Dreamaster

hairy_hen said:

This is looking really good, DrDre. Amazing how one set of corrections seems to fix the entire movie.

Can you post screenshots of the sunset scene? As I recall, that one looks quite different in the GOUT than it does on prints, so I’m wondering if this one correction will also fix it, or if it might need a separate one. That would determine if it had been changed deliberately or if its difference is just a consequence of the global color pass they did…

Placing bets now! My money says the correction fixes it to match the print.

DrDre said:

Here’s another set of frames from different scenes:

GOUT:

GOUT regraded:

😃 I see what you did there… but I won’t tell anyone. Those look nearly flawless Dr. Dre.

DrDre said:

Dreamaster said:

I’m seeing a pretty decent green tint in every single correction shot Dr Dre, making the blues cyan… obi wan’s hair green, etc. It’s consistent enough that I think your green channel is just a touch too hot.

That’s technicolor for you my friend. Technicolor prints are green shifted, and as the technicolor references for this regrade have the typical technicolor green shift, so does the regrade. It is something I don’t want to fix, as it is supposed to be present in a technicolor regrade.

Watch the Senator print photos, and you’ll notice Luke’s green hair, and the cyan walls:

…or the green in the blacks:

OHHH… ok, now I get what you’re after. Completely unfaded, gamma corrected for video, 1977 Technicolor colors that are stable across the entire film. Warts and all.

I’m seeing a pretty decent green tint in every single correction shot Dr Dre, making the blues cyan… obi wan’s hair green, etc. It’s consistent enough that I think your green channel is just a touch too hot.

No MEGA file, sorry. Same audio that came from Williarob’s ISO I think… For some reason I don’t think it’s lossless.

Dr. Dre! I thought I remembered you’d taken a shot at that greenish 70mm frame before!

Dr. Dre’s:

Dreamaster’s:

That’s not a night vs. day difference… instead… looks like yours is projected with a warmer bulb… if we were using bulbs. 😃

dlvh said:

Very nice Dre. PM sent.

Peter Cushings hair was NOT gray in the movie. It was may have been colored, but it had very little to no gray in it. This picture is obviously off-color, but it certainly gives you a good representation of his hair color, and it’s not gray:

OK well we know those silver thingy’s in his uniform are “gray”… here’s what that does to your photo, though I’ll admit to taking out a HAIR more green manually because the facial tone didn’t look quite right yet.

I would NOT match to that photo though because we can tell some red information is missing from the bottom layer of his insignia.

LOL … I think I found the missing reds:

DrDre said:

Dreamaster said:

DrDre said:

Mavimao said:

To be honest Dr Dre it looks like you’re trying to give it a modern grade here. It’s crushed, dark and contrasty and the red in his face looks too red.

The 70mm scan just above, although not perfect, looks much more like a film of the era.

I guess that’s why we really need some accurate references of a projected print, because without those, it’s all just guess work, trying to work back from a bootleg recording.

Matching the colors of the 70mm frame is easy, but the problem is, that neither the hues or the contrast are probably accurate to a projected print.

Dr Dre, I feel like you’re making this scene a lot harder than you have too. That 70mm cell seems to have the same “green cast” that the tech scans have. The beauty of this scene is, poor old Tarkin has naturally gray hair. All you have to do is balance the shot out by assigning his hair as grey:

Contrast levels might be another issue, but consider that the white lights are already true white in this shot… the only question is how dark are the darks, but this shot already looks perfectly natural to me. Would you mind matching to my shot and seeing how the rest of the scene looks?

Here’s what this shot looks like on the bootleg:

… and balanced:

So, it’s actually pretty close to your correction. Here are the color matches you requested:

PS I didn’t fix the green in Peter Cushing’s hiar, which is an issue with the bluray colors being crushed together, such that Cushing’s hair and clothes have the same color.

BAM! Save that LUT please! 😃

DrDre said:

Mavimao said:

To be honest Dr Dre it looks like you’re trying to give it a modern grade here. It’s crushed, dark and contrasty and the red in his face looks too red.

The 70mm scan just above, although not perfect, looks much more like a film of the era.

I guess that’s why we really need some accurate references of a projected print, because without those, it’s all just guess work, trying to work back from a bootleg recording.

