Spaced Ranger

TV’s Frink said:

STOP STALKING ME!!!

Not to rush poita's recuperation (because I’m sure he selected the officers’ ward) …

from The Bridge On The River Kwai:

‘Major’ Shears: "	When the Houston sunk, I made it ashore with a real commander. Later on,
	we ran into a Japanese patrol. He was killed. I figured it was just a
	matter of time before I was captured."
Major Warden:	“So you changed uniforms with a dead man.”
‘Major’ Shears: "	I thought officers would get better treatment. … I kind of got used to
	being a commander, so when I arrived here at the hospital I took a look at
	the enlisted men’s ward and then the officers’ ward and I said to myself,
	‘Let’s let it ride along for a while’. There were certain advantages. I saw
	one of them [a nurse sun-bathing] on the beach."

… but he was going put up a whole new guide for the upgraded film scanner?

That is, if we can tear him away from the beach?

Oops …

I was thinking [computer MMO] RPGs and their “strategy books” … like for “Knights of the Old Republic 2” (KotOR 2):

(I’ll note the "distant-cousin off topic" on my previous post.)

While on the subject of videogames, just a distant-cousin off-topic shout-out to a game from a long time ago, on a computer by-now recycled …

	Quake 2 :: LM-CTF :: Cellblock 1138
.
	CENTER AREA ( connecting corridors )
.
	RED BASE ( prison control room) (and a blue one for Blue Base )
.
	FLAG ROOM ( Leia’s cell )

Thanks! Such things don’t echo high on the Ritcher scale, but they keep

	bouncing around		the caverns		of my mind		.

Some more ideas (only on the avatars again) … angled “banned” stamp with stamp-edges showing /OR/ an “unperson” stamp in passport style (from bottom of this picture) /OR/ a Deathstar circle stamp w stars background /OR/ an Empire stamp (with Empire text):

(The examples above are from image searches & would need reworking to make them fit OriginalTrilogy forum motif.)

"Excellent!"		"Yes!"

Is there a description? (hardware/software used, source info & procedure for capture, type of processing applied [ex: script info for Avisynth], problems encountered & solution methodology, etc.)

Nice. 😃 But I’m thinking a little … more … s i n i s t e r …
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJoExzWnWeA

DuracellEnergizer said:

… I’m not sure I like it.

Yes, when the “dark lords” drop their mild-mannered masks, it is always decrepit-ugly underneath. Mild-mannered Chancellor Palpatine … to … decrepit-ugly Darth Sidious. Mild-mannered George Lucas “director of modern myth Star Wars” … to … decrepit-ugly George Lucas “I’m a '60s, West Coast, liberal, radical, artsy, dyed-in-the-wool 99 percenter before there was such a thing.” The New York Times Magazine - 20120117 “George Lucas Is Ready to Roll the Credits”

Star Wars Modernism blog - 20120607 “Star Wars & Modernism: An Introduction”:

"George Lucas’ life long loyalty to Joseph Campbell’s ideas of archetypal mythic figures and narratives have retarded any-and-all discussions of Star Wars; freezing it where it began: as a “modern myth.” The greatest disservice this does is it frames the film in terms of heros from ancient myth like Theseius, religious figures like the Buddha, and looming figures from history like Hitler … But George Lucas was a young guy from Modesto CA - a product of New World of hotrods and AM radio. Likewise the great majority of his crew were Californians, most, like Lucas, realatively fresh from film school. They might be dressed in the drag of the aristocratic General Rokurota Makabe and Calvery Captain von Rauffenstein, but Star Wars is peopled with characters that would have been familiar to a young man growing up in the 1950s and 60s in small town America; not despots or Buddhas, but uptight conformists and monkish intellectuals.
…
“Darth Vader was not a German Fascist, he was an American fascist (lowercase f). He is the Ugly American - a rigid Cold War ideologue. The inside of his helmet stinks of Brylcreem, gin, and Pall Malls. Yoda was not the Buddha, he was an old Leftist like Obi Wan - black-listed progressives; out of work in the wake of McCarthyism, one-time culture warriors exiled from the bright lights of Hollywood and New York, licking their wounds in back-waters like Modesto CA. Lives that were once public and grand, were wrapped in moth eaten tweed, crowded into three-room bungalows, hidden behind ratty overgrown lawns, reduced to serving Nescafe to the random teenager looking for an abandoned past of radicalism and fame: ‘I haven’t heard that name in a very long time…’”

Through the darkness travels energy – powerful, complex, and … encoded. From the distant reaches, at the speed of light, it finally collides with solid matter. Unmindful and undeterred, it continues on, but emerges permanently changed into more powerful form. Force! And where there was once silence, now thunder …

.

