Dunedain

Wow, looks great negative1! And this is just a recording of the tv, and the cleanup and restoration are not even done yet. The colors are so much better than the home video versions, lush and deep, just excellent. Real 35mm film rules... :) It makes the colors of the home video versions seem like skim milk, compared to velvety rich and smooth organic whole milk, just no comparison. :)

Great news. :) What's the word from the team members on how much filmguard has helped with providing the cleanest possible scans of the film to work with?

The opening to Star Wars looks excellent, great job to all on the project! =) Imagine the whole movie in 1080p once fully restored... :) :)

snicker: I agree with the general concern, but bear in mind that repairing scratches, nicks and other sorts of damage is standard when restoring a film. It's simply putting it back the way it was before it became damaged, restoring it to it's original appearance when the print was new (which is what we want, within the limits of the sources and tools available).

It's totally different than applying digital noise reduction, which causes a loss in detail. It's quite possible to fix the scratches and various other forms of print damage and avoid DNR, and thus retain the very fine detail from the print, and keep the natural film-like quality in the final 1080p video. If you look at some of the best professional Blu-ray movies you can buy (Saving Private Ryan is a great example), this is exactly what they have done. They've taken scans from top-quality prints and transferred it to optical disk while leaving the picture alone, and not interfering with the wonderful natural detail of the 35mm film. And I'm sure negative1 and all those involved have that same goal, restore it back to new as best they can (within reasonable time limits for working on it), while retaining the excellent natural detail of the film. :)

Those shots that went through minimal conversion before being put into jpg form look really great in over all detail and image quality. :)

And wow, that shot below of the Death Star conference room you posted from that other site has some of the best skin tones I've seen. Must be from a really good source, finally an image from the movie that maintains the proper fair skin tones, so natural and realistic, just excellent. If the color correction being applied to the the 35 print can achieve skin tones like that, it will be a huge improvement over any home video we've seen before. :)

http://www.jedi1.net/images/1600/ANH-Galactic_Empire-02144-1600.jpg

Understood, it's all good. :)

If he wanted to share information about his health, I imagine he would have come here and done it already. So I respect his privacy. If he wants to say how he's doing, he knows where this site and thread is. I just hope all is well. =)

Yeah, we have no confirmation, but with that exact name on a Star Wars restoration site, the odds seem good. Let's hope it is him. :)

Yes, it is so important to have accurate color references for the various restoration projects going on. And this will give them yet another source they can check against to make sure the colors are as close as they can make them when color correcting. Plus, it's very cool to have a recording of Star Wars directly from a theater. =)

Thanks for going to the effort to capture this in the best quality. :)

It has indeed shifted a bit in the right direction. :)

Very interesting about the frames. So to fix a part of a frame that has, say, a scratch, you go the frame before or after that isn't scratched. And then find that same part of the clean image that matches the frame that is scratched, and place the clean pixels from that part of the image into their correct places in the scratched frame, so it's all correct and accurate when it's done?

As to the colors, I see the problem, hmm...tough one to get around. But it's good that you've been able to come up with a way to get the overall saturation levels back closer to where they should be, while protecting the skin tones to a greater degree. Look forward to seeing the latest color correction method. Perhaps you could post that same shot of Han like on the previous page, would be interesting to see how the different methods compare.

Thanks for the level of effort being put by dark jedi and yourself into trying to make this restoration as accurate as possible. :)

Harmy: Ok, I wasn't sure if they got all the multiple captures done and then combined for the best possible level of detail.

Frink: Well, assuming he posted in March on the other site, hopefully he's at least fairly well, even if he hasn't posted here in a long time. :)

Well, even if he didn't have time for this project any more, you'd think he'd post to let everyone know he's ok, as many have been concerned about him. But I'm glad to hear he's alright, and it was certainly a cool idea to get the best possible capture of the Definitive Collection laserdisk set, and maybe one day it will get done. :)

It does indeed sound like it will be great with all the fixes. :) Perhaps individual clean frames from an HD broadcast source of the SE might be helpful in replacing some frames that are messed up? Since it's just a frame here and there, any slight differences in color after correction should not be noticeable.

As to the skin tones, it really does help to be watching on a calibrated screen. My HD plasma tv has been ISF calibrated, and it makes Star Wars look great, but even in the Blu-ray V1 the skin tones are rather too reddish, but not too bad. And it was the price of getting the color saturation up a bit higher elsewhere in the scenes.

This new version, of course, will have even more saturation to the scenes now, so you might want to try that script that isolates the skin from all else in a scene and applies a different color correction value to it. Even if there isn't enough color detail in the source to color correct the skin tones accurately, at least it would allow the rest of the scene to be saturated to any high level to bring the background colors back closer to where they should be without affecting the skin tones themselves. Allowing them to be kept restrained and more accurate and not be pulled along with the rest of the scene and made orange, reddish/burnt, etc. A quick test of how it looks might prove interesting. :)

I'm sure the final restored version will be in 1080p and be made available for BD25 Blu-ray disks. Hopefully there will also be an optional BD50 version for maximum quality and minimal video compression. The original unaltered Star Wars trilogy in 1080p with 50 gigs for each movie and optimum Blu-ray goodness, ahh.... 8O)

My first reaction was one of shock and disgust, quickly followed by anger...

