digitalfreaknyc said:
Why is it 25fps???
Sounds horrible.
and you've gotten aliasing artifacts as well.
Harmy does his work at PAL framerate. The actual release will be at the correct speed.
Don't know what's up with the aliasing, either...
That WP3 clip looks great.
Interesting that you put those burn marks back in. It surprised me.
Are you going to do more work on the space shots at the beginning? It still feels like there's still too much red in the Blockade Runner detailing and lasers, Tatooine is too pink, and the whole explosion scene has too much red/pink in it. It has the same problem a lot of the SE recomposited miniature footage has - the pyrotechnics have flattened contrast and weird tints.
That said, as soon as it cut to R2 and 3PO, it felt like I was watching an actual original print. It reminds me of those pictures mverta posted earlier, and seems to match the previous poster's recollections about the color tending green. Completely unlike what most of us are used to seeing, even going back to the original video releases.
1.0 used the walls from the SE version. In fact, most of the background in 1.0 is from the SE - only the soldiers on the ends came from the original painting. I can't remember if it was because Harmy missed it, because he thought the low resolution of the GOUT made it stick out really badly from the '04 footage, or because he didn't like how fake the painting looked.
Someone who had seen an original print on the big screen (possibly mverta) said that even in the original prints, the original matte painting looked pretty fake if you actually focused on it. Cinemagoers in '77 would have been focused on the heroes, and thus on the live footage in the center.
WP2.3 looks like it uses a lot more of the GOUT image - if there is any '04/'11 footage in there, it looks like Harmy reduced the quality to make it blend better with the GOUT stuff. Seems like a good compromise.
Have you considered using the X9 JSC for any shots?
You're right, now that the lightsaber has been perfected, there's still a lot of color flaws in that scene. 3PO's highlights still have too much red, there's way too much blue in the whole frame (excepting the lightsaber), and as you pointed out, the chess pieces are dramatically oversaturated in the '04/'11, even compared to the '97 SE.
Harmy's probably sick of working on this scene, maybe some other time he could come back around to that stuff.
With mverta's recent revelations about how warm the original color timing was, Harmy may potentially have to do color fixes to every single shot in the movie....
You cured Obi-Wan's jaundice! :)
Seriously, that looks dead on. Amazing.
Every time I visit the forum, someone works another miracle to wring some more quality out of either the GOUT or the '04/'11 master. I'm so glad that DJ and Y_T are collaborating on this - the final product will probably make my head explode like Belloq's (figuratively, of course). :)
I'm torn. Jaitea's recolored pic looks great, but I still have this gut feeling that the hue in that scene Harmy's current WP is the correct one, desaturated or no. I just don't know if the other shots are too blue, too cold.
It just kills me every time I think about the fact that it's such a mystery how the film originally looked. Practically every moviegoer on the planet saw it, yet things like the color of Luke's lightsaber still feel like such an enigma...
Yeah, as I said, it was just a quick and dirty experiment, like the one Jaitea did earlier in the thread.
Maybe the "warm" color timing evident in Mike's pics made the saber look cyan in cinemas in '77? Maybe that one shot did look a little more "greenish" even back then?
OK, I did some quick and dirty, not-really-meant-to-be-accurate futzing with the second image in Picture Manager just to see what would happen to the lightsaber if I played around with the hue to make Luke's skin tone look warmer.
Notice that the saber is now a little closer towards cyan. Still more blue than in the other scene, but perhaps it looked a bit more green in that one shot originally. This tweak is not meant to approximate how the color actually looked, just trying to show that maybe the other shots look *too* blue because the rest of the color isn't warm enough.
So many mysteries...
On the spectrum, those colors are to the left of pure cyan (towards pure blue), not on the right side (towards pure green).
In that Making of Star Wars screenshot mosaic I did, all of the shots have it basically the same hue, and it's more cyan than blue, a lot like my saturation tweak of Harmy's. Consider the possibility that the wide shot is right, and the other shots aren't cyan enough. Notice that when you compare the two screenshots, all of the colors look colder in the second shot, not just the lightsaber. I'm looking at Luke's hair and face - they look colder than in the wide shot.
OK, so I went into MS Picture Manager to see what happens if I increased the saturation of the first image. Current saturation is on the left, my increased saturation on the right:
Even though the hue is exactly the same in both, my eye sees my tweaked one on the right as more blue than the one on the left. What do you guys think?
Cobra-Kai just demonstrated that the upper values in the left column are biased towards blue and not green, but here anyway is a little trick I did in MS Paint of all things: I took the color values in the left column, but changed the saturation values to those of the corresponding colors in the right column, and here's what I came up with:
Notice that when the saturation is increased, the top four colors in the left column do look less "green." They look like cyan with a blue bias, just as Stinky said he thought the glow should look. Here's my test without the bottom two colors:
I'll reiterate what I said before - I think the main problem with Harmy's version of the wide shot is that the glow is not saturated enough.
I see it the way Stinky does, the left seems more greenish...but I'm also using a laptop, so...
That's basically what I was getting at. Cyan biased toward blue.
Here's some images from The Making of Star Wars. The overall image is too bright, the saber is totally blown out, but the actual color of the glow feels fairly correct:
Stinky-Dinkins said:
In those lightsaber shots the upper shot leans more towards green, especially relative to the lower cap.
I'd wager that the correct color is in between those two. Something like this:
As I said before, I think we've been corrupted by Empire, where it was a more pure shade of blue. All signs point to there being a bit more cyan; not as greenish as the frame on the left, but not *as* blue as the frame on the right.
