Harmy's Despecialized Star Wars 1977 - Color Adjustment Project for v2.7 (released) — Page 2

I’d be interested in looking at this when I’ve got the time towne32. 😃
If it’s ok with you, I may use this for some of the scenes I haven’t corrected in my version like the Death Star interiors and such.

You can use anything you want of course. Please let me know if there’s anything specific that I can send you lossless versions of, since I really don’t think it can take another lossy re-encode. 😃

I will say that the one thing in my version that people have said hasn’t quite fulfilled their recolorization hopes is the Death Star interiors. They’re certainly ‘improved’ (in that they are closer to meeting my goal), but they are still quite colorful. As Mike Verta has said, the film and the sets do vary in color. And when they stray green, it tends to set off people’s ‘you missed a green shot’ radar. It’s impossible for me to tease apart what should be green, vs. what is getting the green treatment that Tatooine got. And anyway, my amateur skills are probably not enough to get everything consistent in some shots without messing with the skin tones, which are way more important.

Generally, I think the Death Star interiors show off the Technicolor process wheras Mos Eisley shows some weakness. So, I rather like the vibrant look. But I will say that I reduced the vibrancy of the blue exterior Death Star shots a bit, and made the color in the far shots of the approach more consistent.

Will have a more complete gallery up in just a few minutes.

New Galleries:

Color based on Respecialized 97: http://imgur.com/a/iPRRN

Adjusted manually: http://imgur.com/a/2JwDy

Be sure to click to see all images at the bottom. 😃

OHHHH… so ready to download this…

The comparison gallery is looking excellent. Can’t wait to watch it!

Dreamaster said:

OHHHH… so ready to download this…

totalmackerel said:

The comparison gallery is looking excellent. Can’t wait to watch it!

Well then…

Nice! Alas I don’t have access to spleen. I’ll have to wait for it to show up someplace else 😃

It’s a very minor thing that was noted in Harmy’s thread a long while back. After Han and Luke part ways at Yavin, there’s a shot of an R2 unit being loaded into an X-wing with a guy waving it. There’s extra footage there in the SE and Harmy had an extra frame, making it technically out of GOUT sync by a frame from there on.

It’s not something that matters in reality. I just mentioned it because people sometimes care (many remuxed ESB to fix a similar single frame sync ‘issue’), but the main reason was that in my screenshot comparisons it made the images off by one frame, which is especially noticeable with lasers. But I actually ended up offsetting it to match in the final comparisons, so the note is really not important.

Smithers said:

Do you plan on releasing AVCHD versions and/or MKV versions of this?

This is an MKV. Hadn’t thought about AVCHD, but I could do it.

Smithers said:

towne32 said:

Smithers said:

Do you plan on releasing AVCHD versions and/or MKV versions of this?

This is an MKV. Hadn’t thought about AVCHD, but I could do it.

Oh ok I thought it was BD25, anyway that would definitely be awesome!

It’s sized to work well as a BD25, but it’s in MKV format (smaller download, and probably more people want MKV than BDMV). Would need to figure out bitrate settings for AVCHD and look into what audio tracks Harmy includes in those, and see if I have those.

One issue is that, as Harmy said, the grain won’t do well with lower bitrate in this re-encode. For a BD sized render, it had the advantage of the fact that Harmy’s video stream was only 13Gb, leaving me options for a somewhat high bitrate encode. I think his AVCHD probably push the DVD9 boundary a little harder.

Gah, was hoping this would have finished downloading by the time I got back from trivia, but no dice. I’d say I’ll check it out in the morning, but I know myself well enough to realize that I’m far more likely to stay up the extra two hours and be tired all day tomorrow.

EDIT: Finally got to take a look at it. Bravo. This is how Star Wars looks in my head.

(Well, give or take some of the teal on the Death Star, but that’s not nearly so bothersome now that the skin tones aren’t greenish).

towne32 said:

You can use anything you want of course. Please let me know if there’s anything specific that I can send you lossless versions of, since I really don’t think it can take another lossy re-encode. 😃

I’d be interested in any of the scenes you posted images of regarding the death star, both interior and exterior. Your corrections look lovely.

I saw this pop up on the Spleen tonight and as soon as I saw those screenshot comparisons I had to download it. All I can say is Thank You! I didn’t think Harmy’s DeEd 2.5 could be improved any further, but this is actually even better. Great work, Towne32.

