Spaced Ranger

SilverWook said:

I think Puggo did a capture a few years ago, … It wouldn’t be too hard to rescan it I guess?

Unbeknownst to Puggo - Jar Jar’s Yoda, the first reel saved bad (he checked back to the original capture file to verify). It was irrecoverably corrupted after some 7+ minutes (the remaining 2 files were fine). A reel #1 rescan would be cool. (Puggo's system did introduce chromatic aberration & depth defocus problems that required a few extra steps to counter. If he’s upgraded his hardware since then, that would make it even better!)

I hope your full-screen 16mm is somewhere in it’s future. (Between all the different media, missing frames and such would be easy to spot.) (… not to mention the different versions at different times.)

bishabosha said:
Vimeo link to the Death Star Council Scene CC |-> https://vimeo.com/159645887

I tried to download “original” among the 4 video choices . .

• Mobile SD 640 × 360 / 7.671MB Download
• SD 540p 960 × 540 / 21.025MB Download
• HD 720p 1280 × 720 / 40.524MB Download
• Original 1280 × 720 / 125.882MB Download

. . but it comes up as “corrupted”. Any way to DL this version? I DL’ed the same resolution HD video.

Funny … now that I’ve DL’ed the HD one, it show “file not found” on all selections. So this is Vimeo? 😃

DrDre said:
… there’s some smoothing of detail, but I guess it’s either that or unwanted artifacts…

With this being only a proof-of-concept, I tend to push things a little further for the effect to be obvious. You can dial it back to your liking. Or use something different. For example, as these artifacts are actually enhanced noise, they would be different frame to frame. That might suggest using stabilized temporal averaging including one frame (or more?) on either side (image-block tracking handles in-frame area-movement). (Avisynth has such filters.) Then apply a milder application of JPEG Artifact Removal's Avisynth equivalent to keep more detail, perceived or real, while still reducing the remaining “out-of-place pixels” noise.

(All this is would be so you’d have the source in the best condition for your regrade to work it’s magic without it being wrongly influenced by things such as color-noise or crushed/blown areas.)

@ dlvh

Sure!

Avisynth handles lots of such functions. (I don’t know what the paint program’s JPEG Artifact Removal uses for it’s Digital Noise Reduction. g-force mentioned it had the “look” of a spatial median filter, of which there are such Avisynth plug-in filters.) A few lines of Avisynth script, tunneled into your editor (I think Premiere takes .AVI/.AVS scripts), and you can try looking at the entire movie at that one setting in choppy realtime. I’m sure Lucas Mess™ was messing it up scene-by-scene, if not shot-by-shot. If so, you would script different settings for various ranges of frames – easy enough, but not as interactive as a paint program (which still could be used as a prototyper to make that part easier).

If you must work up things to get Avisynth files into Premiere, you can always, in the meantime, run the script in a video player (most seem to support this) and quickly preview it that way.

DrDre said:

The problem is not in the algorithm, but in the quality of the reference. …
So, if the reference is of high enough quality, the algorithm can probably reproduce it, to a high degree of accuracy. …
The algorithm is in a sense a form of automated curves adjustment. … The curves are adjusted, by matching the cumulative probability distributions for the red, green, and blue channels.

If the source wasn’t damaged as much as is the Star Wars Blu-ray (crushed, blown, stretched, noised), that would be half-the-battle won. Perhaps a uniform (read “simple”) prep to roughly “straighten the picture” might lessen your need to tweak so much.

I took the Blu-ray picture through 2 passes of JPEG-DNR (1st low, 2nd high) to reduce that awful Lucas-noise™ on everything (no, those aren’t age spots on Tarkin's skin; Luke has them, too) while minimizing edge blurring (multiple “lower” passes do better than one “maximum” pass) . .

and an R-G-B contrast adjustment (to a rough approximation of the reference) while setting an upper & lower headroom for the crushed & blown picture . .

