AntcuFaalb said:
Zip Doodah said:
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.
Excellent news! Keep me posted via PM, OK?
Ditto, please. Sounds exciting! :)
Zip Doodah said:
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..
All correct, it comes down to definitions.
To me a standard contact print from a neg is 'more accurate' than a technicolor IB print, the technicolor process has a much less wide gamut than 'normal' film and tends to be contrasty and oversaturated. It is definitely a different 'look' to standard film.
However we can't get a hold of Eastmancolor prints that haven't faded to shit, so tech IB prints are our best bet of getting decent versions of older films, short of getting the three strip separations or original negs.
Tech IB also deserve their own restorations as they were of course shown in cinemas and that would be the way some people saw them. But they aren't particularly accurate representations of what is on the negative due to all the reasons Zip has mentioned.
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Thanks for all the info, guys! It all rang true to good bits I've picked up here & there on Star Trek 1960's film history, it's restorations for HD, and all that.
It got me to thinking, which led to this -- the possibility of a single, sweet-spot color correction across both live action & cartoon! How?
Well, I cheated on my R-G-B separations technique by using some of those other functions in the paint program. I'm sure this could've worked solely in the separations but there is no un-do when testing the input numbers (and I change them back & forth to see how they do). But I could un-do specific applications of those tools, to try again with other settings or with something else entirely.
It started when confirming that contorting the graph to get fox's shirt to show as "mint green" would not work well with the live action. Confirmed:
35mm targets for 16mm areas results
Setting specific color areas of the 35mm to the 16mm produced such spikes in the R-G-B graphs that it could not be useful elsewhere (and even affected inappropriate, other areas in the same picture).
From the previous discussion, it was clear that even the 35mm source was inaccurate of the actual production and cartoon cels. Cels! poita had just posted a really good cel with, dare I say it, real good color. So, this time, the 16mm color was set using the cel, on fox again. The graphs were somewhat rolling but not as spiked as from the 35mm. It turned out very dark but, oddly enough, the live action shots didn't look quite so bad. Manually smoothing out the graph lines improved not only the cartoon, but also the live action -- but still dark. To compensate, the control points were pushed upward to produce a lighter picture. It began to look amazingly better. A little more moving points gently upward produced this picture strip:
[EDIT: corrected the sequencing of the mis-numbered pictures]
16mm LUT capture with cel color - manually smoothed
Woah ... not only "mint green" cartoon shirt, but good looking white and black actors (a hard photographic task) ... all with the same setting! At this point, I stop manual manipulation and continued with the other paint program tools.
As this produced a strong orange tinge, Greyworld color balance color temperature was set to 6500K ("sunlight") to move the color cast cooler (bluer). Keeping in mind the stronger color of the 35mm, saturation was increased +25. Done:
& greyworld color balance @ 6500K & saturation +25
I have to say Mr Ranger that I am very impressed with what you are achieving with those tools in the hunt for a single application of colour correction for the entire reel. I tend to think with my hands in the grading suite, it is intriguing to see your approach, and the great results you are getting.
That would definitely give a better starting point to then go in and do the final grade to bring some of the punch back into the images. Your process flattens everything a little, but that is easier to fix than the colour cast. It will be a piece of cake to sneak a little blue back in there to restore the whites. You have restored the green without washing the reds to orange too much. Well done!
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Very impressive! Again, I can't believe the amount of talent we have on this board; that is some pro-level color correcting. Nice work!
This is turning out to be a top-notch project. :)
@ poita & ww12345 - Thanks! Shortcomings aside, I was surprised, but pleased, this had the most color-fullness depth thus far.
The correction at this stage is something of a compromise -- fox's mint-green shirt color area overlaps that of girl's white lace. The more the lace goes to neutral, the more the shirt moves away from green. Since the mint-green is a spike of color, it might be tolerable to keep a lesser strength of it, in it's narrow area, as long as surrounding areas are more on-color.
I'm trying to duplicate in Curves (for the R-G-B separations) what the paint program tools added. BTW, is that necessary for me to do, or can you use your similar-function tools on it?
In the meantime, I'll work up & post my previous step-by-step numbers in case those become helpful recreating it in your software.
P.S. I mis-numbered the pictures in my previous post, which are now rearranged to be in the correct sequence with the corresponding text. :)
Spaced Ranger: You can definitely get better results by working in the "YRGB" color-space used by DaVinci Resolve.
I wish I knew the formulas and/or algorithms used to decode an image into YRGB, but it seems to be Blackmagic-proprietary.
