Here’s my attempt at colourising the scene. Took a hit of work to get it to match the 35mm scan I had used
Very nice! I’ll see if I can integrate this color into the footage soon.
Ok, I always thought this was just a single photo of a before and after, but I clicked on the link (to try and recall how to upload photos here) and discovered this was a video?! What source was this version of empire? I’d like to maybe match it to this version as well. But anyway, heres a quick color test to see what I’m dealing with:
https://imgur.com/a/YdMSKbG.png
https://imgur.com/a/4wPOMai.png
no clue how to get the thumbnails to work
Also: while matching the frame of both deleted and official versions, after “you’re trembling”, the scenes actually align almost perfectly; the audio does start to lag behind: OK at first I thought it was a fps sync issue but then I realized after muting one and playing the audio over both, it had to be re done in ADR which would explain why both sequences match in visual timing but not in dialogue.
Back to the discussion: I could overlay the two to produce the finer details but you would see the cut in quality right as the overlay stops. But it will still be really solid color info since I can just overlay them perfectly for the first half.
Also, just thought of a genius fix to skip the lines. Since both clips match I overlayed a cropped portion of the official version on top of the portion of footage containing scratches and converted it to B&W, add a slight blur, and tone matched it to fit seamlesly into one. Now I can forget those damn line scratches that run for 20% of the film.
