TServo2049

The ITV broadcast is interesting - there's no burn marks, but there's different cropping, the color looks quite different, and it has the 1977 flyover (but the Episode IV crawl). It's obviously not from the same video master as the PAL video releases.

In fact, I bet that ITV didn't receive the film on tape. It looks like they were sent a pre-cropped, Academy-ratio, mono print and transferred it themselves, probably using a film chain hooked up to a VTR instead of an actual telecine. The blown-out contrast, blue-green cast and slightly yellowish highlights remind me of how movies looked on local (U.S.) TV stations in the 70s and early 80s, when they ran 16mm prints live on film chain.

My theory is that the version ITV got was originally prepared for airlines. There are airline prints of the films out there, and from what I can gather, airlines didn't show movies in widescreen. They were Academy-ratio, mono 16mm prints, so a cropped, mono print master had to have existed prior to the video releases.

This would also better explain why the Greedo subtitles on the old video releases are "burned in" and not video-generated - it makes more sense if they used an already-existing subtitled cropped element made for previous non-widescreen versions like airline prints (there aren't any Super 8 digests with the Greedo scene, are there?).

This would also explain the 1977 flyover - I'm assuming that the film element that was used for the ITV print didn't say "Episode IV," and the new crawl was tacked on for this version. (I'd love to watch the ITV version and see how it cuts from the Ep IV crawl to the '77 flyover...)

There's plenty of reasons why it would look different. It's probably a different time of day in the bottom photo. Also, that's a still photo taken in the 2000s; I don't know if it was a digital camera or a film camera, but either way it's not going to look like 70s motion picture film stock.

The choice of film stock, the camera exposure setting, use of filters, and other things determine what a filmed image looks like, even before the final color timing. It can't be replicated using a modern consumer still camera, whether film or digital.

Thanks for providing the uncorrected 82 LD image of the sunset.

msycamore said:

Yeah, of course they did but that's the irony isn't it, scenes looking better in trailers, promos, documentaries and even in chapter menus, but the video transfers of the films themselves are always presented with shoddy quality.

Still, as I said before, according to Mike Verta the '97 colors were inaccurate even in the theater. They were probably closer, but people like Mike and Treadwell noticed color issues from the get-go.

In the 80s transfers, the telecine operator cranked up the gamma during dark scenes. I don't think there's any way to make that shot look accurate - I'm finding that some scenes in these transfers can have fairly accurate-feeling colors coaxed out of them, but others can't. The film colors didn't accurately carry over in the transfer, and it does seem like some color adjustments were made in the video realm - not as severe as 90s transfers, though.

The THX DVD documentary clips look about the same as the ones in Empire of Dreams. Both of them used a different source than the official video masters - for example, Jabba's subtitles were burned in like they were in theaters.

It's the weirdest thing - for the binary sunset closeup, if I go into Microsoft Office Picture Manager, use the Enhance Color tool, and click on the cyan sun as the area I want to be balanced to white, the whole image changes to a more accurate palette.

Again, ignore stuff like color blocking, the pink halo around the sun, etc., this image is auto-corrected by the program using the sun as a point of reference for white balance.

However, it only works with that one shot - using Picture Manager, which is the only image editing program I have (and it's not really a very good one anyway), I can only add or subtract one hue at a time, and I can't get a manual result that matches this automatic correction

By this process of manually adding or subtracting a certain hue, then another one, and so on, and constantly tweaking the brightness/contrast/etc., this is the best I could get out of the middle image from the THX disc (I cropped out the "Star Wars (1977)" caption):

Brightness, contrast, saturation may not be accurate, and once again there's posterization and other artifacting, but I'm working from a considerably darkened image with less contrast detail in it. This is the closest I could get as far as color temperature - matches what I've seen, but not as much color range (for example, the coolness of this version's timing means that I couldn't recover the blue-to-purple gradient in the sky, if I wanted more of one, I had to give up more of the other.)

The wide shot was digitally recomposited and retimed for the SE, and the colors were totally altered. Thus, I can't tweak it to approximate the original colors. Besides, there's no point in doing so, since Harmy already corrected the scene for DeEd 2.0, and that's the closest the SE version of the scene will ever get to looking like the '77 colors.

