Song Of The South - many projects, much info & discussion thread (Released) — Page 29

Not yet. We're picking the HDDs and he will ship them to me as soon as he can. 

Although I can play/watch the .MP4 files, VirtualDub doesn't know the format and won't load them. I'll search if there's a driver to fix that. But, in the meantime, I'm working on stills (the counterparts of the ones Zip Doodah posted) in the paint program.

Fox's green shirt has been bothering me. I just can't get green to show stronger without noticeably throwing off the rest of the picture. Also, I was suspicious of the 35mm's shaded shirt color compared to the 16mm's properly flat, painted cel color:

                        16mm                                                        35mm

When the pictures were split to their R-G-B elements, something jumped out from the RED separation:

                     16mm RED                                                 35mm RED

Do you see it?
Although the values look comparable overall, the green shirt compared to the head is value reversed in the 35mm clip! That is impossible, and that is why the green doesn't come out from the 16mm clip. One of them has been altered and my bet is on the 35mm with it's non-cel-like shading. Now that we can safely ignore the infamous green shirt, on to the color correction.  :)

Using the 35mm as a guide (even though I still think it looks over-saturated -- see the skin colors), the pictures were arranged into one strip to see how adjustments for one picture affected the rest:

                  35mm reference                                                 16mm LUT capture
 

Keeping in mind poita's admonition to watch the range of the picture, I compressed the midtones across R-G-B to show more of the detail in girl's highlighted face. Then using gamma, the R-G-B spectrums were moved to assure the white doily on the dress remained mostly neutral white. I use a stand-alone "eye-dropper" program to check the colors. (BTW, if all R-G-B gammas are adjusted upward, the picture becomes lighter; downward, darker; and one down, one at 1.0, and one higher, remains overall the same with color variations.) The result, trying to make them all look good with one setting, is this:

1st correction
             low  gamma   high  midtones
RED         0      1.1      255           10
GREEN     0      1.0      255           15
BLUE        0      1.75    255           10

               16mm LUT capture                                                color correction 1

Put those numbers into your program and check how other scenes look with this correction. Your experimenting should be easier with the LUT capture's pre-normalized RGBs -- it's only gamma & midtones twiddling now. Of course, the settings are inter-dependent -- changing one usually requires compensation on the other, within each RGB separation.

Very, very interesting, Spaced Ranger. Why do you suppose the 35mm had the difference in color in the shirt? That's very peculiar...

As far as the color correction goes, that looks really good. I think that's really close to the 35mm - the saturation is a bit off, but like you, I still think that 35mm is a bit oversaturated.

What does everybody else think?

A thought came to me - what was the date code on that IB print, Zip Doodah? I wonder if because mine was a later British release, if they could have possibly done some "special edition" type changes or minor fixes, or if there were two different releases of the film? Anybody else think that's a possibility, or is it just too late at night to be thinking about this?

Sorry for the triple post, but it seemed important-ish...

Here's the same frame grab from the BBC broadcast, so I guess that rules out the different coloring, as well as whether that cel was authentic:

Also, here are my color correcting tools - maybe Spaced Ranger can make more sense of them than I can:

ww12345 said:

On the other hand, though, I have an IB print of Horror of Dracula, and about every 100-200 feet (I don't remember how many feet exactly) there was a color change, due to the Tech processing. IIRC, they could only process so many feet at a time, so they just did their best to match colors/etc.

Not to derail but YOU MUST BE JOKING. If you have any more Hammer or James Bond, I (and I suspect captainsolo) will just faint.

Back on topic, the partial Reel 1 looks promising, as well as the color corrections...

@Poita: That looks promising. Maybe I'll go ahead and download the free copy of Davinci you talked about...

@Aluminum Falcon: Yup. I have the whole Hammer Dracula series (only HoD in IB, though...), plus about 10 other Hammer titles... :)

Huh. Installed Resolve lite, but it says it needs a GPU upgrade... Any way to get around this?

Darn. That sort of thing isn't available externally, is it?

Here's what my specs are:

ww12345 said:

Here's the same frame grab from the BBC broadcast, so I guess that rules out the different coloring, ...

Also, here are my color correcting tools ...

Green shirts. Why did it have to be green shirts!  :D

Thanks for the software screenshots. Pretty cool!
I'm not "a colorist"; just some guy analyzing film fade and trying to un-do it based on the way it's faded (which might then allow techniques for automatic or semi-automatic correction). I recognize some of your program's settings; others are new to me, too. At least, after some review, I could see if the numbers I had supplied might present a problem for your use.

poita said:

A quick go at the fox scene in davinci, correcting secondaries (and I do mean quick) gets me to here ... Which looks close to the references I have.

Thanks for the green shirt  ...  :O

Those "secondaries" you mentioned are YCM (Yellow, Cyan, Magenta -- the inverse of RGB)? I cringe at approaching the film fade problem with anything besides RGB (Red, Green, Blue), which is why I try to stay away from HSL (Hue, Saturation, Lightness) or variant HSV (Hue, Saturation, Value), or the other spectrum segmentation/augmentation tools (I fear such corrections will produce the Hollywood cringe-worthy, visually broken Blu-ray releases we've seen of late ... right GL?). Just a personal research approach.

Can you list numbers for settings, which might be available in a paint program, for your nice green shirt correction? Alternately, could you reproduce it on the LUT-capture frame-strip (above) to see the effect of that cartoon correction on the live action sections?

