You_Too

Extended that post a bit now. ;)

No big news but we're at least finished with the first film, both the GOUT-sourced and 97 SE. Well at least on my part anyway.

We're taking a little christmas break and then DJ will put back the fixed frames into SW and I will continue analyzing ESB for color errors and frames that need cleanup. We decided to clean up at least some of the worst ones. But since ESB has thousands of glue marks and flashes we will be very selective.

Oh, and about the missing frames in the 97 SE: I've made a script that recreates some of them, like the ones happening mid-scene, and also if we take the Alderaan explosion as an example, this script takes the two last frames of that and creates two new ones inbetween, and the same with the first frame of the shot after it. There was no other source clean enough to replace them, and the 2004 SE frames couldn't be matched.

This change won't be noticeable, and if you still notice it at the Alderaan explosion for example, it will look like it slows down for 4 frames at the end.

In ESB there's one part where we'll probably use Gkar to fill in the missing frames though, and that's when Luke meets Vader in the cave on Dagobah.

snicker said:

You_Too, this seems to be a fairly accurate translation of your reference colours.

I don't know, it looks quite off. The wall light is yellow for example.

Anyway, let's not get stuck in this bad example, using that mpeg2 encode I made just for frame matching. I think g-force's new script can be useful for other things. I'm looking into some possibilities.

snicker said:

You_Too, I've modified the Blu-ray to remove most of the clipping from that frame. Would you mind running g-force's script on the following image? Should be a much better result.

Yeah, I know the 04 SE is clipped a lot, and got clipped even more when converted back to mpeg2 it seems. I've had better results with some other experiments but I won't post anything just yet.

Anyway, here's that frame of yours run through the script:

Much better! Though if there was a way to make this script also change hues that would be awesome. In the 97 SE Greedo's face and jacket is incorrectly tinted blue, yet they still appear green/teal here after applying the script.

Here's a good example, though when looking at it like this I think it might've been my mistake after all. I had to re-encode the 04 SE that I got from DJ to mpeg2 and it made it darker for some reason. Maybe that's what makes this harder for the script to match it.

97 SE on top, 04 SE in middle and result on bottom.

Ok, my first feedback on this updated script is:

After trying it on the 97 SE TB version and 2004 SE DVD of ANH, this time it does indeed lock black and white level it seems, but the saturation comes out way too strong at times.

Could it be that the difference in gamma between the two versions is confusing this script? Or is it that the resulting chroma of this script is matched to a luma difference which is now ignored since the black/white levels are locked?

I'm going to try it on some sources that match a bit better in luma.

Haha sorry! Maybe g-force could start a thread about it.

@g-force: Very interesting script! I'll make sure to try that out.

EDIT: I tried it right now, since I have frame-synched ANH 97 SE to the 2004 SE it was the perfect test-candidate. It looked like it worked quite well, except I noticed in lots of parts the script raised the black level.

So is there any way for you to change the script so the black and white levels are locked in place but the colors are still changed?

@snicker: There is an avisynth plugin called HistogramAdjust, which can adjust a video using another video as reference, but I've tried it on some various clips and the result never comes out perfect, and it only seems to adjust the RGB gamma curve together, not separately.

So far, Colourlike is the best plugin I know for this, but I wish it would have a mode for video and not only stills. Right now to get the most out of Colourlike, one has to split a video shot by shot and then let it analyze each shot from each version and re-color them separately. There's gotta be somebody with enough coding talent to write an updated plugin based on this.

Are you familiar with avisynth scripts?

If you extract the video file from the DVD to a single mpeg2 file, and then use for example Megui's file indexer, this script will make a quite good upscale:

Mpeg2Source("DVD.d2v")

nnedi2_rpow2(rfactor=2, cshift="spline64resize", fwidth=1280, fheight=720)

(You will need the avisynth plugin nnedi2 to do this)

You can also try getting nnedi3 and replacing nnedi2 with that in the script and see which result looks best.

Congratulations! Hope you'll be able to make the ultimate JSC preservation sometime. :)

Yeah I think that team deserves a long break after all that hard work. But they sure know how to restore 35mm film, that's why I thought about them.

Maybe somebody could find some color reference frames so we could grade TOD and TLC ourselves using the BDs?

