Stotchy

Better encoding setting this time around for your 4k version would be much appreciated!

It started as a thread for how to work with the Star Wars 4k blurays.

Ideally I was hoping to add an extra step to that workflow to correct the errors of these releases and return them to neutral rather than dim.

Re your comments around the settings themselves, clearly you are not familiar with how dark these releases are when compared to all other commercial releases.

All good though, there is good discussion around this on the other forum so I’ll continue it there.

I’ve been playing around with the OT 4K blus in Davinci and comparing them to other studio releases.

All three films are very dark when compared to other commercial blurays, I can see this in practice on my HDR TV and on the scopes in Davinci.

Which got me thinking that perhaps this is due to an authoring or encoding error. So I set out to test this to see if there is a single set of adjustments that can be applied to all three films to improve the picture.

Sure enough the same tweaks to Lift, Gamma and Gain improved all three films equally which leads me to think that there was an error somewhere with the encoding of the OT (I haven’t looked at the other films).

The settings I used were:
Lift -0.03
Gamma 0.04
Gain 1.10

I’m not an expert colorist, so I’d appreciate any feedback on these three settings and whether I should tweak them some more.

This release is probably the best quality source for the original Emperor. The colors are a bit off though but it’s great considering it was released by Adywan pre Blurays

What happened to Dreamaster?

Lots of questions here that are answered in the first post of the thread.

Re grain, I regret even mentioning that there is added grain as grain is such a divisive topic.

The grain added is so subtle that if you werent looking for it you wouldn’t notice it. It’s there purely to make the 4k83 shots blend seamlessly with the Disney 4k shots. I’m tempted to remove mentioning it in the first post.

This is my preferred version. It is not “superior” to any other version as people’s tastes differ.

But if you were looking for a high quality theatrical construction with great colors akin to what Disney should have released then you will love Destiny.

It’s on MySpleen

If you like vibrant colours and minimal grain then Destiny is for you.

Not that easy buddy. Took a lot of time and a number of settings in Davinci Resolve. And it’s different for each film and depends on how you tonemap the footage. We used the HDR 4k bluray as our main source which is totally different the Bluray.

I’m being constantly bombarded with requests from people to invite them to the SWT forum.

99.9% of the users making these requests have literally just signed up to OT.com and never posted or contributed anything to the discussions on this community.

As such if you are one of these people I’m just going to ignore your request.

trillary dump said:
One, I was offline for a few days. Two, I usually don’t give links to brand new users. Three, starting four new PMs repeatedly asking for a link isn’t going to get you anywhere…

I should really adopt this policy with the Destiny projects.

In short, nowhere near them.

Disney was clearly going for a “look” with the OT. That look being “gritty” I guess?

All three films have been deliberately desaturated and darkened by the colorist. They are much flatter and darker than they should be.

In addition, each film (with the exception maybe of ANH) has a color hue that has been added to it.

For Empire it’s pushed to blue/green, which supposedly makes it look colder (and no this has nothing to do with the debate about how blue Hoth should be its something completely new).

For Jedi it’s pushed to red, which makes Endor look very brown and earthy in comparison to how it has looked in previous releases. Again a deliberate choice of the colorist.

However it’s not all bad news. Generally the shot to shot timing across all films are consistent (with the exception of Empire whose reel 1 is all sorts of fucked up). So a single correction can be applied to each film which vastly improves the color timing and brings it close to how it should look or did look in the theatre (optical printing and print stock color pushes aside).

We’ve already done this for ROTJ Destiny and we’re doing it now for Empire. We’re making improvements to brightness and saturation and removing the hues that have been added.

Here are some screenshots of Jedi after the Disney color issues have been reversed

Sounds great!

Actually we’re in the middle of Empire and are hoping to have it out before Xmas in which case it’ll be NTSC GOUT synched to work with hairy_hen’s soundtrack.

If a newer version of hairy_hen’s soundtrack comes out post release then it’s easy enough to do another release that syncs with it.

Jedi is theatrical, Empire is theatrical also (but theatrical and GOUT are the same for Empire IIRC). Are there additional frames in Star Wars theatrical vs GOUT?

For me it’s really about making sure each film syncs perfectly with the latest hairy_hen soundtrack.

Happy to take advice.

Even the “digital” home video remasters deliberately departed from the theatrical colors to create a specific “aesthetic” to their look.

The 04 and 11SEs, I really don’t know what they we’re going for. Incompetence maybe?

The 1920SEs have gone for a muted and more desaturated look. Empire has a green/blue push introduced, whilst Jedi has a red push making everything look kinda brown. However in these releases there is pretty good shot to shot consistency so you can do a lot with a single color correction to the whole films to improve them.

Check out Jedi Destiny if you’re interested. We’re also working on Empire atm.

1. correct
2. neither

There is a 97SE scan of Star Wars on swt.com It shows what the theatrical colors of the 97SE Star Wars

Looks like he deleted his post…

A lot of anger there buddy. You should actually take a look to see how grainy it is. It’s pretty minimal.

I’m in the camp of wanting to see grain that is on the negative (which tends to be pretty fine grain) which is how the film was always intended to look.

But I’m not in the camp that loves 4k83 no DNR which has many layers of grain on it from the optical printing process. It’s too much and too distracting for me to enjoy.

Yes many commercial releases have DNR to varying degrees. Typically the aim of this is to reduce picture noise and dirt and not remove grain that was on the negative. Sometimes they fuck it up like on the original Bluray of Predator but for the most part you can see grain on Blurays of any movie that was shot on film. So I really don’t think that you know what you are talking about and that perhaps your anger is misplaced.

In the case of the Disney Star Wars films most of the negative grain has been completely scrubbed off which is because the masters for these 4k releases we’re originally intended for a 3D theatrical conversion.

It looks bad so we added a layer of fine grain to mimic negative grain and to best replicate how a proper restoration would look. It also has the benefit of better matching with the replacement shots which have been DNRd but still have some fine grain.

But hey if a bit of intended grain in movies that are shot on film is enough to make you have “enough with the whole community” then it’s probably best you left anyway.

PM’d

PM’d

Don’t be sorry. We appreciate the help.

Hostmaster said:

I found a compression glitch (minute 00.20:34)on the 4K version

Sorry mate I wasn’t able to replicate this issue either. PM me and we can try and troubleshoot.

I’ll def fix that. Thanks for pointing out.

PM’d