Even if I had better image editing tools and knew how to use them, I don't think that a certain color curve would magically change the THX/EoD clips to an accurate palette. Even if Technicolor prints were used as reference, the film was still retimed and Mike Verta says it's not accurate to the original colors. Still, I wonder how many scenes still retain some of the accurate colors "hidden" in the image.

The film frame scans are bluish because 8mm projectors used tungsten lamps. When you project the print, it will look like it does in the photos taken off of the screen. (The colors in the pic of 3PO and R2 fall somewhere between Mike Verta's photo of the IB Technicolor print with the 70s projector bulb, and his photo of the same scene with a modern xenon bulb.)

IB Technicolor with 70s light source:

IB Technicolor with xenon light:

8mm print projected:

*jaw drops* Wow. That's amazing. Anybody here wanna try to go for this?

I think the main problem with the 80s transfers is not inaccurate color so much as completely inaccurate levels. The brightness, contrast, gamma, etc. were adjusted during the transfer process so that it would look good on the TVs of the time. Everything has a flat, low-contrast, and often overly bright look (especially in darker scenes like the binary sunset or R2 in the canyon, where the brightness/gamma was obviously turned up).

I don't think these old transfers were timed differently from scene to scene - cinch believes that only general tweaking was done to get the image to match it to the specs of analog video and the TVs of the time. The main adjustments seemed to be to flatten the contrast and boost the gamma.

When a print was transferred to video via film chain (the way movies were run on TV before telecine), the image was always blown out, because film prints have a higher contrast and dynamic range that the analog video of the time could not reproduce. Dark areas would come out as black, light areas would come out as bright washes, and detail would be lost. The ITV airing of the film seems to have that kind of blown-out look; my theory is that they received a print and transferred it themselves, standard operating procedure for film on over-the-air TV at the time.

With that in mind, here's what I was able to get out of the original version of that Luke screenshot just by playing with the brightness/contrast settings in Microsoft Office Picture Manager. I turned the shadows down, turned the highlights up, brought up the midtones a bit, and turned up the contrast. As for the color saturation, I found that I got a better result by turning it *down*, not up. After I did my level adjustments, the colors looked too strong, and as Mike Verta says, the film had muted colors. This is the end result:

Here is a before-and-after comparison of the two (at half-size, to obscure the video noise, compression, and the additional artifacting caused by my adjustments):

I don't think this is exactly how the colors looked on film, and I couldn't bring the contrast up any more without making it look horrible, but it feels a lot closer. It has the warm temperature and fairly muted color that Mike talks about.

These are the tests I did in the other thread:

The original images were screenshots of a PAL video, and my adjustments involved no actual color correction, only brightness/contrast/gamma/saturation. As you can see, they also feel closer to what we know about the original colors.

Adjusting the old 80s transfers will not definitively determine the accurate colors, but if the film source had timing close to the original theatrical version, adjusting the levels to approximate the higher contrast of film might help point us in the right direction. In short, we can't get accurate color out of these sources, but we may be able to find "clues" to the color balance of the scene.

Besides these releases being in pan-and-scan, the adjustments I'm doing cause crushing, blowout and other detail loss, as well as amplifying existing artifacts, so my corrections would look awful in motion. I'm only trying to figure out the balance of the colors; I don't think that watchable color-corrections of these releases are possible. I'm doing this to help -1 with his 35mm project, since the print is not faded, but the transfer still has to be color-corrected.

In the Colortiming and Cinematography thread, I explained that even if the color timing on the film was close to the '77 theatrical color, analog NTSC video was incapable of accurately reproducing it, hence the old joke among supporters of PAL that it stands for "Never Twice the Same Colour." I believe that captures of 80s PAL laserdiscs would be more helpful than the NTSC ones we have. Anybody on this forum have any?

I didn't post the top frame, that came from a Derann 8mm print.

What do you mean about the blue "draining out", Frank? In what transfer?

