Wow that really sucks. Been there with those seagate drives man. Can’t tell you how many times (even just on this forum, yet alone real life) I’ve had to start a project over because one of those drives died on me.
I think you nailed those colors Dr. Dre!
How’s everything going in life, Darth Lucas? Hope your well!!!
Everything is going alright thank you! I just unfortunately am very busy and don’t have very much time to work on this (and other projects) and browse the forums anymore. The project isn’t dead, it’s just very slow-going and quiet.
Looking forward to it.
Messing with the hue lightness and saturation of the color channels does help a lot, but only with smoothing out the COLOR and even then, only the yellows seemed to provide results worth a damn. The image in motion is still super grainy afterwards. My suspicion is that, yes, Mike probably masked around certain areas while adjusting the color of the blobs to make it more smooth on balance; I did manage to get slightly better results masking around the sky and doing the same thing. I think following doing this to each of his sources, the difference between the splotches on each source became so different that his tool ended up scrubbing out A LOT if not all of the remaining splotches and thick grain.
That’s just my suspicion after experimenting a bit with the method.
Williarob, I’m pretty busy lately, hence my comparative lack of activity on the forums recently, but if I can find the time I can make u a video walking through what I did, but it’s pretty simple and basically a matter of messing with the hue, lightness, and saturation of the yellows until it looks better on balance.
I think much of mike’s results comes from the tool he had developed to smooth by averaging the grain across his sources.
I almost wonder if using those dnr plugins after the rough version of mike’s blotch reducing method I managed to achieve (because it’s still pretty grainy and noisy afterwards) would yield a cleaner result.
That’s assuming Disney wasn’t already working on its own release by the time Mike came to them. Haven’t their been a few reports over the past couple years from folks claiming to have insider info that a restoration completely independent of Legacy was in the works?
There have been whispers. I personally know a few people from inside Disney who have told me a trilogy restoration is in the works, but none of them are directly involved in the restoration department so it’s possible they just misunderstood a new bluray release or something. Then of course there was all that Reliance Media stuff that popped up a while back.
So, today I had my first completely work and stress free day in quite a while. So I decided to fiddle around with easily the worst shot in the film to see what I could do to get rid of those dirty color blotches and see what I could get out of it. I tried my hand at a technique demonstrated by Mike Verta in one of his Legacy videos. Mind you there was no manual dirt cleanup and this was just one frame in photoshop, but here are my results after a few minutes:
Your tool continues to astound me, DrDre.
It appears, that the bluray in some respects has more detail for this shot than the WOWOW, namely the skin and eyes, but not for the background, like the water and fog.
WOWOW matched to DVD:
Bluray matched to DVD:
I think what you’re interpreting as detail is artificial sharpening which has made some of the deeper pores on Ford’s face more pronounced. Zoom in really close and compare the two, there are more micro-contours in the grain pattern on the WOWOW. Look at his hat. In the WOWOW it looks like, well, felt. In the bluray it has taken on this ultra-smooth, plasticy look from the degraining. This is also visible if you look at the stubble on Ford’s face. This same smooth, plastic look appears there as well, compared to the more detailed WOWOW broadcast.
This 1981 featurette has a short clip of the filming of the bar scene, and shows the lighting conditions are consistent with the colors of the LPP. The clip can be seen approximately at the 8:20 mark:
Looks pretty neutral to me, like I was saying. Certainly not wildly off from the print by any means, just slightly more toward naturalistic, neutral tones. I do feel the print is certainly a heck of a lot better than the overly warm colors of the DVD or blu Ray. His hat appears the correct shade of brown in that featurette, which supports my suspicion that not much was changed in the grading from the colors captured on set.
I think the “trailer 3” screencap was probably the closest, at least to my eye. It’s consistent in look and color pallet to the other trailers and the print, but looks a bit more natural. In the print and other trailers, Indy’s hat takes on this blue-green color, which is of course not very close to the hat’s actual color.
I’m sorry to keep muddling up your thread with this, it’s totally not the place as the goal here is just to match the print, not speculate on colors.
Maybe a thread should be made to discuss the color timing of Raiders.
Well, after the Clone Wars and whatnot, who knows what Maul’s endgame is.
I would imagine revenge against the man who chopped him in half is still high on the list.
Yeah I’m kind of worried they’re going to kill him in Rebels, which I think would be an enormous mistake because it would close the door on using him for an Obi-Wan movie, which I think it’s all but guaranteed they WILL do. If they don’t announce it as the next spinoff after Han Solo, I will be SHOCKED.
As overrated and boring as I think Maul is, I feel like he would have to be a presence in an Obi Wan spinoff. In order for Obi wan to have any kind of meaningful arc, he would have to have that presence. He should be haunted by this demon from his past. When you think about it, this time period is Obi-Wan’s lowest point. He has lost everything, with only the smallest glimmer of hope for the future in Luke. To me, the last step to him becoming the wise sage we see in ANH is for him to, at his lowest point, face and eventually overcome the demons of his past, and what better way to visualize that than to have him face the only thing in his past that caused him to waver toward the darkness (I mean he got pissed off and straight up murdered maul in TPM). Might actually give Maul some importance for once.
I don’t think ben should face Vader. Vader should be a presence, and this should be used as a venue for Obi Wan to somehow learn what happened to Vader after Mustafar, but I think it is more dramatically appealing for their duel on the Death Star to be the first time they’ve been face to face since Ben left him for dead.