Just saw this was on the spleen. Will be downloading 😃

I finished downloading and I gotta say. WOW. This looks great. I actually kind of prefer your Mos Eisley grading to my own. I may actually just use this as my main source to build off of for my Blu-Ray instead of Harmy’s regualr 2.5. Really spectacular color work here towne32.

Darth Lucas said:

I finished downloading and I gotta say. WOW. This looks great. I actually kind of prefer your Mos Eisley grading to my own. I may actually just use this as my main source to build off of for my Blu-Ray instead of Harmy’s regualr 2.5. Really spectacular color work here towne32.

Wow, thanks DL!

Maybe once we get this branching thing working, you can just send me your crawl and I can export it with matching settings to my own version so we can tinker with that. I think for my own ANH branching attempt, I will just use the 1997SE footage. I like your flyover better since it has the better lasers and all, but I think I want to go with the crawl text that has less gateweave and matches the 2.5 SW crawl in that sense.

Burned this to a disc this morning and looked at a few scenes on my TV. Just a minor quibble: I had the color temperature set to a neutral level on my screen (largely to compensate for the yellow in Harmy’s version), and at those settings fair hair tended to look a little greenish, most obviously Luke’s and some of the grey-haired imperial officers. Bumping the warmth up a little bit did the trick, but I thought that might be something you’d want to know.

towne32 said:

Maybe once we get this branching thing working, you can just send me your crawl and I can export it with matching settings to my own version so we can tinker with that. I think for my own ANH branching attempt, I will just use the 1997SE footage. I like your flyover better since it has the better lasers and all, but I think I want to go with the crawl text that has less gateweave and matches the 2.5 SW crawl in that sense.

Yeah I get that. If the Blu-Ray was just a personal project for my eyes only and I wasn’t concerned with 1981 accuracy, I probably would’ve just spliced in the 97 crawl for the more stable crawl. In my next version, however the crawl will be recreated again from scratch in 1080p which will be a lot cleaner and the only gate weave will be a very slight gate weave I’ll add in myself.

If you like the 77 flyover better, you could probably splice from the 97 crawl to the 77 pandown/flyover. They use the same starfield. Not sure if there are any differences due to compositing though

joefavs said:

Burned this to a disc this morning and looked at a few scenes on my TV. Just a minor quibble: I had the warmth set to a neutral level on my screen (largely to compensate for the yellow in Harmy’s version), and at those settings fair hair tended to look a little greenish, most obviously Luke’s and some of the grey-haired imperial officers. Bumping the warmth up a little bit did the trick, but I thought that might be something you’d want to know.

Thanks for viewing! It’s hard to really assess the feedback much without knowing what scenes or shots, specifically, are in question, as there are big differences between Tatooine, DS, Yavin, etc. But as I may have said in this thread, a lot of the Death Star interiors are straight from Harmy’s 1997 and they can be greenish at times. Too much for some people’s tastes. But the bottom line is that this color adjustment is not perfection. Over-adjusting is risky and can create more problems than it solves, making other elements in the shot look unnatural. The film went through multiple rounds of color correction already (you_too, and I don’t know if Harmy’s various corrections were compounded onto each other). Combine that with my mediocre abilities and there are limits to what can be done. And once you start tweaking one shot in a scene, you end up adjusting everything else surrounding it. Sometimes that works out well, sometimes not.

But regardless, it’s a bit hard to know what to make of feedback. If a TV is being set to ‘warm’ ‘neutral’ ‘cool’ type settings instead of calibrated properly (or semi-properly in my own case), it can make a huge difference. From the sets I’ve calibrated, the neutral setting has always been very warm or cool and not actually neutral (and the actual warm/cool settings were ridiculous). I definitely see why you would set it a certain way for something like Harmy’s 2.5. The same setting for mine might break things that weren’t broken before. And I think a lot of the color is rather intense in nature, so pushing it just a little further with weird TV settings might make it look way too unnatural. I think the material is probably a bit more delicate in that sense compared to other videos. Thanks again for taking a look. 😃

I took a look on my calibrated TV and didn’t notice any strange color anomalies. But then again I just scrubbed through, I didn’t watch from beginning to end.