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GOUT, Automated Theatrical Colouring, and a Reference Guide

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I've done a lot of research on the original theatrical colouring and I found a really easy way to share it with people. The GOUT actually has most of the original colours hidden in it. You just have to extract it. It's not 100% accurate, and it depends on how you have your settings; the pics posted I would say are about 85-90% accurate overall. That's an improvement from the GOUT uncorrected, which I would peg at about 30%.

Very pic heavy, so I am posting this off-site. Only SW is up. Need more pics. ESB is much more interesting, hopefully have those up by the end of the night. You can try it out yourself if you have VLC player.

http://savestarwars.com/goutcorrect.html 

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Very interesting, will you be doing Jedi as also?

by the way, Thanks for this.

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I never actually bought the Jedi GOUT...hehe...

You can pretty much follow my lead though. Just crank up the saturation, back off on the red a bit and sharpen it a little. And that's what you get. Again, not 100% maybe, but in the 90% range which is quite good.

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Just to be clear, the top image is what you are after right? I would have to do this with avisynth though, I am going to compare the V3 screens to yours and see how much of a difference there is.

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I'm not sure if it is possible to do this with Avisynth; the colours tend to bleed and pop more than with other methods in my experience. Even here there is a lot of noise that comes up in certain scenes. It's more for the cool factor of seeing what it ought to look like, but certain scenes would need to be modified on a shot-by-shot basis rather than applying a single setting like I have here. Feel free to take a crack though.

ESB pt 1 of 3 is up. Hint: it's very blue.

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well here are a few screens of V3, I tried to grab the same snaps you did, keep in mind these are not anamorphic yet, these are from the lossless avi file.

 

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If there is anything specific you would like to see just let me know, I will keep checking in every now and then in between Assassin's Creed Brotherhood LOL.

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While in concept your method is a simple fix, Zombie, I don't quite think it does the trick for me. The over-saturation - which does, admittedly, restore color in some shots where it lacks it otherwise - brings out the reds in the skin tones too much. Obviously this is simple levels fixing in a media player, so the results can only go so far. But it may be a good guide in the future for programs such as dark_jedi mentioned.

A Goon in a Gaggle of 'em

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 (Edited)

Some of them are a little red, the pic of Obi Wan saying "the Force will be with you" and Han's "do you think a princess and a guy like me...". But most of the others have pretty balanced skintones IMO; they are more red than they ought to be perhaps, but I don't think distractingly so. Anyway, like I said, it is 85-90% accurate, but gives you a glimpse of what the original colouring would have looked like, even if this isn't the total, one hundred percent real deal. If you were to try it yourself you could spend more time getting rid of the red, as I admittedly did a very quick pass at it.

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ESB pt 2/3 is up.

What I am discovering is that the way the 1997 SE looked is for the most part the way the original film would have looked. Not quite, but especially with the bolder colours it is very reminiscent of what I remember in theatres back then.

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Also, DJ, I think you are confused or maybe I just have explained myself poorly. The lower version in the examples with more saturated colouring is the theatrical version. Both of those are the GOUT, the top one being the GOUT as you see it when you put it in your DVD player, the lower one being that exact same image processed on-the-fly by VLC to basically increase the saturation to original levels of vibrancy. It's not the SE or anything, just in case you thought maybe that's what the lower one was. Although it does resemble the SE, which shows that the SE isn't as "wrong" as people may think in this respect.

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I agree with the basic premise of increasing the saturation and rotating the hue slightly from red to yellow. However I think you've gone way over the top.

Have you calibrated your monitor at all? Even if you don't have a colorimeter (most people don't) needed to achieve an accurate greyscale, you can still use a colour bar pattern with a blue filter to calibrate your monitor's hue and saturation settings.

The GOUT SW is also overly bright, and needs adjustment to either the gamma (g-force) or level curve (pwnage and ed sw '77) to bring it closer to the theatrical experience. 

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No offence zombie, I love your work, but most of these look actually worse than the 2004 DVDs. Waaay too oversaturated.

And in the time of greatest despair, there shall come a savior, and he shall be known as the Son of the Suns.

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I agree, this is way too oversaturated. The faces look like carrots on my monitor. One of the reasons the colors appear so dull and washed out in these transfers is because of the clipped white levels. For example, try to reduce the contrast and you'll see that the colors come back without even touching the saturation slider. But this is all pretty much unrepairable just like the crushed black levels in the 2004 transfers.

We want you to be aware that we have no plans—now or in the future—to restore the earlier versions. 

Sincerely, Lynne Hale publicity@lucasfilm.com

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As most have said, that saturation boost is way way way too much.  Makes it look like everyone has a permanent sunburn in the Star Wars universe.

And DJ, those V3 caps look awesome, by the way.

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ChainsawAsh said:DJ, those V3 caps look awesome, by the way.

They certainly do!

zombie84 said: Although it does resemble the SE, which shows that the SE isn't as "wrong" as people may think in this respect.

Is it possible to tweak the SE then?  Perhaps another attempt to mix SE footage with GOUT footage could be made.  I know the results were largely unsatisfactory in the past, but G-Force's scripts now make the GOUT look much better than before, and the colors could be made to be somewhere in the middle.

