Williarob

Mavimao said:

This sounds like an awesome project! Are you going (Han) solo on this, Willarob, or are others helping?

I am impressed by the screenshot comparison from up above. The blu-ray does SEEM sharper but it could just be artificial sharpening.

Also, take a look at 3pO’s exposed stomach area. Much more detail in the 4k than the bluray.

Dr. Dre is helping with the colors, but I’m running solo on the cleanup at the moment, mainly because of the staggering amount of data involved. Even if I was to copy all of the data for a single reel onto Hard Disks and ship them out, you need a beast of a machine to process it, or it really is a case of click, wait 10 seconds, click, and believe me - that gets old real fast. A basic cleanup on a single frame typically takes between 1 and 5 minutes depending on how thorough, but on a slower PC it can take nearly an hour. Which is why I abandoned the 4k idea quickly the last time I tried it.

camroncamera said:

I don’t know how much crowd-sourced help you’d like to have… but it would be cool if there’s a way for contributors to be able to easily access each shot at any completed stage of restoration. For example:

raw scan only
raw scan + Dr Dre color restoration
color restoration + stabilization
stabilization + rough dirt pass
rough dirt pass + fine dirt pass
fine dirt pass + final scene-to-scene color correction
etc. etc.

One-shot-at-a-time lossless downloads would prevent a whole movie from running wild on the internet, and restoration enthusiasts could learn and sharpen their skills on easily-manageable chunks. The obvious downside is the massive duplication of material when successive passes are rendered and uploaded. Some work, though, could be XML-only corrections that the end user renders on their own workstation. This would help alleviate duplicate fully-rendered version-after-versioned footage from accumulating on the project server.

I think there is just too much data. Each source frame is about 100 MB, so I don’t typically keep copies of each step. Also a lot of the process is scripted, using custom JSX Javascripts that I wrote for Photoshop and After Effects. I’ll put together a video to demonstrate the full process.

Blackout said:

Williarob said:

Blackout said:

Here’s my shot at a color correction:
http://screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/188180

I like that. The pink tint is gone.

JEdit: Sorry, I was looking at it on my phone. If the 2 images are labelled correctly, then yours is even pinker than mine…

Is this more up your alley?
http://screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/188196

Yes, that’s better. His face isn’t so red.

Blackout said:

Here’s my shot at a color correction:
http://screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/188180
I like that. The pink tint is gone.

JEdit: Sorry, I was looking at it on my phone. If the 2 images are labelled correctly, then yours is even pinker than mine…

quin82 said:

theMaestro said:

Did anybody else have trouble viewing the preview clip? I tried opening it but VLC freezes on one of the first few frames and then doesn’t play the rest. But anyway, that one frame I could see looks great!

Yeah, I have the same problem. Maybe it’s the HEVC codec? And I must agree, the single frame looked really awesome 😉

Perhaps you are missing a codec? I used Handbrake to encode it, but you might find that the latest Divx codecs / player would work.

It could also be your Hardware. Even on my twin Xeon and Core I7 PCs it doesn’t always play smoothly. 4K is a lot of data!

NeverarGreat said:

So what sources were used in this preview? I know that the Rebel trooper shot was Eastman, but I would have thought that this would have been more grainy. Is this clip denoised? Because I can’t imagine people wanting an even sharper version.

Yes, this clip is the denoised version, which I prefer. The (still noisy?) version is just as sharp, just grainier. I’ll post that soon too so you can decide which version you prefer.

For those of you who remember the Saving Star Wars site… The Wheels of progress are back!

http://www.thestarwarstrilogy.com/starwars/page/Project-4K77

Too bad it only works with 8-bit color images. I’m not seeing a lot of difference though between the “conventional upscale” and ASS (A Sharper Scaling - unfortunate abbreviation)

(This is the LPP, pre-color correction).

camroncamera said:

…

UHD Video sample looks amazing on my Dell 3216Q. The whites are still a bit pink, and the shadows are a bit green, but the overall image quality put a big grin on my face.

Good! I’m glad. Yeah, color correction is still a work in progress, but don’t worry. I have top men working on it.

fmalover said:

You mean Disney AND 20th Century Fox. Remeber the first Star Wars is 100% the property of 20th Century Fox.

Right, but at this point Disney is clearly in the driving seat.

I’ll probably create a 1080p Bluray version (no seamless branching this time!). Not sure that (cheap/free) software exists to create 4K Blu-rays at the moment. Scenarist UHD is a little out of my price range. Do you need special discs and burners too?

Created a new topic:

http://originaltrilogy.com/topic/Project-4K77/id/51666

The goal of Project #4K77 is simply to create a version of the 1977 Pre-Special Edition version of Star Wars, that will look good on a 4K Television or monitor. Most of the source material is 35mm film scanned at 4K, processed at 4K and rendered at 4K. When no 4K footage is available, an upscale from either the SSE or the Official Blu-ray will be used.