Even though the colors of the film source used for the old transfers may have been fairly accurate to the original theatrical timing, the analog NTSC color space cannot accurately reproduce the colors on the film. In fact, as Mike Verta told me, modern digital video can't do it either - though sRGB comes closer than NTSC. The British and other supporters of PAL had a point when they said that NTSC stands for "Never Twice the Same Colour."

The screenshots I adjusted came from a PAL video. I think that captures of the 80s PAL laserdiscs may be more helpful than the NTSC ones.

This isn't from the 1982 laserdisc or U.S. rental release. It's from a PAL video - the 80s PAL transfer was sort of different (for example, it had a squeezed crawl and flyover).

-1 and cinch have a theory that the early-80s transfers have the most accurate colors. I was never sure about that - judging by stuff like the lack of the Tantive burn marks, my theory was that a new low-contrast IP was made from the untimed negative, one that would transfer better to 1" analog tape on early-80s telecine equipment.

Now, I'm not so sure. Obviously, tweaking was done so it would look better in the analog video realm, and the image is often way too bright with very flattened contrast. But now I'm wondering if the film source for the pre-1992 releases did in fact have the original timing.

As a test, I took the Binary Sunset image LexX posted back in page 1, which he captured from a "1983 rental video" (possibly PAL, judging by the slighty squished image, indicative of an uncorrected 720x576 PAL capture). I tweaked it in (of all things) Microsoft Office Picture Manager. All I did was turn down the midtones and shadows, turn up the highlights, and turn down the saturation a little.

First the original screenshot, then my version:

Then, as another test, I tweaked the Japanese Special Collection image msycamore posted, also back in page 1. This is from (I think) the Dark_Sega capture, the red channel is bleeding to the right, but look what I was able to get out of it. This time, I turned up the midtones and highlights, turned down the shadows, turned down the contrast (to compensate for the extremely high-contrast result), then increased the amount of red (hue 0) by 10 points and brought the saturation down a couple points.

Original image:

My version:

And the results for both are very close to what Mike Verta says the scene looked like in the IB Technicolor print screening. I was stunned that I could adjust these old 80s video transfers and get a result that approximated the '77 timing. The colors seem to match; it's only the brightness, contrast, and gamma that are completely different.

UPDATE: I decided to tweak the other pan-and-scan images LexX put up

I know that the stars are gone; this is meant to show the color accuracy, even if I have to crush the detail to do it

Again, ignore the crushed/posterized/solarized details on Leia's face and elsewhere. I'm not concerned if the contrast looks weird or if details are crushed out. I'm trying to bring out the colors that the transfer's flat contrast and gamma boosting obscured.

What is it -1 always says? "Colors are not final"? :)

But yeah, I agree. And sometimes R2's panels look teal instead of blue. I'm sure he'll improve the color timing later.

I see what slicker's talking about. Yeah, the 2004/2011 transfer really boosted the reds. Obviously, the color timing people at LFL were more concerned with making the transfer "pop" than with preserving image detail - crushed blacks, clipped reds, etc.

With all the improvements that fans have made to that transfer, it's always jarring when I remember what it actually looks like. The '04 candyland makeover is about as far away from the original color as you can get, unless you were to retime the whole thing in teal and orange (don't give them any ideas for the 3D re-release!)

Something I forgot - not all theater screens are the same aspect ratio. If a 2.35:1 film is being projected on a screen with a ratio closer to 2.20:1, then more will be cropped off the sides.

Also, I've always loved that Letterbox Lunacy article.

Again, that image is based on the Senator screening, which Mike Verta said was "overly-cropped, by a long shot." According to him, that print has platter damage on the edges, so the Senator projectionist probably cropped the image closer than normal to hide them. He also said that about 90% of the image on the print is expected to make it onto a theater screen.

That picture was originally posted by Mike in the Despecialized Edition thread.

