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Star Wars OT & 1997 Special Edition - Various Projects Info (Released) — Page 132

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@Mielr: Oh, ok. We've already fixed that color bleeding. It proved to be some kind of combination of an older version of avisynth, and the codec we used for rendering.

The chroma shift in ESB is the same thing, except it's already there on the DVD. msycamore made a thread about it a while ago.

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You_Too said:

I did tell DJ that he's been unbanned. He's just been busy with work and stuff.

We're still working with the frame cleanup, though it sure takes some time. And considering I've been a bit ill lately, things have been going a bit slower.

So while I don't have much news for you guys, I can tell you that at least some of the color errors in SW have been dealt with:

For the first shot I got the correct hue from another scene on Tantive. Since the Tantive scenes are a bit low on reds, making Vader's belt really pure green wouldn't be consistent with the later scenes' look.

For the Death star scene, I got the correct hue from one moment where Vader turns left and the left side of the belt has it's green preserved.

Weird stuff really, these errors.

  Hello this is my first post on this forum.Wow that is amazing that you got all that color from the GUOT, and erased bad artifacts.

One day we will have properly restored versions of the Original Unaltered Trilogy (OUT); or 1977, 1980, 1983 Theatrical released versions (Like 4K77,4K80 and 4K83); including Prequels. So that future generations can enjoy these historic films that changed cinema forever.

Yoda: Try not, do or do not, there is no try.

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Is part of all this manual adjustment also doing a new scene-by-scene color correction where the faces are color corrected separately from the other colors in each scene? I think it was Mother that showed that the color correction scripts could be set up so that color adjustments would be applied differently depending on what the original color in the video frame was. Obviously faces are different than anything else in the scenes, so the script would adjust their colors differently, according to different values entered into the script, than the correction values applied to all else in the scene. This allows separate fine tuning of the color correction applied to faces.

Just wondering, since it seems the only way to get the colors back as close as possible to where they should be without making the faces appear red or dark is to set that scene-by-scene. Only problem is that it takes a lot of time to do it that way. So I understand if it's not being done like that, but I was curious. :)

A big thanks for all the efforts on this new Blu-ray set! :)

The Star Wars trilogy. There can be only one.

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Is there a possibility that you would also include the 1981 crawl (with A New Hope) for Star Wars? Maybe via seamless branching?


Would be cool to not only have all the audio mixes but also the different crawls and with all the available LD preservations out there, it shouldn't be to hard to find a decent looking version of it. But if it's too complicated to do seamless branching (I have no idea how they do it exactly), forget what I just said! It's not that important :-)

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@Dunedain: Such a color correction would indeed be awesome, but when looking at the GOUT it seems that it's technically limited in the way the colors are, compared to original prints.

In the GOUT it's often like hair, skin and lips all share the same red/pink hue, which makes it impossible with normal color correction to fix only the skin tone. In the 70mm scans for example, you can see each color is much more nicely separated from each other.

So you won't see any color correction miracles in this project, but we dug up the colors not visible due to desaturation, and balanced out the biggest problems like too strong reds, and green-tinted yellows.

The manual photoshop work I've talked about only involves removing glue marks, flashes, dirt, burn marks, light bleeding between frames and stuff like that where it's very visible. And fixing the most major color errors like those two pics I posted where Vader's belt lights are pink in the raw GOUT.

@TheObi: We won't change any of the crawls, credits or anything. It will all be left as it is on the DVDs.

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Ah, I see. So the faces should be less red/dark this time (like, for example, onboard the Tantive IV, where they are too reddish on the Blu-ray V1)?

The Star Wars trilogy. There can be only one.

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@Dunedain: I haven't seen the Blu V1 but in the raw GOUT there is mostly more reds than other colors in all scenes. Or a kind of pinkish red.

The only thing I could do to make it look better, while digging up the rest of the colors, was to push the reds down a lot so they blend with the rest. They will still look strong, but all the picture will be strong, not just reds. :)

Here's a couple comparisons between the raw GOUT upscaled and Blu V2:

In this shot of Leia you can see lots of more colors in the picture in V2, and the reds doesn't have that pink tint.

In this shot of Han, in the GOUT all you see is basically pinkish red and grey, except for his shirt that shows the slightest yellow. In V2 you'll find lots of colors here too. The picture becomes much more interesting and alive.

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The new colour scheme looks good, though I've become accustomed to the Technicolor approximation found on the Despecialized Edition 2.0, which has a more muted look.  If you dial back the overall saturation a bit, while keeping the balance between colours the same, it would be somewhat more accurate . . .

