Puggo Strikes Back! (Released) — Page 11

Pristine only happens opening weekend though. With digital projection taking over the multiplexes, a lot of people are never going to see a print that's been running for months, or in the case of Star Wars, an entire year. Movies just don't stay in theaters that long anymore.

It's the memory of seeing those not so pristine prints, is what some of us are responding to on an almost subliminal level with PG, and now PSB.

You'd also be amazed at some of the dodgy prints the studios would use for video transfers back in the 80's. They could sort of get away with it on VHS, but it stuck out like a sore thumb on Laserdisc! ;)

SilverWook said:

Pristine only happens opening weekend though. With digital projection taking over the multiplexes, a lot of people are never going to see a print that's been running for months, or in the case of Star Wars, an entire year. Movies just don't stay in theaters that long anymore.

It's the memory of seeing those not so pristine prints, is what some of us are responding to on an almost subliminal level with PG, and now PSB.

 You should come to our cheap theatre. Ever since everything started going digital, the quality of the actual film reels that the cheap place show has taken a huge nosedive.

It's gotten a lot better lately, but the other day we saw The Fighter, and there were three spots where the film just went completely yellow for a little bit.

It wouldn't surprise me if some studios were getting cheap and nasty with film prints so as to make digital look good. Not every director has control over those things.

I saw Tron Legacy one time in 2D 35mm before it left theaters, and was pleasantly surprised that it looked good. Been a while since I'd seen minor scratches and reel change splices on a "current" film!

When it comes to the local revival screenings, one never knows what kind of print will show up! ;)

We go to the cheap place all the time, Tron 2 looked fine when we saw it.

But maybe we shouldn't go so far off topic...

I saw TR2N at the $4 cinema.

Green squiggly line the whole time, is that a damaged 35 thing?

It can be. I saw Alice in Wonderland at a $1 theater and it was this way for several reels. Made me actually kinda enjoy the movie.

Molly said:

I saw TR2N at the $4 cinema.

Green squiggly line the whole time, is that a damaged 35 thing?

Yes.  I think it's called an emulsion scratch. Could also be a sign of sloppy print handling or a projector that needs fixing?

I saw Star Trek 6 opening night, and there was a "green line" on the right side of the frame for nearly 3/4 of the film! In theory, that print could not have been run more than a few times before I saw it.

Before I started going to revival screenings, Star Wars was the most beat up print I recall seeing. But that was a year into it's run. :)

Puggo - Jar Jar's Yoda said:

Yes, it's barrel distortion. I tried correcting it in the Puggo Grande with a VirtualDub filter designed for that purpose, but the results were horrible.  On some scenes it was ok, but on others it was completely unacceptable, such as on the crawl.

There isn't really a fix for it during capture.  The WorkPrinter wasn't initially designed to capture the entire frame of a scope print, and with the enlarged gate you see it.  Frankly, after being upscaled, I think it's pretty minor.

If you want something to play with, I think I still have a raw clip here:

http://rapidshare.com/files/454420238/Tdark.avi

I had a little play with the raw clip last night.

Firstly I looked at the luma levels. It's interesting that there is a substantial amount of "super-white" information in the clip - pixels with a luma value greater than 235, which would normally get clamped when converting to RGB for display. This detail can be recovered by lowering the white level.

I also lowered the black level to roughly where it should be.

My levels adjustment did give a nice improvement IMO, but there was still some shadow detail lost. If you can work out a method to apply HDR techniques to merge a light and dark capture together that would be much better.

Although I didn't come up with anything, I think that some colour adjustments are needed, particularly to reduce the blue levels. The catwalk that Luke and Vader fight on should be more of a steely grey than a blue-grey.

I also had a play with the DeSpot filter for AviSynth. After a bit of parameter tweaking, I was getting some pretty impressive dirt spot removal in the Hoth scenes; the natural film grain was untouched.

Unfortunately I then checked the transporter fly-by shot and found that the filter was eating half the stars from the panning starfield. Would be worth amending the parameters so that it only looks for dark spots, or even attempt a mo-comped script (see the "combined usage" notes at the above link) to reduce the number of false-positive spot detections.

Moth3r said:

Firstly I looked at the luma levels. It's interesting that there is a substantial amount of "super-white" information in the clip - pixels with a luma value greater than 235, which would normally get clamped when converting to RGB for display. This detail can be recovered by lowering the white level.

I also lowered the black level to roughly where it should be.

Although I didn't come up with anything, I think that some colour adjustments are needed, particularly to reduce the blue levels. The catwalk that Luke and Vader fight on should be more of a steely grey than a blue-grey.

