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Puggo Strikes Back! (Released) — Page 40

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team_negative1 said:

Nice looking print, wonder how much it will go for. Maybe Poita or AMPS will check into it:

http://www.ebay.com/itm/STAR-WARS-EPISODE-V-THE-EMPIRE-STRIKES-BACK-1980/151950691522?_trksid=p2047675.c100010.m2109&_trkparms=aid%3D555012%26algo%3DPW.MBE%26ao%3D2%26asc%3D34492%26meid%3Df72a3f5b471d4378ae241d71b635885d%26pid%3D100010%26rk%3D19%26rkt%3D24%26mehot%3Dpp%26sd%3D181997624976

Team Negative1

The images look like someone took the Blu-Ray and added film scratches to it.

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Puggo - Jar Jar’s Yoda said:

Dreamaster said:
Puggo I’m sure you’ve already been asked this, but did you do color corrections to the Puggo Strikes Back or is this pretty much true to the print? Trying to figure out if all that blue hue in the wampa cave was added in or if it was really like that on the film.

Color correction was done by Adywan.

With regards your question - “is this pretty much true to the print?”, it is important to understand the issues involved in capturing film. The film image is captured by a digital camera, for which a decision has to be made with respect to white-balance (among others). It’s not just a matter of grabbing what is there verbatim - the media are entirely different. Digital capture involves lighting, and ultimately a color model, and there are always decisions made at every step, and adjustments. It’s the same with printing a film, and projecting it. We will never know the exact, correct color, because there is always variation. I tried to capture it as close as I could based on my own eyes, and then had Ady correct it because I liked his color choices in earlier projects.

As for the Wampa scene - to my eyes it looked that blue on the film. Surprised me too.

(note this discussion really belongs in the PSB thread)

Sorry, I did not know this thread existed when I asked. 😃 Empire was the first movie I saw on the big screen when I was 5 years old. I remember that scene because it freaked me out! I don’t remember a blue hue… and then I had Empire on video tape and I didn’t remember it there either… sure enough a few days ago after watching Harmy’s Empire 2.0 (which is what made me originally go WHA?? on that scene) I downloaded the PUGGO Strikes Back, a laserdisc trilogy restoration, and the grindhouse Empire release from TeamNegative (CAN YOU SAY GLUTTONY??? OH MY GOD!!!) and I discovered that the grindhouse and the laserdisc didn’t have any blue, but yours does, and it looks like on Harmy’s FB page shows that the GOUT also has the blue tint.

So at some point… that blue got added in “officially” at Lucasfilm. But it kind of makes me a sad panda because I doubt I’ll be able to talk Harmy into dialing that back for Empire 3.0. LOL

Thanks for replying I really appreciated it!

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Based on what do you figure the blue was added later? The terribly under-saturated laserdisc, or the faded Grindhouse print, which has terrible colors with magenta shadows and green highlights? Or, and this is the least trustworthy of those three super untrustworthy options, your memory from when you were 5 years old?

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Dreamaster: If you dig through Harmy’s ESB thread, circa July 2014, you’ll find near endless discussion about what you’re talking about (you can also find some really fascinating opinions we all had about slightly rounded corners in film). But Harmy summed it up here pretty well. VHS/LD aren’t perfect and neither are people’s memories, and those are probably strongly biased by VHS/LD. ESB fares worst of the three because we don’t have a fade-free theatrical print.

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towne32 said:

you can also find some really fascinating opinions we all had about slightly rounded corners in film

Oh lord thanks for reminding me of that.

miraclemax

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Harmy said:

Based on what do you figure the blue was added later? The terribly under-saturated laserdisc, or the faded Grindhouse print, which has terrible colors with magenta shadows and green highlights? Or, and this is the least trustworthy of those three super untrustworthy options, your memory from when you were 5 years old?

