Harmy's THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK Despecialized Edition HD - V2.0 - MKV & AVCHD (Released) — Page 34

chyron8472 said:

This conversation makes me want to pull my old VHS tapes out and see what color Hoth is on them.

 

If only I still had a VCR...

Grab DJ's standard play preservation of The Empire Strikes Back from a.b.starwars.

I believe many of the P&S VHS tapes of TESB used the same master.

I had a look at a 35mm print of ESB last year that had only been screened 3 times and had been kept in climate controlled storage. It had very little fade, you can tell from the opening logos in most cases.

We watched it on a steenbeck in a light controlled room, I only wish the owner would consent to having it scanned. What I can say is that Hoth is indeed somewhat blue, it looks very much like they colour timed the release prints to be blue to emphasize the cold, a pretty standard technique. It is considerably more blue than the on-set photographs etc. but nowhere near as blue as the SE.

I will download PSB if I can find it and take a look at it, I can probably organise another viewing of the print, so can compare and let you know how close it is.

chyron8472 said:

What did you do for 1.0, Harmy?

EDIT: First post says you used color-boosted GOUT then too, so what do you plan to do differently this time?

Well, this time, I have the BD as a source, so the higher bit rate allows more space for adjustment. Plus I have more skill and better tools this time around, so in terms of color, I basically plan to do the same thing as in v1.0 but with better execution. Same goes for ROTJ.

@Poita: That would be great. Too bad you can't get it scanned.

poita said:

I had a look at a 35mm print of ESB last year that had only been screened 3 times and had been kept in climate controlled storage. It had very little fade, [...] I only wish the owner would consent to having it scanned.

Did you ask if he would consent? What did he say, exactly?

Sounds like a delicate subject to broach. Not sure how I would word that. But I wonder if he could be made to understand what a benefit it would be to the Star Wars fan community...

Maybe if you showed SW:DE v2.1 to him. :)

Harmy said:

And I guess that the fact that the print isn't faded doesn't necessarily mean that it is a perfect representation of what the official 35mm and 70mm prints would have looked like, does it?

Sure, but I wouldn't necessarily assume that the GOUT is a perfect representation of the original colors either.  If every non-GOUT source is more blue, maybe the original colors actually were a bit more blue.

chyron8472 said:

Sounds like a delicate subject to broach. Not sure how I would word that. But I wonder if he could be made to understand what a benefit it would be to the Star Wars fan community...

Moreso, what it would mean to film history.

chyron8472 said:

poita said:

I had a look at a 35mm print of ESB last year that had only been screened 3 times and had been kept in climate controlled storage. It had very little fade, [...] I only wish the owner would consent to having it scanned.

Sounds like a delicate subject to broach. Not sure how I would word that.

It seems this ground may have been covered before ;)

If they are afraid that their scans will end up out in the public (exposing them to legal issues), assure them they won't by requesting something that is unusable as anything except a color reference.

e.g. Scale images down to standard definition or less, and only one frame per second of film.  For example ;)

Or, since we don't likely have time for him to get such a big thing together, scans of a single frame per scene or so, reduced to SD.  You can't do anything useful with that, except color reference.  You can also provide a testimonial that Harmy will keep even these low-res scans private, because he's done it before.

Heck, even pics taken from a camera during the screening could be of some value (also scaled down).  The ones of the Senator screening were pretty close even with all the auto-white-balance stuff cameras do.  Just ask for another screening with cameras permitted, and allow him to limit the images and resolutions that would be shared.

lpd: Wow, those colors are interesting... and beautiful.

Interesting, but the print shows clear signs of fading to pink.

IIRC all 1.0 editions were primarily sourced on a 720p HDTV SE capture.  2.0 switches that to BD.  Both are 720p HD.

Harmy said:

Interesting, but the print shows clear signs of fading to pink.

It may not be actual fading. My telecine bootleg of a release print from 1982 shows much the same pink tint.