Learn more about the 35mm sources:

Should Disney do the right thing, and release a 4K version of the original Trilogy before this project is completed, then it will probably turn out to be a complete waste of time and effort, but I’m fine with that. Even a straight scan of an original interpositive with minimal restoration would be amazing.

This project will not be cleaned to the same standards as Legacy Edition - not even close. It probably won’t even be as clean as the SSE, but it will be sharper, more detailed and have more consistent colors. The colors in the Teaser video are not final, and I think most people will agree that the contrast and saturation are little too much, but that is easy to dial back. For the shot seen in the teaser I went all out, spent about 5 hours cleaning it up. I won’t be doing that for every shot!

Techniques video:

Because I know some people like the denoised, degrained/regrained look of the Despecialized Edition (and other people hate it) I am working on two versions concurrently. The first will be cleaned and color corrected only, while the second will be denoised too. So you can pick which one you prefer.

Due to limitations of both time and space, the version with Digital Noise Reduction (DNR) will not be completed.

What set this project in motion? Well, after finishing the SSE I took a complete break from Star Wars for the rest of the summer, but then in September I upgraded my workstation to twin Xeon, 10 cores each, 128 GB RAM and a Quadro K2200 Video card. I had tried working with 4K content before, for the Silver Screen Edition, and found my computer to be wanting. It was click, wait 10 seconds, click. Just not practical. So the truth is, that this project began only to test my new system’s capabilities. And, it performs wonderfully. Every bit as fast as working in 2K on the old system.

Here is the latest clip:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nTPU8rY0ZF8

The main project page can be found at:

http://www.thestarwarstrilogy.com/starwars/page/Project-4K77

I will do my best to keep that page up to date with the current progress.

For all newcomers, please register at http://forums.thestarwarstrilogy.com/index.php where this discussion continues. Please use the same username there as you use here. Any registrations for usernames that cannot be found on OT.com will be rejected.

No need to post here that you have registered.

If you have already registered but never received the confirmation email, just send me a PM and I can manually confirm your account.

If you have a question, PLEASE SEND ME A PM, rather than posting to this thread, thank you!

fmalover said:

DrDre said:

I couldn’t resist 😉. Here’s my attempt at manually grading the frame starting from Williarob’s correction. I took out some of the green:

I must say I like this.

I do too. I didn’t actually “grade” my clip anyway - I just balanced the blu-ray clip, then matched the cleaned up SSE to the balanced blu-ray (all via Dre’s tools). Using the blu-ray as a color reference is probably not the best idea, but since the point of the video was to bring it up to a level where it could be merged with the blu-ray footage that’s the direction I went…

I like the first one a lot.

For embedding images I followed the examples in this link: https://en.support.wordpress.com/markdown-quick-reference/

Have at it:

https://we.tl/jIFpeXd2dz

Photoshop PSD, exported from After Effects. Bottom layer (SSE) is the frame as it was released, then there is a layer for each effect with NeatVideo at the top (ungraded). Also included are the GOUT and Blu-ray frames.

Lasz said:

What strikes me is that the orange/brown noise in the shots is so prevalent that it becomes part of the overall color tone of the picture and I wonder if that wasn’t intentional. (not the noise, but the color) It gives the shots a bit of a sandy/desert-y look and frankly, I kinda like it. (maybe because that’s how I remember how the shots looked from VHS) But I also remember that they shot the desert scenes through a “panty hose filter” on the lens, which acts a bit like a color filter and which leads me to believe that might have been a deliberate choice for the color tone of the picture.

What I see in Williarob’s and Mike’s cleaned up shots is that by removing the dirt and noise, this color has also been taken completely out and left with a very clean, natural looking shot but I wonder if that’s how the shot’s actually supposed to look, color wise.

Good point. Perhaps something more like this is what they were going for?

rather than this:

Wazzles said:

Williarob said:

However, I would anticipate the Team Blu releases to be as high quality as we can possibly make them, without being destructive or straying into Special Edition or Despecialization territory.

Does this mean the Team Blu stuff is going to be entirely 35mm?

That’s the plan.

This is just a proof of concept at the moment, really I just wanted to test the plugins and see what they could do. However, I would anticipate the Team Blu releases to be as high quality as we can possibly make them, without being destructive or straying into Special Edition or Despecialization territory.

While I’m sure he did use that hue changing method to greatly reduce the blobs, I am also sure he used RevisionFX DE:Noise and possibly REvisionFX DE:Flicker on that shot.

