A New Hope DVD Color Correction (*unfinished project * - a mass of information) — Page 5

Chewtobacca said:

NeverarGreat said:  So perhaps it's time to scuttle this project and start a complete color correction. I would be dissatisfied with releasing any settings which didn't fix the binary sunset or the Death Star explosion, for example.

That's one way to look at it.  Another is to look at the blanket setting as a starting point for someone else's project, like the one You_Too provided for Harmy, in which case it wouldn't matter that certain shots were not perfect.

I don't envy the person who wants to understand my settings. It started out so simple, just a single video layer with about 22 luma and chroma settings to solve every problem in the movie. Ha.

Fast forward a year, and there are over a hundred discrete luma and chroma settings, spread over seven video layers, which together will only minimize certain systemic issues, but leave many scenes and individual shots sorely wanting.

That's what it will look like when it's up and running. I'm just not sure anyone else will want to deal with the confusion.

Please release a video of the Death Star explosion. Your color correction is really amazing.

Did you used rotoscope? How did you recovered these colors?

Well, that was just a quick and dirty correction, as the Death Star turned rather green. Granted that it's not supposed to be as gray as it was in the DVD, but further work is probably in order with that shot. No rotoscoping was done. The removal of unwanted colors was accomplished with selective gamma modifications as well as my method of subtracting the blue bleed.

The Death Star Explosion test got me wondering about the Binary Sunset. So I tried to get it as close as I could to the available Technicolor print references:

The whole scene uses the same settings, but the final image has some issues because of it.

One might even call it...

...night and day.

;)

NeverarGreat said:

One might even call it...

...night and day.

;)

 

FTFY.

This looks really promising - maybe I'll use you correction when making v3.0 one day :-)

Harmy said:

This looks really promising - maybe I'll use you correction when making v3.0 one day :-)

8-0

8D

XD

This one's a bit more subtle.

Getting the brightness right for these scenes may be the most time consuming part of this project.

Here's an uncompressed video of that scene:

https://vimeo.com/78428369

Password: icare

Another test to see whether the original sky color in this shot could be recovered:

I'd say so. But unfortunately for the DVD, most of the detail on 3PO's shoulders is on the blue channel, so it's a compromise.

JEDIT: I've updated the image. This one keeps almost all the blue detail by turning it red.

Chewtobacca said:

NeverarGreat said: Password: icare

Haha!  I like the password. :D

That scene looks incredible.  I've never seen Star Wars looking so good for color.

Thanks! Of course, it's much easier to make a single scene look good with a single set of settings than an entire movie. Going forward, I may just post shots and scenes like the Binary Sunset that are entirely different than the DVD, as these are the ones that will take most of the time to get right. The above shot is an example of that.

NeverarGreat said:

Another test to see whether the original sky color in this shot could be recovered:

I'd say so. But unfortunately for the DVD, most of the detail on 3PO's shoulders is on the blue channel, so it's a compromise.

JEDIT: I've updated the image. This one keeps almost all the blue detail by turning it red.

The problem with this shot is that it wasn't just recolor-timed, the characters were cut out of the background and the background was swapped, so you can't "pull out" the original colors, because they're just not there.

Also, I was horrified by how bad v2.1 looked in your comparison, so I checked and this is what the actual v2.1 frame looks like:

As you can see, not only are there some really ugly compression artifacts in your comparison, but the colors and brightness are wrong as well.

Thanks for pointing that out Harmy, I didn't even check Despecialized on that one. Your image came from the comparison image gallery, so I'll make sure to double check from now on. The real image is much better.

How do you think this shot was changed? I would guess that the background was isolated with a chroma key of some kind and then the color was swapped. This would mean that the original sky remains, it's just a different color. Or would the entire sky be replaced with something else? That doesn't make sense.

So it may be true that the sky was cut out of the frame for the SE, and that would make sense, but I'm just trying to get it as close as possible with color correction alone:

I think it was done with manual rotoscoping, judging by the much sharper edges around Luke's face. Whether the sky was completely replaced, or just recoloured separately is hard to tell. Your attempt is very successful in bringing it close to the original colors - the problem is with these heavy color shifts is that correcting them usually brings out artifacts, which is just the case here.

Yeah, the artifacts are a problem. I reworked this to minimize the artifacts and rendered it, but as you can see there are still some artifacts around C-3PO, and Luke's manual rotoscoping job is painfully obvious. This looks like a job for Team Negative1!