NeverarGreat

I’ll think about that when it’s done. Like any long project, I can’t think about much else other than the finish line right now 😉

Oh and as an aside, the final dogfight is grueling. The first few reels benefit from long takes, but this section probably has an average shot length of less than two seconds, I’m seeing a whole lot of variation between shots, and there are a tremendous amount of gradients which are simply missing. Lucasfilm clearly didn’t care about these brief shots.

Shot by shot, as Dr Dre begins his first pass on the film, I am wrapping up my first pass. Actually I’m down to the last ten minutes of non-credits shots, and I’m very happy with the last three reels. I’ll have to give the first three reels another look since my process has evolved quite a bit, but it’s nearing the end of a long road. 😃

Smithers said:

The argument that George Lucas always intended the Jedi to be selfless and emotionless people is not true. Hell, in the first draft of TPM (found here: http://starwarsuniverse2.tripod.com/id7.html) Obi-Wan ends up falling in love with Anakin’s mother!

I can’t decide if you are trying to be funny or you genuinely believe that these ‘rough drafts’ were written by Lucas.

I’m guessing the former.

Haha!

I believe what you are referring to is the clipped highlights of the Blu-ray when played on most (all?) players. The only explanation I have is that when originally encoded, the highest value was 255 rather than broadcast safe 235, so when players ‘expand’ the values, anything above 235 is clipped. Therefore, you must import an unconverted transport stream of the Blu-ray into your editing program and bring the highlights down before making further changes. I’ve tried to convert the Transport Stream into RGB in avisynth with a contrast reduction before the RGB conversion to see if it would retain the highlights, but no dice. The only method that I’ve found to do this is bring the TS file into Premiere and use a curves adjustment, which operates in the YUV colorspace. Perhaps you have a better method of doing this.

Regardless, I’ve found that virtually all of the highlight information exists in the Blu-ray data. Now if only there was a way to recover the superblack detail.

DrDre said:

It’s fine. 😃 Here’s my adjustment. It needed a red boost in the darker tones, and I’ve made it a little brighter. Somehow the eyes look more alive with the boosted blue tones, compared to some of the earlier attempts, but I think this is the one for me:

This looks the best in terms of skin tone that I’ve seen so far.

I think it looks quite good, I’d just make sure that Tarkin’s uniform remains green even in the shadows.

As you know my corrections have been manual in contrast to your algorithm. I think that this provides certain advantages. I was able to achieve my results with only a curves adjustment, saturation adjustment, and the channel mixer. The channel mixer is one of the most versatile tools on account of it’s ability to reduce the stressed color of the blu-ray. If the green-green channel is lowered and mixed into the red and blue channels, it reduces the green artifacts that pop up on the skin tones in these scenes, as well as give Tarkin’s skin tone a more consistent hue. Also, where the skin tones are a great deal darker than the film sources suggest, one way to fix this is to boost the red-red channel, then mix green-red and blue-red (while keeping the totals of these mixes at 100 of course). The result is reds which are substantially lighter and less saturated than the Blu-ray, and a good match to film sources. Of course you must keep an eye on the solid red, green, and blue lights in these scenes to make sure they don’t become too diluted, but often these lights are too saturated anyway. This makes me think that a channel mixer tool was used on the Blu-ray to get the colors this distorted in the first place, otherwise it wouldn’t work so well in fixing these problems.

This is my best guess as to how this scene should look. The Death Star Walls are blue and green. Tarkin’s uniform, as has been discussed on my thread, is green (although color problems in the blu-ray don’t allow many color gradients here, which is why Tarkin’s hair has gone a bit green).

The attempts to make the walls neutral just look dead to me, like the home video releases where the color has been washed out.

These are certainly in the ballpark.

One of the biggest problems with fanedits is that they can feel jarring and out of place, especially when we know how the movie is ‘supposed’ to play out. The Dooku appearance feels like that, but I think that the shots themselves are actually very well done. The trouble, as you said, is that we are essentially foreshadowing two evil characters at once. I’d suggest that the shots be reordered.
First, remove Dooku from the opening shot.
After ‘You will be a Jedi’, cut to the excellent panning shot of Palpatine, since he is already going to ‘watch [Anakin’s] career with great interest’
Then have the Jedi talking about the master and apprentice, and after this exchange have the opening shot duplicated and zoomed in, so that it slowly pans to the right and shows Dooku, and then shows him walking away.

