Star Wars Trilogy SE bluray color regrade (a WIP) — Page 16

Whoaa

edit: oh, it’s red faded. Did they not do LPP in Russia? Could there be another country that might have printed LPPs for later theatrical showings?

towne32 said:

Did they not do LPP in Russia?

No, from my research it seems that low-fade stock was not available until after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and that existing Russian film manufacturers at the time used obsolete equipment when making colour film.

I think that the issue was that Western products could not be imported easily or at all during the Soviet era. Once Eastman was available, local companies like Svema (a.k.a. Cbema) lost traction and went out of business.

Mike Verta has responded to my question on the greenish walls, and accuracy of the eBay print scans. His answer is insightful as always. For the full response, please visit starwarslegacy.com.

Here are a few quotes:

“This is not correct and the walls are not green. They vary in how much blue they have in them from panel to panel, but the paint for the Death Star set always biases towards a blue and not a green. There are a number of issues with this particular image [my Han Solo regrade, based on the eBay scan], from an artificial red/pink in the highlights to a curious skin tone. BUT - and this cannot be stated loudly or enough - this is being viewed on varying web browsers, no two of which interpret colors exactly the same way, in sRGB space which cannot represent what the film looks like in any case.”

“Looking at the album of images [http://imgur.com/a/2FSs1], I’d say this is pretty classic Tech IB, however. But the best way to describe the “accurate” color of Star Wars would be an amalgum of Tech and Kodak (which is precisely why I’ve done it that way). The blend isn’t linear, which also complicates the issue.”

That pretty much matches my suspicions on what the accurate color ought to be.

DrDre said:
Mike Verta has responded to my question on the greenish walls …

“This is not correct and the walls are not green.”

Aww, and I was just going to post about that! I’ve got the evidence – videogames don’t lie (and I checked those walls with an eyedropper, too!):

Quake 2 mod - Loki’s Minions Capture The Flag map 27 (LMCTF27) - Cellblock 1138 by Der Kommissar

Dreamaster said:

DrDre said:

DeEd 2.5 is definitely more green than the print scans, which are themselves green sifted, so my guess would be that there should be a slight green shift, like this:

WOW… that looks awesome… definitely gets some of the excess reds out. Now can you apply that LUT to a Tarkin scene just to see what that does? That might give us another counter reference even though I know part of the problem is inconsistent grading on the blu ray.

DrDre, this shot “slightly green-shifted” is making the walls a more cyan/blue color. I really do think this one is really close. Still curious to see how that LUT applied to some other death star scenes would look (like a Tarkin scene, or Obi-Wan deactivating the tractor beam)

Playing catch- up here:

I am pretty sure those film frames are from IB Technicolor. The ANH crawl frames show considerably more fading, which matches with the Senator print. (The UK prints had the 1981 crawl cut in on pre-LPP Eastman.)

The other reason I think it could be IB is because there are no Eastman edge codes on the actual stock. There is only occasionally a printed-in negative Eastman edge code. And I could have sworn some of the images had a gray soundtrack.

I have hundreds of images from this movie_maniac guy, I’ve been saving these pictures for months. I can send more if needed. These are obviously captured off some kind of light table or something. The hue of the clear film stock looks different depending on the photo, so I’m thinking there’s auto white balance at play here too. (I have Sandpeople/Kenobi canyon stuff, the unexposed portions of the film and the light shining through the sprocket holes look bluish instead of white on those.)

I’m not sure if this person has dupes of the same footage, has cut up bits of multiple prints, or if they are different 5-frame strips from the same print. But either way, I can throw all the images up in a ZIP and post them up somewhere for Dre. Though they may raise even further questions.

As to the 70mm cells, I was trying to figure out their origin before, so I analyzed tons of eBay images looking for frames that contained edge codes for print stock and printed in from the previous intermediate generation. Here’s what I found:

SW(ANH) has no printed-in internegative edge codes, and the edge codes on the actual print say EASTMAN LPP and have the symbols corresponding to stock manufactured in 1995. I recently formulated a theory that they had no usable 65mm internegative for the film, the negatives were obviously in dire condition (this was concurrent with the SE restoration), so they simply made a new 65mm blow-up off of a 35mm IB. Do any of you think the SW 70mm cell images look grainier compared to the ESB/ROTJ ones?

Another possibility could be that the internegative had mild fading, I assume the dyes would fade in the same way on negative stock, so you’d be left with a magenta/pink negative image that would turn green when reversed (like that clip on the SE documentary). But it doesn’t look like color information had actually been lost (or not much) just that there’s a green cast.

ESB seems to have been a new print made off a seemingly original 65mm IN. The printed in blue-on-black edge codes have the symbols for 1979, the yellow-brown codes on the very edge on the actual print stock have the symbols for 1995. Some of them look to have shots that were added after the initial 70mm prints (extra Wampa cave, Bacta tank, Falcon dish shown when Luke is hanging on the weathervane thing), so it could have been a slightly later blow-up IN. (I haven’t found one of the extra Rebel fleet shots yet.) But the color looked to have been quite intact at the time - though that was 20 years ago.