That’s it! Simple settings, quick to do, and now it’s prepped (for your regrade) . .

Actually, the prep-result looks amazingly good, with colors magically coming close to on-the-set reality. (The way it was messed up, the entire Blu-ray should be dealt with this easily.)

And, no, I didn’t cheat. Check out this sequence comparison with a full-size area for close inspection. I included an extra column to show the result if DNR is skipped. SPOILER: the noise gets noticeably worse (!) because normal contrasting, needed to bring the picture back, emphasizes that, too.

Top-row is the Blu-ray; Middle-row is JPEG-DNR; Bottom-row is contrast & headroom adjustment:

I wonder if the full-size prepped picture, run it through your regrade process, would come out looking more (or exactly) like your reference picture of choice?

	nn-ee-vv-ee-rr-mm-ii-nn-dd
	nev neve eve ever ver verm erm ermi rmi rmin min mind
	never mind [beep] never mind [beep]

I thought it was a good post and didn’t recall seeing that link before. But what’s a duplicate link among the masses? 😃

poita said:

Even $5 would bring it closer to happening. … will be under the clock-tick of my software license expiry …

My $5 is yours. Go ahead.

I’d like throw that 47 credits (I think that’s the conversion rate), or more, at this project but I would send it U.S. mail. Can that be worked out? (PM me.)

Crush refers to luminance being cut-off at the low end. When color correction is mishandled as was on the Star Wars Blu-ray, the range of luminance “0” through “13”, for example, is all mashed down into blotchs of “0”. Detail is lost, but so is the balance of the picture, which starts to look like an artificial, high contrast.

DrDre said:
I think with the crush in the bluray, less contrast is probably the way to go:

Your 1st regrade looks the like your Verta target. The 2nd regrade doesn’t (looks more like the Blu-ray).

If you think such crushed picture(s) need the help for best conversion – perhaps raising the baseline from 0, to 8 or 12 (pushing the picture uniformly up), and then lowering the gamma from 1.0, to 0.95 (pulling the picture disproportionately down, mostly into the problematic lower end), that would be the best starting point. It would reduce the crushed range for least impact on your regrading.

There is allot of crush in those notorious Blu-ray, dark Cantina shots [top: Blu-ray, bottom: picture dimmed w/crushed R-G-B’s hilighted] . .

. . which carried over into your regrade. I hope it doesn’t make them more problematic.

BTW, as much as I can make out on this lcd screen, your fine-tunings are looking great!

TServo2049 said:
As to the 70mm cells …

I don’t know much about Star Wars’ film-stock pedigree, but I think your pathology approach is important to eliminating clearly additive/defective color, it’s champions notwithstanding.

BTW, if you’ll ZIP the full-sized eBay pictures you saved, I’m certainly interested in getting it. The https://www.wetransfer.com/ is a good site. Without signing up, posts are available for 7 days. (Thanks!)

TServo2049 said:
I have hundreds of images from this movie_maniac guy, I’ve been saving these pictures for months. … I can throw all the images up in a ZIP and post them up somewhere …

Great minds think alike! 😄

I did the same thing for movie.maniac's completed auctions.

http://www.ebay.com/sch/m.html?LH_PrefLoc=2&_ssn=movie.maniac&LH_Complete=1&_ipg=200&_nkw="star+wars"±empire±jedi

As of today’s date, it is 185 pictures (from 20151216 thru 20160310) by searching for “star wars” -empire -jedi. A custom webpage was designed to snag both thumbnails and full-size photos from a webpage-viewer structure, to be saved for viewing offline.

If you can choose particular terms with which you’d expect quality hits in https://www.google.com or https://www.startpage.com or others, just add this extra term to your search . .

site:originaltrilogy.com

. . to restrict the search to this website (or to any website of choice).

Good luck!

DrDre said:
Mike Verta has responded to my question on the greenish walls …

“This is not correct and the walls are not green.”

