Dreamaster

skyjedi2005 said:

I would be interested in seeing what the color timing is on the HDTV release of Star Trek II.

The blu ray is restored from the negative.

Are there screenshots of the color of the uniforms Kirk and his crew wear?

In the blu ray some shots are almost orange or brown like the source the negative was faded.

While some of the earlier home video versions had the film overly red with the colors blown out but the uniforms were red.

Before I even look at the screenshots to muddy my mind… from my childhood memory they were deep to dark red, almost maroon but not quite that dark.

EDIT: Checking the screenshots… Jesus what is up with the crazy color timings we get from blu ray releases? This one is closest to my memory:
http://s166.photobucket.com/user/adzez/media/Star Trek/fbc133be.png.html

DrDre said:

Deleted [the most awesome looking, neutral colored sand pics of reel 1 you’ve ever seen]

You know sometimes this forum’s edit capability is maybe just a little TOO flexible! 😃

DrDre said:

I haven’t been able to compare these shots yet with Despecialized v2.7, but while working on regrading the bluray I always struggled with C-3PO’s color, which just did not look right. The bluray C-3PO is much too green, and gold is one of those colors that’s difficult to reproduce.

Here are the shots I’m referring to from the automated correction of reel 1 of the Spanish LPP:

I really like these colors, as C-3PO really looks golden.

ACHE EEE double EL to the WHY EEE ES!

DrDre said:

poita said:

Ok, excellent.

So basically it gets us back to the colours on set, but not necessarily the colours captured on film, or to the original grade.

It does give a great neutral starting point to work from, I am keen to try it out.

Well, since you would correct large parts of the reel as a whole, the shot to shot color relationships would remain intact, so unless the original grade had some color bias (even for shots that were originally shot under white light), you should recover the original grade to a good approximation, before it was captured on film, which would then introduce the bias of the film stock.

Poita and Dr. Dre are finally starting to join forces… my work here is done.

DrDre said:

What’s interesting to note is, that aside from the fact the print has not been corrected yet, the colors on the print suggest the scene was shot during the day, while the Despecialized Edition’s colors suggests it was shot while the sun was setting. How do I know this?

If I correct poita’s scan with the algorithm (which essentially tells us the colors at midday), the colors hardly change, suggesting the scene was actually shot relatively close to midday:

Original poita scan:

“Corrected” poita scan:

The Despecialized Edition’s colors show a massive change however:

Original Harmy:

“Corrected” Harmy:

The “corrected” Despecialized colors are closer to the print colors.

A production photo I found on the internet, suggests the scene was indeed shot at a time closer to midday, and is more consistent with the print colors:

I was going to post those comparisons in your thread and say almost EVERYTHING you said line for line. I’m not even joking… and throw in my opinion that Lucas made the conscious choice to regrade the movie colors there to make it look like it’s getting near sunset hours because they’ve spent the “whole day” with the events leading to and traveling to the Sarlac pit… And that I think the Endor forest scenes are a tad warmer than they were in the theater also (because I actually remember those better) and then end it with screenshots of Willow original DVD versus the blu ray release in 2013 in which they REALLY added in the gold tones. The difference between Jedi, Willow, and Star Wars is that the color timing changes made for Jedi and Willow films have “artistic merit”… right or wrong, the brain can logically work out what the thinking was, versus Star Wars which has just left us all in a cluster getting rid of them and our brains screaming “MAGENTA NOT RIGHT!”

Then I was going to beg Dr. Dre to do a shot of the blu ray corrected to Poita’s scan to see how that would look… you took care of me there too!

Poita, Dr. Dre… you guys are the bomb.

WOW!! Despecialized 2.5 on top, Poita’s work on bottom. Poita, is it ok if I post comparisons like this in Dr. Dre’s film color thread? In that thread we can pick apart and debate white balance, light bulb degrees, red vs. blue hues and such without interrupting your flow here. 😃

MAN those colors are awesome looking.

pittrek said:

The Tantive 4 shots look fantastic. The Tatooine shots would need IMHO a bit more saturation, but that’s just my opinion, I’m not claiming it “should” be saturated 😃

Our eyes have become accustomed to way too much red saturation for these films even though the skin tones are unnatural.

I feel it too. The pull to the [red] light.

EWE, sounds like Salmonella Poita. I remember when I first got married, my wife’s chicken cooking skills weren’t quite up to par yet and that night is one I will always recall as “the dark night of the soul.” It also taught me that if your chicken tastes like Turkey… stop eating it.

You’re in my prayers today as well!