It also seems strange that the big ending isn’t included. I wonder if the music could be changed to something grander, and simply have the entire scene dialogue free.

Anyway, those are my thoughts. Again, really good work on the Dooku shots.

Here’s an example of the changing color of the walls from the Blu-ray (uncorrected). This sequence has some horrible color smearing that seems to be on every version of the film from 77 onward, but it’s also clear evidence of the wall sections being painted different colors:

The wall on the left has about ten points more green than the one directly beside it, and neither are gray according to the blu-ray.

JEDIT: Yes, Mike has also said that the walls were painted different colors - see his discussion about the wall sections abutting the droid alcove across from the Falcon, which was intended as a more neutral gray.

That Tarkin shot looks to be as close to perfect as I can find, with perhaps a bit too much teal in the grays. However the skin tones look good, and the olive of his uniform is good.

Indeed. It seems like there’s slightly more gray in the greenish officer uniforms than in the Nazi uniforms.

Yeah, that looks alright.

Very funny guys.

But yes, the shirts are blue, pants are grey, stormtroopers are white, Tantive walls are white with a very slight green tint, Death Star Walls are dark blue/green, lightsabers are reddish pink and sky blue, 3PO is coppery-yellow, R2’s metal dome is blueish grey, his panels are very dark blue/almost black, Tatooine is dusty yellow brown, etc, etc.

But here’s a question that I haven’t seen yet: What color is Tarkin’s uniform? As far as I can tell from behind the scenes pictures and other sources it’s green, but I’ve heard other people say that the Imperial uniforms are supposed to be gray or tan. I’ve always assumed they’re the green of Nazi officers, such as this yellowish green one here:

Here’s a costume photo from ROTS, the background of which I’ve balanced to neutral gray. Is this accurate?

I very much doubt that the look of Tatooine is because of fading.

from this article: http://www.wilhelm-research.com/pdf/HW_Book_10_of_20_HiRes_v1c.pdf :

“Based on the many Technicolor imbibition prints he has
examined in recent years, Robert Gitt of the UCLA film archives had this to say about the image stability of the process: If you took a Technicolor dye imbibition print and you projected it many times at a drive-in theater and put a lot of light through it, the dyes do fade a little bit — particularly the cyan — although not that badly. But if you are careful with Technicolor imbibition prints, and keep them in the dark and don’t show them a lot, they don’t seem to fade at all. I’ve never seen one that has faded if properly cared for. It is a remarkably good process. Technicolor imbibition on triacetate base is very, very good.”

Of course, the process itself can be (and was in the case of Star Wars) uneven in terms of color across shots, but I highly doubt that every shot is wrong. For example, many shots in the Death Star are simply too green, but among these incorrect shots are shots where the color is accurate, and it’s easy to tell the difference. With Tatooine, you say that every shot has these issues, so there are no shots where you can get a good idea of what it should look like on the print. I know that there are Tatooine shots without the pink shift, so my recommendation would be to simply take the most color accurate shot of Tatooine you have (the one that most matches the actual shooting conditions and/or other reference photos) and work from that as a basis for the correction - it’s what I’ve done with the Death Star interiors.

The shot you mention is actually the first shot of reel 5, and is more blue than most of the surrounding shots. It does look nice in isolation, but there is a lot of variation in the color of print sources, and most of them have a strong green tint in this scene. I could still tweak the contrast, but I’m fairly happy with the color.

Congratulations on your first post! You have taken your first step into a larger world. 😉

Thanks!

dlvh said:

NeverarGreat said:

“I’ve finished this scene in my version, and the yellow is actually gone from entire shots (if you notice, the flowers in the lower left are supposed to be yellow as well). It’s a problem with hundreds of shots of the blu-ray, which means that I’ve had to pull these colors from other sources since they simply no longer exist in the blu-ray.”

