Idea: replacing the 'Crushed Blacks' of the 2004 and 2011 official releases...

As I understand it, the 2004 & 2011 releases suffer from “crushed blacks”, where areas which previously contained varying levels of darkness have been flattened to straight blackness, losing detail.

I was wondering… would it be possible to replace those crushed areas with the equivalent areas from DJ’s V3 or some similar source? Obviously those areas would be blurry compared to the rest of the frame, but at the same time they are awfully dark, so perhaps it wouldn’t be as noticeable.

Thoughts from people who actually know what they’re talking about would be great.

You might be able to do it with that avisynth script we played with on the PSB segments.

^A very good idea! I'd never thought of that. The only problem would be applying the filter in scenes with smearing...

I've been fantasizing about doing this very thing for quite a while now, and after seeing this thread, I though I might play with the idea a bit.  I don't have V3 (yet), so it may not look spectacular.

I took this shot from harmy's (superb) ded, and this shot from gout.  After adjusting for the aforementioned distortion and whatnot, I came up with this result.

IMHO, some parts work pretty well, but some aren't perfect.  Maybe it would look more real if I did better with the shadows on his nose and jaw.  I'll take another look at it tomorrow.  Oh, and btw, the extreme blockiness you see in the upper left isn't part of the matte I generated, its just due to the poor quality of the gout rip I have on hand.  If it is/were possible to adjust for the warping with a script, or perhaps depending on the consistency of the warping, this might be possible.

I remember once reading some equally ridiculous explanation as to why there was a blue cast to the Tantive corridors.

Edit: discussed here.

Pericles77 said:

"We did not crush the blacks on Episode 4 or Episode 6 in the 2004 transfers. Some scenes are deliberately dark and dense (not the same thing), because of the director's creative intent."

Geez, nobody crushes blacks on purpose. But they are crushed nonetheless, so it was done by mistake.  "Dark and dense"... what a bunch of rancor poo.

It would be interesting to hear how the thoughts went when they timed these sequences.

fucked up

back to normal

fucked up

back to normal

normal

back to fucked up

color is gone

color is back

Or how about these.

Decrease the gamma and add purple to the spark

I want the image to be devoid of color here except make the clothes of the Jawa purple

Should Vader's lights in his belt be green or do you want them to be blue instead?

No, make them blue in this shot instead

And on and on, you could easily fill an entire book with all the errors in these transfers.

yotsuya said:

I think a few of the things we are seeing and complaining about are are just differences in how we've been seeing them for years on pre-dvd media and how they are supposed to be seen. We all know about all those garbage matt boxes, right? Well, when you darken the transfer those garbage matts should be less noticable. I think some of what we are seeing is that for years we have been watching this films from fairly poor transfers. TV, VHS, and LD don't have that high of an image and the TV's they were made for matched how they were scanned.

 

I think a lot of the issue is that these films were dark originally and we just aren't used to it. I'm not saying that a lot of these issues shouldn't have been dealt with, but that they are inherent to the films themselves. but the crushed blacks and some of the other issues I think are part of the way we are used to seeing the films transferred compared to a more accurate transfer.

Really? I think Gil Taylor and Peter Suschitzky would like to have a word with you, or the director for that matter, oh I forgot he turned insane.

yotsuya said:

ANH was color corrected to closely match the technicolor print. As none of us have seen that print and how the colors stand out, I don't think we can really judge.

Yes, the 1997 Special Edition was, but not these 2004/11 video masters. Many people have seen IB Technicolor prints projected many times through the years, as late as last summer in fact and there's really no mystical science involved on how these films should look, this is one of the most widely seen films in cinema history with lots of reference material, weird that no one has pointed out the inconsistencies in color timing and crushed blacks and blown out whites in the cinema reviews throughout the years. The look on this film wasn't particularly stylized, it had a very natural look like other 70's films at the time like Jaws or Close Encounters Of The Third Kind.

If you look at the examples I posted above, those are all before and after shots just separated by editing and should have the same basic color levels, we're talking seconds between the changes in levels, as a colortimer you should get fired from your job if you presented such inconsistency. Vader's blue lights in the belt seems like a minor thing to be upset about, but how do you get those green lights to display as blue if you haven't screwed up something else (if you don't isolate the lights themselves). This terrible inconsistency in color and contrast levels is what is causing these films to look like shit in their present incarnation, you don't need to be a rocket scientist to figure this out.

yotsuya said:

I'm not saying the 2004/2011 versions are perfect, but I think they are closer to the theatrical presentation than the TV/VHS/LD versions were. One way to judge is to look at the period prints from the movie stills and look at how dark they were. They weren't as light as the TV/VHS/LD transfers.

I don't think you're going to find much support for your theory here.  Certainly my experience with the 16mm prints, made in the years that the films were released, contradict your assertion.

msycamore said:

color is gone



color is back

Yeah, it's extremely sloppy. There is one thing if these new versions had a new specific modern look, they aren't the original films and as far as I know, no effort was made to match those films anyway, so a new colortiming can be nice if Lucas now wants them to look different, but do a standard professional job when you're at it so that those who like these updated versions at least have something to enjoy.