Here are the other images from the screening which he posted there:

Mike's original posts are in pages 122 and 123 of the thread. He explains more about the screening, how warm projector bulbs were in the 70s, and how the same print projected with modern lighting looks different:

http://originaltrilogy.com/FORUM/topic.cfm/Harmys-STAR-WARS-Despecialized-Edition-HD-AVCHD-DVD9-and-NTSC-DVD5-AVAILABLE-see-1st-post/topic/12713/page/122/

http://originaltrilogy.com/FORUM/topic.cfm/Harmys-STAR-WARS-Despecialized-Edition-HD-AVCHD-DVD9-and-NTSC-DVD5-AVAILABLE-see-1st-post/topic/12713/page/123/

I agree about the halo. It was airbrushed onto the matte painting, but in the top image (which is based on the 1997 SE recomposite), the upper part of the "two-tone" effect is way too visible, making it look much more like a painting. I'm not faulting Harmy, of course - as I indicated before, the scene was digitally recomposited in '97, and the halo effect doesn't show up the same way it did in the original optical composite.

Here's a frame from -1's test capture of the flyover:

Obviously, the painting looks much more diffused, partly because of the generational loss and increased contrast that isn't in the recomp which came directly from the separate elements, but I'm guessing it's mostly because of how the painting exposed in the original composite. The halo glows more and (IMO) looks better than either Harmy's version or your retouching. (And actually, it also looks better to me than the GOUT version of the '77 flyover, which looks kind of drab and flat.)

I'm obviously not criticizing Harmy. Besides working from the '97 recomp, he doesn't have an IB reference for this scene because all of the British IB prints had the Episode IV crawl and recomposited flyover spliced in, on regular Eastman print stock, for the 1981 reissue. So not only is the flyover on the IB print not the original, it's also faded to a nice pink tinge as well.

Also, there's been some talk about how the starfield seems almost total black on the left side - this is true on all versions of the actual '77 flyover (including the GOUT). Besides the generational loss, the light level seems to drop off on the left side of the entire background layer (look at how the aforementioned atmospheric halo seems to fade out). If you look closely, the stars *are* there, but they're so dim that it just looks like a black void.

Look at Harmy's version - even with the stars so visible and luminant, you can see that the left side is still more sparsely populated than the other two thirds, and that a lot of the stars are little pinpoints. Both the multiple generations of duping and the odd light dropoff on the left made those stars virtually invisible by the time the scene got to the projection-print generation. It wasn't until the '77 flyover was recomposited for the SE that the stars on the left side became visible - in fact, they may be more visible on Harmy's version than on any official version.

(Does anybody know if the starfields were brighter on the '97 theatrical prints than on the '04/'11 transfer? For that matter, how do they look on the '97 video transfer?)

All projections were not cropped the same. If you're thinking of the Senator screening, that was cropped considerably to hide platter scratches on the edges of the print. The film would not have been cropped that much on a 2.35:1 screen in '77.

Mike Verta could explain more about the nuances of projection aperture and cropping.

As an anecdote, I just saw a screening of Fantasia where basically the entire picture area was positioned within the semi-translucent screen border - during loud parts, I could sometimes see the edge of the soundtrack through the left border. I could also vaguely make out the edges of the sprocket holes through the right border, and a teeny sliver of the previous frame through the top border.

As to the first image, the film cells are visible from both the front and the back of the package, and this photo was taken from the back side. That's why it's flipped.

Some more film cell images I found on eBay, this time from the first film. These are a higher resolution than the ones I posted before, but lighting is  much more uneven - you can see that the person who took the photos was shining a flashlight down onto the cells, so some parts will look blown out, others look too dark/translucent (and you can often see the texture of the white bedsheet under the cell). Some of the images have similar greenish tendencies to the Jedi1.net scans, others don't.

R2 and 3PO - same shot as in my earlier post, the colors seem to match:

"There's nothing you could have done." Same scene as one of the Derann images above:

Preparing to completely blow away Alderaan. Lots of warm golden yellow on the button lights:

Luke has a bad feeling about this. Unfortunately, the light source is too concentrated, so the image is way too blown out in the middle. Not sure if the greenish look is due to fading or too much illumination. The colors on the right edge look good, though:

"This is some rescue!" Again, some blowout and greenish highlights (though it's certainly not as green as some of the Jedi1 scans of Death Star scenes):

Red Leader:

From another seller, Ben Kenobi heading for the tractor beam, with a definite yellow-green cast. Not sure if this is due to fading, or due to the camera white balance - it's warmer than the Jedi1 scans, but still, I think it's *too* yellow-green:

Another seller posted some images which are strangely lit - they seem to be backlit, but the light is some kind of rectangular shape positioned at an angle so that part of the image is blown out, and part is too dim.

