I must say that I am very impressed, and I am torn. Processing definitely has its place, but once it is done, it can't be undone. I feel it would probably be best to have Puggo release as planned in the best possible "original" format and then allow the community to tweak it from there. That way we have both options.
The Aluminum Falcon said:
Wait sorry, out of curiosity, who did that color correction?
The top pic was just an upscale from the raw capture on Puggo's website (no color correction). The bottom pic was from the PG. I think tinypic slightly modifies the colors (which is very annoying).
In general I agree that an extensive color restoration is too much to ask and takes away from what this project is, and it may be that there is a magic formula that works for the whole reel capture, so maybe just send one reel to see how it goes, like with PSB.
http://i56.tinypic.com/jjlgzk.jpg
Looks pretty good to me!
Puggo - Jar Jar's Yoda said:
There's no way normal color could be restored to PG, it would be like asking Adywan to polish a turd (especially reel 2).
You might be surprised. I know I was when I first saw what he did with his HD Special Edition of Episode IV. If the color is really bad on PG and one setting won't fix everything satisfactorily, maybe different rules can be applied (do whatever it takes to fix the color to make it look the best it can).
If you still need convincing about what is possible, check this out: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yiJ9fy1qSFI
;-)
Wow! Looks really great! How close are you to finishing the project (not trying to rush you, just curious)? At this point you need to send Adywan the remaining reels, choose the best color corrected version for each scene, crop the borders and resize to HD, do the final encode of the video, and mux in the audio. Anything else?
Having access to two reels of ROTJ is awesome! More chances for a better picture in each scene.
Are you planning to redo the HD version of PG before Return? Since you kept the original captures it might go pretty quick. Maybe you could send those to Ady as well for color correction.
Sounds really great! Also given this is a 16mm film, I think the mouse droppings, etc. add to the vintage feel of it and will make it an all around better experience!
I think the Pyramid version has the most detail in the bright areas, but it could benefit from expert hands to get the colors corrected. It is looking really good so far though given the source. I am not sure if there is less detail in the dark areas though. A hybrid of the Pyramid and the GOUT might be the answer.
That's awesome news about Adywan helping out and I like the plan to do one adjustment per reel. The only thing I am wondering about is you have said in the past that you were capturing each reel multiple times and were going to choose the best capture for each scene.
You could do what you now suggested and give a totally consistent look for each reel at the possible expense of washed out light or dark areas from scene to scene. The other option would be to send Adywan all captures for each reel and have him give suggestions for each captured version of the reel. Then you could select the best version scene by scene and have consistency amongst the captures scattered throughout the reel, but not use one capture across the entire reel. I am not sure which approach is better, but probably your approach you are going with is best overall to keep it as original as possible (as long as one of the captures is pretty good for most parts of the entire reel).
Can't wait to see it!
Mike
That would be awesome if Adywan or someone as qualified would work on the colors for this. My only request would be to try to adjust them in a way that preserves the original capture as much as possible and adjust everything together to make the best overall balance, rather than look at the snow and say "that should be white" and look at the faces and say "those should be skin color" at the same time. In other words, don't select certain items and adjust their color, and adjust the rest of the frame a different way. Since this is a capture from the original colors, it would be great to have a good idea how they originally looked as much as possible.
Can't wait to see this!
Mike
Hi Puggo,
I just had a random thought and wanted to run it by you. I am not sure exactly how your magic rig works with your DV camera so that it captures each frame perfectly centered and converts it to DV AVI frames. I happen to have an HDV camera and I am wondering how hard it would be to make it work in that format instead. It still uses firewire, but has a capture resolution of 1440x1080i if I recall correctly. Since it captures in widescreen, it would lose some of that horizontal resolution, but it would still have much more overall resolution. If it was something that you think could be configured, I probably could lend you my camera to try it out.
Thanks,
Mike
Thanks for the update. That's cool about the other restoration you did!
Hi Puggo, I hope you had a great vacation. I am looking forward to mine in July. :-) I was wondering if you had any more thoughts about the blend idea and if you could post some screenshots of the frames used and the blended frame.
I am thinking that in general, you can capture darker scenes (Dagobah) so they capture a bit on the bright side, and capture brighter scenes (Hoth) so they appear darker. Then you could adjust them to the correct level in post and have all the detail there. If there are scenes with both extremes, then you could use the blend or just capture somewhere in the middle and lose the high and low details (of course the blend would be ideal if it worked ok).
Thanks,
Mike
Cool!
French and 909 Svideo look the best to me in terms of detail. German looks nicer but slightly less detail.
TV's Frink said:
Love the username, btw.
Now look who's sucking up. ;-)
Hi, welcome to the forum. What would be great is if you could do this in two parts. First do a raw capture the absolute best way possible, and provide samples of that for download to judge the quality and the worth to proceed further. Then let other experts help with post processing. From what was posted so far, I think there is more detail in the raw than the post processed screenshots and would rather watch the raw in this case.
Mike
I am very sorry to hear about your loss, Adywan.
Hi Puggo, just wondering if you have any updates.
Puggo - Jar Jar's Yoda said:
Thanks for the feedback. A couple of questions:What filter would you suggest for dialing back the white areas? (in Avisynth, VirtualDub, or Vegas preferred)
Yes, I will back off the blues (and reds). However, I have to do it scene-by-scene because I'm using several captures and their white balances are not all the same.
