ROTJ:R is back in production.
After over a year i have finally finished restoring the 2020 blu-ray, removing as much of the static grain possible without impacting the detail in the picture. There is some minimal static grain in a few places, but for the most part that problem is gone. I have also replaced a few shots throughout with better quality ones taken from the 2011 blu-ray. These shots were so scrubbed of grain thanks to their algorithm that is removed so much detail in the image and made them really soft. But, thanks to a bit of tinkering with grading an image processing, you won’t really be able to tell that 2 different sources have been used.
It wasn’t an easy task, which is why it took so long and so much work. You can’t just apply digital noise reduction to the image to remove the static grain, or just place a layer of grain on top to try to hide it. Using an all over DNR that would be enough to eliminate the static grain would just destroy the detail in the image and give everything a waxy look or worse. So you have to go shot for shot, creating many layers with different levels of DNR or a level with none at all. Then you have to rotoscope every level in a shot so that foreground objects that don’t require a great amount of grain reduction, or any at all, would not be affected. But faces that have bad static grain then need a different technique. Reducing the grain that is visible on the skin while keeping the original level of detail in the facial features. So you have to rotoscope eyes, eyebrows, nose & mouth to keep those elements intact. Its backgrounds that suffer the most in the 2020 blu-ray and that was a bit of a godsend with the depth of field used in this film. so the backgrounds are out of focus and the only real detail that you perceive was caused by the static grain. this is not the case with all shots though, so that’s what took so much work and took so long. Once this was completed and a layer of minimal grain was added, the static grain problem was no more for the most part.
Here’s a sample you can download that shows a before and after comparison that will give a better example of what i mean by all of this:
https://mega.nz/file/aFtCgRjT#1JfzlVrRnPYYDmISy1rcrAEl4NOzDh9Q_ASjvKJ7Cqs
there are still one or two shots that i’m not 100% happy with, but i can tweak those as i go along. But at least i now have a suitable version to begin this edit.
And thats what i have done this week. I have completed about 5 fixes so far, but at the moment i’m concentrating on the colour grading.
I can’t understand why people rave about the 2020 blu-ray so much. It’s a mess. Not just the static grain and over softened shots, but the grading. Jedi never looked like this. It was vibrant and colourful. Not this flat, almost sepia, desaturated version we got with this release. Its like they heard the complaints with the 2011 releases, about the oversaturated image with the overuse of a blue filter throughout and though " we better do something about this" but when in the completely opposite direction and muted all the blue tones and desaturated the image far beyond what they should have done. It’s horrible. All the high levels have been muted. There’s no definition in the image at all. The bright levels in objects look flat, especially noticeable in skies with clouds. Mids have been raised to brighten the image but have gone overboard in places. Take the scene when the emperor arrives on the Death Star. They have raised the levels in many of the shots in that scene it’s almost blown out the image. What was the grader who worked on this release thinking? . I’ll be posting a comparison video of this scene next week sometime and you can see just how bad it is. But, for now, here’s a sample image comparing the 2020 official grade with the Revisited one…
So the colour grading stage has begun. I’m using the 4k83 & 97SE versions as a rough guide to the grading. Over the next week or so i will be posting 3 comparison videos showing the new grade, so watch out for those. But here’s a little teaser of the first video i will be posting over the weekend…
