A New Hope DVD Color Correction (*unfinished project * - a mass of information) — Page 4

I've never worked with Avisynth before, but shouldn't that program have all the functionality of Premiere?

A few Google searches pulled up this:

http://neuron2.net/www.math.berkeley.edu/benrg/avisynth-premiere.html

So if I understand it correctly, you could use Premiere as the editing program, and output in Avisynth. I think?

NeverarGreat said:

I've never worked with Avisynth before, but shouldn't that program have all the functionality of Premiere?

A few Google searches pulled up this:

http://neuron2.net/www.math.berkeley.edu/benrg/avisynth-premiere.html

So if I understand it correctly, you could use Premiere as the editing program, and output in Avisynth. I think?

Yes, but that still doesn't give you the ability to share your color correction here as a simple text file that we all can use and modify to our liking.

This is one of the biggest strengths of Avisynth, as it's more-or-less a programming language for video work.

Hm. Good to know. I really only know Photoshop and Premiere (and a bit of Vegas) when it comes to video editing.

So is this how the collaboration aspect of projects such as Despecialized work? Someone sends the settings, another person uses these as a base for more scene specific work?

So I may have to learn Avisynth.

In the meantime, I was gunning for matching a color seen on several Senator photos:

The green in Luke's hair and Ben's robe is probably not exact, but the reddish hue of the DVD is not correct either in my opinion. So I decided to get it as close as I could to the photo while keeping the rest of the movie's colors close:

It's still a bit red, but it's the closest this shot has ever come to looking right to me. The rest of the movie looks pretty good as well IMO:

This is where a scene by scene correction would be helpful. Luke could stand to use more red skintones here, but colors fall where they are.

Just wanted to share another step along the correction path.

I haven't rendered a test since applying the blue removal technique, so I'm definitely going to be rendering something soon. I'm kind of putting it off because I need the computer for other things right now, and the project has something like six or seven video layers all doing different things, so will probably take forever to render.

After agonizing over some of the Senator Technicolor reference photos, I decided to make a comparison of all the sources for the "Force" scene:

I'm guessing, based on this comparison, that the Despecialized color correction of the Blu-ray was based on a Technicolor print, probably from Mike Verta, for even a theatrical print (Team Negative1) has a reddish cast. Granted, this is prior to color correction, but it is very similar to the GOUT.

Basically, I'm not worried about trying to match the Senator Technicolor photos in this case.

Also, the video has been rendered, though there is a glitch and I will need to re-render at a later time. Render time is up to 25 hours, because of the 7 video layers involved. However, the rendered results are shown below:

The pink flashes have been all but eliminated, and the highlights restored. After re-rendering, I'll see about showing more high quality comparison video.

Apologies for the long silence guys, school and all that ;)

NeverarGreat said:

There's still some blue remaining, but this is still much improved over the original.

Not to discourage you, but the above screenshots gives you an example of how much color information that was eaten up by the "Lowry restoration" in this sequence, the blue artifacting in the '04 transfer is one thing and these '97SE screenshots are too cyan/blue so they looks a bit off but you can clearly see how screwed up the "fire" in the picture was, the same thing can be seen on explosions in the trench run as well. Just thought I would point that out to you in case you had forgotten how it looked. Might be impossible to restore though.

Chewtobacca said:

You've more than made up for the long silence with your last post, NeverarGreat.  Your results are fantastic.  Can you do anything about the purple in Obi-Wan's hair?  I see it was present in the DVD.

That's a tricky question to answer.

The short of it is that the purple in the skin tones helps other aspects of the movie more than it hurts this one. For example, consider the following:

The second one down is what I've settled on, which has the same settings as every other scene in the movie. I don't believe for a second that the first or second examples are what this scene originally looked like. The reality is more like the GOUT, in my opinion. It just looks better. So I took the above correction and pulled up the blue and red just a bit in photoshop, something that took perhaps twenty seconds, and the result is much closer to the GOUT than months of tinkering on the movie-wide settings. So the movie obviously needs a scene by scene correction, and the global settings are really just to fix the most glaring systemic issues like the blue bleeds and pink flashes.

msycamore said:

NeverarGreat said:

 

There's still some blue remaining, but this is still much improved over the original.

Not to discourage you, but the above screenshots gives you an example of how much color information that was eaten up by the "Lowry restoration" in this sequence, the blue artifacting in the '04 transfer is one thing and these '97SE screenshots are too cyan/blue so they looks a bit off but you can clearly see how screwed up the "fire" in the picture was, the same thing can be seen on explosions in the trench run as well. Just thought I would point that out to you in case you had forgotten how it looked. Might be impossible to restore though.

Well again, this isn't a scene-by-scene correction. Though from what I've seen, there can be a lot more done with these shots than most people would think. It just requires a lot of time (in my case) to figure out how best to do it. I would not be surprised if the original colors of the 97 SE could be completely rescued, but it would require a shot-by-shot correction, and I'd want to use the blu-ray in that case so it wouldn't have to be redone in higher quality. All of this falls beyond the (albeit limited) scope of this project.

@Chewtobacca: I've actually wanted to do a scene-by-scene correction for a while, essentially an optimization of the existing settings whenever needed throughout the film, without re-rendering to preserve quality. This would require 1: The know-how to work with the Blu-ray (easily attainable) and 2: A reasonable quantity of definitive sources for every scene (less easily attainable). One reason that I've stuck with this method for so long is quite simply the lack of good sources for scenes.

@Msycamore:

You can get a lot out of shots if you don't mind doing them one at a time.

JEDIT: I'd say the journey from DVD to the correction below it took thirty minutes to do. Multiply that by the amount of shots in the movie (assuming good references) and that would be how long the correction takes, working from the global settings.

RETURN OF THE JEDIT: This is one thing that perplexes me about Despecialized. There are explosions in the Trench Run which require fairly little correction to look right, yet these are replaced with inferior GOUT upscales.

Chewtobacca said:

NeverarGreat said:  One reason that I've stuck with this method for so long is quite simply the lack of good sources for scenes.

I can help you with the scenes that were changed between 2004 and 2011, but not much else.

Do you mean they changed the color balance of the movie when they released the Blu-ray? I was only aware of the superficial changes such as R2 behind the rocks and the removal of the blue ring around the Death Star explosion, and was under the impression that the color remained unchanged from the DVD. Is this not the case?

Ah, I see.

Mike Verta has said that he is planning to post definitive screencaps of every shot in the film on his website, which he is updating as we speak. I have no idea when the screencaps will hit, but probably before the completion date in 2015. So I know that these sources will be available by then.

Chewtobacca said:

I was thinking the same thing.  Recreating NeverarGreat's settings in Avisynth would take a long time, and I'm not even sure if it's possible.  The only current option is for someone with a fast computer to purchase Premiere Elements and apply the same settings.

I was thinking about this last night, and I realized that even if somebody else applied these seven video layers to the movie as a global change, shots like the Death Star explosion above would require massive deviation from the settings. The above correction pushed the settings to their limits, and though it was second nature for me to manipulate the settings, it would be a steep learning curve for anyone else to learn about my peculiar settings for a scene-by-scene correction. 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.

frank678 said:

If you are considering scene by scene maybe you should still render a version with these settings as back up. Is there a way to split your source file at the reel changes and render the reels individually with the settings to split the rendering time? 

The problem isn't render time, necessarily. I did just render the entire thing, the only problem was that I was derpy and forgot to disable a single reference image overlaid on the video, so now I've got a still image halfway through the film that hangs on screen for a few seconds. Next weekend I may render it correctly.