Leia captured - wow, that's blown out. It looks cold where the light is strongest, but you can see yellow and green and cyan tendencies on the right side where there's not as much light:

"Secret mission? What plans? What are you talking about? I'm not getting in there!"

The Jawas - a nice reddish-gold hue, it feels right to me:

Another seller's photo - this one of Leia and R2. Looks too cool?

A big, sharp, high-res image of Luke, Ben and R2:

Notice how close the color is to this photo Mike took at that IB screening (though his seems a little more muted):

Some more big, high-res photos. First, the Death Star conference room:

It's got some yellow-green in the walls and uniforms, but notice how much better the skin tones look, and how generally warmer it looks, than the Jedi1 scans from this same scene:

Han introduces himself - pretty strong golden yellow cast here:

Chewie in the cockpit. Seems too yellow-green:

Vader grills Leia on the Tantive. Again with the odd light source, not sure what to make of this image:

R2 in the Sandcrawler - again, it has that warm look Mike has talked about, but the photo is kind of soft and there aren't many distinct colors visible, so again I'm not sure what to make of it:

Luke takes his first step into a larger world. Nice and warm, natural skin tones, this is another one that looks about perfect to me:

Just found this one from Empire. Looks pretty blue (ignore the reflections):

Also missed this very good pic of an Empire cell - Lando invites our heroes for a little refreshment:

OK, that's about all the legible film cell images I've been able to find. Sorry, no Jedi, every single cell is faded.

Wow - this is proof that even as late as 1989, new prints that were intended for projection still had the original "warm" theatrical color timing. Obviously, it doesn't look like, say, the IB Tech screening Mike Verta went to, because it's on different stock, the print is tungsten-balanced for Super 8 projectors, the white balance of the digital camera may have affected how the colors came out in these photos (I've seen other Derann screengrabs that are either colder or warmer), and probably other variables as well.

Still, Mike's screenshots, the LPP print, the least faded of the 70mm film cells, and these Derann images all have certain color traits that reflect the way the film was timed back in '77.

Someone in Italy was selling a Derann print last year, and posted some screenshots on his blog: http://passionesuper8.blogspot.com/2011/09/star-wars-episode-iva-new-hope.html

They look a little cooler, with some blue-green tendencies that remind me of the Senator images. Still, I bet if you were to run these two Derann prints side-by-side in the same room on identical projectors, they'd look the same.

I'd just like to point out, the mthr telecine has more vertical info than the GOUT, but it also has a good amount of cropping on the sides.

It's not the brightness of the eBay photo I think is more accurate, it's the color. No version I've ever seen has as much green as the Jedi1.net image. All of the Jedi1 scans of the hospital scenes seem to have a yellow-green cast to the whole image, including skin tones.

And as far as the JSC Empire goes, to my eye it's too yellow as a whole. Even if Hoth isn't as blue as some of us might have thought, I really don't think it's as neutral as in the JSC. Also, to provide another example, 3PO looks too pure yellow to me, almost tending toward greenish - basically, the color of a certain bodily fluid. He's not yellow, he's gold (with a bit of a brass/bronze tinge). Skimming through the whole film, I keep finding scenes where something looks too yellow.

In the thread for DJ's project, I went into an aside about the 70mm film cell scans on Jedi1.net (specifically the ones from Empire), and how they probably don't reflect the actual color timing of the films. I surmise that they may have been auto-corrected or otherwise post-processed after scanning. However, I found some interesting photos of other 70mm cells someone was selling on eBay, which are the best-illuminated digital camera snapshots I've ever seen of these. However they were lit for the photos, the clear areas look neutral white, and so the colors seen in these pictures *may* more closely reflect the colors on the actual film frame.

The bacta tank wide shot (notice the Eastman stamp on the left - could this be LPP?):

For comparison, here's the Jedi1.net scan of the same scene:

Notice how in the top image, the ceiling isn't as green. To me, the top looks more balanced than the bottom.

