GOUT, Automated Theatrical Colouring, and a Reference Guide — Page 8

True, they're probably not what the actual movies looked like, but they still have a 'natural' sort of look that my eyes find pleasing, far removed from the harsh manipulation of the destroyed SE images.  And since that is what final movies ultimately originated from, there's a certain authenticity involved.

How exactly does analogue colour timing on film prints work, anyway?  I don't know much about that sort of thing.

I like the look of some of the trailers; though, it probably isn't truly what it looked like in theaters (i.e. not fully color timed yet). Though, I honestly find myself disliking the blue throne room and preferring the color of the trailer. It's probably because it looks more natural. Anyways, I think that this just proves how desaturated the GOUT is. It really is too bad that we don't have a definitive source to base a color correction on; though, I think that the recently released ESB bootleg and the Senator Theater screen shots come pretty close.  It seems to me that Star Wars should look saturated, vibrant, and colorful as originally suggested. In fact, I sometimes prefer the color of the 1997 SE myself (minus the pink tint errors in ANH), as they were supposedly timed from the reference of Lucas's print. Ah well... more GOUT blues...

hairy_hen said:

True, they're probably not what the actual movies looked like, but they still have a 'natural' sort of look that my eyes find pleasing, far removed from the harsh manipulation of the destroyed SE images.  And since that is what final movies ultimately originated from, there's a certain authenticity involved.

How exactly does analogue colour timing on film prints work, anyway?  I don't know much about that sort of thing.

I assume you mean film colour timing? I don't think film would be considered analogue, because it's not electronic. But the way film colour timing works as far as I understand it is when the film is printed there are coloured lights (three I believe--RGB) that shine on it to control contrast, brightness and colour. So, you decide on the printer light settings for each shot, and as the shot comes up the intensity and mixture of the lights change according to the result you want. There is also a "one light" method, where if you can't afford or don't have time to do a shot-by-shot correction you just choose one printer light setting for the whole film; I think this is usually done to control contrast and brightness, rather than colour. So anyway, you run your negative assembly through the printer, and as it's going through the lights that expose it on to the new copy affect how it looks. You then get a new print with all the colour correction--it usually takes multiple tries to determine the precise settings because you can't see the result until it is printed. When a print is approved, this is called the answer print. The negative is then run again using the same settings from the answer print, and this makes the interpositive, which is used as the master for making theatrical prints.

csd79: Those examples are terrific! They have a very natural quality to them. Would make a good example for fan preservations to follow. The only problem is the same one that keeps coming up again: in terms of representing the "look" of the film, they lack that bright saturation.

Now that I have the V3 finally finished and just about out the door, I would LOVE to revisit this, I still have(actually will always have LOL)the lossless avi files on my PC of the V3 files, I would like to be more aggressive on getting these colors right, or at least closer, so if anyone wants to team up and help me figure this out, I would love the company LOL, because some of the software used on this, I have zero experience with, I also have all the Blu-ray files(HD) on my external drive.

Ah, that makes sense.  I meant 'analogue' in the sense that it's not digital, though maybe that isn't quite the right word for actual film.  Sounds like the process of setting the colours would allow you a good degree of creative adjustment but ultimately it wouldn't stray too far from the source photography, because it is just shifting the whole image in a certain way rather than the sort of intense manipulation that movies today seem to go for.

I keep wondering how much good it would do to apply colour correction to the 2004 footage vs. the GOUT.  For all its flaws, the GOUT is at least sourced from a copy of the actual movie, and so should be closer to the original, but the video noise and fading make it difficult to get something truly accurate from it.  On the other hand, the 2004 version is usually much more saturated and has more information to work from, but the crushed blacks are a huge problem beyond any real fixing, and things like colourless laser blasts and dull sabres have to be adjusted individually.  Both are frustrating messes in their own ways.

Here is a good example of how some of the colour only becomes apparent when you saturate it:

From the ESB trailer:

Raw GOUT:

They look pretty close together. But the saturation-corrected GOUT looks much different.

But before someone speculates that maybe such saturation isn't accurate, here is what the 1980 bootleg of a theatrical print looks like. Pink-shift, of course, but its obviously closer to the oversaturated GOUT, both in terms of saturation and also in terms of the blue cast.

Another good example:

Raw, uncorrected GOUT:

Here is the corrected GOUT, with the saturation pumped up.

And here is that shot in the theatrical bootleg:

Obviously, the bootleg does not have pefectly correct colouring, but the one thing we can learn here is that this scene has a blue cast to it. But you can only get that when the colours are deep and rich. That's why I love that outtake shot of Obi Wan on the Falcon, you finally see that rich, saturated look, and then you look at the GOUT and its just this dull blob.

@zombie, so you think the GOUT just needs a saturation pump only? if that is all then you would think this would be a very simple fix.