BTW, awesome looking cel! I suggest the next archive and/or distribution medium incorporate vector frame-reproduction video!!

I'd be interested to see if you could make some sense out of my color correction software - I know you aren't a colorist, per se, but your input is more valuable than mine as far as that is concerned...

Also, I wouldn't be too concerned fooling around with YCM, as that is what films are geared toward - on the end of 90% of my Tech stuff is a YCM test pattern.

ww12345 said:

I'd be interested to see if you could make some sense out of my color correction software ...

What I do in the paint program looks like it falls under the main category
MASTER (PFC picture 1)

My settings (shown here from an older posting) are
Low .. Gamma .. High .. Midtones

Your MASTER :: HISTOGRAM (PFC picture 4) has my Histogram settings of Low and High, for each channel R-G-B. Normally, I would set these to stretch out the ends of the shrunken spectrum due to fading. In this case, each R-G-B channel already has been expanded in the capture. So Low will remain at it's default of 0 and High at it's default. In the paint program, the High maximum is hard-wired to 255. In PFClean, it is set to the relative value of 1.0 to allow for more than 8-bit range (0 to 255). When needed to convert my numbers to yours, divide mine by the maximum of 255. It's that simple.

Your MASTER :: COLOUR (PFC picture 2) has my Histogram setting of Gamma for each channel R-G-B. This adjusts the low end in proportion to the rest of the spectrum, with the higher end least unaffected. This mostly adjusts the shadows for more visibility while changing R-G-B color strength that moves into the mid area. From the tick-marks, it looks like my numbers, default = 1.0, minimum = 0, and maximum = 5, may correspond directly to yours.

Unfortunately, I don't see anything here that looks like Histogram's Midtones, unless there is a screen not posted here that produces it's characteristic "S" curves. Histogram has default = 0, minimum = -50, and maximum = 50. If need be, I can just post my Histogram graph with Midtones only for you to recreate the shape in your MASTER :: CURVES for each channel R-G-B.

That's all I use ... at this point. From the PFClean demo video, you could try the auto-color-correction(s) to determine how useful it is. As much as you can, go for general manual settings and/or automatic settings that do the acceptable job (because this is a BIG job).

poita said:

Do you still have the IB print?

I'd love someone to take a look at the film on a lightbox or project it and let us know if the girl at the end of Reel 4 and at the start of Reel 5 have that much colour disparity on the film, or if it is due to different settings when scanned.

I looked at my notes about the transfer and pulled the 35mm out as well. Reel 4 and 5 have the same setting throughout the transfer, and looking at the 35mm frames of the film the color shift is fairly accurately represented in the transfer.  Technicolor had of course limited tools to do color correction, and it seems they usually used filters to match other elements in a scene. So, the answer is that it's actually like that on the actual prints. Other prints may vary as well. When you're collecting film you'll often have two different looks between reels, though prints from the same year/run look pretty identical color-wise (you can match them frame for frame if you have two from the same year). Collectors often complain that Technicolor got sloppy the last few years of printing (they stopped the process in 74- the last film to come out in IB was the Godfather part 2, although the printing technique was used in China for many years afterwords and in England (there are IB prints of Jaws, Star Wars and Empire Strikes Back-but not US prints)). Turner struck new IB tech prints of Gone with the Wind in 1997 or so. A handful of prints were struck of Apocalypse Now redux in IB technicolor even more recently- and it looks absolutely astonishing.

There will be an offer to the list of an unrestored animated feature soon to help finally defray the cost of transfer- and the original hd file to a few of you folks to work with.

Spaced Ranger said:

. Also, I was suspicious of the 35mm's shaded shirt color compared to the 16mm's properly flat, painted cel color:

 

 

 

A quick thought on the 'properly' painted shirt- and, to calm your suspicions (!) it looks like that on the IB print.

A standard Eastmancolor print (like the one you're using and comparing to) looked very different in the first place from the original IB technicolor release. Even a 1971 IB release print looks different than a 1946 original release Nitrate technicolor print- and very different from the Eastman versions. You've actually lost more green and yellow in the Eastmancolor print than can even be recovered from that copy, though I give you huge kudos for trying.  Something that needs to be considered about 'accurate' colors on the cels versus the original film is how the Technicolor process worked in the first place- so 'accurate' is thrown out the window entirely since the process NEVER reproduced the color spectrum in any kind of accurate way, in animation or in live action- that's just a basic fact. That said, the Eastman print projected side by side when it was brand new next to a Technicolor print would look drastically different- and did since it was a contact print from a single color neg compared to Technicolor's 3 neg dye transfer process. Color wedges were made of scenes to determine what certain colors would reproduce as in the technicolor process, then painted a color up or down to reproduce the wanted color in the process. This was the only way to do it then.  About four years after this film was made Eastman's single color neg allowed a less bulky camera to be used finally for live action, with a single strip of film.  Animation was shot progressively- that is, the three color records were shot next to each other on a single strip of film, with the filter wheel turning for each frame, creating the three color records. Technicolor would then take these three records and make the three seperate color negs from those. The printing process using ink created film that looks more like color printing in a magazine from the era rather than a color photograph. Technicolor also often (especially in the early years) took the red negative and made a faze in b/w to boost the contrast on reds (just in live action). So, accurate becomes entirely in how you define it!  My thinking is that the closest to 'accurate' would be to have the film look as close as possible to the look of the actual Technicolor release- as gaudy and bright as it is..