Towne replied and let me know I’m apparently beating a dead horse (didn’t know this was already a “thang” sorry!)… but I will answer your question since you posed it too me and to do so as intelligently as possible…

Snow and ice… are white. We know this, start there (but of course as they are both highly reflective and thus easily influenced by colored lighting but… now from the laserdisc, which you describe as under-saturated… I agree with that, but looking at Luke’s face hanging upside down in the cave… it’s a good flesh tone… the specular highlights in his face and the yellows in his uniform lets us know there’s plenty of color information in the shot. So if the shot had been made with blue lights, and then the scene desaturated so that the blue disappeared into white, it’s highly unlikely that his face and uniform wouldn’t have been affected in a very unnatural way. Now travelling to the Grindhouse print… again, yes the primary’s are somewhat off… but the snow shows the magenta tones of the faded print. Again… were those snow shots originally not only blue, but a deep blue, the magenta push would made those probably more purplish than simply a gentle magenta hue that’s left (from the obvious pullback color correction since the actual film makes it look absolutely rose colored). And again, the skin tones are “reasonable” to lend that I highly doubt that the blue faded in such a way that when colors were corrected it suddenly went to almost white.

Thing is… I “get” why Lucas changed it. The sun was setting in addition to the snow storm hitting hard (in the story)… Puggo’s film gives it a more “night time” appearance that I think they were going for when they graded that in. There might have also been the artistic choice to make it bluer so that it looks more “alien” to separate Hoth from “Earth”.

But to me in the cave scene, the blue is strong even on Luke’s skin. It doesn’t “feel natural” when I see it.

Thanks for listening. 😃

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Oh, yeah, most old home video releases were undersatured with unnaturally boosted reds.
As for Grindhouse, the point there is that the print was faded and so it had to go through color correction and they had no good reference, so they had to do it by eye and just decided to make snow white, which all evidence points to that it wasn’t in the original ESB prints.
Also, when a snowy landscape is dark, it does usually appear bluish, even in real life.

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Harmy said:

Oh, yeah, most old home video releases were undersatured with unnaturally boosted reds.
As for Grindhouse, the point there is that the print was faded and so it had to go through color correction and they had no good reference, so they had to do it by eye and just decided to make snow white, which all evidence points to that it wasn’t in the original ESB prints.
Also, when a snowy landscape is dark, it does usually appear bluish, even in real life.

Interesting photo, which almost leaves it just as unresolved because it does show some blue lighting but the main carcass snow is perfectly white:
http://dimmerlightstudios.com/screens_med/tfu/e5s_bts_48_r.jpg

I respect your decision sir, I had to at least try! 😉

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Dreamaster said:

Harmy said:

Oh, yeah, most old home video releases were undersatured with unnaturally boosted reds.
As for Grindhouse, the point there is that the print was faded and so it had to go through color correction and they had no good reference, so they had to do it by eye and just decided to make snow white, which all evidence points to that it wasn’t in the original ESB prints.
Also, when a snowy landscape is dark, it does usually appear bluish, even in real life.

Interesting photo, which almost leaves it just as unresolved because it does show some blue lighting but the main carcass snow is perfectly white:
http://dimmerlightstudios.com/screens_med/tfu/e5s_bts_48_r.jpg

I respect your decision sir, I had to at least try! 😉

Before DI grading became the norm, DPs would use gels and filters to achieve a certain look. Now every DP is different, but I once worked on a film where we wanted a warm look and asking the lab to make all the shots warm was too expensive so we used warming gels on the lights.

I could show photos from the shoot and everyone would look normal. I could also get the original negatives scanned and make everything ‘normal’ but that’s not the effect we were going for.

You can’t trust photos from the set.

What’s the internal temperature of a TaunTaun? Luke warm.

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Puggo - Jar Jar’s Yoda said:

I can’t imagine George Lucas adding blue tint for a 16mm film.

Or for the entirety of the DVD/Blu Ray releases of A New Hope…

SO SORRY, you left yourself wide open there! 😉

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Is desperately trying to avoid revisionism in one of the few places there isn’t any. Proceeds to call it A New Hope. Sigh.