Here's a rather muted and white-looking Hoth:

Echo Base interior, slightly bluish but also fairly muted:

Leia in Luke's recovery room:

Notice how it's not as yellow-greenish as the Jedi1.net image:

A good-looking cell of Vader - look at how those red lights pop:

"He doesn't want you at all, he's after somebody called, uh, Skywalker!"

The Falcon inside the "cave". The purplish cast suggests that this frame might have some fading (or it could be how it was illuminated, look at the blowout around the sprocket holes):

Another image from the same scene - yes, it's dark and blurry, but it doesn't look as purple, so the visible colors may be more accurate to what's actually on the film:

Unfortunately, some cells are definitely faded. All of the Yoda/Dagobah-related frames I've seen have apparently faded to reddish-brown (possibly sourced from Kodak SP?):

From another seller, Han and Chewie visit Luke in the recovery room. This pic is smaller and fuzzier than the ones above, but the illumination still looks pretty good:

Notice that once again, it isn't as yellow-green-y as the Jedi1.net image:

Luke after the infamous kiss:

More pink and less green than the Jedi1.net image (in fact, the pinkish highlights in the top picture kind of remind me of the theatrical bootleg telecine):

Another small, but surprisingly clear, image, this time of Vader and Captain Piett:

Luke in the Wampa's cave - notice that it's not as blue as in the bootleg telecine or the Puggo Strikes Back early preview, and that Luke's face isn't frostbite purple. Actually, it kind of reminds me of -1's color-corrected version, except with a little more blue than he was able to recover:

Han and the Falcon - again, a bit of a blue tinge evident, but not overpowering:

This other seller has more photos of other cells, but they're fuzzier and I'm not as sure about the color accuracy. Here they are anyway:

Here's a big (but unfortunately fuzzy) image from a third seller:

And from the first film, here's R2 and 3PO when Luke discovers Leia's message. This seems to have the most intact color of any 70mm cell of the first film I've seen so far. The warm golden cast reminds me of Mike Verta's snapshots from that IB print screening. (Hey Harmy, how does this pic compare to your IB scans?)

I'm really not sure how accurate the colors are in any of these pics; some of them don't seem to have any visible fading, while others do. I'm just putting them here because I don't often see images of the 70mm cells that look this good.

I like the comparison, but I will say something about that overly blue 70mm frame.

I'm not sure if that 70mm scan is accurate to how the film would have looked in a theater. Though most of them don't seem to have visible fading (possibly LPP?), we don't know what kind of post-processing was done by the person who scanned them. If they were auto-corrected in the scanner software or some other image editing program, then the brightness, contrast, gamma, saturation, and/or color balance may not reflect the colors on the actual film.

For example, here's the Jedi1.net scan of the bacta tank wide shot:

Now here's an image of a cell of a different frame of the same shot, which I found on eBay:

Notice how the ceiling isn't as green. To me, the lower image looks more balanced. I think the Jedi1.net image had some kind of auto-correct or something. And I'm not sure if even that reflects the "correct" color balance of the film - this was taken by a digital camera, and I'm not sure how the film cell was illuminated (though the light behind the clear areas *looks* correctly white...

Since this really doesn't have anything to do with this project, I'll talk more about the film cells in the Color Timing and Cinematography thread.

All of what Harmy said is correct. After I posted my previous message, part of me kept thinking "Why would an earlier source look grainier?" So now I really don't know why the GOUT appears sharper and "more detailed" than the 35mm, when a 35mm print obviously has more real detail than a standard-definition video transfer, even if it's from an earlier-generation source. Nor do I know why it appears "grainier" when an IP would have less grain than a print.

Perhaps the GOUT has artificial sharpening as well as DVNR? That's the only thing I can think of.

I do know that the Blockade Runner explosion has extra detail in the Technidisc and GOUT, where on actual prints it's blown out and appears solid white, due to the increased contrast with each generation. I was thinking about that when I wrote my original response, but obviously this is something entirely different.

This is why we need to stop using the GOUT as a frame of reference. :)