Harmy

Yep, exactly.

Thanks guys :-)

About the black borders. It was an oversight on my part. In the final version they will of course be perfectly black the whole time.

If you're using MPC to watch, I recommend right-clicking the screen and going to Filters > FFDShow Video Decoder > Properties -  There choose crop and set it to Top:90 Bottom:90. This will crop the boarders for you and you can have an uninterrupted viewing. But be careful to uncheck the crop in the settings after you finish watching, because otherwise it's gonna apply it to all the videos you'll watch.

OK, so the 1st WP is uploaded and PMs are sent. If anyone else is interested, I'll be happy to send you the link as well. Every pair of eyes is valuable in spotting mistakes. I uploaded to uloz.to, because it only took like five minutes, whereas to MU it would have taken hours, so I hope it works for everyone.

Now keep in mind that this is just a 1st pass on everything and that it is quite low bitrate, so there's quite a lot of compression. But on the other hand, it's high enough bitrate as not to be distractingly compressed for the most part, so it should be quite enjoyable to just watch - most mistakes in the final version of v1.0 were likely spotted by people who just watched it and not by people who scrutinized it for mistakes, so even if you're just gonna watch it for fun, you might be helpful :-)

P.S.: There's a little surprise near the end of the WP :-)

For what it's worth, I think this is actually a pretty good change. It lends continuity not only to the light but also to the hatch opening in the shot from the outside. I'd actually recommend you keep it because these are exactly the kind of fixes that are not distracting and actually add to the film.

You do of course realize that "correct" flesh tones are a highly subjective matter, right? Flesh tones aren't always the same, they depend greatly on lighting of the scene and many other factors. 

The GOUT was scrutinized quite thoroughly here and the analysis shows that while it is very desaturated, the colours can be recovered by boosting saturation but it has boosted reds, so when you use GOUT as a reference, you need to count with there being more red than there should be, so everyone's faces are too red. The lobster faces is something that plagues the 2004 transfer as well, although there it is something more complicated than a simple red boost. Just look at the scene in Ben's hut, they both look as if someone threw a bucketful of red paint in their faces. 

Also, I'm not sure where you get this notion of the GOUT being dark, over-all it is definitely brighter than the 2004 transfer and since it is unlikely that any scene by scene adjustments were done to it, the scenes where it is darker than the 04SE can quite safely be assumed to have been darker in the original.

Yeah. Although, I don't just use the GOUT as a reference. Wherever available, I compare different sources and references, trying to colour correct it the way I believe is closest to the original colour grading (which most of the time coincides with what I like, so that's cool) based on all references available to me. And of course, choices will be made based on personal preference even in my project, because the references sometimes simply aren't there. But in those cases, I usually make my choices based on what I think was probably in the original. That's the nature of my project.

The nature of your project is different - your effort is to make a version you'll like, which, unlike for me, isn't necessarily the original version, so the original colour timing doesn't really have to mean anything for your project and that OK too :-)

I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree on that because I disagree so strongly that it would just lead to a pointless argument - to me the 2004 colour timing isn't appealing but appalling ;-).

This is your project and you should mainly do it so that you enjoy the final result :-)

Not really, because putting that matte around the subs took about 5 minutes, rotoscoping a new background into numerous shots from a low quality source, just to make something that is already there more visible and which would take hours, perhaps days for each shot is a whole different league. If I did that, why not go through the films and rotoscope out all the crushed blacks as well? Because it would take ten years, that's why ;-)

Yeah, I don't know if I'd want to go that far. Besides, I'd really rather focus on SW right now.

It's gonna be relatively low bitrate, (sth. like 4Mbps) so it should play on weaker computers.

Well, partly, yeah :-)

Also, here's the final look of the cantina matte:

OK, just finished editing the first half an hour. I will render this 1st quarter workprint tonight and upload it sometime tomorrow. Any takers?

Well, I wasn't talking about my current project, I meant my old Partly Despecialized Edition.

Which title I wouldn't mind Omen using, if he wants to - I would actually encourage it :-) It would be sort of nice, I've moved on to another project but Omen is doing an upgraded version of the Partly Despecialized Edition, with the BD as a source.

Nicely put, msycamore. That's what I was saying all along, the 2004 transfer is such a horrible mess that no single setting is going to fix it, especially the brightness and also that there's a huge difference between blue and cyan (which is what I was trying to show in my screencaps).