I was really confused about something but I think your post sort of cleared that up… I had assumed you were the one scanning the film because you have a film scanner but that’s not the case here and in fact your function here is more to assemble, stabilize, and clean the scan?

I’m all for reviewing film and looking for glitches, that sounds like fun… I have a good internet connection too so size shouldn’t be a problem.

DrDre said:

Maybe, but I’m pretty sure that the light outside is meant to be sunlight, and not some vague green light like on the bluray 😉.

Touché!!

DrDre said:

The next update for the color correction tool will also contain some post-processing tools. As the color restoration algorithm is generally meant to be used as a global color correction for a large part of a film reel, individual scenes or shots may require slight adjustments, because of color imbalances caused by non-uniform fading, or caused by the scan process itself. As such, one post-processing tool that will be available, is a “simple” white balance, specifically meant for correcting very slight color imbalances for specific shots or scenes, without affecting the overall color grading. For example, the first and third frame I posted of reel 2, have a slight blue shift. The white balancing algorithm that will be part of the tool, can be used to fix this:

That’s awesome to include that tool but are you sure Luke wasn’t using cold florescents to light up his garage? 😉

Finnius said:

mverta said:

SilverWook said:

Finnius said:

…it’s been real quiet for over a month…my guess is Mike had a heart attack from all the stress of the project…

Not funny.

I thought it was funny. Partly because the “other” project I’m on nearly HAS given me a heart-attack. 😃

Legacy is slowly moving up the chain. Executives are nervous, skittish creatures.

I have it on good authority that Mike’s ‘other’ project was the recently completed “Godzilla versus Mecha-Barney” film that was recently put in the can…I can only imagine the ulcers from working on that…

There is a part of me that would LOVE to see that movie, if only because we know that Godzilla always kills the other monster at the end of the film. Watching a purple singing dino in pink armor die would be epic.

It looks to me Bobbajet to have a slight lack of green, the faces just don’t quite look neutral to me, especially compared to the SSE. But the blu ray… lol what were they thinking? 😃

CHEWBAKAspelledwrong said:

Trying to interpret why “‘other’” is in quotes is getting me way ahead of myself.

Williarob said:

towne32 said:

Looks very nice. Any samples from Ben’s hut?

Some effort went into improving this scene!

Thought I’d see what this frame looked like in my “one passer”… seems like it’s the “Half way point” between “purple Luke” and “real boy Luke”. 😉

Wow… well why I’m not necessarily sold that the TFA changes are “better” they are definitely very visible to me, even though they are much more subtle than say his Jedi regrade, he’s shifted all the reds in the skin tones towards orange/peach hues and it creates a very gentle orange push in the other shots as well.

To know whether or not Harrison’s face was really that red, we need to ask the most important question…

“What was his blood pressure during shooting?”

Because high blood pressure can give bright red hues to real people in real life. 😃

LeLwrence said:

Looks nicer. I like it.

DrDre said:

The colors are looking very good. Nothing cheap about them 😃.

Thank you!
As for all of the SSE version 1.5 stuff I’m glad to see what’s being done! As I told my wife “Seperately these guys have ALL the puzzle pieces, they just all need to unify and put them together for greatness!” 😃

Coming to these forums about 4 months ago was a thrill ride of epic proportions. Somehow Harmy’s Return of the Jedi 2.5 preview showed up on my youtube page and all of a sudden, years of “dormant” Star Wars fandom came rushing back. The excitement was through the roof. I found his video’s on tehparadox and went through all the little downloader hoops to get those films. I did not yet have a blu ray burner so in order to watch them on my xbox 360/50 inch plasma, I had to reencode them down to mp4 files.

After having vowed for years to never buy the blu rays, Harmy’s “honor system” compelled me to go pick up a copy. I wanted to do my part! I looked online and discovered the steelbook editions and made a special trip to Best Buy and picked them up.

In reading Harmy’s FB I found links to these forums and Harmy’s threads and, being in a lull at work, for the next several days solid I read tons and tons (literally YEARS) of posts and through most of the main threads here… From a group of people coming together to get Lucas to release the OT on DVD … then to Poita finding the “deal of the century” on a film scanner in Korea… to TeamNegative1 starting their own scans… K650 recoloring the blu ray… and of course Harmy’s initial work… Mike Verta coming in and explaining his restoration project. From an “outsider looking in” this is a PASSIONATE group of people, and sometimes those passions have led to very heated and emotional discourse! Even I got involved in that when I tried to beg/debate Harmy to make a color change in Empire snow! 😃
 

What does all of that have to do with this post? I have no idea except perhaps I wanted to do something of my own for those that are itching to play with these releases on their own while we wait for “things to come together” with Poita/Dr Dre/Silver Screen Edition version 2.