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<p>That shirt seems really yellow, but maybe that's more accurate.</p>

If I had some gum, I’d chew a hole into the sun…

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<p>With all respect to H_h don't you guys dare. You_Too, that's brilliant work.</p>
<p>Please pass on my sincere gratitude to both you and DJ. These are going to be special.&nbsp; Can't wait.</p>
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<p>&nbsp;</p>

I love everybody. Lets all smoke some reefer and chill. Hug and kisses for everybody.

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Hmm, the faces look orangeish now, better they look a little red (rosey cheeks and such) than looking orange/burnt. That's always the problem with trying to boost the colors in the rest of the scene, the faces get dragged along for the ride, and even if you drop the reds back to help compensate, the other colors still flood the faces.

That's why darkjedi went easy on the saturation in the Blu-ray V1 color correction, to spare the faces from being made red or orangeish dark in appearance, even if that meant the other things in the scene wouldn't be as saturated as would otherwise be perhaps desirable.

That's why separate correction for the faces would be nice, maybe desaturate the reds in the faces in some scenes even to get rid of the reddish tint. But in the absence of that, it's best to lean towards the side of backing off on the overall saturation correction of a scene. Because when faces are red/orange/burnt looking, it's far more noticeable than if the other things in the scene maybe aren't saturated as well as might be liked. It can be a tough balancing act, but keeping the faces natural and fair looking is the most important thing, as that distracts the most when they don't look right.

schorman13: Now that you mention it, the shirt does seem awfully yellow, and I'm pretty certain it should be a light cream color.

The Star Wars trilogy. There can be only one.

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It seems to me that DJ's and You_Too's picture is closer to that technicolor photo that the raw GOUT, including the skintone.

I feel bad for you guys, now you're under the skintone bombardment :-) Take cover!

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Harmy said:

It seems to me that DJ's and You_Too's picture is closer to that technicolor photo that the raw GOUT, including the skintone.

I think so too. Look at the right part of the technicolor photo, at the X-wing engine, it's got a bit of a cyan tint. A slight cyan tint can be seen in our V2 too if you look there closely and compare to the raw GOUT shot.

I'm sad to say to everyone who thinks it's oversaturated, that this kind of saturation boost, satmask, known as vibrance in photoshop, was the only way to bring all those colors back, and because of the bad overall balance of colors in the GOUT, it ends up this way. Dialing down the saturation will make skintones less saturated, yes, but would remove all that color which was brought back.

When I made these color settings I tried many combinations, lower saturation for example, and in the end I decided and DJ agreed, that this was the best overall look. Perhaps when you see it all in motion you'll see that many scenes benefit a lot from this. A lot has also been done to improve the very muted contrast of the GOUT.

If it had been a cleaner and more balanced scan of for example a technicolor print, it would have been much easier but there is a limit for what can be done with this particular version.

ESB and ROTJ weren't as desaturated as SW though, so in those two the result might be a little better to your eyes.

But of course, do take in account that you're all used to watch the GOUT as desaturated as it is. When you get used to our version most of you will like it, I'm sure. :)

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Well said, You Too. I've been very impressed with the improvements you guys have made since V3 and can't wait for the new one. 

So speaking of Empire and Jedi, what sort of theatrical color references are available for these?  Is the GOUT fairly accurate or is there even any way to know for sure?  Just curious.  I've seen various discussions on Empire and the question of how "blue" Hoth is supposed to look, for example, but didn't know if there were any reliable sources like the SW tech prints.  I assume it would be from a variety of sources like the GOUT, PSB, 35mm scans, etc?

“In the future it will become even easier for old negatives to become lost and be “replaced” by new altered negatives. This would be a great loss to our society. Our cultural history must not be allowed to be rewritten.” - George Lucas

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Don't get me wrong.  It's beautifully vibrant and I will watch the hell out of this version when you guys are done.

I was just most worried about Han's shirt.  It is great to see true reds in the picture again.

Dr. M

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Cobra Kai said:

So speaking of Empire and Jedi, what sort of theatrical color references are available for these?  Is the GOUT fairly accurate or is there even any way to know for sure?  Just curious.  I've seen various discussions on Empire and the question of how "blue" Hoth is supposed to look, for example, but didn't know if there were any reliable sources like the SW tech prints.  I assume it would be from a variety of sources like the GOUT, PSB, 35mm scans, etc?