And yeah, I guess this would be classified as a fan edit. The reason I didn't put the PDE into the fanedit section was that I was recreating the original cut, albeit with some CGI effects left in, so I felt it fell under the category of "other fan projects" rather than "fan-edits." But since you'll be keeping stuff like the new Wampa scene and I presume the new CGI cloud city introduction but not for example the shots of Vader going back to his shuttle, you'll be making an all new cut of the film, and thus basically a fanedit. But I guess it is really the way you feel about it that is really important in deciding whether it's more a fan edit or a preservation effort :-)

I'm not concerned. Once a film comes out on Blu-Ray, with good, nicely detailed, not DVNred transfer, and that Blu-Ray is still available, I don't really mind what they do with it in other releases. A well mastered Blu-Ray is good enough to be projected on a huge cinema screen, so as far as I'm concerned, the film's preserved.

As to the Emperor, I'd recommend using Ady's 97SE 1080p reconstruction MKV (it's on tehparadox). That's where mine came from, so it will by definition be higher quality than in my 720p AVCHD, since it's one generation up, 1080p and quite high bitrate if you use the MKV and not the AVCHD version.

OMEN!-_-! said:

but removing that dual CG hatch could be a problem. As far as i'm aware, only the GOUT has that clip intact without the dual hatch and I don't want to mix GOUT footage with the blu-ray footage in such a small shot, it'll be too jarring. Perhaps Harmy's done another great matte job to get round that as well and he doesn't mind me borrowing that as well as the fantastic work he's done with the Sarlacc pit.

Sorry, totally forgot to comment. The difference is very subtle but definitelly an improvement, which I think is the way to go here, because that set is supposed to be rather gloomy IMO.

http://originaltrilogy.com/forum/topic.cfm/Lord-of-the-Rings-Trilogy-Extended-Edition-coming-to-Blu-Ray/topic/12796/

The actual colour timing discussion starts here:

http://originaltrilogy.com/forum/topic.cfm/Lord-of-the-Rings-Trilogy-Extended-Edition-coming-to-Blu-Ray/post/510807/#TopicPost510807

Here's the shot as it appears in the GOUT (top) and when you increase the saturation (bottom):

I am convinced that that is what the shot should look like.

@OMEN: LOL, anyone here, I'm sure, will tell you that the is absolutely nothing valid about the 2004 colour timing :-)

CatBus said:

If the detailts were meant to be blown out, they wouldn't be on the film in the first place.  That's as close as we can get to a statement of intent from the cinematographer.

Not necessarily true. Films get graded after they are shot, in fact after the o-neg cut is assembled and the actual technical process of the grading occurs while the interpositives are being made, and since the 2004 scan is sourced from the o-neg, it's colours, brightness and contrast aren't in any way indicative of the original grading. And the original film-makers don't necessarily know what their films looked like - the grading of SW was personally approved by George and look at what kind of mess that is.

However, I'd say that BOTH screenshots are too cyan.  If you're color-adjusting this scene, I'd cut that back quite a bit.

Mine isn't so much cyan, as it is blue, just like most of the newly surfaced sources seem to indicate (including the GOUT, when you increase saturation).  I don't have the GOUT at hand but as I timed the whole film to  saturation boosted GOUT, I'm pretty sure that it is how it appeared there - both the blue and the brightness.

The brightness on the sandpeople clip looks really good and the black-levels seem very nice and consistent. The ESB scene seems too bright (and also to cyan). The thing is that just like with the colours, the brightness has been fucked with very inconsistently throughout the films, there are scenes that are too dark but then there are scenes that are too bright, so I'm afraid that one brightness setting for the entire movie isn't gonna cut it (although, since for the most part the films are too dark, even over-all raised brightness would be an improvement for the most part).

Here's a screenshot from DeEd:

Compared to your:

Now, I like mine much better but it is of course a question of taste, so you should make your edit the way you think looks good :-)

Sorry, what sand people clip? Must have missed that.

And no problem about using my edit, that's how the community works here, if you check my source list, you'll see that I've also used the works of many talented people here in my edits :-)

And I'm pretty sure the sarlacc shots should work with the BD footage, you'll have to upscale them of course but most of them are very short, fast moving shots, so the difference shouldn't be distracting at all.

It's in my ROTJ DeEd, which can be found on tehparadox.com :-) That is currently the best quality I have of it myself (well, that plus the uncompressed shots that are not cut together and are way too big to upload).