I have three 35mm trailers for Raiders, two from 1981 and one from the July 1982 re-release. The bar scene colors in all three trailers support the cooler color timing of the LPP. Each of the trailers is slightly different, and none of them have the exact frames we’ve been looking at (and I didn’t grab identical frames from each one), but clearly the whole scene was originally a lot less red than we are used to:
Trailer 1 (1981):
Trailer 2 (1982):
Trailer 3: (1981)
LPP (balanced - not matched - using Dre’s Color restoration tool) :
LPP as released:
WOWOW:
JEDIT: One more just for fun: WOWOW balanced - not matched - using Dre’s Color restoration tool):
Looking at all of those screenshots from trailers and the print and kind of averaging them out in my mind, it seems to me that the correct timing is pretty naturalistic, not too warm but not too cool. I think if one were to correct Indy’s hat to be the correct shade of brown (sable is I believe what Herbert Johnson calls it) and his shirt to be the correct shade of grey, then the timing of the scene would be pretty much correct. The walls seem to be a pretty neutral shade judging from the print and trailers. I think this particular print may be a bit on the blue side, but should not be nearly as warm as the DVD and WOWOW would have you believe.
Obviously this is all speculation and contrary to the goal of the project, which is to match THIS print. But dang I wish we had more prints to compare and I wish I had the time to take a crack at fiddling with the colors on this film.
However, this is totally irrelevant to this project, as the goal is to reproduce the original theatrical color timing, including any color timing errors, that were in the original theatrical release, not the most realistic color timing.
I think this is a great project and I’m kinda bummed that you’ve had to say the above numerous times when you’ve already made it clear that it is what your doing with “this” particular project.
Just be clear, I wasn’t suggesting he change the color or deviate from the goals of the project, only commenting on the weirdness of color in that scene, and speculating as to how it ended up that way.
What’s particularly weird for me in the bar scene on the print is you can clearly see their faces illuminated by red light, but there is nowhere in the frame that the warm light is originating from. The look that ended up on the print HAD to be deliberately put there during the grading of the film, because there is no way those were the colors on set. It’s actually perplexing me how they ended up with that look, as even if you have never seen Raiders before and have no preconceptions of the color, that would just look wrong and off putting, which makes me think it might have been a mistake, but one made too far along in the process and that didn’t seem a big enough deal to justify the price of fixing it.
It’s weird, it reminds me of some of the wacky experimental color grading done in the early 2000s when digital grading started to take off. The regraded WOWOW actually looks more like an 80s film. Just all around strange to me and I wonder how it ended up that way.
Ok I’m man enough to admit when I’m wrong. I was mistaken. I was explaining it as I understood it based on what I was taught. Obviously what I was taught was incorrect, after further examination. I had no reason to doubt what I was taught since it really hasn’t made a difference in my career as basically everything is shot 23.976 these days.
Don’t appreciate the snide remark though, Darth Id, insinuating that I intentionally misled people. I don’t see how explaining things as I understood them based on my industry experience is a bad thing, even if my understanding turned out to be somewhat skewed.
When are Empire and Jedi Respecialized coming out?
Just as soon as Harry finishes them.
Harry Needs To Create The Empire Strikes Back Respecialized Edition '97 & Return Of The Jedi Respecialized Edition '97
Oh good. At least Harmy won’t have to stress over it anymore. Best of luck with it, Harry.
And just to avoid confusion, what your Wikipedia article is talking about is 24p, which is a video/broadcast format, not an analogue film projection format, which is how Star Wars was originally viewed. Hope I’m coming across well. I have a hard time explaining technical stuff like this but I’m just trying to help out your understanding.
When you’re taking about cinema, the answer is almost always 23.976. When you start getting into video standards, that’s when the waters get really muddy and confusion starts to set in.
I think you’re just confused. 24fps has really just always been used as shorthand for 23.976 fps. 24fps was decided on as the frame rate of motion pictures in the early days because it is the smallest amount of fps you can have and still achieve the illusion fluid motion. You have to understand that film is a mechanical process, and it was near impossible for them to achieve TRUE 24fps in the early days and they eventually figured out that what the cameras were actually shooting was 23.976fps. But the frame rate stuck due to aesthetic and tradition, even when it got to a point where we COULD accurately shoot true 24fps. Even today, the standard frame rate for theatrical films both digital and film is 23.976. It came from tradition; it would be kind of odd if that was just a random decimal someone decided to use for the hell of it, right? Now, you could screen any 23.976fps motion picture at true 24fps and not really notice any difference, but I promise (at least in the case of Star Wars, but majority of others as well) it is more accurate to screen at 23.976, since that is what the cameras captured and the projectors projected. (My source for this info is four years of film school and three years of industry experience, which you may or may not find more reliable than Wikipedia)
But long story short, if you ever hear anyone in the industry say “24fps” what they mean is “23.976”. They are used interchangeably and very seldom is anything shot at TRUE 24fps.
On Mac, just burn through disc utility.
As I understand, most films are shot in true 24p, and therefore I assume the original Star Wars movies were as well (especially given their age).
Your understanding, as well as your assumption, are incorrect. Very few movies, unless they are very early digital movies, were shot in true 24fps. Digital cameras today only have the capability of shooting 23.976 fps because early adopters of digital video in the film industry wanted the same frame rate as film, because they needed to print to film for distribution (very few, if any digital theaters in the early days of digital). The frame rate has stuck around because it has become synonymous with the elusive “film look” that people shooting digitally strive for.
So far I’m pretty disappointed with the new canon. I’ll be checking out Aftermath soon which seems the most interesting and I hope it’s good. I’ll keep you guys posted.
I didn’t care for aftermath. It felt a lot like bad fan fiction as opposed to a proper Star Wars novel. If you haven’t yet, I’d recommend reading Lost Stars if you want to restore your faith in the new canon.