ROTJ doesn’t look to have been a new print off of existing internegatives, but rather actual original picture-only (no mag soundtrack striped on) 70mm backup positives? The printed-in internegative edge code symbols are for 1981 or 1982, but the actual print stock edge code symbols aren’t the ones from 1995 like SW/ESB, but instead the ones from 1982 or 1983, depending on the reel. (The cells from the final reel - possibly the final two reels - aren’t faded, and when I found frames showing the print edge codes, they said “EASTMAN LPP” instead of just “EASTMAN”, but they had the symbols for 1982, so they were also original.)

I spent too much time on this frame, and I realized I did my best regrading a while ago, so this is it for real 😉:

Dreamaster said:
DrDre, this shot “slightly green-shifted” is making the walls a more cyan/blue color. I really do think this one is really close. Still curious to see how that LUT applied to some other death star scenes would look (like a Tarkin scene, or Obi-Wan deactivating the tractor beam)

I’m thinking how to incorporate Harmy’s and Mike Verta’s input into a reasonably accurate grading. We’ll get there…

DrDre said:

Dreamaster said:
DrDre, this shot “slightly green-shifted” is making the walls a more cyan/blue color. I really do think this one is really close. Still curious to see how that LUT applied to some other death star scenes would look (like a Tarkin scene, or Obi-Wan deactivating the tractor beam)

I’m thinking how to incorporate Harmy’s and Mike Verta’s input into a reasonably accurate grading. We’ll get there…

😃 OK I’ll be patient. I think I also figured out what I wanted to say about Tattooine gradings the other day, so I’m glad you posted another “final” of that scene. 😉 This one looks like you’re already thinking of it but a few of the latter ones seemed to white balance as if the lighting was something more akin to florescent lights, whereas all of these scenes need to have a warmer “sunlit” white balance (tending gently towards yellow or orange). I make game environments/terrian and I’m always setting the mood by changing the color of the directional light (the sun basically)… That’s the point of white balance, which does NOT effect the primary colors so much as the very lightest colors. The specular highlights in Tattooine should never really have a green or a blue tinge but that’s the common mistake I’ve seen in a lot of the other colorings done to the movie. (Looking at people’s skin, not talking about the specular highlights on R2’s blue dome or something, LOL) In the Death Star shots, that’s a COMPETELY different story because there are actually green lights on some of the walls and the lights really ARE in fact more florescent in nature. In fact, in Empire I noted that in the Hoth base the lights actually were set up to alternate between white and blue as Han and Leia are arguing down the hall! But Tattooine, I just wanted us to keep that warmth in mind. And again, that really shouldn’t effect much of the “red/peach” in people’s faces, but it will very much effect the whites on the astromech droids and the oily highlights in the skin. I think it will also effect the color of the sand a bit. Death Star Shots you’ll have to really look at the different sources to figure out which direction to push the highlights based on what color you think the lights are that they are closest too.

P.S. All of your tatooine finals on the first page look perfect BTW… Verta’s on the other hand might lean a bit green still in darker shades of that speeder though! 😃

TServo2049 said:
I have hundreds of images from this movie_maniac guy, I’ve been saving these pictures for months. … I can throw all the images up in a ZIP and post them up somewhere …

Great minds think alike! 😄

I did the same thing for movie.maniac's completed auctions.

http://www.ebay.com/sch/m.html?LH_PrefLoc=2&_ssn=movie.maniac&LH_Complete=1&_ipg=200&_nkw="star+wars"±empire±jedi

As of today’s date, it is 185 pictures (from 20151216 thru 20160310) by searching for “star wars” -empire -jedi. A custom webpage was designed to snag both thumbnails and full-size photos from a webpage-viewer structure, to be saved for viewing offline.

I have more than that. Can’t remember how far back I was saving? I think June-September?

Anybody have any thoughts on my 70mm film cell observations?

DrDre said:

I spent too much time on this frame, and I realized I did my best regrading a while ago, so this is it for real 😉:

It looks great and not even a little bit like piss. 😄

TServo2049 said:
As to the 70mm cells …

I don’t know much about Star Wars’ film-stock pedigree, but I think your pathology approach is important to eliminating clearly additive/defective color, it’s champions notwithstanding.

BTW, if you’ll ZIP the full-sized eBay pictures you saved, I’m certainly interested in getting it. The https://www.wetransfer.com/ is a good site. Without signing up, posts are available for 7 days. (Thanks!)

I’ve also settled on my grading for the Death Star conference room scene:

DrDre said:

I’ve also settled on my grading for the Death Star conference room scene:

I think I like those colors Dre. Both uniforms match, and the colors of the walls look good as well. Nice job!

I will go for an alternative, that agrees better with Mike Verta’s view, that the Death Star walls always bias towards blue, and also agrees with a raw frame from -1’s LPP for this sequence:

I like the newest set.

towne32 said:

I like the newest set.

Agreed… it gets rid of most of the green in Tarkin’s face/cheek area.

Maybe a little bit of fine tuning, but it’seems very close.

I think this is it:

Time for another shot completely.

Bluray:

Bluray regraded:

Nope, I borrowed this color grading from Mike Verta. I trust his judgement 😃.