Project Threepio (Star Wars OOT subtitles)

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CatBus said:

Is desperately trying to avoid revisionism in one of the few places there isn’t any. Proceeds to call it A New Hope. Sigh.

BWA HA HA HA HA! Touche.

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CatBus said:

Is desperately trying to avoid revisionism in one of the few places there isn’t any. Proceeds to call it A New Hope. Sigh.

To be fair, those are the titles of the DVD/Blu-ray releases. 😃

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Dreamaster said:

Puggo - Jar Jar’s Yoda said:
I can’t imagine George Lucas adding blue tint for a 16mm film.

Or for the entirety of the DVD/Blu Ray releases of A New Hope…
SO SORRY, you left yourself wide open there! 😉

I disagree… it makes complete sense to regrade the color for a digital release of a film. It’s standard practice and the tools make it easy. But 16mm film releases were such a tiny market, and they were in a sort of in a “grey area” - it’s not even clear they were done legally nor by a related studio. It’s doubtful that Lucas had any involvement in the 16mm films at all, and I doubt have spent any of his own money on them. It’s apples and oranges.

"Close the blast doors!"
Puggo’s website | Rescuing Star Wars

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Puggo - Jar Jar’s Yoda said:

Dreamaster said:

Puggo - Jar Jar’s Yoda said:
I can’t imagine George Lucas adding blue tint for a 16mm film.

Or for the entirety of the DVD/Blu Ray releases of A New Hope…
SO SORRY, you left yourself wide open there! 😉

I disagree… it makes complete sense to regrade the color for a digital release of a film. It’s standard practice and the tools make it easy. But 16mm film releases were such a tiny market, and they were in a sort of in a “grey area” - it’s not even clear they were done legally nor by a related studio. It’s doubtful that Lucas had any involvement in the 16mm films at all, and I doubt have spent any of his own money on them. It’s apples and oranges.

I almost don’t know how to respond to this, except to say you’ve almost unintentionally strengthened the argument that Puggo Strikes Back shouldn’t be seen as a defacto reference for color in Empire Strikes Back… though… that actually might be your point? 😃

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Oh, I don’t think anyone’s claiming that PSB is a perfect color-reference, just that it is far more likely to be closer to what the original prints looked like than any old home-video release or severely faded print color-corrected by eye. And when I have several sources, which I have reasons to trust, pointing towards a certain timing of a scene, I am, hopefully quite logically, gonna take the timing in that direction, especially when the sources pointing to another timing have very questionable colors. There is no definite reference for Empire (and having more experience with these matters now, I agree with Puggo that there is no definite perfect color reference for any movie), which is why even in v2.0 I didn’t stick to any one reference religiously, like I did (quite misguidedly as it turns out) on SW v2, but instead, I studied the various references and came to a conclusion on which general direction to take the timing of a certain scene. You’ll be happy to hear I am dialing down the blue in the Wampa scene for v2.5, but nowhere near to the level of the Grindhouse, which is at least as far from a trustworthy color reference as the official BD. I already have the new Wampa scene nearly done, so stay tuned for some samples in my own thread - sorry about hijacking yours, Puggo but I didn’t start it 😉

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Harmy said:

You’ll be happy to hear I am dialing down the blue in the Wampa scene for v2.5, but nowhere near to the level of the Grindhouse, which is at least as far from a trustworthy color reference as the official BD. I already have the new Wampa scene nearly done, so stay tuned for some samples in my own thread - sorry about hijacking yours, Puggo but I didn’t start it 😉

YAY!!!
/fist bump, high fives and a man hug

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Is there a website where I can get the .iso or video files for Puggo Strikes Back?

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Puggo Grande was amazing! I would love to be able to find Puggo Strikes Back. I appreciate and respect all of the hard work and dedication to your projects!! Thank you Puggo!