Dreamaster

LOL you guys sure watch those black bars awefully intently.

In the Dreamastered version, everyone lost 20 pounds…

Screenshots added to post 1… 😃

If the source material was a lot cleaner, I would be tempted to release a non DNR’d version, but as you can see from the test video the color correction really damages the grain quite a bit (in actuality it’s making an underlying issue even more visible.)

There will only be one release. I will say, I kept lowering and lowering the amount of noise reduction in order to try and maximize natural looking skin (too much DNR turns faces into wax). Originally I had the grain layer’s opacity at 90% but that too kept getting backed off as the DNR percentage went down as well. So while it’s not 100% “natural grain” I really tried hard to strike a good balance to get that natural film look.

Still, guys lower your expectations a tad, LOL… I am NOT a perfectionist… there are still areas where the source fade’s in and out, Yoda goes from red to green in a 3 second period, and then there are a few places where I got a scene perfect, only to miss that same set piece later in the film and it’s a completely different base tone of color. 😃

5 months ago the day after Christmas ‘16, I released a single pass regrade of the Grindhouse that for me, greatly increased the enjoyability of the film. But the washed out stars and the green snow kept knagging at me like a fly. I kept thinking “How hard would it be to learn Adobe Premiere and do some shot by shot corrections?” I purchased a subscription to Adobe cloud and started tinkering with it. I learned how to make cuts and apply individual LUTS.

After fighting with doing some correction by hand, I got to thinking more and more about Dr. Dre’s color tool, so I finally got up the courage to ask him for a copy, and then went and watched Williarob’s tutorial on how to use it. Around this point, Williarob sent me the Prores files for the Grindhouse project so that I can make adjustments reel by reel and work from the original source. In order to use Dr. Dre’s tool, I needed to match frames of the Grindhouse reels to identical frames from another source. I had two sources to work from, Adywan’s 1080p 1997 SE version, and Harmy’s version. I specifically looked for places where both Harmy’s and Adywan’s were as close as possible for the first pass “reel” correction of each reel. As an example, the shot I chose for Reel1 was this one:
 

Just as an example of a late minute change, my coworker convinced me there was too much green in sections and this shot was one that got the benefit of the last minute change.

 
As you may know, I was originally drawn to this project because the Grindhouse had “white snow”. I didn’t want to do a color match anywhere near those snow shots. The Han/Rebel Soldiers shot seemed like a good candidate because both versions were similar and there was a lot of blue in the background of those shots. What came out to me, was quite striking and beautiful as well. Luke still has naturalish skin tones in the cave, but the snow/ice goes from light blue to deep blue in a natural and chilling way. I’m officially a convert… and I really believe that the snow color in this edition is fairly close to the original look.

After I had a reel by reel correction I noticed there were always these “cuts” that completely shifted in color. The more and more I discussed this project with Rogue1, the more I learned and discovered that the Grindhouse doesn’t come from a single contiguous print, but from at 3 prints intercut together. So I spent the next several weeks… almost completely by eye, adjusting the reels, making the shots smaller and smaller as time went by.

I threw the reels together and exported the first version of the recolored film. For the life of me, I could not get the audio to export. I must of tried 5 times before it finally dawned on me to ask… “Williarob does the Prores files have the audio in them.”

“No. Maybe you should just GOUT sync it.”

He sent me a tutorial that involved some other software and LOT of frame counting, but then it dawned on me… Isn’t Harmy’s GOUT synced? I threw Despecialized into the project and then started moving the reels around to match his frames. That immediately got me 95% GOUT synced… the last 5% was just a few shots here and there in the middle of the reels where the Grindhouse was missing a frame or two. I left some black frames at the reel changes… it leaves the project with an organic “film” feeling but honestly, those reel changes are well thought out scene changes. When there were missyncs in the middle of the reels I actually did duplicate a few frames and in Reel6, the Grindhouse actually had an extra frame that Despecialized did not. So, to the best of my ability this project is GOUT synced.

