We’re through the looking glass, people.
http://screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/189787
The first comparison is between the HD broadcast colors and my settings. As you can see, the blue is still very prominent.
The second comparison is between the corrected Blu-ray and a combination of Blu-ray and HD Broadcast shadow detail. I noticed that the shadows of the Blu-ray, especially in this scene, were quite pixelated and the Broadcast seems to have a similar level of detail without pixelization, so I am going to use this combination for the scene, and perhaps others. The door is now a very grayish blue.
We actually never see R2 enter the pod though - when he opens the door, he is actually going through an entry tunnel of some kind made of a reflective material. R2 stops next to a door bathed in blue light at the end of the tunnel, but in several shots the blue light is gone and it’s just reflecting the brownish gray of the surrounding set.
Since Image Shack is down for now:
Escape Pod Colors
You can clearly see the end of the access tunnel when the pod ejects from the ship. Granted, there are no visible doors on the side of the pod, but nothing about the pod makes sense as there is also no window looking back on the Star Destroyer. The people in charge of making sense of these things apparently also gave up and put the window on the side of the pod:
And the prop used in the desert doesn’t look like the model:
Too bad it’s in black and white, but the interior of the pod appears gray in all of the releases, it’s just the door that is blue.
In short, there’s no evidence one way or another as to what the pod door looks like except what is seen in the desert.
JEDIT: @Towne: That’s a good point. I’m going to see how the blue door looks with my final grading.
The circle is now complete: when we started our projects we were trying to match the Blu-ray to 35mm sources, now we’re matching 35mm sources to the Blu-ray.
That still begs the question though, of how they managed to make C-3PO’s highlights look green. It looks like even your program can’t make them look that crappy.
Thine criticism wounds me mightily! Prithee, cast no evil aspersions on the SE, for long it has weathered the slings and arrows of outrageous backlash, and yet the original is safe in the keeping of not a few among us.
But yes, I updated the first post a few days ago before finalizing the scene and yesterday when I finalized the scene I remembered that it isn’t in the goal of the project to despecialize the film, but only to make a ‘best of’ the 2004 and 2011 versions with an eye to continuity and fixing mistakes. The blue doors were clearly a mistake long overdue of a fix.
😃
It’s up to those those in charge of the prints, but it certainly makes sense for the despecialized parts to be cleaned first. The last large sections of the blu-ray for me to finalize are the last half of reel 1 and most of reel 2. After that it’s just small pieces involving lightsaber replacements. I would be surprised if this took me long after the end of 2016.
Maybe someone working on the site decided that the Blu-ray was too crappy looking to show, so they did some adjustments on the sly. Perhaps Lucas himself didn’t realize just how bad it looked on the disc so for the online segments they applied a LUT to make it better. Who knows, Lucasfilm is anything but consistent in their decision making.
Are we looking at the same thing? I took a screenshot of one of the videos in question and compared it to the blu-ray:
http://screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/189547
It only required a small color adjustment to closely approximate the Blu-ray, and the cropping/warping is identical. The Blu-ray also has more detail, probably because it isn’t compressed for the internet.
It’s the Blu-ray with a small paint job.
@towne: Check your PMs
😃
Perhaps that extraneous shot could be replaced by a quick glimpse of the engines shifting into reverse. Best of both worlds.
There are no humans in Star Wars, just aliens wearing stillsuits that look like human skin. The aliens in the cantina are what everyone looks like without them.
One thing that’s always bugged me about ANH is that when they’re getting pulled into the Death Star, Han says ‘full reverse’ and then the ship begins to shake. I understand that ships use repulsorlifts to maneuver when taking off and this could conceivably push them in any direction, but it seems bizarre that Han would engage this rudimentary system instead of simply ‘turning the ship around’ as Obi-wan suggests. The Falcon has no forward engines or jets that I am aware of, so how does the ship go in reverse?
The only semi-plausible answer I can come up with is that the engines have flaps which can redirect the thrust of the engines to the sides and slightly forward (due to the curvature of the hull) and these flaps are what steer the ship through adjustments.
Then I thought how interesting it would be to see these flaps in motion, such as when the Falcon is turning around to exit the Death Star hangar. They may ripple and move independently of each other in order to direct thrust from one side of the ship to another, allowing it to spin and turn. I know suggestions aren’t being taken at this late hour, so I’ll just imagine it all pretty-like in my head. 😃
Thanks all!
Sorry I didn’t respond sooner. Those shots have an interesting teal tone similar to some other prints I’ve seen from the 80’s. I don’t have the Super8 print as a reference, so it’s nice to see it.
A mini update: Work continues apace with finalizing the first three reels. Most of reel 3 is finalized, and I’ve just signed off on the opening scenes:
Sounds good.
Those aren’t banners, they’re (extremely) long windows.
There are so many questions. Does this mean they only watch the Prequels? Does real time mean that they wait in line at the theater for weeks in breathless anticipation of Episode 1? If so, are you a sadist for even suggesting this?
I think it is lovely. Did you use photos with photoshop filters? If so, it’s quite well done. I quite like the lack of lightsabers, since they’re so overused on most posters.
One minor issue. Why is Leia front and center? I would have expected Luke to take that spot as the main character.
Mike also mentioned that the paint was applied directly to the aluminum model, creating a highly variable ‘anodized’ look. So in certain light, R2’s panels could appear almost black, whereas other lighting would have sections of the metal appear vibrantly blue. In any case, it’s a good bet that the color is somewhat on the reddish side of blue under even lighting.
I do think this is a big step up from the SSE. This is much shaper (the Eastman prints are perhaps even sharper than the Technicolor), more detailed, will have more consistant colors, and won’t have any of that light streaking that our scan of the LPP had. If I had to put a number on it, I’d say 75% better than the SSE at 1080p. If it was only 10% better it wouldn’t be worth the effort.
The Technicolor process softens the image, which is why the process prints a black and white image underneath the color dyes to give it extra sharpness, and also why Technicolor prints are only two prints away from the negative - any further down the line and the image becomes too soft.
However, I didn’t realize that Eastman was that sharp. Mike Verta doesn’t have any of these prints for his project, last I heard. Perhaps someone should tell him.
See for yourself:
http://screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/188207
The Blu-ray is sourced from a higher quality print, but has of course been encoded to less than 2k quality. However, it has been sharpened, which leads to the illusion of greater detail.
The 4K scan shows levels of detail that approach that of the Blu-ray, if not surpass it in some cases. However there are also areas where there appears to be less detail than in the Blu-ray, though this may only be an illusion caused by sharpening.
The color is really what separates these two scans in my opinion. Try as I might, I often can’t recover the subtle greens of the Tantive walls in my project, nor can I recover the yellow hues specific to C-3PO, which is why I may need to use other sources to achieve these gradients. The 4K scan has none of these color issues, at least in this shot.
I used Virtualdub to view the video since VLC lacked the proper codec. It doesn’t play smoothly, but still looks superb.
So what sources were used in this preview? I know that the Rebel trooper shot was Eastman, but I would have thought that this would have been more grainy. Is this clip denoised? Because I can’t imagine people wanting an even sharper version.
Excellent news!
Our greatest hope is that Disney will release the originals and make our work for naught, but until then, we work.