I also had a play with the DeSpot filter for AviSynth. After a bit of parameter tweaking, I was getting some pretty impressive dirt spot removal in the Hoth scenes; the natural film grain was untouched.

Thanks for the feedback.  A couple of questions:

What filter would you suggest for dialing back the white areas?  (in Avisynth, VirtualDub, or Vegas preferred)

Yes, I will back off the blues (and reds).  However, I have to do it scene-by-scene because I'm using several captures and their white balances are not all the same.

I've been scared of DeSpot.  I tried it on the PG, but it always seemed to remove other stuff too.  Even on the DeSpot page, in the sample image the boy has lost his nostril.  I may only use it for the beginnings and ends of the reels, where the spots are most distracting. And I suspect it will work well in the crawl, if I can get it to avoid the stars. If you have any recommended settings, I'd be interested in hearing them.

By the way, I finished merging clips for reels 1 and 2.  I may skip merging clips for reel 2... the results just aren't as good.  So my next step is starting the editing process.  This will be a bit tedious.

Quick script with level adjustment and mo-comped DeSpot on dark spots only (cropping and aspect ratio only approximate):

http://www.sendspace.com/file/2elee3

There is a fair amount at 235 - 255 that can be recovered:

On the other hand, there is still some hard clipping at 255 (in the ion cannon blasts, the light to the right of Yoda, and some of the lights in the falcon's cockpit).

The problem with capturing lower is that you are already losing shadow detail (to the right of the Cloud City catwalk, for example). This is why I mentioned that HDR techniques to combine two different captures would be ideal.

Anyway, for the example clip above I used a simple levels(19,1,255,0,235,false) in AviSynth. Better results may be possible with one of the more advanced filters like Ylevels or SmoothAdjust.

You cannot do this in VirtualDub, because VDub filters work in RGB colourspace - and this "superwhite" information gets lost on the conversion to RGB.

And I agree with the concerns about using DeSpot. The advantage it has over normal denoising methods is that it only touches the picture when it thinks its found a spot of dirt, so the natural grain is kept intact. However, its detection is not perfect - you would have to check very carefully that it isn't removing real detail. This is where motion compensation would help; but even so, in the clip above I noticed part of an X-wing's engine was missing in one frame.

Life intervened... my computer has been tied up doing a couple of boxes of audio transfers for someone.

I did finish creating the mergers of reels 1 and 3.  Probably won't do one for reel 2.  Still haven't started the piecewise editing yet.

Ok, here's what I've been doing lately...

I finished going through scene-by-scene in reel 1, picking for each scene the best from three tracks: a light capture, a dark capture, and the "blend" of the two using althor's script.  Most of the scenes seemed best either from the dark capture, or the blend. As I reviewed the finished edit, two things bugged me about the blended track:

- a frame that didn't sync correctly in the blend.  It took this long before I noticed a single incorrectly aligned frame,  so I knew there couldn't be many.  But I went on a hunt for more, and managed to find a few others.  So now I'm worried about using the blend lest there be others that are noticed later.

- colors. It occurred to me that because of the differing exposures, the white balance in each of the two captures isn't absolutely identical. That isn't a problem when slicing scene-by-scene, however it could make the blended track problematic to color-correct in those scenes where the blend is chosen.  Because, the blend is made up of bits of two slightly different color sources, meaning that in some cases there potentially might not be one white balance appropriate for the entire frame.

At this point, I'm inclined now to go back and redo the edit, and only use the blend on a few particular scenes that clearly benefit from it, and only by checking frame-by-frame to ensure there aren't any badly aligned ones.

I know what you mean about the blend frames.  I'm using it right now on my hybrid script.  The only way to be sure is to go through it frame by frame.  It's enough to drive one crazy. I wish someone knew a better way to do it.  I guess it's still faster than doing it in PS or Vegas.

Any updates Puggo?

Yeah, how's this coming along? Can't wait to see it :-)

I'm currently heading to Europe on a 3-week vacation.  Progress has been slow since I'm pretty much scrapping the idea of using the blending script. But when I get back, I'll get back on it!

Even Jedi Masters need a vacation. Bon Voyage!

Totally awesome! I loved the first one because it sort of put Star Wars in its place. Feel more like a period piece, like the one-off it was intended to be.

Hope you're enjoying your break

Got back a few days ago, and playing catch up at work.  I also have spent the past 3 days restoring an old skipfield CV open reel videotape deck. Totally stoked that I was able to get it to work!

Although the blending worked rather well, there were enough improperly aligned frames that I think I'm not going to use it.  I'll just choose scenes from each of the three captures and live with it (like I did for PG).  It's still a slow process.  And I still have to grab a few missing segments from another print.  So we're still quite a ways away from the finished product.

But I will do the upscaled HD... THAT is worth it.