Somewhere along in this process, someone spotted that the LUT I had used for Reel1 and 2 created quite a bit of blue “noise”. I firmly believe this is due to “film grain/noise” of the reels aging differently. Williarob showed me some samples of what Neatvideo denoiser can do and suddenly I got VERY excited. It has options for cleaning specs and dirt as well as smoothing and denoising the image. Promising my wife I would starve for the next month I purchased a license of the plugin and put it to work.

Unfortunately the dirt busting part of it completely destroys lightsaber flashes, laser bolts and occasionally super fast movement on the screen. So in order to make this work for the project, I had to run the plugin TWICE, once for a version of the film cleaned, and one simply denoised. On top of this I found that some parts had to be denoised separately to look well and to THIS DAY I still kept finding colors to adjust. The final project has 8 video layers stacked on top of each other, and places (entire scenes) where there is lots of saber action or blaster fire, you can see that the specles and dirt comes back… once the Empire brings “peace” though, it gets pretty clean again.

The very top layer in my project is film grain. I found a nice “dirty” 35mm film grain online and learned how to “blend” it as an overlay. It turned out to be too dirty though, so I exported the grain as a TIFF folder and went through frame by frame and cleaned the scratches out in GIMP. I imported the newly cleaned 5 seconds of grain and then duplicated it to create 30 minute swaths. Most of the film has this layer at around 73% opacity, but there is one 30 minute area where it’s not applied. See if you can figure out where that is! 😃

This project was about learning something new, about working with a movie that was the first movie I ever saw at a movie theater, and about putting my money and time where my mouth is. It will always haunt me a bit that my first discussion with Harmy was me arguing with him about snow color. Now I can be on the other end of the stick, as a user of this forum I asked to preview this release said, “It’s of noticeably lesser quality than the Grindhouse and it has a yellow tint and lots of blown whites.” 😃 Perhaps so, but I’ll always be thankful for the experience, and thankful that Williarob kept encouraging me forward throughout the process, and hopefully, it’s good enough for you guys to enjoy until something even better comes along in the hopefully not too distant future.
 

Here is an early example video when I was using the demo version of the denoiser. You can see the serious difference between the outside portion not being denoised and the inside portion!
https://vimeo.com/209815129
Password: ThisIsNeat!

May the 4th be with you!
 

Williarob said:

Could just be that after 13 years it’s a bit faded. Could also be that adjusting the settings would help - I probably haven’t done that since I bought it in 2004! Perhaps I’ll try that tonight.

The brightness of plasma’s fade with time… at 13 years it’s less than half as bright as it was the day you opened it. 😦

dahmage said:

Williarob said:

Yeah, the blacks are not even close to black on the the plasma.

That seems odd to me, perhaps it is an age thing related to your specific tv. but isn’t deep blacks one of the things plasma does better than lcd?

You’re missing a generation in the middle. Old school LCD’s were TERRIBAD at blacks, the best they could do was a glowing blue/gray. But then the TV makers figured out they could divide the backlighting into zones and once they got good at it, blacks got MUCH better on LCD’s.

Panasonic was known for it’s “deepest blacks of any plamsa” but no, plasma blacks aren’t quite true black. Though they are good enough that you have the lights in the room completely off to notice an issue.

Williarob said:

The best TV I have in my house is a 13 year old, 42" Panasonic 480p plasma EDTV. Everything looks great on it: 1080p blu-rays are scaled down and look great, 1080i HDTV looks fantastic, DVDs look awesome at their native resolution and even old, lower quality, 512x218 DIVX/XVID AVIs and standard definition TV channels are watchable. Also in the house are a later 32" 720p Panasonic LCD TV and 50" 1080p Smart TV by LG that I was going to use to replace the old EDTV, but it’s just not as good.

When all my content is 4k, I’ll want a 4K TV, but for now, that 480p is great because scaling down always works better than scaling up…

I owned that TV for a while! Until I decided to take it to my friends house to play God of War 2 on his Playstation 2. Apparently, leaning those against the wall is a bad idea, because after I went home to take a nap, my friend called me in a panic “I just… It just… I’m so sorry brother your TV fell over and the glass is smashed to pieces.”