You have to colour-shift it away from the red as well. But as has been stated, there are a lot of problems still. You have a lot of artifacts because of the saturation (noise mainly--but this is on the master too, it just becomes more noticeable), and the red needs to be controlled somehow because it saturates so strongly that it bleeds and pops. It makes hard to get good skintones sometimes as well. You'd have to figure out how to control the reds without losing the vividness of the red hues. That seems to be the biggest issue so far. There have been a lot of attempts which have gotten rid of the popping and given decent-looking skintones (see csd79 the previous page, for example), but every one of them has done so at the expense of the saturation, which sort of puts you back at square one. I like csd79's settings for an "optimized GOUT", but it doesn't resemble the theatrical colouring, for example the Death Star interior in his Obi Wan shot is still greyish when it should be a fairly rich shade of dark blue. I'm not sure if you could get the GOUT to have the theatrical colouring and still be pleasureable for viewing because of all the technical issues. Hairy_hen's idea of starting with the 2004 master is an interesting one...

That is why I mentioned that I have the HD files as well as all the DVD's released.

bkev said:

While the Han shot looks pretty gray, the shot of Ben and Luke on the Death Star is lookin' blue in csd79's shots. I think at that point it becomes a case of applying his settings to the entire movie and then color-correcting by scene, if anyone has the patience for so.

 

While the shots have some colour returning to the walls, they still have that drab GOUT look when you see the way a theatrical print looks.

This:

is an excellent "enhanced GOUT", the best I have seen so far, but it doesn't resemble this very much:

Obviously, that isn't exactly what that shot should look like either. But I think you get a sense of the saturation and tonality, and then you look at the shot above it and it's not really the same.

This was my first attempt at it, which is too red, has bad skintones and hasn't had any contrast or gamma tweaking, but it better captures the sense of colour I think. You can see that the walls are clearly blue, not just having a hint of blue in them. I don't think this is how the shot should look, obviously, but probably in between the two is a good place to be.

Csd79 is close, but not quite there, the basic essence in terms of colour is still somewhat elusive. There is a vividness that is still lacking. But he said that was just a first attempt--I would be very interested in what he could do if he spent more time at it. His skintones certainly blows away the lobster-Ben in my test shot above.

edit: this process might be a good place to start.

 That's an interesting thought, convert the 2004 master to the 1993 colours and then basically do what we have been doing here. I wonder if screwing around with the colour that much would make things start to look weird though.

Okay, so since I started this a couple months ago I haven't given this another go, so I thought I'd take another crack. This one looks really good, I think. It's not quite as saturated as I would like, but if you go any further you get all sorts of artifacts and weird things happening, but the sort of "essence" I was talking about comes through.

These were the settings I used in VLC:

Lessening the bad skintones wasn't quite as difficult as I thought, compared to last time I basically just went more towards cyan in the hue and held back on the saturation. I gave the contrast a decent kick as well, which looks nice IMO (I think I could have gone further though), and brightened the image a bit.

I used a sharpening filter as well, which I think looks really nice, but you can't tell in the caps. Anyway, this is what I ended up with.

You can still see a bit of popping in the reds, but it's pretty tolerable IMO. If there was a way of desaturating the reds only just by a bit, which would give skintones a further help, I would say this is a pretty decent "theatrical look", even if it lacks a little bit of the vividness I would like.

You know that is all good doing these adjustments in VLC, but we need some sample adjustments using software that will actually change the avi file, to me VLC adjustments mean nothing, does VLC save the changes and render a new lossless avi? I could be wrong but I think that is what we are trying to do here, is make substantial adjustments to the file and render a new one, but as I said, I could be wrong.

I will leave the Virtualdub stuff to people that know how to do that. I just wanted to demonstrate that it's actually possible to do this just by playing around with settings.

Has anyone actually thought of recolour timing the 1997 SE versions ? They don't seem to suffer the crushed blacks as the 2004 SE, and the Flunk/Reivax and other broadcast sources seem pretty good quality wise to work with. If we could change the colour timing of those and then convert them to the theatrical versions (like Harmy has shown) we could be almost there.

Not saying this is the perfect solution (far from it) but certainly there would be more colour and detail to work with over some of the GOUT sources.

Ah, that looks quite nice, both Lee and Ady.

Ady's sorta reminds me of the 97SE colours a lot, with that coldish blue interior of the deathstar etc. :-P

Yeah I agree about the 97SE smearing, that's why I think it should only be parts or selected scenes. The Flunk one is better in a lot more places than the Reivax I would say, after comparing them both, but there is a minor problems with the Flunk too. I think the best from both would be a better compromise.

Not sure what d_j's 97SE broadcasts look like, but from what I have seen from the small sample clips and screenshots it looked more detailed than the 97SE laserdiscs ever did, but again I hear it has its own problems too.

I think what we would need is a hybrid version of all the best parts taken from the best sources to achieve what needs to be done getting it to look as close to the original as possible. So we could have a mixture of GOUT/04SE/97SE for particular parts but not too much that it becomes jarring between sources. As we know, that working from one source has its limitations, and in this case the GOUT source doesn't have all the colour information in parts that would be needed to recolour time it.