Here's a screen from the Hoth battle, and one where I overlaid my bootleg over the corresponding frame from the GOUT:

This transfer was made pre 1982 so fading would be unlikely, no? In fact, the entire transfer has very saturated colour throughout the whole film. No way to tell how accurate it is though.

Maybe some flaw in the transferring process then? Because I will not believe for a second that the original color timing could have been this pink.

Harmy said:

Maybe some flaw in the transferring process then? Because I will not believe for a second that the original color timing could have been this pink.

I tend to agree, and there is reason to believe the boosted colours are due to tape-to-tape dubbing back in the day. However, the pink had to be there in the first place for it to be emphasized like this.

I did not see this theatrically, but when I released the bootleg a few years ago, some forum members who did indicated it gelled with their memories of it. For what it's worth.

Harmy said:

I'm still hoping for a more detailed explanation about PSB as a reference - I know Ady is using it as a pretty literal reference (although he is taking some liberties but I think he believes those to then be different from theatrical color timing) and I'd like to know if there's some proof beyond "it looks like it's not faded" that the PSB is the closest color reference. You know, I'd really like to know whether I can trust PSB the same way as I did with the IB print for Star Wars - i.e. not keeping 100% perfectly faithful to it but keeping very close to it. Because at first glance PSB looks a bit wrong to me in some scenes but it could be for the same reason the IB print did look wrong but in the end we accepted it as a good reference and got used to those colors, even though they were differnt from what we were used to watching on discolored video releases. But in the case of the IB print, that was conclusively proved to be non fade material, plus there were several of them and the colours were the same (or close enough) on each of them - is there any such empirical evidence of the PSB colors being similarly correct?

Pardon my ignorance, but what is PSB?

Also, is there any new info on what you've decided to do regarding color correction for Empire?

chyron8472 said:

Pardon my ignorance, but what is PSB?

Puggo Strikes Back, a scan of a 16mm print of ESB.

http://originaltrilogy.com/forum/topic.cfm/Puggo-Strikes-Back/topic/12548/

I know one thing that I remember distinctly is that Hoth was always an icey blue. Definitely not the straight snowy white that Lucas has changed it to in the more recent home video versions. So the cool icey blue of the snow fields and mountains is correct. The trick will be getting the precise color as close as possible.

As to this 35mm print, it's great to hear of a print in such fine condition. :) I wonder how it compares to the prints of those who will be continuing on with negative1's 35mm restoration after Star Wars is done. Makes you wonder if this one might be an even better one to base the restoration on than the 35mm prints they are going to be lining up for The Empire Strikes Back. And if he might be willing to let them have access just long enough to do a HD scan for the restoration. Then he would have a superb quality back up of his print on Blu-ray. =)

In any case, I hope at the least that very high quality photos can be taken during a screening (with the projector paused for a few seconds on various scenes to give a good sampling throughout the movie) with a nice SLR camera on a tripod, with the white balance, exposure and such set correctly manually to get the most accurate shots of the movie possible. No doubt the camera/movie experts on the forum here could advise on the best camera settings, lens types, etc. to take photos with.

This could be a superb reference for color restoration for Harmy and everyone else working on such projects. But whatever you do, please don't compress the images, so as to leave the colors fully intact and unaltered. Have the camera take them and store them as uncompressed bmp's, tiff's or whatever. I guess it would be in 32 bit color, or maybe even 36 bit (the next step up in color detail/gamut, IIRC) if the camera supports it (not sure if any do). I hope all goes well with this. :)

chyron8472 said:

 

 ...is there any new info on what you've decided to do regarding color correction for Empire?

Not really - like I said before, I'll do the first color pass based on the GOUT with boosted saturation and then tweak it in the second pass based on other sources if there are any I find more reliable.

I was wondering about PSB, whether we know when the print was made? I thought that if it was made at a later date, maybe the print from which it was copied may have already been fading and so they may have used some blue filter when copying it to counter the pink fade? Just a thought.