Aww, and I was just going to post about that! I’ve got the evidence – videogames don’t lie (and I checked those walls with an eyedropper, too!):

Quake 2 mod - Loki’s Minions Capture The Flag map 27 (LMCTF27) - Cellblock 1138 by Der Kommissar

poita said:
Currently the best approach is to match the sensor response curves to the LED emmission curves.

Wow, thanks! I didn’t get far enough to even consider the sensors. Of course!

poita said:
Using an array of RGB LEDs, you can adjust the colour mix by changing the individual flash duration of each colour.

In figuring the somewhat restricted response of original film, exposed to full-spectrum natural & incandescent light (even throughout post-production), is the information loss appreciable due to the spiked spectrums of the R-G-B LEDs? Wouldn’t using some wider spectrum source (like incandescent, or white LED [if truly full spectrum]) produce a superior capture, for now and the future?

(It’s akin to the slices of music on music CDs, replacing analog’s continuous sound. People can really hear the difference. Yes, it’s digital and it may sound great, but it still is damaged by gaps in the audio spectrum. (Note the “comeback” of vinyl LPs.)

Just wondering …

DrDre said:

… to get as close to the original color timing as possible. … correct the contrast, saturation, brightness, and white balance, resulting in the final color grading … it should be pretty accurate.

Thanks for your work-flow! That is always of major interest to me.

I did discover something about program processing over at the 2001: A Space Odyssey thread. Standard picture adjustments (as opposed to individual R-G-B adjustments with the same processing numbers) have a built-in color bias that actually distorts the color . .

The justification for this has something to do with how color is supposed to look on hardware. But notice the resulting “pink-ish” bias from the standard adjustment compared to the expected, clean coloring from individual R-G-B adjustments (it’s the same numbers – only RED is showing here on the drop-down menu, but GREEN and BLUE have the same settings). This might be skewing all our projects. (You may want to test to see if/how affects your processing.)

… oh, and yes, I do love R-G-B!

Thanks for the heads-up. That looks great! Now I must find the plain old trailer in it’s present neglected condition (the more scratches & fade, the better) for an A-B comparison.

On thing about the trailer itself, though. GL has always tried to inject his juvenile humor into his films. Problem is, R2-D2 falling over, hitting the ground, sounding like an empty garbage pail (what’s this foolery? Lost In Space? where’s Dr. “oh the pain” Smith?) surely lost many a viewer from even bothering with this bad/laughable thing called Star Wars.

poita said:
I will have the full guide up in the next month . .

. . if there is any interest, I will post it here when done.

Would this help (click picture for full size)?

@ thxita

When you have opportunity, would you please show a raw screen-cap of this shot (at the beginning of the movie and of this exact frame, if convenient; note the child’s moving feet position) . .

On page 77 of this thread, poita made mention of this very badly faded shot being the worst he had seen. After deep analysis & flash of insight™, I concluded it was actually colorized B&W footage, probably salvaged from some production mishap and unlike any other shot in the entire film. The test of my theory was processing that shot (laserdisc source) from B&W (by complete color desaturation) to colorized (by simple R-G-B biasing, as might be done in the analog 70’s) … which exactly reproduced the original-release shot!

As you may guess, I’m quivering with anticipation (and it’s making me wait) to see that shot in original, reference-quality condition.

This is so excellent! The quality is astounding! This is really something special and critical – thanks to a particular revisionist whose initials we all know so well. Don’t let the words he spoke for Star Wars become a tombstone for this, his other (and arguably his best) movie . .

"The other versions will disappear. Even the 35 million tapes of Star Wars out there won’t last more than 30 or 40 years. A hundred years from now, the only version of the movie that anyone will remember will be the DVD version [of the Special Edition], and you’ll be able to project it on a 20’ by 40’ screen with perfect quality. I think it’s the director’s prerogative, not the studio’s to go back and reinvent a movie."

!! IT’S-AWE-SOME !!