ChainsawAsh said:
One of these days (possibly with DJ's V3, actually) I'm seriously considering loading each film into Avid or FCP's Color and color correcting them shot by shot, maybe even doing some scratch & dirt cleanup while I'm at it.
Yeah, but at the same time one reason I feel doing a sort of "one light" printing like I have done is good is because it gets rid of the guesswork. Part of the problem I feel is that people tend to colour films they way they would like them to look, or feel they ought to look, instead of the way they should actually be, because sometimes shots need to have some objectionable elements in them in order to be "correct" but people make the mistake of assuming they were ideal looking, or looked more like a particular version we are familiar with. Because the problem with the GOUT is not really a shot-by-shot thing, its an overall problem caused by a print-wide desaturation and a print-wide red shift. So you basically have to work backwards from that, but it would be a set variable condition and not a shot-to-shot thing, so it's really a matter of finding that golden setting that is the perfect opposite of the desaturation and red shift levels. I can see treating the odd shot for video defects, because some shots might need less saturation due to video noise. Adywan is a good example where he really put a lot of work into tweaking each shot to "fix" it using a number of different colour balance controls depending on the shot--but while the completed shot look great, it didn't quite look like it did theatrically. For instance I think I remember he had to do this for one of the shots in Luke's Hoth recovery ("scruffy looking nerfherder" scene) in order to get it white, but if you look at the shot I posted of it, it has a lot of beige in it, with some red and green mixed lighting in the frame. A lot of shots are like that. In the raw GOUT they just look neutral though, once you get the colours back you see how much variation there is in the frame.
Every shot in the GOUT has been affected in the same manner and in the same way as far as any of us can tell (the exception being the binary sunset scene, which was recoloured), so for the most part the same correction setting should be used for the whole film. That would be my take on it. Maybe this wouldn't work as well in practice.