I've been scared of DeSpot. I tried it on the PG, but it always seemed to remove other stuff too. Even on the DeSpot page, in the sample image the boy has lost his nostril. I may only use it for the beginnings and ends of the reels, where the spots are most distracting. And I suspect it will work well in the crawl, if I can get it to avoid the stars. If you have any recommended settings, I'd be interested in hearing them.
By the way, I finished merging clips for reels 1 and 2. I may skip merging clips for reel 2... the results just aren't as good. So my next step is starting the editing process. This will be a bit tedious.
For the overly bright white scenes (for example the snow in the background on the right side in the scene with the little at-at), can you recapture the film to make the scene a bit darker so you can see all of the brighter details? That might do better than trying to recover blown out highlights. If the data is really there, above 235 and below 255, then you should be able to just lower the white level or brightness setting. If a lot of it is color 255, then it is not recoverable.
I agree with your fears about using DeSpot and that it will remove unwanted details. I am usually a believer in not messing with the original too much because when you artificially fix something, you might be breaking something else. Some things may be worth it (like color correction or manually fixing a few bad spots on a frame), but others are not (like scrubbing out details to make it look less grainy).
Thanks,
Mike
I think that the least amount of processing plus the higher quality / bit rate makes it look the best and most natural. I am hoping that the fluxsmooth and any sharpening won't be necessary in order for it too look good and fit on a DVD-DL disc. Using the 2P size method with the variable bit rate should give pretty good results hopefully. I think the first pass determines where all the peaks and valleys are and the second pass splits up the end result size and adjusts the bit rate throughout the encoding process.
Holy crap the CRF 18 seemed to make a big difference. For some reason though when I burned the file to disc, it wouldn't play properly. Maybe it was the option I chose that was the problem (x264 Q21 Insane Film then modify CRF to 18).
I went through the process to get the cropping done right for each scene. What I did was use Virtual Dub to cut out each scene and save as an AVI using direct stream copy and number the scenes in order in the filename.
Then I used Xvid4PSP to crop, resize, and add black bars to each scene so that it was the same as it would be in the final product and save the files individually again. I used lossless AVI FFV1 to save them. Then finally after all of the scenes were cropped and resized, I opened the first scene, then joined each scene in order, and encoded the group into the final mkv file.
Here are the settings I used for each of the scenes:
http://i53.tinypic.com/34q21vp.jpg
It is easy to tweak it for each scene (assuming each scene is in a separate AVI file). Just adjust the numbers and hit Apply and see how it looks.
I didn't check to see if the aspect ratio was correct. This can be adjusted easily by tweaking the 117 setting. I chose 117 based on Harmy's findings that the height of the movie should be 486 (486+117+117=720). The correctness of the aspect ratio may vary slightly from scene to scene depending on how it is cropped in that scene, but I would pick one number like 117 for the whole movie or else the size of the picture will adjust itself and that would be distracting.
Here is the final product that for some reason doesn't work on a blu-ray player, but it looks real nice on a PC.
http://www.sendspace.com/file/aebelg
Mike
Thanks. For clips, I would suggest using CRF 18. If you try to do it based on a large size for small clips, the bit rate may be way too high. I tried this last night for the short clip and it made a 400mb file that stuttered and had glitches. When the clip is much longer, the bit rate is within reasonable limits.
For the whole movie, you could try it both ways or any combination of ways to see what gives the best results. I am a fan of not filtering out stuff to make the file size smaller. With the 2 pass size restricted method, it uses a variable bit rate and will use more bandwidth only when needed and probably give you the best overall experience.
Tonight I will re-encode it again with CRF 18 and post it again.
Mike
I am not sure what CRF is, so you are probably right. I usually encode the file as big as I can and still have it fit on a disc. When using that mode, CRF isn't an option (x264 2P DVD-5 Insane Film, size at ~7900 depending on the audio size).
You can break it into multiple files and adjust the cropping for each file, then at the end, use tsmuxer to append them together. By the way, I used tsmuxer to convert the .mkv to AVCHD which is what I posted in the link above.
Edit: After thinking about it, I am not sure how stable that break in the encoded files would be. Two other options would be to crop each file and resize inside of VirtualDub, save as lossless AVI, then join all of them together into one AVI when all the files are the same resolution. Then use Xvid4PSP to add the black bars and encode. The other option would be to crop the files in VirtualDub and try to join them in Xvid4PSP. I am not sure how well it handles files of different sizes though, so using Virtualdub is probably the best option.
Ok, here are my current settings:
http://i54.tinypic.com/n6s401.jpg
It is encoding right now so I am not 100% sure the aspect ratio is correct. I like doing 2-pass encoding. For the final product I recommend using the highest quality preset for 2P DVD-5 then editing the settings and setting the size to 8100 minus whatever your audio file size is so the final mkv will be around 8100. This should be small enough so that when it is converted to AVCHD, it will fit on a DVD-DL disc.
Once my encoding is done, I plan to burn it to disc and check it out in my theater. Can't wait! I will see if I can upload the final product (probably using sendspace).
When burning to disc, I recommend using Imgburn and you will need to set the disc format to UDF 2.5.
Mike
Edit: Ok it finished (that was quick). I noticed that Yoda and Bespin aren't cropping properly.
Edit 2: Here is the file: http://www.sendspace.com/file/ijtzky
Like I said, just use ImgBurn and set it to UDF 2.5. I just watched it on my 163" screen using my PS3 and it looks great! Can't wait to see the final product!!!
Thanks Puggo! I can't wait to start playing with the raw clip (hopefully tonight)!