Honest to God, I don’t know what got into my wife but after a few months she bought me the 50" Panasonic at 720p, and I’m STILL running that.

But if I had $4000 I’d drop it on a 65" LG 4K OLED in a heartbeat. TRUE black, and with 4K you can be inches away from the TV and not lose detail! So immersive!

I don’t have any “inside info”… but it seems obvious to me that Disney didn’t accept Mike’s proposal. Since the only way we were supposed to see this was as a legit release means we won’t ever lay eyes on it… though I have this feeling in the back of my mind that when he’s on his death bed one of Mike’s last acts will be to push the “upload to internet” button. 😃

Ouch:
http://movieweb.com/star-wars-classic-trilogy-disney-wont-alter-restore/

Honestly it’s a little shocking that there aren’t a lot more 97 film prints to scan.

Outstanding Swazzy!

Why was my reply deleted?? I agree with Darth Lucas, the revision has less saturation making it look more like the photos and looks awesome!

NeverarGreat said:

If you discover that they do indeed contain a consistent yellow tint, that would mean a bit more work for my project, which is why I want to be absolutely sure 😉

It’s interesting that this is stressing you a bit given that your current example shots already have a good amount of yellow in them and your philosophy towards editing REEL 5 and 6 was about consistency and not about theatrical purity (for which I am grateful, your preview vids are pure sex). 😃

SwissArmyTin said:

Oh man, those Tarkin frames look incredible.

If only he were alive today to see us all obsessing over getting his colors right!

So white balanced, those look closer to what your eye is seeing, right Dr. Dre?
Composited and widened… LOVE where this is headed Dr Dre.

     *** MAY 4, 2017 ***  

Showing how important it is to have a set of real life eyes on the frame because even your photos (as he said, non calibrated) don’t get us quite from A -> B. LOVE the regrade here Dr. Dre!

JSC is just too inconsistent in my opinion for a single pass regrade. Every time I get Ben’s Hut fixed, Tarkin turns to &*(&.
Also I see the palette change as well between GIMP and imgur. Strange.

Swazzy said:

And one last attempt to round things off. This is about the closest I could possibly get to the ideal Tech/Mike Verta color model:

Even though your gamma is so high it’s blowing out the highlights I kind of like this one. It reminds me of sort of modern day “home video” hybrid with 70’s technology.

DrDre said:

Dreamaster said:

Gamma levels are PERFECT Dr Dre! I pulled 4% from the mid green channel to see if that made Beru’s hair and Ben’s beard more natural:

Looks great, but the technicolor prints are green shifted, so more natural may be a bit out of the scope of this project 😉.

I know Dr. Dre, I know… it’s just such a minor shift that makes my brain relax and feel all fuzzy. 😃

Gamma levels are PERFECT Dr Dre! I pulled 4% from the mid green channel to see if that made Beru’s hair and Ben’s beard more natural:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/y5bai6pg8bf380f/EmpireGrindhouseRecolor.cube?dl=0

I made this learning to use Dr. Dre’s tool, see if that works!

joefavs said:

Honestly, my main takeaway from this thread is nostalgia for the original GOUT colors. The regrade looks great too, but that washed out low-contrast look does my VHS generation heart good.

The team blu uprez is still a great version to watch isn’t it!?

DrDre said:

hairy_hen said:

Hmm . . . the sunset scene still doesn’t look like the prints. I didn’t think it would; apparently too much blue/purple has been added for a single correction to get it back. The only other problem shot I see is the first shot of Artoo in the canyon being excessively red, but it’s like that in the GOUT already. The rest of the movie looks fantastic with the adjustments.

Well, we actually don’t know exactly what it looks like for a projected print, but it’s really close to the the Senator print photo, which is a bit brighter, but also purple:

The R2-D2 canyon scene actually is excessively red for the technicolor print scans we have, and the -1 LPP as well.

Whew!! You saved me Dr. Dre I thought I was gonna have to pay Hairy_hen a million dollars.