Ground Zero presents
.
"The new Star Wars film officially opens tonight and there has never been so much excitement and anticipation for a film in a long time. The space fantasy movie has captured the hearts and minds of many generations. I am most definitely a fan of the films and was even begrudgingly being an apologist for the barely tolerable prequels where we find out how Anakin Skywalker fell from grace to become Darth Vader. … The Death Star, an ominous base with the ability to destroy an entire planet, was later obliterated by the freedom fighters of the public. The death toll was 300,000 loyal subjects of the Empire.
.
“Lucas has done what artists constantly do: created something that on the surface seems harmless, but as we dig deeper into the politics of ‘Star Wars’ reveals a story told – and played out – throughout history. From the Roman Empire to Nazi Germany, we have seen these stories, …”
.
“In modern American conspiracy history, we have a secret fear that a darker power of [illuminised] intelligence operators are in control of our government. Our government has a leader that hides many secrets. The people wonder about his origins, his birthplace, his childhood, his family life and what loyalty he has to God and the Republic to which he serves. If we choose to believe in a darker narrative, “The Force Awakens” becomes more of an eerie doppelganger to what is happening in reality.”
…

.

	.		.

msycamore said:

Lucas talked briefly about it at the end of this Nolan interview: http://www.dga.org/Events/2011/04-april-2011/George-Lucas-on-Star-Wars.aspx

Great link, thanks! (Yeah, it’s taking me a while to catch up.)
So, has anyone figured out a way to save this video, short of brute-force, continuous screen-grabs? I tried the all usual methods without success.

I just saw a “robo-post” (so the explanation went) and clicked on his it’s name for other posts, and up came an unexpected notice that he it was banned. In the old forum, there was a darkened overlay on ALL banned-posters’ posts, to show a poster’s banned status. That was annoying as it was hard to read ANY of those posts, even ones that did not stray beyond the rules.

There isn’t any just visual status now. If there are plans to do such, how about an overlay only on the avatar? Here are a couple of examples that came to mind, beyond simple darkening. (The below .PNG uses transparency for ease of application and were put over the default avatar for sizing.)

From these (that is cool!)?

How did those originals start off and what is the difference after your re-encode?
(Always wanted to get them [and the “timecode version”] but never had the bandwidth.)

• OT forum formatting looks better, now, in Firefox (v.37.x).
• Opera (v.12.x) still looks like it has no formatting instructions. Setting it to identify itself as either Firefox or Internet Explorer (name only, no version number) doesn’t change how it looks.

It’s too bad that nightstalkerpoet thinks it’s really too bad about OracleBoy77 thinking it’s too bad.

"http://tinyurl.com/sotss" comes up with an error because it’s long-link of "https://www.wetransfer.com/downloads/7c5cf031e140d844bfff8bf329d1451820151110164419/b0f66a" (from 11/15) comes up expired.
(Perhaps poita may UL that clip again for those who missed it. For now, check out the few representative [and really nice!] screencaps on page 37.)

eBay had an auction for a Toy Story 35mm trailer printed in 1995 on Eastman color print film #16, with (what looks like scanned, not screener) samples from the reel. The first (Woody & Buzz) looks mis-captured with high contrast and blow-out. Of the rest, only the final sample (crowd of toys) looks like a properly balanced capture.

eBay - 35mm Cartoon Animated Walt Disney Preview “TOY STORY”

Does “The Hidden Fortress” == “A Hidden Base”?
Only Kurosawa & Lucas knew for sure, until now …
http://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/883839

Bosk said:

… he even said in the book icons he never wrote the whole story and these drafts show only the Ot http://starwarz.com/starkiller/category/star-wars-scripts/

Good link! Thanks for that resource!
But be certain to follow a link within for “The Star Wars (Story Synopsis)” and go to comments at the bottom of the page to a more telling link …

Film Club: Star Wars Episode IV (Lucas, 1977) - Akira Kurosawa News said:

Although Lucas had already created a fair amount of background material by the time of the first film, the characters and the overall story kept evolving as he worked on the films. … It is in connection with this constant creative evolution of Star Wars that Akira Kurosawa comes into the picture. It is often pointed out that the first film of the series, Episode IV, which we are watching this month, has clear connections with Kurosawa’s The Hidden Fortress, our last month’s film club title. …
When we compare The Hidden Fortress and Star Wars Episode IV, it is clear that calling the latter a remake of the former is a stretch. Yet, the two films certainly share common elements: they are both set at a time of civil war, Lucas’s two robots are clearly based on Kurosawa’s two peasants, both films feature a princess who is central to the story, and the jedi seem to have been modelled after samurai. …
In fact, in order to discover the real Kurosawa in Star Wars, we need to go back to Lucas’s 1973 story synopsis, which was one of the first written treatments of what was to become Star Wars. In Lucas’s synopsis, after a space fortress is destroyed, a general is escorting a princess into safety in a civil war torn 33rd century galactic empire. They are disguised as farmers and in possession of valuable spice. When two bickering bureaucrats discover some of that spice, the general captures them and makes them join the escape. In their journey home, the group has to overcome a number of obstacles. In the end, they successfully arrive at their destination, and the princess’s true nature is revealed to the bureaucrats, who are also rewarded for their help. …
A year later, by the time Lucas had finished the original 1974 rough draft, much had changed. … Yet, it can be said that Lucas continued to keep Kurosawa at the back of his mind. Some clear influences can in fact be spotted also in the later films. Episode VI for instance has a speeder bike chase similar to the horseback chase in The Hidden Fortress. Meanwhile, Episode I makes use of the idea of the princess having a double who gets sacrificed to save her. Many of the costumes and designs are also heavily inspired by Japanese motives, and supposedly Lucas was even hoping to cast Toshiro Mifune as either Obi-Wan Kenobi or Darth Vader.