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Spaced Ranger said:
@ poita & ww12345 - Thanks! Shortcomings aside, I was surprised, but pleased, this had the most color-fullness depth thus far.
The correction at this stage is something of a compromise -- fox's mint-green shirt color area overlaps that of girl's white lace. The more the lace goes to neutral, the more the shirt moves away from green. Since the mint-green is a spike of color, it might be tolerable to keep a lesser strength of it, in it's narrow area, as long as surrounding areas are more on-color.
I'm trying to duplicate in Curves (for the R-G-B separations) what the paint program tools added. BTW, is that necessary for me to do, or can you use your similar-function tools on it?
In the meantime, I'll work up & post my previous step-by-step numbers in case those become helpful recreating it in your software.
P.S. I mis-numbered the pictures in my previous post, which are now rearranged to be in the correct sequence with the corresponding text. :)
Doing secondaries is exactly that, working on 'spot areas' of colour by isolating them out and working on them alone. So working on just the fox's shirt is quite acceptable and standard procedure. Getting an overall change for the entire reel that minimises the amount of secondary colour correction required is a massive timesaver. The numbers are very useful, it is easy to use them as a reference for correcting in Davinci where we can access the curves directly and apply them overall or just to qualified regions.
What you are doing is very valuable, it takes what would be a year's worth of colour corrections and brings it down to a few month's worth instead.
And yes it is best to work in YRGB or ACES colour space at 32bit whenever possible. A good overview of Davinci and colourspace relationships is here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=JVoUgR6bhBc
Oh and support Jesse's film if you can!
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Thanks for the info, guys! I hadn't heard of "YRGB" or "ACES". Then again, I'm using a paint program. Still it's something to look into and ... wait. Did someone say ... proprietary?
Back! Back, color abomination! Back to copyright hell from where you came!
:O
ACES isn't a proprietary standard, most systems have it as an option. It is just a colourspace.
Short story:
http://www.ibtimes.com/aces-color-space-gamut-end-all-gamuts-404278#
Long Story:
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@ AntcuFaalb
After watching poita's link for the DaVinci color adjustments demo, for it's professional nomenclature, I see that the "Y" in YRGB is merely luminance ... the linked +/- movement of individual R-G-B separations as a whole or on spectrum areas. That function is in the paint program I'm using and in the Gradation Curves plug-in for VirtualDub (both simply identified as "RGB"). Nothing proprietary about it.
In fact, there is no such thing as YRGB per se. It all starts as RGB --> is manipulated by luminance and/or saturation and/or tint and/or the individual R-G-Bs and/or any other function --> ends as RGB (now modified). So, there is no translation for it, nor is one needed.
@ poita
Thanks for the ACES links -- I approve of generalized future-proofing. :)
Speaking of procedural record-keeping, I've duplicated my above color correction steps into a single RGB Curves adjustment -- using the previously demonstrated one-to-one color-compare between the starting capture and the previous correction to get me started. While at it, I tried reducing some of the green cast (but preserving the mint green in the shirt-spectrum-area) while maintaining the stronger colors and higher contrast of the 35mm.
BTW, starting with the cel instead of the 35mm probably didn't make much difference. But it was the cel's initial correction that began with better looking skin-tones (such as it was).
Anyway, let me know of problems using these numbers and, or course, how it looks across the entire reel/film (posting some before-after picture pair examples would be cool). If you can take it from here ... great! If you need closer tweaking, work up something in both cartoon and live-action (per reel?) to demonstrate where it might need to go. The same settings, with proportional adjustments, probably could compensate for different degrees of fading in different reels.
CURVES -- points (in,out)
RGB (0,0) (255,255) = no adjustment
RED (0,0) (88,76) (110,97) (144,166) (202,197) (231,236) (255,255)
GREEN (0,0) (57,60) (115,93) (172,143) (201,188) (220,228) (255,255)
BLUE (0,0) (64,58) (106,76) (181,120) (213,169) (238,237) (255,255)
If your Master::Curves for each R-G-B channel has minimum=0 and maximum=1.0, divide each of the above numbers by 255, for your use.
I thought I'd try further tweaking, working off the last correction, working towards the 35mm coloring while mostly disregarding the cartoon color. Primary was to further reduce the green cast, which consequently reduces the mint green shirt color. Also, I smoothed the curves, reducing hard turns that creates hard-boundaried hotspots of color (like the prominent tears on girl's face):
universal cartoon-weighted universal live-weighted 
CURVES: universal live-weighted
RGB (0,0) (255,255) = no adjustment
RED (0,0) (24,10) (59,58) (99,104) (155,161) (203,182) (231,209) (255,255)
GREEN (0,0) (16,6) (64,54) (118,91) (162,126) (195,165) (220,197) (255,255)
BLUE (0,0) (16,20) (48,48) (106,75) (176,118) (216,189) (238,237) (255,255)
I like the live weighted better for the live action.
