Harmy

I never said they didn't have a different hue, they definitely do.

Like I said, to me it looks ligher blue, maybe cyan, with perhaps a hint of green but it definitely isn't a green glow or a shade of green. This is green:

@TServo: Oh, yeah, I see how you could have got the impression that the BD glow was used, I left some information out, the mask following the sabre was actually expanded and feathered to take in the glow as well. Some of the BD glow probably survived on the outside but most is new (well, actually old).

@TServo: No need to apologise, I just hoped you guys would notice that I actually restored the lightsabre from the original, since it looks quite different and IMO much better. I kept it as a surprise, except no one noticed ;-)

@Stinky: You always seem to see colours totally differently from me, I don't think the sabre's green at all in that shot, just a lighter blue that in the other, which according to the reference I've seen is correct.

I most certainly did not use the Blu-Ray glow in that shot. And the second one is definitely not from Ady's version, you should compare those lightsabre shots with v1.0 and you'll see what I'm talking about.

Also, I did make the horizon line sharp at first but it looked wrong.

I'm a little surprised no one commented on the last few shots of the WP.

Yeah, that's another thing that should get better by shifting the hue slightly.

pittrek said:

Harmy said:

Yeah, actually I think I'll have to redo that shot once more, I have a very good reason to believe the sun shouldn't be so orange, the shot shouldn't be this bright and it should have more of a purple cast to it.

Some new reference pics ? :-)

Maybe... ;-)

Here's the result, it may look quite different from what you're used to but I'm quite confident it's close to how it should be:

That looks awesome! You realize I'm gonna start begging you for clips now, right? ;-)

Yeah, actually I think I'll have to redo that shot once more, I have a very good reason to believe the sun shouldn't be so orange, the shot shouldn't be this bright and it should have more of a purple cast to it.

I decided to shift the hue a tiny little bit, which seems to improve the skintones. I'll post some pics later :-)

OK, so this is what I did with this scene. I've been at it for quite some time and am honestly sick of it, so I hope everyone is ok with it looking this way:

Sometimes a gridlike pattern appears due to video or jpg compression, which might be what you're seeing, though I don't see it in this case.

My guess is that it's the JPG compression utilized by the site I uploaded to, sorry about that (but then, even the Blu picture must have been affected, so the difference should still stand.

I've seen some of the Blu V1 footage and believe me, we're talking vast picture quality improvement here, especially if DJ manages to make it even better for V2.

Here's a comparison I posted some time ago:

That wouldn't help, it was in there too.

wonkeychoobaca said:

i just got done watching the work print and i am super excited.  I however noticed that there are some scenes that have been brightened alot and thus have elevated black levels.  The blacks look grey and creates the effect of looking through wax paper.  It probably wouldn't be noticable if you adjusted your monitors settings though.  I can point out the scenes if you are interested in fixing them.

Sure, I tried to avoid that for the most part and in some cases, I opted for it over the crushed blacks but if there are any distracting cases I may not have noticed, I'd sure like to know about them :-)

also i like the warmer color pallete but in some scenes it has made characters faces harder to see.  mostly lukes and owens faces when they come out to buy the droids.  however if this was present in the original film then i guess it is correct.

Yeah, I'm not quite happy with that, but the loss of detail in faces in that scene seems to be more due to some kind of DVNR applied to the 2004 master and it's more visible here due to it being brighter rather than warmer. Not much I can do, I'm afraid.

but overall it is a vast improvement to v1.  any prediction on when part 2 of the work print will be done?

I try to avoid predictions now because in the past, I was usually wrong.

also i was wondering when you do esb and rotj v2 will You_Too be providing you with the color corrected blu ray footage?

Nothing's been decided yet. I'd of course appreciate if You_Too could provide that for me but I'd also understand if he doesn't want to.

Well, hopefully by then v2.0 of Jedi will be out, so the quality should be quite a bit better but I'm still not sure it would be quite good enough for Ady to use as a main source but he could definitely use my Sarlacc and whatever else he might want to revert to the original. I'd even be happy to send him higher quality files for those shots.

Again, the same problem, it's only in AE since CS5, which won't work on my computer.

But don't worry about it, guys, I think I can do it without it :-)

Erm:

Not saying that Ady should use mine, just that he could do exactly the same thing, if he wanted to undo the change and then fix it himself ;-) I think it worked quite well in my edit.

A script wouldn't really help, since it would have to be used very selectively and it would be crap not being able to see the results right away.

No, always there as both a character and an object.

I have nothing against the use of CGI where there's no other way to do something that needs to be done but IMO a model or a really good animatronic puppet or make-up will always look more "real" than CGI, especially in close-up. Even now, I watched Avatar on Blu-Ray the other day and it does look like an animated film for the most part, especially in 2D.

One other recent example is the Rise of the Planet of the Apes; while I thought the film itself was great, the monkeys looked incredibly fake. Now take a look at Tim Burton's PotA remake, they used animatronics and makeup and the monkeys look absolutely real.

Both technologies have their limitations, so it is usually a combination of both that yields the best results (like eg. in Jurassic Park).

@Laserschwert. Thanks that vibrance effect sounds perfect. I have Premiere CS4 but don't remember ever seeing this effect there. I'll have to take a look.

EDIT: Nope, couldn't find it. And the Premiere CS4 help gave me no  result. And it seems to be a part of CS5, which won't work on my 32bit system... :-/

@Jaitea: Thank you, that is very helpful!

As to the 1st sunset shot, the one in the WP is long out of date, I have since reworked it completely:

As I said previously, I believe that the new DVNR-ed master was made specifically because of the 3D release. I have two reasons for this belief:

A) If it wasn't for a pending 3D conversion and subsequent theatrical release, I doubt they would have even bothered making a new transfer.

B) Grain doesn't exactly look great in 3D - it is natural to a 2D film image and the human eye usually doesn't detect it as making the image unrealistic, however in a stereoscopic 3D image, the grain seems to cover 3D objects as a moving-grain layer on their surface, which is something the human eye recognizes as unnatural - For example, I have seen Avatar 3D projected both digitally and in IMAX and in IMAX the grain added by the 70mm film used made for a very distracting effect.

And I fully expect that if it ever comes to releasing the OT in 3D, appart from further meddling with the films themselves, we can expect a similar amount of DVNR applied, albeit probably to the current masters...

No no no, those are not compression artefacts! They are some kind of weird colour separation and it only happens when I increase saturation in Premiere, when I increase saturation to the same level in AE, these artefacts don't appear at all.

Perhaps a direct comparison will better show what I mean:

And of course, I do use colour balance, adjusting shadows, midtones and highlights separately; that's how I do most of the colour correction. But sometimes you really need to adjust the over-all saturation, though after some experiments I decided against the saturation boost in this case, because I really don't like what it does with the skintones.