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I don't know how useful / reliable this is but I had a thought, As all you (zombie84) have for reference are photos of the technicolor print screenings, which are not ideal. Could you not use the OUT trailers on the 2004 bonus disc instead?

The reason I suggest this is I was watching a few of the trailers today and noticed how much their colours resembled what you seem to be aiming for. I was thinking these might be a better source of reference, but I am no expert so I could well be wrong.

Dark Jedi those caps from the V3 look fab! :D

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I realise that the results here look slightly ugly. One reason is because of the video transfer, tones don't saturate evenly or smoothly, so you have that blotchy effect, especially in faces, the video literally cannot handle colours like this and begins to break up a bit. Perhaps the settings were a bit too saturated, but if they are it is only by a bit; a lot of people have their monitor settings too vibrant keep in mind as well. Some shots needed to be treated individually (Han in the SW cockpit comes to mind, too orange) but I wanted to leave them on a "one-light" printing for demo purposes.

But in fact, this kind of vibrancy is basically what the films looked like. The colours were bright and saturated and skin tones were vibrant. The effect is not fully reproduced here because of the video issues and also because I didn't spend enough time getting a totally pleasing effect but just did a quick pass for a demonstration.

What people always ask though is what was the palette of the films? What was the "look"? Is it like the SE, or the GOUT? It is actually in between, but leaning towards the SE, and in fact the actual original colours are often more vibrant that the 2004 transfer because of frequent dullness that transfer was plagued with in shots. No one has ever seen the film look right since theatres.

One way you can tell that the vibrancy here is approximately accurate is because you get colour in Hoth and in the Death Star again, and you get those luminant skin tones. That is what the Technicolor print looks like, and it's sort of the way the SE looks like as well, and also other prints and stills --and it's all there on the GOUT. Which indicates that this approximate level of saturation is appropriate. Again, there are some issues, the video doesn't reproduce it well and maybe I could have made the tones more pleasing looking or backed off a touch. You can't get the original colours to look accurate like this and also pleasant, which is why G-Force and LFL Pwnage just gave it a bit of a bump rather than something radical like this. Even then, I felt LFL Pwnage had some popping issues; I've stated before that my favourite version thusfar is the newer Editdroid, even though its the most desaturated and thus the least accurate, but it just looks more pleasant to me.

However, I think it is noteworthy to demonstrate how desaturated the GOUT is, that colours that approximate the Technicolour levels is actually hidden in there and that it reveals a lot of information about the grading palettes--Dagobah being so green and blue, rather than grey and brown, with colour back in the Death Star as already confirmed by other sources, and blue tinting returning back to Hoth in most (but not all, mind you) scenes there. You also get to see that a lot of scenes, even in live action, had unexpected colour casts either in lighting or grading or just print fluxuations, which has been seen in other prints and stills but never in home video telecines. I just thought this would be interesting for demonstration purposes, that the GOUT has fairly accurate colour buried in it if you can extract it. Again, the effect is not the greatest looking for various reasons, but like I said the original colour vibrancy is pretty close to the levels here and it changes the GOUT palette pretty radically, which a lot of people might not have seen before.

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While they don't look great, they definitely could be used as a base for finding the true color of the sequence.

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I lowered the saturation from your shots:

A little better and they still have the colors. Just an example.

And in the time of greatest despair, there shall come a savior, and he shall be known as the Son of the Suns.

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The shots are brutally oversaturated, LexX's shots look much better. But still, a very good "experiment" . And if somebody can turn it into an Avisynth script ... :-)

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Yes, that looks better. You still lose out on some of the vibrancy, there is a luminant quality to the way the films looked, but it's pretty hard to recreate that using such an old and washed out video transfer.

Going back over my caps, I found that a more accurate reproduction, probably close to your levels there, is to shift it cyan a few points and then reduce the saturation by 5-10% based on the shot; it tends to make the skintones more neutral and takes the saturation "edge" off, probably not far from the example above.

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I'm looking forward to the results of this.  The idea that the Gout can be improved like this is fascinating. 

I did find a sentence in there that didn't make sense to me:

Many of the composites in all the films suffered this problem, which has never been obvious since theatres because of the washed-out nature of home video.

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But to do something like this scene by scene, WOW, that would take a long time, but it certainly can be done, it would be nice to do it as a team, rather than just 1 guy.

also, all this can be done in avisynth, we just need to find the right commands is all, then separate scene by scene.

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Just remember - vibrancy ≠ oversaturation.  You can have a vibrant image without everyone's skin looking like they've been lying on a beach for a week with no sunblock.

One of these days (possibly with DJ's V3, actually) I'm seriously considering loading each film into Avid or FCP's Color and color correcting them shot by shot, maybe even doing some scratch & dirt cleanup while I'm at it.  While the initial results of this thread are less than perfect, they will improve, I'm sure of it, and having a thread such as this - purely devoted to the color of the films - will be an invaluable resource for anyone doing color work on the OT.  Myself included!