I would personally balance it for the live action, and fix the cartoon segments separately in Davinci or similar.
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After more self-critical review, I tried more tests, R-G-B separation comparisons, & tweaks. Mainly, RED was little hot on the live-weighted correction, Curves needed more manual smoothing (resulting in a straightened RED curve, which was the average of it's squiggling back & forth), and better balance on the highlights & shadows. And fox's shirt got (a little) it's groove mint-green back! :)
universal live-weighted universal (cartoon & live) 
CURVES: universal both
RGB (0,0) (255,255) = no adjustment
RED (0,0) (255,255) = no adjustment
GREEN (0,0),(64,60),(116,88),(167,131),(217,197),(255,255)
BLUE (0,0),(64,60),(113,79),(183,122),(211,175),(238,211),(255,255)
I really like the skintones and hair now.
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Here's something interesting. The look of the latest complexity of Curves was reminiscent of a simple Histogram. So I tried it (because I don't know when to stop):
Curves Histogram 
HISTOGRAM
RED Gamma 1.0 Midtones 0 = no adjustment
GREEN Gamma 0.9 Midtones 15
BLUE Gamma 0.8 Midtones 20
:)
edit:
ADDENDUM
I wanted to add this note to explain why the above part of this post was important (at least, to me) for the "de-fading" of film fade, which is not necessarily that same as "movie restoration". When motion picture film fades, it essentially loses contrast -- the picture as a whole becomes lighter as the film grain, which holds the darkness of colors, is bleached away. This happens in different degrees to the different color layers due to varied exposure to the environment that produces characteristic changes ("turning red").
For example, this faded 35mm film frame [center] from the 2001: A Space Odyssey trailer, when compared to the original picture [top] (a later "restored / remastered" DVD), demonstrates fade -- loss of contrast and spectrum shift at the color layer level:
Once these characteristics are identified, it is a procedurally simple matter to "re-contrast" the remaining color in the layers (there may be some unrecoverable loss of completely faded away highlights, but not as much as may appear at first examination) and "re-shift" their positions into a mostly corrected picture [bottom]. Histogram's functions (Low & High for contrast, Gamma for shifting, and Midtones for weighting the shift) are almost perfect to quickly and easily do this.
As gamma is only a close correction (it wasn't designed for film fading), the greater flexibility (and greater complexity) of Curves would be used for fine-tuning with "problem" corrections.
As is the case with the Song Of The South correction above, using Curves (and other such tools) is tricky. When one is too close to the color-trees, one loses sight of the picture-forest. Such micro-management results in squiggly-line adjustment curves, which is not how film fades nor is it the way to correct such fading. Applying manual smoothing reduces this +/- "ringing" of the adjustment. After my smoothing, I noticed the characteristic curves I see when using Histogram only. Going back to Histogram, I quickly adjusted it's functions to produce similar-looking curves and ... lo ... the mostly-same Curves-corrected picture appeared!
This is important as it indicates that the faded film (with normal fade variations, per reel) can be simply and globally corrected, with tweaks added thereafter where needed.
* As a side note, consider how luminance stabilization should be applied. Per R-G-B separation? To maximum values? Averages? To minimum values? Remember, it's not the luminance that is varying, but the degree of fade (the varying of contrast). As a practical matter, it may not make much difference, but tests should be conducted on a worst-case shot for that determination.
I am truly amazed at the dedication and skill being put into this piece.
I am proud to be able to witness the process and soon the end result.
Thank you for all your hard work.
Ooh - I like that histogram shot. I'll definitely try playing with those numbers once I get the hard drive. Thanks much for doing the work - it would take me ages to get to where you got very simply...
The hard drive arrived here today. Should be away tomorrow.
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Awesome! Sounds great!
Thanks, everyone! And of course thanks to you-all for making the project happen (and happen so well) in the first place. ;)
Also, please see the Addendum just added to my previous post.
I'm offering the 35mm IB tech transfer from previous posts. Funds from the sale will be used to defray the transfer cost. It's on a DVD. It's also being offered as an HD mpeg.
PM me for details, and thanks for your work on this project!
Any news on this project? My hype level is through the roof.
I am with you !