@jero32: We don't even know what backlight was used. Such photos are never a good reference unless photographed properly by a professional.

I agree with you guys. I just did that color experiment for fun to see how it looked.

Maybe negative1's team would be interested in restoring these from 35mm prints after they're done with Star Wars? That would be awesome.

Tyrphanax said:

Make up your mind, You_Too! I don't have much seat edge left to sit on!

Haha! I think I've made up my mind now. :)

But I'm very interested in doing some kind of project with at least TOD and TLC in the future.

I might just buy this box after all. But I wonder why they didn't change the colors of TOD and TLC too? It wouldn't have been that hard to at least make them warmer. And to fix the edge enhancement was at least easy with BlindDeHalo in avisynth.

Anyway, as a fun experiment I applied the color timing of ROTLA to some BD screenshots of the other two, using the avisynth plugin Colourlike. Here's comparisons before and after:

Harmy said:

jero32 said:

edit: the plane is a matte? Jesus, I can't even tell.

Just the background. But look how it compares to the BD and the DVD:

That's interesting. The original matte has a more muted contrast just like the BD version.

You know Harmy, seeing that shot makes me think you might be right. :)

And you're right about the plane being a matte! I looked closer now and saw why it looked different. In the DVD they had smoothed out the edges around the plane and added reflections to the water.

I didn't say I know the water shouldn't be teal. It would actually be nice to see some original 35mm shots to compare with.

I just know that back in 1981 they didn't do the orange/teal shift on movies. (Though in this one it's more like yellow/teal)

Also if you zoom in on some shots there's highly saturated color noise, which looks exactly like the color noise in Kingdom of the crystal skull. It's almost as if they wanted to match that look.

Actually, after reading through this thread and looking at some HDTV vs BD comparisons, I think I've decided to not buy this box.

I might just talk to DJ about doing a project with these 3 sometime in the future. I've managed to make a script that removes almost all of the edge enhancement from the HDTV shots, then one would just have to apply the color of a projector bulb from that era, and maybe it would look a lot more like it originally did.

I'm planning to buy the blu-ray box soon and I just wondered about some things when looking at the BD vs DVD comparison. (Note that I'm not familiar with any changes made between different releases of this film)

Here the reflection in the water under the plane's wing looks like it's been smudged out in the BD version, and the water has a teal tint, reminding a lot of the color timing used in many modern movies like Transformers.

In the same shot, here the water reflection at the front of the plane is different and has some mist added.

Here the blue colors are shifted to teal, while the rest is shifted towards yellow in the BD version, again reminding me of Transformers.

Here it's a bit the opposite. The DVD's yellow tint of this shot has been shifted towards pink.

Here it's very visible how they've muted the contrast in the highlights. The clouds are very natural in the DVD but melt together with the rest of the sky in the BD.

Taking all of this into account, I really don't think this is what the film originally looked like. They didn't tint water to teal in 1981. They didn't push the contrast of highlights down. This screams modern-style color choices to me.

Works now. They look great! For being youtube-compressed that is.

Maybe you should put them on Vimeo or something? I think there one can also download the raw uncompressed clips.

You know, you could sell those frames as art. It could start a new art movement: Encodism. :)

Anyway, jokes aside, the new color timing of that scene looks great! Much more warm and desert-like.

"This video is private" is the message youtube gives me when trying to view them.

Thanks a lot from DJ and me for the lossless files! These will make a great addition to our project.

Might be too early to ask, but are you planning any updates to your ESB and ROTJ mixes in the future?

_,,,^..^,,,_ said:

@Yoo_Too: I found some NTSC GOUT frames at http://aptirrelevance.com/otscreenshots/frames.php; I used them as comparison with my work (but I don't understand why they are 720x306...) - the difference between NTSC and PAL were not huge, but some are noticeable... if someone want to see them, let me know - 720x306px x2frames x36pics... will be a long long post, but if I'm allowed to do it here, let me know!

They're resized to 720x306 because that's the correct aspect ratio when cropped. And actually since they're resized on that page, you can't really see the true difference between the PAL and NTSC versions there.

I first noticed the difference when I started working on upscaling the GOUT, and compared an upscaled frame from the PAL version with the same frame from the NTSC.

That said, if you use the shots on that page I don't think they'll add much for your comparison.