The quality on these is just great, soo much better than the messed up SE, wonderful natural detail and vibrancy! Have to love real 35mm film. :)

Hmm, the faces look orangeish now, better they look a little red (rosey cheeks and such) than looking orange/burnt. That's always the problem with trying to boost the colors in the rest of the scene, the faces get dragged along for the ride, and even if you drop the reds back to help compensate, the other colors still flood the faces.

That's why darkjedi went easy on the saturation in the Blu-ray V1 color correction, to spare the faces from being made red or orangeish dark in appearance, even if that meant the other things in the scene wouldn't be as saturated as would otherwise be perhaps desirable.

That's why separate correction for the faces would be nice, maybe desaturate the reds in the faces in some scenes even to get rid of the reddish tint. But in the absence of that, it's best to lean towards the side of backing off on the overall saturation correction of a scene. Because when faces are red/orange/burnt looking, it's far more noticeable than if the other things in the scene maybe aren't saturated as well as might be liked. It can be a tough balancing act, but keeping the faces natural and fair looking is the most important thing, as that distracts the most when they don't look right.

schorman13: Now that you mention it, the shirt does seem awfully yellow, and I'm pretty certain it should be a light cream color.

Ah, I see. So the faces should be less red/dark this time (like, for example, onboard the Tantive IV, where they are too reddish on the Blu-ray V1)?

Is part of all this manual adjustment also doing a new scene-by-scene color correction where the faces are color corrected separately from the other colors in each scene? I think it was Mother that showed that the color correction scripts could be set up so that color adjustments would be applied differently depending on what the original color in the video frame was. Obviously faces are different than anything else in the scenes, so the script would adjust their colors differently, according to different values entered into the script, than the correction values applied to all else in the scene. This allows separate fine tuning of the color correction applied to faces.

Just wondering, since it seems the only way to get the colors back as close as possible to where they should be without making the faces appear red or dark is to set that scene-by-scene. Only problem is that it takes a lot of time to do it that way. So I understand if it's not being done like that, but I was curious. :)

A big thanks for all the efforts on this new Blu-ray set! :)

Well, 35mm negatives should being scanned in at at least 4k (if their condition warrants it), 6k if it will gain even a tiny amount of fine barely perceptible detail, better to preserve as much as you can while you have a chance to do a nice clean scan of perfect negatives. For 70mm you'd need at least 8k. Wish more films were shot on this, so much better than even excellent 35mm. :)

With digital cameras, there's a certain artificiality to the image. We live in an analog world, that's reality, and when trying to translate that to digital, there's something lost. A little hard to put your finger on sometimes, but it's there, the images look sort of plastic, fake, artificial, there's a unnatural sheen to them. Much prefer 35mm film, with it's very fine level of natural detail. :)

When you see images from a Star Wars film print, it looks so much better than even a nice video. It has a vibrancy, a sumptuous depth, detail and natural quality that is so wonderful. Just no substitute for real film. :)

What a difference. Imagine how good a scene like this will look when it is scanned in with filmguard and then precise restoration is done to that very clean film scan. That's going to look amazing! :)

I hope they are re-scanned. Having seen some of the results of filmguard, it makes a huge difference, giving you the best possible source images to work with for the restoration. :)

Yeah, Luke's lightsaber was always a pure cool shade of blue, any cyan appearance must be home video transfer errors.

Those look great, negative1! :) Imagine what Star Wars will look like at full resolution once all restoration is complete? =)

A big thanks to you and all those involved in making this happen, negative1! =)

Well, I saw Star Wars last night. Wow... It's amazing how good Star Wars looks! :) Such clarity and detail, a great natural film grain, nice strong natural colors, too. Some scenes are so crisp and clear, it's hard to believe. If I didn't know any better, I'd think it was a commercial DVD being up-converted by my HDTV.

And the sound is just fantastic. I just love the unrestricted power and clarity of the restored Star Wars 70mm soundtrack. :) Sounds like being back in the movie theater, way to go hairy_hen! And yes, it's very cool seeing the DTS HD audio light up on the receiver. =)

The only thing I noticed was the faces were a bit redder than ideal (watched it on a high-end Panasonic plasma tv that has been pro ISF calibrated, so the colors displayed are accurate), but just a bit. But that's the price of getting the color saturation up closer to what it's supposed to be without getting into a very tedious scene-by-scene color correction. Overall, the colors are great, nice and rich. :)

The Star Wars menus look so nice, great job whoever did those (can't recall at the moment). The alien subtitles looked so good also, very authentic. Oh, and the disk played perfectly on my Panasonic 310 Blu-ray disk player,

Speaking as a Star Wars fan, you have my appreciation for this set dark_jedi, excellent work, very professional looking Blu-ray set. This has to be the finest unaltered Star Wars trilogy home video set ever released. :)

Looking forward to watching The Empire Strikes Back. :)

dark_jedi: Ah, ok, so it might be the encoding process itself. Hmm, maybe it's something to do with the program that handles the encoding, maybe it results in a more natural sounding soundtrack once it's encoded to DTS HD. Sort of less strained sounding, or something like that, which makes it sound less loud, less harsh on the ears. That would make sense.

Well, that's great news, anything that can deliver the soundtrack with the highest fidelity, with a nice clean natural sound, is a good thing. :)