Do you dare cross over to the dark side of Lucas revisionism/homage? Then they even recommend a “proper order” to watch all GL’s Star Wars films. “With Kurosawa influences spread across the two trilogies, one may actually feel compelled to watch the whole saga, … I actually followed exactly this order this week, and having never seen episodes II, III or V, and remembering almost nothing of the rest, this order worked pretty well.”

But, then again, you knew all about those “samuri swords” from the beginning …

Intruder said:

Spaced Ranger said:

DeHalo_alpha() actually lightens the source. It is Tweak() that pulls it back down again …

Right, … Although an interpolation still remains?

Yes. There isn’t any correction that can be made within DeHalo_alpha(). Tweak() or another function must do it.

Several people have stated that they noticed a green shift in V15 (see Page 15,

My guess is the color shift is compounded from all those ConvertTo’s.

by the way: Are we not able to directly link to posts here?!).

We can. It’s clunky, but you click on the poster’s name and up comes ALL his posts. One must wade through them (by date is a must) to come to the isolated post with link directly to it. Then use markdown-it format to make a referring link in one’s post.

DrDre already tried to keep conversions to a minimum as … he also resolved a problem that came from colorspace conversions. … Why don’t all plugins even support one “standard” colorspace like RGB32?

It’s the history of Avisynth. Processing some colorspaces were easier to figure out and faster to execute than others. Later, they started work on other well used colorspaces. By then, many had already written their plug-ins for the earlier colorspaces and moved on. So it a hodge-podge of timing and missed opportunities and lost interest.

Now that computers are fast enough, Avisynth can/should be re-written from the ground up in an “uncompressed” colorspace. (Easy for me to say.) Oh, wait, aren’t they doing something like that now? (The system I use is NOT up to date. So I’m not keeping watch on development.)

TK428 said:

ray_afraid said:

Han was never a “cold-blooded killer”. Greedo was gonna kill Han no matter what. He had just said so!
…
Han’s actions were perfectly justified.

… His life was threatened and he was at the wrong end of a bounty hunters weapon. In that moment it is kill or be killed.
I don’t understand how George can be that far removed from reality …

Well …

The New York Times Magazine (2012) - George Lucas Is Ready to Roll the Credits
… Lucas said, “I’m a ’60s, West Coast, liberal, radical, artsy, dyed-in-the-wool 99 percenter before there was such a thing.”

We’re talkin’ “agenda” here. Lucas is an Orwellian propagandist – he says one thing when it suits him, and then a different thing when that suits him. That’s probably why he’s always so glum. Nobody is getting all his secret meanings; and when he spells it out, nobody cares about his secret meanings. They think Star Wars is about spaceships (for the boys) and sex-symbols (for the girls). And it is!
Poor George.

thorr said:
It would be interesting to see the bluray … to see how it is supposed to look.

(Sorry, but first reaction is … that it’s a funny thing to say around here.)

But, yes, the Blu-ray does show the helmet almost like it was processed (no solid black line along the front):

(fullsize 1920x824: http://www.vcdq.com/files/samples/16-2011/64867/96247362.jpg)

about how the “After” was constructed (if it is SRV15 or not)

The “before” was SRV15 and the “after” was SRV15 processed with the Avisynth code shown with the picture(s) posted here.

There are several issues: The darker part at the very top of the soldier’s helmet is removed;

All those deep-dark parts were bad-sharpening artifacts. The remaining lighter line on the very top of the helmet is a residual halo and should be removed, too, possibly with a 2nd pass of DeHalo_alpha() at new setting for that.

his mouth looks strange,

Only because … “We’re on a diplomatic mission … cough, choke, gag, sputter.”

the brightness (black level) of the image changed,

Already noted and with a mention on an easy fix.

and overall detail is reduced.

Overall noise is reduced. Detail is still there. See the mention about sharpening and DeHalo-ing.

Hope that helps!

