Harmy's STAR WARS Despecialized Edition HD - V2.7 - MKV (Released) — Page 158

What is the chants that you may include some thing like a THX optimizer , so People can better Calibrate there screen for this version?

Kingherb said:

Not to offend here Snicker but i prefer Harmy's colors, that wall you are talking of seems to lose detail in your shots and C3PO looks to dull, i guess it all comes down to personal opinion, and since Harmy is basing his colors from a very decent source i think we must trust his judgement.

Hopefully this illustrates what I'm talking about a little better.

CatBus said:

snicker said:

Hopefully this illustrates what I'm talking about a little better.

It would be more helpful to compare against still from the workprint.  We already know the Blu Ray colors are wrong, and Harmy's workprint doesn't look much like the Blu Rays anymore.  Are you sure there's even a problem to fix anymore?

The issue I'm trying to point out is with the red channel highlights clipping so that any bright red object becomes an area of 100% saturation/brightness and the image detail is lost. It is possible to restore that lost detail with good information from the other colour channels as shown above. Harmy's colours are not the issue, they're actually great. I personally find that these clipped reds stick out like dog's balls so if it's something that bothers him, and he's interested in fixing them, he can.

The top image here shows the result of clipping in the red channel. This problem presents throughout the movie and is responsible for a loss of detail in explosions and also why a lot of the laser cores are missing. Together with a (sometimes) badly damaged and clipped blue channel it also contributes to the bright magenta in a lot of shots. 

Darth Vader button reference to help you recolor. Note that the belt lamps are a different shade of green.

http://i125.photobucket.com/albums/p64/Midnight_Trooper/Vader053.jpg

http://i125.photobucket.com/albums/p64/Midnight_Trooper/Darth_Vader_ANH_ESB_Helmet_31.jpg

http://i125.photobucket.com/albums/p64/Midnight_Trooper/HPIM4383-1.jpg

I see what slicker's talking about. Yeah, the 2004/2011 transfer really boosted the reds. Obviously, the color timing people at LFL were more concerned with making the transfer "pop" than with preserving image detail - crushed blacks, clipped reds, etc.

With all the improvements that fans have made to that transfer, it's always jarring when I remember what it actually looks like. The '04 candyland makeover is about as far away from the original color as you can get, unless you were to retime the whole thing in teal and orange (don't give them any ideas for the 3D re-release!)

Harmy said:

Yeah, I see what you mean snicker but you didn't explain how you did that, is it complicated?

I guess the main complication for you at this stage is that the settings have to be applied to the raw Blu-ray capture. I don't know if you have it split into separate sequences for editing but if so it would be impossible to apply now. The only way to do it would be to render the whole movie with your settings in lossless, load it into After Effects, then apply the red fix as a colour key, tune the colour to match your render, and re-render. Pretty painful.

I've been working with individual colour channels to build up detail in each one. The red channel highlights clip a lot, the blue channel too but not quite so much and the green channel rarely clips. It's not often that you have clipping in all three channels simultaneously so there is usually good detail in at least one channel. The green channel is often useless because the white point is so much lower than the other channels but it can be used as a 'base' to restore some detail in combination with the blue channel which contains most of the highlight detail.

I've used 4 keys just in the red channel alone to build up the red highlight detail as well as using difference mattes to limit the areas which are being altered.

So basically I started with three precomps - one each for the red, green and blue channels, worked on building the detail in each using colour and luma keys, then used 'set channels' in a fourth precomp to set each of them as new R/G/B channels. This then becomes your new video layer.

Harmy said:

Yeah, not worth it. I'm not even working with the raw blu-ray, I'm working with You_Too's over-all colour fix rendered at 720p.

I figured it might be a bit late to incorporate, just wish I'd figured all this out a little earlier. Anyway, I'm liking the look of your latest workprints a lot. Good luck with the rest of it.

I wonder if those fixes would work for ESB and ROTJ?

ww12345 said:

I wonder if those fixes would work for ESB and ROTJ?

Can't see any reason why they wouldn't. Is clipping a problem with either of those transfers? I'm really only familiar with Star Wars.

Oh, I don't know. I was just thinking that if Harmy hasn't started ESB or ROTJ, maybe that technique would be advantageous for those films.

Harmy said:

Here's a little teaser for reel 3 - Three shots with a Ronto removed:

http://uloz.to/xzMDjDE/flyby-deed-v2-0-mp4

Perfect.

Greetings all, and especially harmy...thanks SO much for your work on this!  I just discovered this project and this forum thanks to a metafilter thread and had a followup question:

Would anyone else be as interested as I am in harmy perhaps sharing the source files for the cover art, like in PSD format or however they were made?  I'd like the ability to tweak them in various ways (but not have to start over from scratch, as I like their general design and content).  

I'd be happy to make what I produce available to the community in case anyone likes what I end up doing with them.

My apologies as a newbie if this has been discussed in the prior 150+ pages on this thread.  I might be doing something wrong but I couldn't seem to get the forum to search just this topic for me (phrases like "cover art" and simple words I could see right on the first page kept coming up with no results).

Harmy said:

Thank you guys.

To the covers, no I don't plan to release the source files, for several reasons; A) they're pretty huge, B) they're really messy but mainly C) I'm quite proud of the design and I'd like the covers to stay the way they are and I definitely don't want them to be used with something else than the Despecialized Edition, I'm sure you'll understand.

In a moment of pure excitement (while happily watching a test burn of ROTJ, in fact) it didn't even occur to me that using the "source code" as it were of your designs, someone could repurpose them without consent or attribution for a non-intended use.  That's a completely legitimate concern!  Thanks for your reply dude.  If I go ahead and produce something for my own personal use, I'll share what I create with you via a PM or something just in case you like it (fan art inspired by fan art).

Many thanks again for the amazing undertaking this all represents, and your commitment to the preservation of these historic films.  Cinephiles everywhere are in your debt.