Harmy's THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK Despecialized Edition HD - V2.0 - MKV & AVCHD (Released) — Page 28

Harmy, I'm trying to type a tutorial to explain the process but it's way too complicated to explain simply. I'm at work so I'll have another try when I get home.

I don't know how much sense you'll make of this but here we go...

It's easier to work with separate RGB luma channels because you don't have to worry about altering colour values. For this example we'll use the red channel to brighten the green channel. Layer order as follows:

1. [Adjustment layer] Use Colorama to set to green luma (explained below)

2. R/G channel difference matte (created in a separate precomp and explained below) - Make sure you turn this channel off

3. Source video (duplicate) [Track Matte, Inv. Luma] -- Set blend mode to ‘Lighten’ – Set this channel to display red luma using Colorama

4. Source video

Some notes about these layers:

1. Changes everything below this layer to display luma values.

2. The red/green difference matte will show areas of difference between the red and green channels.

3. Applies changes to only areas of the green channel which differ in brightness to the red channel. As you’re working with areas that should be black or near black ideally you would expect there to be little difference in brightness between the channels so where it finds a difference it will apply a lighter value (Obviously if the change would make it darker there will be no change). In this way you can never darken the image further. You can apply a curves adjustment to layer 2 to increase/decrease the contrast of the matte and thus the area affected. You can also alter the opacity of this layer to lessen the effect and obviously apply whatever filters you like.

Optionally, if you want to further limit the effect you can paste another duplicate of the source video layer between layers 1 & 2 and create a luma mask to 'paste back' more of the original brightness values. Even though you're working in luma you should still select the channel colour as the key rather than luma.

Using Colorama (find it under 'Colour Correction' in Effects):

Input Phase - Choose colour channel values you wish to use

Output Cycle - Always choose 'Ramp Grey'

Modify - Deselect 'Modify Alpha'

Masking - Deselect 'Composite Over Layer'

R/G Channel Matte (create a precomp called, say, 'R/G_diff'):

1. Source video - Set this layer to display green luma using Colorama, set blend mode to 'Difference'

2. Source video - Set this layer to display red luma using Colorama, set blend mode to 'Normal'

Harmy, when you set a curve in the 'R/G_diff' layer turn it on temorarily to check the effect. Set a curve which looks like an upside-down 'U' cut in half. That is, hug the left of the histogram to about one-quarter of the way up then gradually roll it off to finish at the midpoint of the top line in the grid.

This curve will then make sure changes only take effect in areas of extreme difference (ie, clipped areas).

A lot has been made of the problem of black crushing with these transfers but the highlight clipping is a much worse problem because it creates massive colour shifts. Red and blue highlights both clipped will give a full saturation of magenta at 100% brightness. Red and blue clipped shadows will still be black. Also highlight clipping creates hard-clipped specular highlights which are usually associated with video which has a narrow dynamic range, whereas deep shadows with nicely rolled-off highlights give the impression of watching film. Restoring the highlight detail allows the use of steep curves to stretch the black levels while retaining highlight detail. When you restore the highlight detail the specular highlights lose their hard edge and create a softer filmic look. Another problem with fully-saturated colours is that background objects are so fluorescent that they make a perceptual shift to the foreground. This is why these transfers suck so much, it's not the colours, it's that they just don't resemble film.

An example of how much red channel detail is missing from Star Wars is shown below. When you watch this uncorrected frame normally it looks horrid. The yellow and blue flames are swallowed up by red to give a pink fireball with a very hard edge where the clipping starts. These are raw Blu-ray captures. In the bottom one I've recovered the highlights in the red channel. Sorry Harmy, not trying to hijack your thread. I'll probably start one showing more instances of these problems.

Will do. Just need to fix a few settings that I inadvertently altered. Should have something up over the weekend.

The problem mentioned (the Tantive lights bleeding through the smoke) is something that can also be corrected. I'm positive that this transfer can be sort of reverse engineered to restore some subtlety to the image. The clipped blacks are my next challenge but, apart from a few noticeable shots, they usually account for something like 1% of a frame's total luma range. I'm looking at a flash frame now where the blue channel from 210-255 accounts for about 80-85% of the frame information while the green channel is only around 15-20%. It's just very fortunate that the green channel is intact (though slightly compressed) throughout the movie and that the blue channel highlights are often salvageable otherwise there would be no way to fix this thing. Anyway, I guess I should save some discussion for a dedicated thread. Sorry again Harmy.

Mate, I'd be happy to help but I don't own the Blu-rays for either of those films. I'm also less familiar with Empire and don't care enough about Jedi to devote that sort of time to it. These settings are fairly selective in their application though so should port without much modification. Each film would still require colour correction, all this would do is eliminate clipping and repair damaged/noisy channels. I've noticed a marked improvement in automatic corrections with these settings too as they eliminate extreme colour shifts in the lower and upper ranges. I will be starting a thread over the weekend detailing this process and, as I said, I'm more than happy to share the knowledge.

My portuguese dubbing from the "OUT VHS" is too "muffled" and I need to mix it with the 97'SE re-dubbing to make Star Wars:Revisited (Brazilian-Portuguese version). But the re-dubbing have a superior quality, the audio is so sharp and clear. How do I "de-muffle" the VHS audio?

PS: I have Adobe Audition and Sony Vegas.

Harmy I NEED these. How do I get a hold of someone to get a Myspleen invite?

* EDITED to add *

I'm new to all of this so a bit of a learning curve.

I have an invite to and have registered with myspleen. So hopefully with in the next day or two I will have a copy of Empire that I remember from the theater when i was a kid.

a big thank you to Harmy, walkingdork and all who have contributed to this fan preservation.

disregard below

/EDIT

I looked for the Empire Strike Back(ESB) thread over at tehparadox.com and it appears to be missing. Not sure where to go to download the DVD5 edition of Harmy's despecialized fan edit.

Can anyone point me in the direction of a source for the ESB DVD5?

If the DVD9 edition of ESB is the only one still being used can someone point my in the direction of a source for that download?

Would an invite to myspleen solve all of this for me?

Thanks for any help

warwick said:

I looked for the Empire Strike Back(ESB) thread over at tehparadox.com and it appears to be missing. Not sure where to go to download the DVD5 edition of Harmy's despecialized fan edit.

Can anyone point me in the direction of a source for the ESB DVD5?

If the DVD9 edition of ESB is the only one still being used can someone point my in the direction of a source for that download?

Would an invite to myspleen solve all of this for me?

Thanks for any help

 

I had the same problem, and would also appreciate an invite to myspleen--even though I have no clue how torrents work. I don't care--for something close to the original versions, I'll figure it out!

These are awesome! But how can we tell the difference between the different "versions" of the Harmy Despecialized releases?

Sorry if I missed that...

Goody goody :-)