DrDre

yotsuya said:

I think we need to figure out how to apply these to the film in our restorations. I am encouraged that C-3PO comes out a bit brassy (on the greener side of gold) and a lot of the skin tones look fantastic. But the darker colors seem far too dark. I think we need to couple these with the Senator and other showings to understand how the dark colors appear when projected. I don’t think they come out quite that dark on the screen. Those Tatooine/Tunesia shots look way too yellow (as in unnaturally yellow) but the rest look great. Can’t wait to see more.

It seems to be a generic property (issue?) with the technicolor prints. When we compare the calibrated scans with Mike Verta’s calibrated photographs, the yellow appears fairly consistent:

I will adjust the contrast and brightess settings somewhat to see how the scans come out, to optimize the scans for view on a computer screen.

This thread is dedicated to presenting and discussing color references based on scanned frames of a 1977 Technicolor IB print. The scanning was performed with a Reflecta RPS 10M scanner:

http://www.filmscanner.info/en/ReflectaRPS10M.html

I also bought the Silverfast software package, which allows you to calibrate the colors using a it-8 color target. An uncalibrated scan generally gives a fairly poor reproduction of the colors of a film frame or photo:

http://www.silverfast.com/highlights/autoit8/en.html

Here I will share 1080p 8 bit versions of the calibrated scans for color reference purposes, and to discuss and compare with other OT versions.

A big thanks to all who contributed!

As a special thank you, everyone who donated will also get access to the raw scans, and the high color depth, high resolution calibrated versions of the scans.

Here’s a set of completed scans:

I have bought a scanner, the best in it’s price class apparently, which should yield 48bit scans with an effective resolution of 4300 dpi (if the reviews are to be believed):

http://www.filmscanner.info/en/ReflectaRPS10M.html

I also bought the Silverfast software package, which allows you to calibrate the colors using a it8 color target. An uncalibrated scan generally gives a fairly poor reproduction of the colors of a film frame or photo:

http://www.silverfast.com/highlights/autoit8/en.html

This weekend the scanning process will begin. When I have the first scans, I will create a separate thread dedicated to technicolor print reference scans matched to print, where I will share 1080p 8 bit versions of the calibrated scans for color reference purposes, and to discuss and compare with other OT versions.

A big thanks to all who contributed!

As a special thank you, everyone who donated will also get access to the raw scans, and the high color depth, high resolution calibrated versions of the scans.

SilverWook said:

I’ve toyed with the idea of dropping hundreds of Sebastian Shaw Anakin figures on tiny parachutes over their corporate offices, but it would be probably be expensive and illegal. 😉

They would probably wonder who the old guy in the gray Jedi outfit is. 😉

SilverWook said:

Time to go rob some graves then. Who’s with me? 😉

Great picture! Time to haunt Disney and Lucasfilm: the ghost of Star Wars past.

The official site now has a 40th anniversary hub, but as expected not a single frame or still, that’s not a production photo or behind the scenes photo, looks even remotely like the theatrical release. There’s a section devoted to the Star Wars frames book (2013), all of which originate from the bluray master. As far as the official site is concerned the OT films exist in one form only, the final cuts. The theatrical versions are dead and burried.

Looking very nice!

Yes, something like that. The photographs tend to increase contrast, so it will be interesting to see what the calibrated scans will show. The cyan Death Star conference room walls are very consistent though for all shots across multiple reels.

I really like NeverarGreat’s correction too. It reminds me of some 1997 SE frames I saw recently. I think they probably represent what most of us would like Star Wars to look like.

The technicolor frames sort of remind me of the remastered Godfather with it’s warm sepia tones. In it’s own way it’s quite beautiful and very distinctive.

NeverarGreat said:

Another scene in progress. Just 7 or so minutes of footage left for this film.

http://screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/210595
(The second comparison is between my correction and Despecialized 2.5)

It looks amazing, but the walls for the frames I have of this scene and look slightly more green, while the lights and top off the walls are a bright teal/blue, not unlike the frame you regraded recently in the theatrical colors thread.

Here’s a not so great photo of the frames:

The Senator print photos are actually not far off for the conference room scene:

My new scanner arrived today, so hopefully I will be able to share the scans for this scene, and others soon…

Hey, that looks amazing! We’ve been having some discussion, because the Raiders scan I’ve been using has some color balancing issues (litemkr said a number of scenes were green shifted), leading to many shots having a magenta shift, caused by a slight over correction. I was thinking of putting the regrade on hold until we can figure out what the color balance should be (litemkr is looking for a 16mm reference print for projection). However, this scan is looking pretty sweet, and the print looks to be in excellent condition…😃

Amano said:

Dear Mrs. Kennedy!

Do you feel guilty for celebrating the 40th anniversary of Star Wars while shamefully hiding the original cut - the only cut from 40 years ago?

Yours sincerely,

All those waiting for far too long

Dear all those waiting for far too long,

No, I don’t. All hail George’s vision!!!

Yours sincerely,
K

I’ve got zero experience with command line versions, so I’m afraid that’s not very likely to happen.

The color balancing tool is not widely available.

Fang Zei said:

crissrudd4554 said:

Then again I’d think if they’re willing to spend money to restore it they’d release it yes??

That’s exactly what I was thinking. “Restore” not only implies “release” but also leaves no room for them to pull something similar to the GOUT.

For example, if we only say “release on blu-ray” they might just keep it to a 2k “restoration” from inferior elements. The OOT deserves the highest quality treatment from the best existing film sources. If there’s already a 4k master of George’s preferred version, we shouldn’t accept anything less for the unaltereds.