DeHalo_alpha() actually lightens the source. It is Tweak() that pulls it back down again (“bright=-5”). Avisynth docs note that Tweak()'s variables are floating-point. One should be able to set “bright=-4.5” and get a compromise-image between the two previous test results.

Aside from non-pro LCD monitors’ “what you see isN’T what you get”, the sequence of processing in Avisynth may significantly affect the result. I didn’t realize all the extra processing DrDre was throwing at it outside of the super resolution program until I read his last version: Star Wars GOUT in HD using super resolution algorithm (page 50) - SRV15.

While I’m at it, here’s a warning about ConvertTo???() – to change the colorspace. It’s considered prudent to make minimum use of this function by grouping same-colorspace processing under a single ConvertTo, or by only using functions that operate under the same colorspace. Colorspace conversions have rounding errors, which compound in the destination. I counted one, two, three, four, … well, allot of ConverTo’s, and each use negatively impacts the final product’s integrity. That part of the script, at the very least, should be optimized.

Oh, yes, I used DrDre’s SRV15’s screenshot from the Star Wars SRV11-to-SRV15 comparison - frame 8228, also from page 50.

.

@ DrDre
BTW, AWESOME project!! Loved following it and your results!
(“THX 1138” laserdisc needs a similar treatment. Hmmm, but why does that ring a bell? Oh, yeah … another movie from that same Lucas guy!)

Wow, thanks for that mouse-over compare! While I’m moving the mouse on and off the pictures, I can easily angle my viewing and better see the fix on this angle-sensitive LCD screen. (CRT, come back! You were good!) It looks even better than I realized, especially on those black crayon-lines on many edges – gone!

I’ve found that DeHalo-alpha() tends to lighten the picture overall (it must be the “additive” way the fix is obtained). That’s the reason for Tweak(), to restore the luminance level. In the 1st picture group (previous post) I put in a -4 brightness. Some areas still looked a little light. So on this last group I put in a -5 brightness. What it really needed was brightness AND contrast adjustments, to balance the spectrum from top to bottom. I tried that the 1st time around, but Avisynth’s no-feedback commands made it a frustrating endeavor. That’s why I finally left contrast at it’s default value (does nothing) in Tweak() – just to let it be known it’s there and can/should be used, too.

Again, don’t let post-application “softness” mislead. It was that way before “they” applied the wrong “type” of good-news/bad-news sharpening. I made sure to limit the re-sharpening just enough so as to roughly match the original picture’s sharpness without much affecting noise, jaggies, and outline remnants, with the numbers I worked up.

LimitedSharpen() is one of those non-intuitive-numbers functions. More experimentation than in my proof-of-concept would be needed to work out stronger sharpening without also “enhancing” picture artifacts. (It’s the same with DeHalo_alpha() and it’s functionality. More experimentation need there, too.)

TV’s Frink said:
He’s either a liar or an idiot. I prefer to think he’s a liar.

Obi-Wan “old Ben” Kenobi said:

Who’s the more foolish? The fool, or the fool who follows him?

So which are we?

Previously (the Fleischer Superman Cartoons thread), I was thinking about a Technicolorizer in a paint program using functions that would also be available in Avisynth (overlays, inversions, scaling, etc.). But I just had a brainstorm (ooooh pretty lightshow) for a different approach. The paint program has a colorwheel for hue, saturation, and lightness adjustments. It also has the alternate function of breaking down the spectrum into R-G-B C-Y-M divisions to apply adjustments on those divisions independently.

The whole idea of the Technicolorizer is to restore the strong-primary-colors look of Technicolor’s narrow spectrum sensitivity to the 3 colors that make up film and make it’s films “pop”.

Other film stock are not as narrow and each color picks up neighboring secondary colors – resulting in a comparative muted colors.

In this quick test using the colorwheel, I adjusted the saturation higher than one normally would want, to make more obvious the differences between the various saturation applications. (Sorry for this rushed and abbreviated article. Even this little write-up gobbled more time than I have to put to it.)

• The 1st picture is the recent scan. (Keep watch on background foliage and hand & face color.)
• The 2nd is your every-day, standard, whole-spectrum saturation of +50. Typically, nice coloring on everything also results in glowing skin.
• The 3rd uses the colorwheel’s divisions to saturated, to +50, only the R-G-B divisions of the spectrum. Notice that we’ve achieved stronger color in many areas than picture 2, without making the skin any worse. But our R-G-B spectrum is not yet narrow enough.
• The 4th picture uses the spectrum divisions to over-raise the R-G-B areas to +70 and the whole spectrum to drop everything down, by -20. (This gets us back to the test level saturation of +50.) It has the effect of not only raising the R-G-B, but also lowering the adjoining secondary colors – the ultimate Techinicolor spectrum-narrowing simulation! Notice the colors really come out on everything and the skin glowing has actually subsided. (It should look even more natural at a +40-ish saturation target.)