Harmy

Yep, I’m using the same settings but the job won’t start.

Same.
I’m trying to download some alternative sources to see if they have the same problem.
Looking at the artifacts, they look like compression artifacts, so maybe it’s something to do with the h265 decoding.

Hmm, I’m seeing those same artifacts in the screenshot you posted.

Yeah. I converted it to ProRes and I’m getting the same artifacts there. Though I did the conversion in Adobe Media Encoder, so that might be the problem. But when trying to do the conversion in ffmpeg, it always crashed after a few minutes. Or rather it said it had finished but the resulting file would be only like the first couple of minutes of the movie.

OK, 44rh1n’s LUTs make it look more or less correct but the artifacts are still there.

blob:https://imgur.com/f36f802f-03e1-4734-af08-86c89094bcaf

When I look really closely, the artifacts are there even on the flat image and when I increase the saturation on the m2ts, they come out as well. Could there be something wrong with the file I have?

I was wondering if you guys could help me out with the HDR stuff - I’m working in Premiere and I don’t have DaVinci studio.
I remuxed the mkv to mp4, as per the guide and when I import that into Premiere, I do get the flat-looking image but when I try to make any adjustments to it, it brings out some really awful color-artifacts.

Interesting thing is that when I remux it to m2ts in tsmuxer, Premiere will read it as well and it displays the proper colors but it’s incredibly slow and buggy.

Could someone maybe provide me with a LUT that would work in Premiere or something like that?

EDIT: I just noticed 44rh1n already provided some LUTs in his post, so I’ll try those.

Hello, guys. So, as I said before, I’m getting this month off from work and I’m planning to work on Despecialized.
Now, the reason I’m writing this post is to ask you guys for donations. I hate to do this but as I’m a freelancer, being out of work means I’m not gonna be getting any income and right now, the VFX industry is kind of f*cked, because all filming has stopped due to COVID, so I’m not even sure there will be much payed work for me in the future. Luckily, if it comes to that, I can survive on savings for a while but I will have to cut any extra expenses, so I could really use some help with the software and hardware expenses for Despecialized.
Any donations to harmypaypal@email.cz are welcome and, of course, any donors will get their names in the credits.

Just to be upfront about this, I can’t actually promise any delivery date on Despecialized - I’m starting over with an all new set of sources and right now, I’m still trying to figure out how to properly work with the HDR sources and it’s a bit frustrating. But I’m talking to some guys about possible collaborations, including oohteedee and DrDre, so hopefully, we’ll figure it out together.

UncutIsSuperior, as a non-Jewish European, I must agree with your user name 😉 😄

Sorry, couldn’t resist 😄

I prefer the 97 version too. But I guess it’s probably just nostalgia - I was a kid when the 97SE came out, so I do have a certain level of nostalgic feelings towards it.

Oh, I see, it’s not finished yet. HDMan72 made it sound like he already had it.

Hm, doesn’t seem to be on the spleen and even google didn’t find anything under 4K97_IV.

There’s a 35mm '97 version?

That’s actually a really good price.

How much did you pay for it? I’d love to get one of these as well but I bet they’re going for silly high prices.

Yeah, I think so.

Having recently compared them, I actually like the colors of this better too (not to blow my own horn 😉) but I think it would be much easier and a more worthy effort to recolor 4K83 than to clean this.

Yeah, I thought that’s what it was - my uncle had that release and I remember discovering it as a kid and thinking it was the coolest thing ever. He later gave me the movie tapes from it but the box along with the documentary got lost somewhere and I couldn’t even find any proper pictures of it online - I was almost starting to believe I made it up.

That’s the third one from the right. The third one from the left was the one I was interested in 😉

Awesome! In the last two pictures, what’s the third one from the left?

They do? How?

I’m wondering what the UHD LOTR will be sourced from. While it was shot on 35mm,it was finished digitally as a 2K DI,so going back to film would mean redoing the entire post production and believe me, it would not be as simple as rerendering CGI in 4K - even if they still had all the assets and project files, which is ridiculously unlikely, CGI is rendered in layers, so the compositing would have to be redone as well - basically it would take pretty much the full cost of doing post production on a very high budget movie,so more than likely, they will go to the original 2K DIs, upscale them and give them an HDR grade.

In a proper preservation, I definitely agree power windows shouldn’t be used. But again, that’s what 4K77 is for.

Thanks. I’ll check it out!

I just checked out those scenes and what you’ve done certainly helps a lot. Whenever watching the trilogy on BD, I always opted for the theatrical version of FOTR, because I couldn’t stand the colors of the EE, and, like you, I found the sacrifice of slightly worse detail over-all and a couple of DNRed scenes preferable over that of the entire film looking like someone spilled dark-green all over it, so this is by far the best option for me at the moment, with those problematic scenes at least not obviously looking processed. Even if the lost detail isn’t there, it at least looks pretty natural and not distracting. I’m hoping to achieve the same with Star Wars UHD.
Could you tell me a bit more about the method you used to minimize the over-sharpening? The Star Wars UHD could certainly benefit from that too.

This makes me so happy - I was going to do this in the same way - use theatrical Blu-Ray and only fill in EE shots from the EE BD with EE DVD chroma overlayed - I even started working on it but never could find the time to finish it, so I’m really glad someone has done this and even went above and beyond.

The only thing I probably would have done differently would be to replace some of the worst looking scenes in the theatrical with CCd EE - the theatrical BD looks really nice 95% of the time but there are a couple of scenes where the DNR was applied much heavier than the rest (off the top of my head, it was the scenes where Gandalf talks to Bilbo and then Frodo inside Bag End and then Gandalf’s confrontation with Saruman). Since they are theatrical scenes, the theatrical BDs chroma could be overlayed for those instead of the DVD. Might be something to think about for the next version. But even as it is now, it’s far better than anything we have from official sources 😃