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Project 4K80 (a WIP) — Page 2

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Out of interest, are these untouched frames, or has basic colour-correction been applied to make them less faded? When you mentioned earlier that the print was faded, I was wondering if it had started to fade to red to the same extent as the Grindhouse print from 2015.

Bluto

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Bluto said:

Out of interest, are these untouched frames, or has basic colour-correction been applied to make them less faded? When you mentioned earlier that the print was faded, I was wondering if it had started to fade to red to the same extent as the Grindhouse print from 2015.

Bluto

All the frames are at least a little pink. Some are pinker than others, but on the whole there is less fading than on the other 35mm prints we scanned. So the samples above have been adjusted slightly to show how much color information is still there.

Here is an untouched frame from the same set, for reference:

Imgur

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 (Edited)

You mention the 16mm has great color. Do you suppose you will utilize one of Dre’s color matching algorithms to match the 35mm print to the 16mm color?

Also, you’ve got a donation from me 😃

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Williarob said:
All the frames are at least a little pink. Some are pinker than others, but on the whole there is less fading than on the other 35mm prints we scanned. So the samples above have been adjusted slightly to show how much color information is still there.

Here is an untouched frame from the same set, for reference:

Thanks for the comparison; the untouched frame doesn’t look too badly faded at all. Is this Fuji type of print therefore generally more stable and slower to fade to red than whatever was used for the Grindhouse print (Eastman?). I remember seeing a few untouched frames from the Grindhouse a few years ago which looked like they had been doused with ketchup!

Bluto

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Handman said:

You mention the 16mm has great color. Do you suppose you will utilize one of Dre’s color matching algorithms to match the 35mm print to the 16mm color?

Also, you’ve got a donation from me 😃

That could certainly be done, yes… but do you really prefer the 16mm colors as a reference?

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Dreamaster said:

Handman said:

You mention the 16mm has great color. Do you suppose you will utilize one of Dre’s color matching algorithms to match the 35mm print to the 16mm color?

Also, you’ve got a donation from me 😃

That could certainly be done, yes… but do you really prefer the 16mm colors as a reference?

Unless somebody comes up with a way to automate, or batch the color matching process, this would be a nightmare.

To be fair, we’ve only seen previews of the 16mm print - I don’t know if they were color corrected at all, but if not it’s certainly possible that a single correction could make it all look fantastic - it all looks very blue in the previews, but if we dial that back it might look great. I don’t know, but I hope that’s the case. If not, the Fuji print looks very nice on it’s own.

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Bluto said:

Thanks for the comparison; the untouched frame doesn’t look too badly faded at all. Is this Fuji type of print therefore generally more stable and slower to fade to red than whatever was used for the Grindhouse print (Eastman?).

From what I understand (and feel free to correct me if I’m wrong), Eastman film was by far the worst when it came to fading because their cyan dye was basically trash. Fuji has other drawbacks that Kodak doesn’t, but as far as fading goes, it supposedly lasts about twice as long.

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Williarob said:

Dreamaster said:

Handman said:

You mention the 16mm has great color. Do you suppose you will utilize one of Dre’s color matching algorithms to match the 35mm print to the 16mm color?

Also, you’ve got a donation from me 😃

That could certainly be done, yes… but do you really prefer the 16mm colors as a reference?

Unless somebody comes up with a way to automate, or batch the color matching process, this would be a nightmare.

To be fair, we’ve only seen previews of the 16mm print - I don’t know if they were color corrected at all, but if not it’s certainly possible that a single correction could make it all look fantastic - it all looks very blue in the previews, but if we dial that back it might look great. I don’t know, but I hope that’s the case. If not, the Fuji print looks very nice on it’s own.

I was just trying to guage interest in those super blue versions of ESB. Yes… the color potential in the Fuji print is almost unreal. Here’s a denoised shot I made of a frame over a year ago (4K80 initially won’t be denoised, it will be full movie grain but this is just an idea)

I did some color work early on in 4K77 but since I never saw that movie in theaters my confidence levels were very low. I’m much more confident in ESB colors… this print yields incredible reel by reel colors. I’m even thinking we could do a white snow and a blue snow version near the end, but that’s really jumping the gun, gotta get it cleaned up first.

