prediction: color correction tool v1.3 released!
Time

Hal 9000 said:

It… doesn’t matter if the images are aligned? I assumed the way it worked was to compare each pixel with the pixel at the same address in the other image.

If it doesn’t matter what order the images are in, I guess it shouldn’t matter if the two images are even perfectly aligned. If one were slightly stretched or squished relative to the other… that may not matter?

They should be perfectly aligned, but stretched or squished doesn’t matter, because it does not affect the information in the image. A squished or stretched number four is still a four. A number four that is missing it’s top is not a four. Because the method works with color distributions across the image, the precise location of the colors doesn’t matter, and so the order of the processed images doesn’t matter, but they should have the same content.

Post
#1518306
Topic
Color matching and prediction: color correction tool v1.3 released!
Time

Hal 9000 said:

Thank you, that helps me plan how to wrangle them into usable input. Should it matter whether they are stacked horizontally or vertically? It’d be easier and more precise for me to do that than to arrange them into a grid.

No, it doesn’ even matter if the source and reference frames are in the same order. What matters is that the source and reference contain the same color information.

Post
#1518301
Topic
Color matching and prediction: color correction tool v1.3 released!
Time

Hal 9000 said:

I’ve used VMware for years and had no problems. VirtualBox is a good free one I had used in the past.

Also, stitching multiple frames together seems to work really well. However, mammoth images seem to choke it and it does not progress past a certain point. But even with a low amount of color spaces (since a large amount choked it) the results are pretty darn good across a whole movie with very different locations.

Yes, there’s a limit to the size of the image it can handle ~8K. So, make sure to resize the frames to something like 360p before putting them together. This should not affect the color matching result.

Post
#1517985
Topic
Color matching and prediction: color correction tool v1.3 released!
Time

Hal 9000 said:

How would you correlate the number of color spaces with the exactness of the image alignment, and same question for smoothing parameter?

More color spaces lead to a more exact match. A lower smoothing parameter does the same.

Sounds like a higher smoothing parameter is better when the sources aren’t pixel-perfect. Is a higher number of color spaces always preferable, with the only downside being time?

Yes, this is true.

Also, would it make any sense at all to create a collage of multiple frames (twice, per source) and feed that into the tool for a more informed LUT to export?

Yes, but use plenty of color spaces (>20) and set the smoothing factor to about 0.1.

Post
#1517976
Topic
Color matching and prediction: color correction tool v1.3 released!
Time

Hal 9000 said:

I’m trying to use this for two different sources for ESB, one from 2004 and another the 19SE. I align the images as best I can before generating the two frames to feed into the tool, but I can’t get it to be exact.

Would it be better to use a higher smoothing parameter? I haven’t seen DrDre recommend anything higher than 0.1, but it can go as high as 1. If the two images are not totally identical (same frame, but the sources aren’t pixel-perfect), is there a drawback to using 1 as the smoothing parameter?

A higher smoothing factor is less exact, but reduces the incidence of artifacts. I generally rarely use a value over 0.2. For more exact matching use more color spaces and a smoothing factor of 0.001. The frames have to be virtually identical to prevent artifacting.

Post
#1517748
Topic
Lord of the Rings - The Fellowship of the Ring - Extended Edition - 4K Dremastered
Time

coreyatad said:

Wow, this looks incredible. The definition of the Blu-ray, but with the style of a film print. What comes next, after the regrade? Also, is there a special method to dealing with the problem shots where the green tint darkened and took detail from the image? I know the other big colour restoration here used the chroma from the theatrical blu-ray for that stuff.

The black crush isn’t nearly as bad as I feared. However, in so far as the shadows have been compressed, the AI upscaling/detail enhancement treatment should restore what was lost.