I really think this is expecting too much of the response to the letter. What is realistic, is the hope that we might uncover the intentions of Disney/Fox/Lucasfilm regarding a future OOT restoration/release. The idea that this letter is seriously going to influence those intentions is pretty fanciful imo. It’s not like they’re going to halt any potential release based on a 2K source for the OOT, because a group of fans put the words “restoration” in a letter rather than “blu-ray release”.

I will have a look, whether I can cook up something…😉

That’s a good idea. I will look into it.

As far as I know the LUTs produced by the tool work in both Resolve and After Effects. Here’s the latest version, for which I tested the LUTs in Resolve:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B8_LYKyZDiajTE5ZOXNlMW5JQ28/view?usp=sharing

imperialscum said:

Amano said:

But the people who we are addressing were alive back then. Those should be the focus of the letter.

Like I said, that would make it look like you are doing it for a specific group of people who will eventually be gone. They might even say: “Why would we even bother doing it for a few old-timers?”. The focus should be on preservation for everyone now and future generations.

I agree. The films should be preserved for posterity, not specifically for a group, that’s rapidly going the way of the Dodo. Preserving the OOT is like preserving the Mona Lisa, or preserving ancient structures. It’s about preserving our cultural history.

I like the letter very much, but I also worry it’s a bit too long. I always learned you should use three paragraphs in a letter:

1. Introduction
2. State problem
3. State solution

Impressive, most impressive!

For those of you expecting a special announcement with regards to the Star Wars blurays for May the 4th, here it is:

“Save $40 on the Star Wars Complete Saga Blu-ray box set”

http://www.starwars.com/news/star-wars-day-2017-deals

lansing said:

DrDre said:

lansing said:

DrDre said:

It’s generally much faster to export a LUT for use in Davinci Resolve or Adobe After Effects, than to do it frame by frame in the tool. Shot-by-shot correction still takes a lot of time though, as each LUT is good for roughly 100 frames, and there are roughly 2,000 shots in a two hour film.

Thanks, I imported the generated LUT into Premiere and it applied instantly, with the cost of spike in RAM.

I’m testing it out on my dragon ball now, and I have a panning shot where there’re noticeable ringing artifacts along the lines. I have to turn smooth up to 0.9 in order to get it away. Is this normal? Can you take a look? I uploaded the reference and test image.

reference: http://i.imgur.com/id8AiRx.png
test: http://i.imgur.com/I54GI7O.png

Did you make sure the cropping is the same for the test and reference frames? If so, could you also share the raw test frame?

I tested on 3 other scenes, they all work fine even without cropping. I did try cropping this test image to match the reference, but it’s still the same problem with the white ringing between the character and the sky. I also tried sampling from the last frame of this same scene and it works fine again without the need to pump up the smoothing parameter.

reference: http://i.imgur.com/YOCkH0E.png
test: http://i.imgur.com/sRUrxNw.png

The fact that it works without cropping is fortunate, but the method is not developed specifically assuming the image content is exactly the same, except for the colors. It may work fine for some frames, but give artifacts for others.

The reason you get ringing is, because the ringing is already present in the test frame, a side effect of DNR:

The ringing has rougly the same color as the clouds next to it, both being light blue.

The clouds in the reference image are more white, than in the test frame, while the sky is a darker blue:

By color matching the color of the clouds, you automatically also give the ringing roughly the same color as the clouds, causing them to be more apparent against the darker blue background. Sadly there’s very little that can be done about this.

By increasing the smoothing parameter, you reduce the color gradients, as the algorithm tries to keep the gradients as close to the original gradients as possible, while also trying to find the best color match. This may reduce the ringing somewhat, but will generally also result in a poorer color match.

lansing said:

DrDre said:

It’s generally much faster to export a LUT for use in Davinci Resolve or Adobe After Effects, than to do it frame by frame in the tool. Shot-by-shot correction still takes a lot of time though, as each LUT is good for roughly 100 frames, and there are roughly 2,000 shots in a two hour film.

Thanks, I imported the generated LUT into Premiere and it applied instantly, with the cost of spike in RAM.

I’m testing it out on my dragon ball now, and I have a panning shot where there’re noticeable ringing artifacts along the lines. I have to turn smooth up to 0.9 in order to get it away. Is this normal? Can you take a look? I uploaded the reference and test image.

reference: http://i.imgur.com/id8AiRx.png
test: http://i.imgur.com/I54GI7O.png

Did you make sure the cropping is the same for the test and reference frames? If so, could you also share the raw test frame?

lansing said:

Hi, your tools works wonder! I want to know if there’s a way to speed things up? Like make it multi-threaded? I tuned “number of color spaces” to 20 and it took a couple of hours to process 250 frames. It is just unrealistic to go for higher quality setting with this speed.

It’s generally much faster to export a LUT for use in Davinci Resolve or Adobe After Effects, than to do it frame by frame in the tool. Shot-by-shot correction still takes a lot of time though, as each LUT is good for roughly 100 frames, and there are roughly 2,000 shots in a two hour film.

yotsuya said:

DrDre said:

NeverarGreat said:

I always liked this shot, since not only is it the last we see of poor Owen and Beru, but it’s the only time we see this set in the film:

http://screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/206702

Here’s a regrade based on one of the technicolor frames of the dinner scene, which shows a similar warm color grading:

I would feel more confident if this were at least based off of a scan of the frame rather than a photo of it.

This is a manual regrade based on a visual inspection of the frame (I have the frames remember 😉), which resembles the photo, but with lower contrast and saturation. While the actual calibrated scan would be much more accurate in terms of hues, contrast and saturation, the hues seen in the photo are pretty close.

While this is not very apparent in any of the home video releases, the dinner scene is graded on the print as being consistent with late afternoon lighting conditions, hence the warm yellow/orange hues.