If one would aim for a true theatrical look for each film, I think ESB and ROTJ would be a bit problematic. Since none of those two were printed by technicolor, I guess there is no completely accurate reference source where the colors hasn't faded, at least that we have access to. (Correct me if I'm wrong!)

But one thing is sure about the GOUT, and that is that the colors differ from the screens I've seen of theatrical prints of each film. It's like they did a new color grade pass when this version was released on LD.

So what we chose to do was to simply use the greyscale in the three movies and tried to balance it nicely, and use the same color correction settings for all three films since they all have the same problem with reds and tint. Except that SW is more desaturated than ESB and ROTJ so the saturation increase is a bit higher in SW. What you get is a better representation of how the LD release should have looked.

So not a true theatrical version but a nice cleaner GOUT with more colors dug up!

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Actually, I think most ROTJ prints were LPP, so if stored properly, they shouldn't be faded at all (the one stored in the LoC for example apparently has beautifully preserved colours).  Empire unfortunately is a different story. I'm not sure how well preserved are the colours on Puggo's 16mm prints of ESB and ROTJ but those could in theory serve as a reference.

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<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p>I was 17 when ROTJ came out. A couple of my friends and I watched it all day in the theater. I watched it 8 times in total while in its theater run. I don't remember blue stars. Years later when the SE came out for a limited run in the theaters I remember thinking, "wtf"? Where did those blue stars come from?</p>
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I love everybody. Lets all smoke some reefer and chill. Hug and kisses for everybody.

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Well, I think it's a question of perception. I've watched ROTJ on VHS like a hundred times and now I know the stars were blue on the VHS I used to watch but if somebody asked me before I started paying closer attention to stuff like that, what colour they were I wouldn't have known and would probably have said they were white.

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Yeah why is it that the stars have the blue tint in Jedi? That always bothered me 

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Harmy said:

Actually, I think most ROTJ prints were LPP, so if stored properly, they shouldn't be faded at all (the one stored in the LoC for example apparently has beautifully preserved colours).  Empire unfortunately is a different story. I'm not sure how well preserved are the colours on Puggo's 16mm prints of ESB and ROTJ but those could in theory serve as a reference.

we have 'our' reference for empire. and the people that do have

return of the jedi have said they are LPP prints. so those will be

pretty accurate.

 

later

-1

[no GOUT in CED?-> GOUT CED]

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Harmy said:

I'm not sure how well preserved are the colours on Puggo's 16mm prints of ESB and ROTJ but those could in theory serve as a reference.

They are vibrant and not faded at all.  But as with all telecines, capturing the color accurately and completely is also a challenge.  What I can say is that PSB will capture the breadth of color sufficiently so that someone could use it as a reference, adjusting for variations in white balance and hue.

"Close the blast doors!"
Puggo’s website | Rescuing Star Wars

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<blockquote>
<p><strong>You_Too</strong> said:</p>
<p>@Dunedain: I haven't seen the Blu V1 but in the raw GOUT there is mostly more reds than other colors in all scenes. Or a kind of pinkish red.</p>
<p>The only thing I could do to make it look better, while digging up the rest of the colors, was to push the reds down a lot so they blend with the rest. They will still look strong, but all the picture will be strong, not just reds. :)</p>
<p>Here's a couple comparisons between the raw GOUT upscaled and Blu V2:</p>
<p><a href="http://img96.imageshack.us/img96/8835/leiar.png"><img src="http://img96.imageshack.us/img96/8835/leiar.png" width="720" height="612" /></a></p>
<p>In this shot of Leia&nbsp;you can see lots of more colors in the picture in V2, and the reds doesn't have that pink tint.</p>
<p><a href="http://img163.imageshack.us/img163/3420/han.png"><img src="http://img163.imageshack.us/img163/3420/han.png" width="720" height="612" /></a></p>
<p>In this shot of Han, in the GOUT all you see is basically pinkish red and grey, except for his shirt that shows the slightest yellow. In V2 you'll find lots of colors here too. The picture becomes much more interesting and alive.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>&nbsp; Lower the contrast and increase the gamma a little bit.that&nbsp;should&nbsp;make the skin tones look better without&nbsp;losing the colors in the movie.&nbsp;Scene&nbsp;you have the saturation high.&nbsp;</p>

One day we will have properly restored versions of the Original Unaltered Trilogy (OUT); or 1977, 1980, 1983 Theatrical released versions (Like 4K77,4K80 and 4K83); including Prequels. So that future generations can enjoy these historic films that changed cinema forever.

Yoda: Try not, do or do not, there is no try.