Thanks guys!
First a brief preamble: it is NOT possible to restore perfect colors from a black and white image (or video). Period.
Said that, and as I’ve written before, I’m not going to colorize by hand thousand frames (this is the only way to achieve a great, almost perfect result). So first I used the only avisynth filter that tries to guess how to colorize a b&w picture; it’s a nice filter, but, as this is a simple one, that could rely solely on its own, results are usually quite bad. (this doesn’t mean I don’t like the filter, at the contrary; and the author did a good job, you know that…)
The only other logical way IMHO is to use neural network; here results are better, but dependent on many factors; I used one of the websites that offer this service for free; unfortunately, I have first to export each frame as a picture, then load it in the website one by one, by hand, wait for the conversion, save the colorized one, rescale at the proper size, and use it as a chroma plane. Now you know why I wanted to make a test clip first, using just few frames as reference…
I guess if there is some software (now available) that accepts a b&w picture, and a color picture for reference, and tries to recolor the b&w following the reference… I don’t think so…
About quality: I’m aware that’s pretty bad, but you have to trust me that this result is the LESS WORSE… all the others were so ugly in comparison, so now you can understand a bit better.
So, this is one of the options we have for the b&w scenes. I wrote about those before, but I’ll refrain them again here:
- leave it untouched, in b&w - don’t like this option at all
- recolor by hand, good to perfect results - the best, but, until some volunteer wanted to make the job, it could not be considered
- recolor by automatic software, bad to decent results, like the following one, used for the test - at the moment, I think it’s the best option, a right compromise
- a “trick” like the one used by TMBTM in his War of the Stars II - where the frames have big shades of one or two colors - of which the following is the best one - I can see the point of his choice, and it worked pretty well in a way; still prefer less-than-perfect recolors, though!
- other ways like simulation of Biocolor or KinemaColor is out of question…
- do further options exist? If so, please let me know!
The fact is, there are many edits around with the b&w scenes inserted untouched (AFAIK all not even cleaned); the only attempt at recolor them is TMBTM’s edit; yes, better than the b&w version, but still not what I aim to.
At the end, until a crazy fan would step in and declares that he/she could recolor them by hand, or using a NASA-kind of supercomputer that will guess almost perfectly the colors, or some sort of miracles, I guess the less of the evil is to continue with the path of automatic colorization.
Last words: pick all the deleted scenes, shots, outtakes and so on, and throw them in the films as they are is quite easy. But it’s not what I’d like to achieve. A perfecly inserted version with all the shots cleaned as film? An impossible task for fan users like us. The right compromise, that’s what I would like to obtain. Is restored blue screen shot like “Bail Organa” perfect? Nope. But is good enough to be used. Is the Dooku extended duel (a mere 3 second shot) perfect? Far from it! But it’s the best version available, so it’s OK. Are those colorized scene perfect? Of course not. But should work better than an out-of-place b&w version. Again, everything IMHO.
Ideas, opinions, critics?
I think there is only one deleted scene in Black and white that really, really should be restored in full color.
I think all effort should be made to get that particular scene that is in Black and white done and done proper.
Han & Leia extended kiss Empire strikes back.
Honestly you could take or leave the rest. you could probably get away with Coloring Luke a sort of Cyan trying to hold on in the Rancor pit again a bit of trickery like TMBTM and use some clever ideas to “Get away with it” actually looking at what TMBTM did actually the blue and the Red should be the other way round sort of… I would go with a Red Bacta Tank as it was originally meant to be Red and is red in the background in a few shots so again no real issues.
Say if you wanted to do general Veers Death you could simply color in the cockpit of the AT-AT red like an alarm was going off. And seeing has they occasionaly have red cockpits it’s not gong to be a massive issue for anyone.