And what did your shots of this scene look like, my we see?

Sure:
http://screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/164143/picture:1

Screenshot Comparison has recently been increasing image saturation for some reason. I also may give it another look since Silver Screen was made available after I finished this scene.

Jedit: Now two comparisons at link

Reuploaded the images at more accurate saturation.

DrDre said:

Here’s another shot from the same sequence.

Funny tidbit: on the print the food in the bowl is actually orange/yellow. Good ol’ George probably thought people didn’t like yellow food, so he turned it into gray goo for the bluray release. Some of these changes are just weird.

Bluray:

Bluray regraded:

I’ve finished this scene in my version, and the yellow is actually gone from entire shots (if you notice, the flowers in the lower left are supposed to be yellow as well). It’s a problem with hundreds of shots of the blu-ray, which means that I’ve had to pull these colors from other sources since they simply no longer exist in the blu-ray.

Sheepish said:

NeverarGreat said:

Some of the grading goes too far in my opinion, for example making mauls black cloak look green. But I like how you got rid of the purple. Very strange choice for Lucasfilm.

See, I’m not really seeing green. Maybe that has to do with the settings on my monitor, but if there’s green to that cloak, it certainly presents a problem, as I didn’t do any green level adjustments in that scene.

…though I did use a slight teal filter to neutralize some other colors. That may have done it. I’ll give it another look.

One way to check your work is in Photoshop, where you can get RGB info for any pixel. It’s showing higher green levels for the shadows than the other colors.

Some of the grading goes too far in my opinion, for example making mauls black cloak look green. But I like how you got rid of the purple. Very strange choice for Lucasfilm.

Someone (I can’t remember who) uploaded scans of an original trailer, and though it’s a bit yellowed, it has a much more pleasing tone to me. It’s also a good idea of how it may have looked on a release print:

http://screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/163375

Sounds good, I’d like to see some screenshots of the new coloration!

DrDre said:

The problem is that none of the production photos I’ve seen seem to reflect a pronounced green shift. The JSC is pretty inconsistent in this respect, and so are the print scans. So, although it certainly off-white, if there is a green color, it’s a creme color with the slightest hint of mint.

That’s it exactly. By subtly green, I simply meant that the pixels have a few points more green than anything else, which is what this photo shows. 😃

The greenish tone to the Tantive walls is subtle, and I’m not sure that it was intended to be green in the finished film. But if it were to tend toward a color, green it is.

I liked everything about the final scene except for the idea of the scene itself, by which I mean that the movie is structured to be bookended by fanservice to the OT. The opening crawl teases Luke’s eventual appearance, and the final scene reveals him. Through the film we are given the idea that he’s a great Jedi and the Jedi are important and magical, but one small problem with this is that he’s reduced to practically macguffin status, like the Death Star plans. Luke’s power is never shown in the film, only told through exposition.

The bigger problem takes more explanation:

The enigmatic nature of Luke in the final shots most closely mirrors the end of ESB, where Luke is left pondering a big question regarding the nature of his father. Both films clearly lead into their sequels, but they are different in that the audience is given a clear problem at the end of ESB. Luke became a Jedi because of his father, so if his father fell to the Dark Side, he could as well. Also, he is expected to destroy Vader, and if Vader is telling the truth, Luke would be massively conflicted about his entire quest. This is the nature of the film’s end, a very precise obstacle for our hero to overcome.

However, the end of TFA leaves the audience with no revelation, no clear problem. Rey finds Luke and holds out the lightsaber. Will Luke accept it? Will Rey become a Jedi and confront Ren? Is Rey Luke’s daughter? Yeah, probably, is my answer to all of the above. But why bother thinking about it? There is no obstacle here for Rey to ponder. This is no second act reversal, but a first act victory like ANH, and in this case the film should have ended on the shot of the Falcon leaving the base. But TFA wants to be a mashup of ANH and ESB, so it has both endings, with neither being particularly strong.

TL;DR version: Luke is a not-so-interesting macguffin, and the opening crawl and final scene is the beginning and ending of ESB tacked onto a functional remake of ANH.