As promised, here is my landspeeder cleanup video. In this video I test out a bunch of different Noise filters for After Effects. Surprisingly, Neat Video 4 is not the best filter to use on the almost static SandCrawler scene, though it does by far the best job on the Landspeeder scene…

http://www.thestarwarstrilogy.com/starwars/post/2016/09/15/Cleaning-Up-Team-Negative-Ones-Silver-Screen-Edition-of-Star-Wars

Though it didn’t make it into the video, I did try out Mike’s technique, changing the Hue on each channel and I can see how that might work to a certain extent, if you have the patience and the skill. It looked like each color pass would probably need to be in it’s own layer or at least use masking? Darth Lucas if you have any screen capture software I’d love to learn more about that technique.

Looking at Mike’s ‘final’ result though - which was still a work in progress at the time - it looks to me like he still denoised it with something like Neat Video after he was done playing with the hue controls…

Grading my own results:

Sandcrawler Shot: B+
Landspeeder Shot: C

Removing the grime in the landspeeder shot just left my shot looking a little too plasticy smooth, and hiding that with new, artificial film grain was the best I could do. Did it look better? Probably, but I don’t know that I’d want to use it. Needs more work!

Grading Mike Verta’s results:

Sandcrawler Shot: A. Mike’s Sandcrawler shot looks fantastic. (https://vimeo.com/119620458)
Landspeeder Shot: B. (https://vimeo.com/120218626)

His landspeeder shot certainly has more detail (hello 4k, multiple prints) but it still looks overly smooth to me, but that could just be down to the compression by Vimeo. I guess there really isn’t a lot we can do to improve it unless we want to borrow details from the blu-ray, which was not an option for the SSE or Legacy, but could be an option for another project…

I’d love to see what Mike’s final version looks like. Come on Disney - just release Legacy Edition already!

^ Very Cool, I have a video about cleaning up that scene too - demonstrating some of the commercial noise reduction plugins and how they work on that, but I’d love to know more about the technique you used. I remember watching Mike’s video but I didn’t really understand what he was doing…

In the meantime…

I created a new tutorial demonstrates how to use both the new Color Balance Tool by Dr Dre (still in Beta) and the latest Color Match tool, using a faded Eastman Reel of Star Wars…

http://thestarwarstrilogy.com/starwars/post/2016/09/12/Restoring-Color-to-a-Faded-Eastman-Print-of-Star-Wars

New tutorial demonstrates how to use both the new Color Balance Tool (still in Beta) and the latest Color Match tool, using the faded Eastman Reel…

http://thestarwarstrilogy.com/starwars/post/2016/09/12/Restoring-Color-to-a-Faded-Eastman-Print-of-Star-Wars

How is this still up?

+Dan Roganti - No need to download; we already fought the CDO and won. This video isn’t going anywhere. Enjoy.

*** REDACTED ***
http://originaltrilogy.com/announcement/Fan-edit-preservation-forum-rules-and-FAQ/id/5950

Edit: Don’t see Youtube links listed anywhere in those rules, but whatever. Point is, The Silverscreen Edition v1.0 is on Youtube in 720p and the fact that Disney/Lucasfilm/whoever did not (so far) succeed in taking it down is interesting in and of itself is it not?

Good news, I may have access to more of these red faded Eastman Star Wars reels, though condition may vary…

Using just the one set of LUTs generated for the shot above (one LUT for balance, the other for Match) I applied them to the whole sample that I have (about half of Reel 5) and saved it as a quick xvid AVI:

https://we.tl/X2CS5GnF61

Generating a separate set of LUTs for each scene would improve things even more, but I’ll wait until I have a better source to play with before I do that.

Jedit: And here is the Before:

https://we.tl/BQzrgH02Eg

Dre: Sorry to keep bumping your thread, if I am able to get hold of more Eastman scans and decide to do something with them then I’ll create a new thread for the project. Just posting this here because I believe it perfectly illustrates just how astounding your tools are. Thank you so much for sharing them with us.

You may recall that some time ago TN1 was experimenting with a very faded Eastman Reel 5, using Histograms and HSV color spaces to try to restore the colors. Anyway, the end results were not really usable, some color was restored and some of it even looked ok, but there was also a lot of noise and a lot of artifacts, so ultimately the reel was put aside.

However, I just rediscovered it while trying to free up some hard drive space, and figured I would run it through Dre’s tools to see what would happen. Now I only have access to an 8-bit color version of the reel so these aren’t as good as they could be… But, well, see for yourself:

Here is the original frame (actually it’s just a nearby frame, I didn’t make note of the frame number when I started, but it’s close enough to illustrate the faded colors of the original):

First I used the color balance tool, which gave me this:

Next I used the Match tool and matched the balanced version I just created to the same frame from the SSE:

Not too shabby! And look how clean the reel is. Makes me wish we had more than just the one reel.

Dre: Why hasn’t Hollywood come knocking and offered you millions of dollars for these tools?!