Song Of The South - many projects, much info & discussion thread (Released) — Page 28

poita said:

I got the densitometer out to ascertain the best gamma and light balance settings for the scanner, so at least some colour has been recovered.

I'm finding that your custom LUTs have make this even easier to correct for the closest, original colors. In the test I'm now trying (your last reel3 LUT capture), my tweak has been reduce to strictly gamma (in the paint program) -- R=1.4 G=1.3 B=1.1 -- for an improved by-eye correction. That reflects just how close your capture has come to being it's own color correction. Well done!

Now that I'm not in a rush, I went back to correct the slight over-brightness, which didn't look so bad in the live action, but did show it's deficiency in the cartoon.

When working the live action shot, I used mostly the girl's hair and face for the color correction. This time I reduced the bright areas of her face (the 35mm target was a different shot) for a now subtly better correction (the background opened up a bit, too):

first correction
             low  gamma   high  midtone
RED         0        1.5    255           -5
GREEN     0        1.4    255           -5
BLUE        0        1.2    255           -5

correction tweaked
             low  gamma   high  midtone
RED         0        1.4    255            0
GREEN     0        1.3    255            0
BLUE        0        1.1    255            0

                              LUT capture                                           35mm-guided color correction tweak

And, when blindly applied to the cartoon, it now looks less washed out:

This demonstrates that maybe a single correction can be used as a general correction across a single reel and, perhaps, multiple reels.

poita said:

The cartoon shot on the right actually looks more washed out to me though?

Oh, I didn't mean the contrast of the cartoon ... rather the color strength improvement over the previous page's attempt (like in trying to see more of that green in fox's shirt). But right now I have only a little idea what everything should look like.  :)

Thanks for all the information! Will definitely look into it.

New programs will be problematic as I'm using older equipment with older OS. For now, I'll just spew out the theories and approaches (which I test and refine in these instances) ... and the relevant numbers as a starting points for the project(s). And, yes, they should definitely use the high bit processing, which I think they can with that expensive software they use (ouch, I think I hurt my wallet again).

I figured I'd share this with others, too:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/amrl0a8lrulii98/Reel3.mp4

Totally SD, but still worth it to play with...

From the end of reel 4

From the beginning of reel 5- Technicolor variance is displayed pretty well between these two scenes!

Awesome!! Thanks Zip Doodah!

Paging Spaced Ranger...  :)  If you wouldn't mind cooking up some color correction numbers, I'll go ahead and apply them to see how it would work...

@www12345

Thank you so much for the upload of reel 3! It's already beautiful!

No problem! It's only SD, and part of the reel, but it's still cool. Glad you enjoyed it!

When the hard drives get here, I'll make an HD version of the full film available, unedited or changed, so that others can play with it. I'll then start work on the actual restoration, and as soon as that is finished, I'll make the complete, finished project available.

By the way, my thanks goes to Poita, for without him, this project would be flat on its back before it even got started. Also, my thanks to Antcufaalb and Spaced Ranger for assisting in tutorials/edit methods and color correcting, respectively.  :)

That's awesome! My parents never made me a Star Wars costume... :)

Reel 3 looks pretty good. I'm excited to see not one, but two film-based SOTS projects coming out of this thread. Both look pretty nice. Definitely upgrades to the current broadcast. The colors are pretty wonderful too!

Zip Doodah said:

 

From the end of reel 4 ... From the beginning of reel 5- Technicolor variance is displayed pretty well between these two scenes!

Wow! Thanks for posting those snapshots.

Previously, I thought film fade was pretty uniform over time and the medium. Now that I've discovered it's all over the place, it blows up my thought of a fade fingerprint(tm) based restoration. Oh well ... back to the drawing board.  :)

ww12345 said:

I figured I'd share this with others, too ... Totally SD, but still worth it to play with... Paging Spaced Ranger...  :)

Did I mention I hate green shirts? Al least, I hate fox's green shirt (see Zip Doodah's fox & rabbit picture). I can also see complications trying to match similar shots across reels (again, Zip Doodah's pictures).

I'll do what I can with the present method, test it's viability on samplings from this file, and post some numbers to test. Don't be afraid to play around with them in your way-better software (if you can directly input low/gamma/high/midtones numbers). If you can work better reconstructing my resultant R-G-B graphs, I can post those, too.

In the meantime, try using my previous numbers just to see what they do. I'll probably make those my starting point anyway.

Thinking out loud:
My present approach using a paint program's standard spectrum manipulation has some not-easily-resolved deficiencies. But I know, to paraphrase Yoda, that "you can un-fade what has been faded"! (It's okay to mix similes here, this being the Original Trilogy forum.) I have some ideas to develop that should also yield post-able numbers but I'm not sure if the standard manipulations will work to easily produce them.

Haha! - no kidding about that green shirt! I thought we'd buried that idea... Oh well, like you said, back to the drawing board...

I think I can do lows, gamma, midtones, and highs in my software, plus some more... Maybe I'll post a screenshot of the color correcting portion to help you figure out the best direction to take.

Also, I'm going to have to get a better way of exporting files. That clip I posted the other day was run through about 7 different programs to get that wrong-framerate clip I posted. I'll see what I can do about exporting to a different file or something.

@Aluminum Falcon: I know - isn't it great that we are such a film-based preservation site? I think it is really, really cool, that given enough time, most projects on here get a film preservation. Neat, if you ask me... :)

poita said:

Do you still have the IB print?

I'd love someone to take a look at the film on a lightbox or project it and let us know if the girl at the end of Reel 4 and at the start of Reel 5 have that much colour disparity on the film, or if it is due to different settings when scanned.

+1. I'd be kind of interested to know, as well.

On the other hand, though, I have an IB print of Horror of Dracula, and about every 100-200 feet (I don't remember how many feet exactly) there was a color change, due to the Tech processing. IIRC, they could only process so many feet at a time, so they just did their best to match colors/etc.

Here's part of R1, in SD:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/p5he2dgw1ehiuvr/Reel%201.mp4