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Even as they are the grabs look gorgeous. I simply cannot wait for this to progress.

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 (Edited)

Dreamaster said:

Handman said:

You mention the 16mm has great color. Do you suppose you will utilize one of Dre’s color matching algorithms to match the 35mm print to the 16mm color?

Also, you’ve got a donation from me 😃

That could certainly be done, yes… but do you really prefer the 16mm colors as a reference?

I was under the impression that our 35mm sources were in much worse condition than they are. I really like the 16mm colors, but the 35mm looks good enough. I just grew wistful remembering an instance where color matching tools were used to reobtain original color from high quality black and white footage and a very low quality NTSC videotape.

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Handman said:

Dreamaster said:

Handman said:

You mention the 16mm has great color. Do you suppose you will utilize one of Dre’s color matching algorithms to match the 35mm print to the 16mm color?

Also, you’ve got a donation from me 😃

That could certainly be done, yes… but do you really prefer the 16mm colors as a reference?

I was under the impression that our 35mm sources were in much worse condition than they are. I really like the 16mm colors, but the 35mm looks good enough. I just grew wistful remembering an instance where color matching tools were used to reobtain original color from high quality black and white footage and a very low quality NTSC videotape.

It’s not “color matching” that’s being done here but rather frame blending. You take the b/w luma channel of the film footage and take the chroma channel of the video footage and overlap the two to recreate the color footage.

What’s the internal temperature of a TaunTaun? Luke warm.

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Mavimao said:

Handman said:

Dreamaster said:

Handman said:

You mention the 16mm has great color. Do you suppose you will utilize one of Dre’s color matching algorithms to match the 35mm print to the 16mm color?

Also, you’ve got a donation from me 😃

That could certainly be done, yes… but do you really prefer the 16mm colors as a reference?

I was under the impression that our 35mm sources were in much worse condition than they are. I really like the 16mm colors, but the 35mm looks good enough. I just grew wistful remembering an instance where color matching tools were used to reobtain original color from high quality black and white footage and a very low quality NTSC videotape.

It’s not “color matching” that’s being done here but rather frame blending. You take the b/w luma channel of the film footage and take the chroma channel of the video footage and overlap the two to recreate the color footage.

And in this case, it worked well because of a particular type of noise that allowed them to unwarp the 16mm source and overlay things more easily.

Presumably it’s not always an easy task to align two film scans.

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Handman said:

Dreamaster said:

Handman said:

You mention the 16mm has great color. Do you suppose you will utilize one of Dre’s color matching algorithms to match the 35mm print to the 16mm color?

Also, you’ve got a donation from me 😃

That could certainly be done, yes… but do you really prefer the 16mm colors as a reference?

I was under the impression that our 35mm sources were in much worse condition than they are. I really like the 16mm colors, but the 35mm looks good enough. I just grew wistful remembering an instance where color matching tools were used to reobtain original color from high quality black and white footage and a very low quality NTSC videotape.

That’s good to hear.
Dre’s tool while maybe not necessary for 4K80 has been nothing short of magic for some sources that were super faded. I used it extensively for my ESB Grindhouse shot by shot recoloring.

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 (Edited)

Great news to see this project kicking off and I’ll be very happy to make a donation, which reminds me I was going to make a donation to Poita’s TESB 35mm project and also the fact that I’m sure I saw a post from yourself Williarob on the 4K83 page that you were using Poita’s scan as a basis for this project. Ended up politely arguing with a few people that said otherwise and I would quote your own post but I can’t seem to locate those comments anymore. Anyway, I see from comments in here again that this is actually not the case and that you are using your own Fuji 35mm film so I guess that settles that once and for all 😉

Regarding the 16mm scan, is this just for a frame by frame colour reference for the 35mm scans? If not, what is the purpose of the 16mm in regards to the 4k80 project?

Finally, thank you to yourself and the team for the amazing work you have done and continue to do. Who knew the Star Wars fandom would be first to release the Star Wars OUT (or in any form for that matter) in 4K before Lucasfilm or Disney…

Val

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The 16mm scan will be used to guide us with some of our color choices - it’s not a perfect reference by any means, but it’s bound to carry more weight than the bluray. It can also be used to repair missing or damaged frames.