There is thinking that recoloring the Silver Screen edition in one pass is POINTLESS, because the color correction has been done shot by shot. So if one or two scenes are “off” if you “fix that” the everything else will be destroyed by that fix. But the more I looked through the SSE the more I felt like there was a consistant feel to it… and that feeling is… it’s “Cold”.

Inspired by Dr. Dre’s recoloration at reel 1 I felt like that is VERY close to definite (discussion of lightbulbs aside, LOL) and so I decided to do an expirement and try and make a tattooine scene from SSE “match” his recoloration, and then just see what it does to the rest of the film. To my surprise the changes positively impact at least 80% of the film, and perhaps only a small number of shots “look wrong” now, at least IN MY OPINION! 😃

So using, aviDemux 2.6… a very small and simple video re-encoding utility that has a pretty nice array of filters and options. I set the output BACK to mkv (because it defaults to AVI) and then changed the video output to Mpeg4 AVC… then I added the color filter, found my scene and made these changes:

You’ll notice that the results on the right are quite a bit “too green”… I’m not sure why but it seems the video encoded by avidemux tends to show up “more red” when viewed in VLC media player.

Anyway, after a couple of hours of reencoding, I got these shots comparisons: (SSE on top, reecocode bottom)

After reviewing these… I think the colors are still too saturated and so I’ll go back and lower that down some more… and that’s the beauty of this one! I just wanted to offer settings as a starting point and if you want to desaturate it or change the brightness you can change it to your hearts content. 😃 Good luck and have fun!

So… to try and bring this slightly back on topic (THE CAKE IS A LIE), Dr. Dre color corrected a reel from the Spanish LPP, which is the base for SilverScreenEdition, but clearly it’s not the same because it hasn’t been cleaned… (so dirty but still sexy, but let’s not get off topic again!) which begs a couple of questions. Did TeamNegative clean and stablilize the movie BEFORE any color correction was applied? Or did they do the color correction first and then clean it?

Secondly, Poita has a full scan of the movie that he has done independently that is red faded and Dre is working on obtaining it?

Poita has done cleanup work on the THX film with high dollar software… so would his scan be “cleaned” like his THX sample or will it be “raw/grindhouse”?

thxita said:

Recent update on the preservation project: second and final part has been scanned and will be shipped next week.

HOORAY!

Although… now that you got me thinking about it… this DOES sort of look like the differences that a bulb color might make in the output… IB print on top, Harmy/Town2.7 bottom:

You guys are overthinking this. There was/IS a “bulb” used and it was the one in Poita’s scanner (Or TeamNegatives). The difference is in the color temperature between his bulb and the one used in the 70’s… ala white balance… and the only difference is if he scanned it with an LED lamp, or if it used an incandescent. The differences are known temperatures and IF it’s that important as Dr. Dre said that would be a final LUT applied to the entire movie once everything else is done. What you’re going to get though is Stormtroopers that are mildly yellow though, instead of mildly blue. The primaries are going to be largely unaffected.

LeLwrence said:

Colson said:

LeLwrence said:

The videos on Vimeo are awesome. Are there more shots completed other than those?

The entire movie is complete. I believe this has actually been screened once or twice.

Wow I’m so out of the loop. That’s awesome news. Are there plans to release it to the public soon?

Look for Mike’s first post on page 77 of this thread… And then enjoy the emotional ride. 😃

Simply beautiful!!

DrDre said:

Here’s a video sample of the SSE Grindhouse color corrected using the automated color correction algorithm:

Video deleted

Edit: sadly something went wrong converting the file from raw to mp4, as this is how the video looks:

While this is the shot in the raw version as it’s supposed to look:

Oh look! You’ve stumbled onto “how to take a good color film and create a Lucas film release sunburning faces for home video.” process. Color space conversion error? R2 probably doesn’t look right after conversion, so if you’ll add on more blue to fix him you’ll land at the official blu ray release! It sounds like I’m making fun but I’m not. I seriously think you just discovered what might have really happened.

HOLE LEE &(&(!

I have NEVER seen his face look “right” or “natural” in that shot before. EVER.

Until now. It’s simply a “bad shot” in terms of a man’s face who’s background contains a ton of light so therefore his face is “too dark” but typically this shot looks like people (Lucas included) are trying to photoshop his face “brighter to fix the bad shot” and there’s always been so much RED in it that he looks “burned”… and and and…

Great work Dr. Dre!