Matching the colors of the 70mm frame is easy, but the problem is, that neither the hues or the contrast are probably accurate to a projected print.

Dr Dre, I feel like you’re making this scene a lot harder than you have too. That 70mm cell seems to have the same “green cast” that the tech scans have. The beauty of this scene is, poor old Tarkin has naturally gray hair. All you have to do is balance the shot out by assigning his hair as grey:

Contrast levels might be another issue, but consider that the white lights are already true white in this shot… the only question is how dark are the darks, but this shot already looks perfectly natural to me. Would you mind matching to my shot and seeing how the rest of the scene looks?

Can I make a suggestion Dr. Dre? Take the original blu ray, and then make a 5 minute “cut” that includes 5-10 second chunks of the most important scenes. You could even trim into multiple files by reel, so you have a 1 minute “quick review” for each reel.

Then when you apply your color corrections, you can render the entire “movie” in a few minutes and review how it looks in film more quickly… and maybe even upload a few of the best samples for us to review. 😃 For my one pass correction process it made iterative steps much faster and easier.

NeverarGreat said:

Premiere doesn’t actually have that capacity either

Are you sure? If I recall it’s in the form of a saturation “wheel” and you can click on it to add points and increase/decrease different colors that way. That said I’m definitely going to research Speedgrade to see what it’s all about!

I’d just wait for a higher quality scan before considering a shot by shot project - it has a tendency to take over your life 😉

Exactly! Thanks for letting me off the hook, LOL.

DrDre said:

This is looking excellent Dreamaster! I’m adding this one to my collection!

Thanks Dr. Dre!

NeverarGreat said:

The comparison video is good, overall the correction is an improvement 😃 One suggestion - C-3PO looks a bit too green in your version, I think somewhere between that and the grindhouse would be ideal. I remember having to specifically increase the saturation of the yellows in my original LUT in addition to shifting the hue in order to get the golden droid back to being golden.

There are places where he’s a little green… just like there is places where the snow is cyan. I didn’t use Premiere so I didn’t have access to individual color saturation.

What do you guys think? Would it be worth it for us if I loaded up Premiere and did a shot by shot adjustment to the grindhouse? Or should we just wait for the other projects to come to fruition?

Sweet! This just happen to pop up in my recommended videos yesterday, very cool Blackout. It shows how I really needed to bring the brightness down a hair more (and the saturation level a bit as well with that brightness) but I’m still pleased with the overall improvement.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aatXcvikzPg&t=120s

Ronster said:

R2-D2 is not Cyan

And if a photo like that is really Cyan and green it’s not really reliable. But it is now a better indicator once you remove all the color that absolutely should not be there.

It’s also brighter because the smoke machine is not on. It’s clearly not the same take as in the film and the light is dimmer in the film.

Make the walls green if you want I don’t mind. but would it have been green when it was first struck and made very much doubt it. It’s probably gone green.

Things like that to me are just not worth the time of day. But I guess it’s fun if you want to watch a simulation of an old faded print add some dirt and flek and grime.

There is a very definite problem with fluctuating color hues at least at the end of the film. Not sure about this part the lights Red anyway.

That almost shows me they wanted the scenes graded with a bit of green or they might have actually used a green light.

Taking Towne’s comment into consideration I removed a bit of green to neutralize the black bars then adjusted the gamma of the image of the swedish bootleg:

2nd Edit: Just read Neverargreat’s comment. Sorry! Since it was seemingly changed for the 1997SE release really one could say both colors are “official”. 😃

DrDre said:

Intruder said:

I liked the contrast of your previous version, but the sky really profits from either the reduced contrast or added yellows. DrDre, what if you lower the contrast just by a bit in comparison to the first version?
I fiddled a bit around with Photoshop and multiplied 30% luminance of the new one with the old one, which results in this:

http://screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/196883

I really like it, but it’s just my view through a calibrated, but not professional display.

NeverarGreat, if you don’t want this discussion in your project, I can of course move that to a private topic 😉

Here’s the same colors as the last set with the contrast of the previous set:

The extra contrast takes away the “film” look to me completely. REALLY liked the flatter one with “compromise” yellows though, seemed to be a great balance between “heavily stylized” and “raw camera footage.”