While we would love to add Poita’s Empire scans to our mixing bowl, the logistics involved in copying TB of data is quite an imposition on his time and resources. It’s no exaggeration to say that it would require days of his time to restore the scans from LTO tape to hard drives (and at least three 8 TB Hard Drives would be needed for each scan), which would then have to be shipped to us. Even if we requested Prores versions, which could cut the file size down by about two thirds, it would tie up his computer for several days or even a week or two of encoding, a computer that then can’t be used for doing work on any of his own projects. The files are too big to download, and even if we tried it would still tie up his computer for weeks and weeks.

So, if you’re reading this Poita, and you can think of an easy way for us to access any of your Empire scans, by all means let us know, but in the meantime we certainly have enough to keep us busy. Indeed, it might be wiser to wait and see what we need - perhaps there will be a handful of shots that we just can’t fix, and then we can request just those shots from you - if that’s easier than just sending everything…

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Williarob said:

The 16mm scan will be used to guide us with some of our color choices - it’s not a perfect reference by any means, but it’s bound to carry more weight than the bluray. It can also be used to repair missing or damaged frames.

While we would love to add Poita’s Empire scans to our mixing bowl, the logistics involved in copying TB of data is quite an imposition on his time and resources. It’s no exaggeration to say that it would require days of his time to restore the scans from LTO tape to hard drives (and at least three 8 TB Hard Drives would be needed for each scan), which would then have to be shipped to us. Even if we requested Prores versions, which could cut the file size down by about two thirds, it would tie up his computer for several days or even a week or two of encoding, a computer that then can’t be used for doing work on any of his own projects. The files are too big to download, and even if we tried it would still tie up his computer for weeks and weeks.

So, if you’re reading this Poita, and you can think of an easy way for us to access any of your Empire scans, by all means let us know, but in the meantime we certainly have enough to keep us busy. Indeed, it might be wiser to wait and see what we need - perhaps there will be a handful of shots that we just can’t fix, and then we can request just those shots from you - if that’s easier than just sending everything…

Road trip to Poita’s house in the Outback!!! Shouldn’t be too hard to rig a car for the ocean, right? 😃

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Thanks for the explanation Williarob, sounds like it would be a logistical nightmare to get a complete copy of Poita’s scans across to you and makes much more sense as you suggest to simply request small amounts of frames for any you may need to replace.

Val

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I thought the Blu Ray didn’t alter any of the colors.

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Morphzero said:

I thought the Blu Ray didn’t alter any of the colors.

You’re joking right? The blurays were created from scans of the original negative, the original negative was not color graded for theatrical release, so the entire movie had to be graded from scratch for the bluray. In other words, ALL of the colors were altered for the bluray.

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Man, I didn’t realize how orange & blue this movie was. This monitor isn’t calibrated at all, but a lot of that orange (especially in the 16mm) looks almost neon.

Valheru_84 said:

Who knew the Star Wars fandom would be first to release the Star Wars OUT (or in any form for that matter) in 4K before Lucasfilm or Disney…

…probably most of us… ¬_¬

At this rate, I seriously doubt Disney has any interest in the OUT. And unless they accept Mike Verta’s offer, I seriously doubt they could do any better.

Williarob said:

You’re joking right? The blurays were created from scans of the original negative, the original negative was not color graded for theatrical release, so the entire movie had to be graded from scratch for the bluray. In other words, ALL of the colors were altered for the bluray.

Not only that, but according to Mike Verta’s analysis, some of the shots look as if there was so much color loss, that they were basically colorizing grayscale footage.

Did they color grade the Blu from scratch, though? I thought they used the DVD SE masters as a base, and just fixed some bits and pieces.

This signature uses Markdown syntax, which makes it easy to add formatting like italics, bold, and lists:

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Asaki said:

Did they color grade the Blu from scratch, though? I thought they used the DVD SE masters as a base, and just fixed some bits and pieces.

In 2004 they scanned in the negatives at 1080p and graded them to that over-saturated-magenta disaster that we’ve been stuck with ever since. There may have been some tweaks in 2011 for the bluray, but the fact remains that all three movies were graded from scratch in 2004.

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