Yes, I just watched it again. Notice I kept talking about the glow, not the core. I know he restored the core from the original, but doesn't the blue glow still come from the Blu-ray? That's the impression I've always gotten from that video.
ww12345 said:
I don't think the horizon line in the "Binary Sunset" sequence should be crisp, if that's what people were getting at. I think it should have some level of atmospheric distortion...
The horizon line should be diffused, yes, but notice that the edge of the hut is too. That seems to be an after-effect of Harmy's isolation of the sky so that he could adjust it separately from everything else - it looks like he slightly blurred the dividing line between the two or something?
Harmy said:
I most certainly did not use the Blu-Ray glow in that shot. And the second one is definitely not from Ady's version, you should compare those lightsabre shots with v1.0 and you'll see what I'm talking about.
Oh, sorry, my bad. I have no idea why I thought that. I guess I misremembered.
Harmy said:
Also, I did make the horizon line sharp at first but it looked wrong.
The horizon line looks good - it's supposed to be blurry and diffused, and has always looked pretty much like that. But is there any way you could make the edges of the hut against the sky sharper, while keeping the horizon line soft? The hut is in the foreground, hence the edges should be much harder and clearer than the far-off horizon line.
Stinky-Dinkins said:
ww12345 said:
That's what I wondered as well. Growing up, I remember the blue being closer to the top than to the bottom picture. I don't know the definitive color timing of that element, though.
The top is more green than blue though, and it definitely wasn't green.
As I said, he used the 2011 Blu-ray glow, which is basically the 2004 without the green tint / a more saturated version of the 1997 glow. In Harmy's behind-the-scenes video for that shot, the clip from the actual Blu-ray has a more vivid color, while in his final composite the glow is less saturated.
This is from the actual 2011 SE Blu-ray:
Here's Cobra Kai's screengrab from the WP:
For all the things they did wrong in 2011, the hue of the glow seems correct.
The bottom shot, IIRC, is based on Adywan's corrected version. I think he, like many of us, were somewhat corrupted by years of watching Empire. The glow in the upper pic could be a little more saturated, probably a hair less green, but it seems to have originally tended more towards bluish cyan than true blue.
It's always been difficult to determine that perfect hue that's not *too* blue, but at the same time not too greenish either.
Also keep in mind, it would not have looked exactly the same from shot to shot - even though it was more consistent originally than it is now, every shot wouldn't have completely matched when put side by side. (For example, long before the SE, I think I noticed Vader's saber tending towards red-orange in a couple shots, rather than pure red.)
The slightly aqua cast of the first shot is how the glow looks on the Blu-ray. IIRC, Harmy took the glow from the Blu-ray and matchmoved it with the core from the GOUT.
mverta said earlier in this thread that the original color timing looked warmer than we're used to - can we even be sure that the blade showed up as cold a blue on a cinema screen in '77 as in the bottom pic? In the clips in The Making of Star Wars, the blue glow looks a bit warmer (even with the slightly colder bluish white balance of the Japanese LD transfer of that documentary).
g-force - I noticed that too, I think it has to do with Harmy adjusting the sky separately from the foreground, is that blur covering the "matte line"?
I did some fooling around in Picture Manager to try to replicate the fading, contrast/blowout and slightly desaturated look of Puggo Grande, as well as skewing the color a little blue (to match the slightly bluish white balance), and here's what I got:
Compared to the actual PG:
Obviously, I'm not asking you to make it look like PG, I'm just showing that I was very easily able to take your version and approximate the way the scene looks in PG without much tweaking of the color balance. This particular scene doesn't seem to be particularly faded in PG, the biggest issues seem to be contrast and saturation. Taking the slightly more blue temperature of the PG transfer into account, and leaving the differences in contrast, saturation and luminance aside, the color balance seems to match.
I'd bet that when that print was new, and viewed on a projector rather than a video transfer, it would have looked pretty close to your newest version. It's obvious that the color timing of the scene has moved further and further away from the original with every successive transfer.
That almost exactly matches what it looks like in Puggo Grande, albeit not as faded or blown out. Since Puggo Grande comes from an 1977 16mm print, the remaining color information should reflect the original timing. Since your version looks very close to PG, I'd wager that you got it right.
And the lower sun finally looks correct; it's once again properly diffuse, the way the sun actually looks through the atmosphere, rather than the '04 where it looked like a big red dot pasted over the sky. :)
Luke's tunic wasn't true white, or at least it didn't show up as such in the original color timing. A sort of sandy tan/yellow/gray, very slight but noticeable.
Jaitea's adjustment looks really good, that's close to the kind of timing I'd want to see on a perfect OUT Blu-ray.
I was just watching the Blu-ray of Close Encounters; I wasn't alive to see the film in the theater, but the color timing feels right, it feels like 1977. Due to similar negative/CRI fading issues, I believe that at least some of the transfer comes from an IP, so sometimes it looks kind of grainy (particularly in FX shots), but so what? It still looks like a movie from 1977. If only Lucasfilm was willing to give the OUT a transfer with that kind of fidelity to the original color timing...
Why is it that whenever someone has something rare and doesn't instantly make it available to everyone for free, they're pilloried as greedy hoarders? It'd be a shame if this degenerates into another flame thread, so I think this should be nipped in the bud right now.
I don't think they are holding it back for reasons of profit. If I had to guess, perhaps they and their source are worried about possible legal repercussions from Lucasfilm if they release it. The copyright notice at the end is to LFL. Knowing about how they've repossessed "stolen" film prints, it's probably wiser not to take chances.