Wish we could all load into a van and go watch the tech with you! I hope that comes to fruition for you!

UnitéD2 said:

And a comparison between the two versions of Neverar’s correction :

http://screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/195909

😃

Much better Neverargreat… blue sky, whiteish sand, warm sunny tones… One thing I figured out about Star Wars is you can’t really judge skin tones by Luke’s face. I have NO IDEA what his makeup artist was thinking but in both Star Wars and the “Holiday Special”… yeah. /shiver LOL. (You can really see it in that frame we compared a while back with Luke, Han, Leia next to each other on the Death Star.)

Hagdorm said:

I watched this last night Dreamaster, and I wanted to thank you for this amazing improvement to the Grindhouse! This is now my go-to version of ESB until Poita’s restoration becomes available. Well done!

😄
I’m really happy this regrade has been so well received! And it’s intention was exactly that, a bit of fun and education until the amazing work of others comes to light of day with these Poita/Harmy/Adywan versions rock our socks off later.

Just to keep things clear… (SO MANY VARIATIONS NOW!) this is Dr. Dre’s version:

The top one in Neverargreat’s comparison was from my single pass regrade of SSE 1.5, before 1.6 was released.

Something interesting about this shot is how much of the “sky color” is reflected in the “sand color”. Getting a nice, deep blue sky nets an unusually blue sand, probably showing the sky shouldn’t be quite that blue in the shot?

Thanks for posting that shot, it’s great… in fact… it’s kind of NeverarGREAT! 😃

fmalover said:

Could somebody upload this torrent elsewhere that isn’t usenet or tehparadox? I really want to get my hands on this gem but the torrent file from myspleen doesn’t download.

PM sent

Dek Rollins said:

Dreamaster, this version looks wonderful; thanks for uploading it!

May I inquire as to how you applied the regrade and re-encoded?

You want to know the secret sauce eh? 😃

Amazingly, it was a free to use software called Avidemux. It’s pretty good for quick, one pass adjustments with a few caveats. It seems to render the video with more red versus the green… so I typically have to “get the preview perfect” and then pull the red channel back until the image is starting to just look a tad green. Blech, lol

For this project I had two color filters, MplayerHue, set to +14 and then I added the MPlayer eq2 adjustment with these settings:

I set the audio as “copy” so it didn’t get altered, but set the Video output to Mpeg4 AVC (x264) and then changed those settings to do a 2 pass render with a target size similar to the original grindhouse.

That’s it!

DrDre said:

Never mind 😉

I was just about to check on you Dr. Dre! Have you checked out my Empire Recolor? We’re almost to the New Year!! Happy Holidays!

dahmage said:

Bluto said:

Thank you for uploading this!

Please could someone advise me the tools necessary to convert the original Grindhouse ISO (Blu-ray compatible) so that it uses Dreamaster’s video file?

I’d like to be able to burn it to disc and play it on my standalone player.

Bluto

well, that depends on how Dreamaster encoded this, if it is still a blu-ray compliant x264 stream it should be pretty straight forward… (ish)

Aye… it was encoded with x264. The program you’re looking for is called TsMuxer. It’s pretty straight forward.

The Aluminum Falcon said:

Yes, RIP, Miss Fisher.

Thank you, though, for this release. Had a chance to grab from the Spleen and it looks wonderful. I tried a similar 1-pass grading before, but ended up with green end credits! Glad to see how saturated and vibrant this looks in comparison to the original. Would recommend burning this with all the synced audio, including the trimmed '97 SE 5.1 audio someone created!

You are most welcome.

And Williarob, thanks for helping me seed it! What a fun experience! 😃

Oh my God. Carrie Fisher you will always be our princess. ❤️ 😦

Lasz said:

Awesome. Will you still do Williarob’s prores version later on?

The more I think about it the less and less it makes sense. While I didn’t give him the LUT I did narrate the “ingredients” for how I got from original to my colors… but really… what Grindhouse needs is a shot by shot adjustment. And cleaning. And even though he didn’t say this to me… I’m 99.9% sure he’s busy with other things at the moment. 😃 Plus, I’m not sure recovering the extra 1% of grain detail that might have been lost with my 2nd gen encode would be worth it given the less than pristine nature of the original.