StarWarsLegacy.com - The Official Thread — Page 48

I've said this before, but since I have nothing to offer this project besides cheer leading, I'll do some more of that..

I love these videos, Mike! Seeing your comparisons and hearing about how ya did it is always a treat.
The work you're doing is just amazing.
A certain company would be crazy to not make an offer on your finished product.

Thank you! Glad you enjoy them...

The Destruction of Alderaan

ray_afraid said:

I've said this before, but since I have nothing to offer this project besides cheer leading, I'll do some more of that..

 I'm in the same boat, so I'll join you in the cheer.

"GIVE ME AN M!" "M!"

"GIVE ME A V!" "V!"

"GIVE ME AN E!" "E!"

"GIVE ME AN R!" "R!"

"GIVE ME A T!" "T!"

"GIVE ME AN A!" "A!"

The explosion looks way better without the CGI ring, and I love how you brought out every distinct ember. Great video, as always.  :)

Here is R2's Arroyo, restored.  Unfortunately, much of this image's look doesn't translate from DCI-P3 to sRGB, making the shot you see less contrasty and thus desaturated as well.  I will put a "corrected for sRGB" still on the Legacy site for more accurate viewing!

R2's Arroyo

It spells " Arm Vet".

Sandcrawler at Dusk

That looks great. In the restored clip there seems to be a little white fleck in the bottom right of the frame that looks like it escaped the clean-up.

Yep.. that's what I was referring to when I said I noticed it still needed some clean-up :)    Good eye.  

All the little details are really what this second pass is all about!

Glad you're enjoying the work, and it sounds like you're on a good path with your own project.  Some of deciding how to present a material comes simply from spending time with the material; really learning what can be done with it "naturally," versus what you can force it to do with modern technology.  We have the capability to grade every part of every frame separately now, and craft any image we want, but this almost never yields a cohesive, accurate representation of a source, so you're probably in the right aesthetic when you embrace the most stubborn flaws.  Plus, human perception is a curious beast :)  Best of luck!

_Mike

That's two things happening at once: 1) Those areas are below visible black in P3 color space and 2) What IS there is driving the Vimeo compressor crazy.

One of the biggest differences in P3 is in the gamma curve, especially in the low-mids to lows.  For an example, let's say on a scale of 0=black and 1023=white, your computer monitor in sRGB, or Rec.709 can easily differentiate between values as low as 25-50; that is, on a calibrated monitor you can easily tell that a value is 50 is brighter than a 25 (and that 25 is brighter than 0, as well).  Well, in P3, it's basically like any value below about 300 is all pure black.  This has the effect of increasing saturation, but it also creates a large safe-zone for "black." The negative consequence of this, however, is that things which were assumed to all be in the black safe zone may in fact appear when viewed in other color spaces.  A variation of this is why the garbage mattes in Star Wars, which were invisible in the theater, showed up to the horror of everyone involved when Star Wars was first being transferred to video.  Different luminance/gamma curves - and that also means different saturation/values for colors.  There is one immutable fact to remember: YOU CANNOT DISPLAY P3 COLOR SPACE ON ANY MONITOR (other than the $40k Dolby PRM-4200).  

Lots of times, we simply grade in Rec.709, because the entire 709 color space fits inside the larger P3 color space. So we know that our Rec.709 footage will look the same in P3 once we apply a correcting gamma curve.  But Rec.709 is missing many color hues which are crucial to replicating film, so you don't want to throw those out, just for Rec.709/sRGB compatibility.  I try to tweak the videos a touch to more closely approximate on your monitor what the shots actually look like, but it's only marginally effective.  These shots actually look much sexier "for real" than I'm able to show you.  But when the entire thing is locked, I'm going to do a special Rec.709 grade conversion to be able to show more accurate stills.

Great eye; thanks for the comment; keep them coming.  I don't want to miss a speck, and I know you guys won't let me!  Also, if you want more detailed information and videos on the specific shots and processes, they're on the starwarslegacy.com forums.  There's just no way to put all that discussion into this one thread here, so my idea is to post overall updates here, and then if people want to dive in further and get more details, that's what the forum is for!

_Mike

The garbage mattes certainly weren't as visible in the cinema as on the home releases, but I watched a 77 print in the cinema just recently, and the tie fighter mattes in particular are clearly visible on screen.

I dug out a review a few months back from 1978 where the reviewer mentioned the 'green shields' around the tie fighters, so it seems some people back in the day thought it was an intentional special effect.

I have a memory of seeing them at the time, but memory is horribly unreliable, so it could be later conditioning, but they are certainly there when watching in the screening room.

I've seen that, too, but to that point, when I screened a few prints on a vintage projector, with vintage bulb and screen, which apparently had lower reflectance by default, they weren't visible.  It's been my assumption since then that improvements in screen reflectivity and/or increased luminance output was the culprit, but this doesn't explain your anecdote from "back in the day."  One thing is for sure which is that during the development of the shots, whatever they were screening the tests on was not exhibiting the artifact or they'd have compensated.

Where does that leave us? Certainly I have been setting my garbage-matte-black-point nice and low in the P3 curve...!

I think the safest assumption is that the mattes were visible in some cinemas but not in others. They also had 3 different soundtracks too, so not everyone in '77 got the same experience!

mverta said:

I've seen that, too, but to that point, when I screened a few prints on a vintage projector, with vintage bulb and screen, which apparently had lower reflectance by default, they weren't visible.  It's been my assumption since then that improvements in screen reflectivity and/or increased luminance output was the culprit, but this doesn't explain your anecdote from "back in the day."  One thing is for sure which is that during the development of the shots, whatever they were screening the tests on was not exhibiting the artifact or they'd have compensated.

Where does that leave us? Certainly I have been setting my garbage-matte-black-point nice and low in the P3 curve...!

 

 I was watching it on some big-arse 1949 carbon arc jobbies, on a somewhat too large screen, increased luminance and reflectivity certainly aren't features of that setup. I've found multiple mentions of the 'force fields' on the tie fighters, I think the mattes were always visible, but not many people would notice them, the effects were so far ahead of anything else out there at the time, and so exciting, that I don't think people would have noticed en-masse, at least not the first few dozen times they saw it :)

Well there goes my theory...

These were the days when R2-D2 was referred to in reviews as "a self-propelled computer" to try and explain the concepts to an audience. We weren't as sophisticated and picky back then I guess.

??  ... pretty sure they'd heard the word "robot" in 1977, but whatever...

Either way, garbage mattes will not survive my color picker.

I had to look that up. That phrase is indeed from an original 1977 review and it's online here.

I love how the article describes the movie as: "The story is set 'a long, long time ago in a galaxy not too far from here' where Grand Moff Tarkin (Peter Cushing) rules the Galactic Empire from his Death Star, an enormous artificial planet managed by Imperial Storm Troopers. ..."

I think he needed to watch the movie again! :-)

Melatius said:

I love how the article describes the movie as: "The story is set 'a long, long time ago in a galaxy not too far from here' where Grand Moff Tarkin (Peter Cushing) rules the Galactic Empire from his Death Star, an enormous artificial planet managed by Imperial Storm Troopers. ..."

I think he needed to watch the movie again! :-)

 Other than small expository dialogue mentioning the Emperor, he didn't miss much