You_Too

@Darth Tater: Now that looks awesome! Wish I could've been there... haha

Greedo might be a cold-blooded killer, torture animals and support Hitler, but Han still has the funkiest dance moves.

I've been comparing the 97 SE versions to help dark_jedi with an eventual future project, and I can tell you that the Flunk version is not the best.

Flunk has crushed shadow detail and is oversharpened.

Reivax has some weird frame-blending which adds more smearing, and makes each shot fade into each other by one frame.

The best is Gkar, and TB is second, being a bit more blurry than Gkar.

By the way, by Hybrid, do you mean like layering Gkar and TB on each other to get more detail out of them?

@Tyrphanax: Nice try, but that guy is so incredibly narrow-minded, ignorant and angry that it's a waste of time to try to have a serious discussion with him.

Rox64 said:

Aren't Technicolor prints supposed to have different colors than other prints due to the dye-transfer process, so the colors aren't truly faithful to the negatives?

The way I got it, the Technicolor dye-transfer process preserved the colors better than any other print process and also preserved a much wider color gamut. More colors than our monitors can display.

I agree with Puggo. Reading such stuff makes me so happy that originaltrilogy.com exists.

But bashing guys like that won't help either. He would only need to spend about 5 minutes on google to be proved wrong. Some people just can't accept the truth about Lucas.

As far as I know, none of the official releases (even that 1982 tape) have accurate colors, at least if aiming for the original theatrical look.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't all video releases made from separate prints which didn't have the alien subs in them? I know some of them had dark scenes brightened at least.

Your PS78 tape might just be the best we have. Or negative1's upcoming release of course.

Puggo - Jar Jar's Yoda said:

Sorry, it's English audio with Swedish subtitles.  Interestingly, Chewbacca's name appears to be "Tugg".

That's a funny mistake they made in the theatrical subs, trying to make it sound more swedish.

Chew = Tugga

Back = Bak

Chewbacca = Tuggbak? haha

This was corrected in the video releases though.

Puggo - Jar Jar's Yoda said:

Hmm, now might be a good time to ask the question that the subtitles left me with --- what's a "misslycat"?

Gotta be a misspelling of "Misslyckat" = Failed, unsuccessful.

EDIT: I noticed now that I actually replied to something from page 1... haha

Saw this at myspleen now. I didn't even know you were finished with it yet but that was a nice surprise! Thanks a lot. It'll be interesting to see this one.

Thank you for taking that risk, for all of us. :)

TV's Frink said:

The Empire has droids that can fix that.

No thanks. At least if "The Empire" is Lucasfilm and "droids" is CGI. :)

pat man said:

Can't you just cut and pasted or Photoshop it. so the guy will have his legs.

That's what I explained in my last post, why I can't. Because Moth3r's LD is cropped more, there's nowhere to get that information when the guy enters the picture and walks away.

If I'd use Moth3r's LD to fix his legs, he still won't have any legs when he's at the edges of the screen.

AntcuFaalb said:

Can you get away with replacing the worst sub-sequence of the shot?

(Because the LD looks better in the second snapshot, but the GOUT looks better in the first.)

The problem is that Moth3r's version is more cropped than the GOUT.

If it had been a perfect match, I could've layered the LD under the GOUT in photoshop and erased the smeared parts of that guy walking by, but because of the cropping, when he enters the picture and walks out of the picture, there is no information to use since it's not there!

And I don't want to crop the GOUT even more, to make it match, because that's just stupid to remove parts of the picture.

I've checked the 4-eyed trooper part too, and it's the same there, except the problem is at the bottom of the image. They're all more cropped than the GOUT.

I think we'll have to live with the smearing, and hope for the 35mm versions being the GOUT's replacement in the future.

By the way: Also remember that when in motion, you don't notice the smearing as much as when looking at the stills.

Ok there's been some experimenting now with the speeder scene.

AntcuFaalb gave me samples of the GOUT's chroma combined with the luma of some different LD releases and Moth3r's capture of the French THX LD was the one we both thought looked the best and also looked the most like the original.

Right now I'm leaning against keeping the GOUT as the source of this shot. Simply because the GOUT is sharper and has more detail preserved.

Here's the last frame of the sequence, and if you look closely you can clearly see how much more detail the GOUT has. (GOUT first, Moth3r's second)

Now the thing is that the GOUT does of course have that awful smearing:

There seems to be some slight smearing in the LD version as well, but not nearly as much.

I still think I can live with the smearing of the GOUT just for the sake of preserving the detail.

Tell me what you guys think.

I'll soon post a link to the sequences as video, so you can watch and compare.

EDIT: Here are the clips.

Yeah, I think the 35mm will kick the GOUT's ass. Finally. :)

I also think the grain in the GOUT looks a bit artificial. Could've been added after their DVNR pass maybe? But artificial or not, detail preservation is the key!

Don't. I'll try that myself when experimenting a bit on the files.

And it's ok if we talk about this over pm. :)

I'll present the result here later anyway.

That looks very good for an LD! Except it's the same version as the GOUT.

AntcuFaalb said:

So you'd rather have a severely-blurry upscaled image than an upscaled image with less fine detail?

I think he was just worried we'd sacrifice what's left of the grain in the luma, and some resolution, to get it cleaner.

I'm very careful when I do these things, just like with the frame cleanup.

@Doctor M: I can assure you, if something is done to fix those two scenes, I will make sure no (or at least not much) detail will be sacrificed. One of the key things of this preservation is also to preserve detail and to bring out the detail that we thought lost.

AntcuFaalb will make some samples for me using different LD sources and who knows, maybe I can somehow combine them, and even combine them with the GOUT to get a clean result. I will try lots of stuff and see how it turns out.

And if we fix the 4-eyed trooper, I'm almost sure I'll just paste in the fixed trooper helmet and blend it in, to keep all the stuff around it preserved.

Don't worry, this won't be a sloppy preservation that's for sure!

You didn't derail this thread that much. :)

And if we'll fix it we'll only fix those two shots anyway.

I'll invite you. It seems I have 1 invite left.

hairy_hen said:

Are you going to take advantage of this at all?  Applied carefully and selectively, it could eliminate the worst and most noticeably smeared shots in the GOUT, and that would definitely be worthwhile.

Unfortunately it's not possible since the Technidisc's picture seems to be warped differently, and the resolution of the GOUT's luma is better so it would be too much of a downgrade in quality.

We will keep working with what we have, and we'll have to live with the smearing.

AntcuFaalb said:

Agreed, but what do high-end video cameras use? They seem to be quite intelligent...

They use optical stabilization which analyzes the movement of the camera while recording.

I can only say wow, you were right. They only DVNR'ed the luma.

Tried it myself and here's the luma from the Technidisc with chroma from the color corrected GOUT:

About some filter removing motion blur, I know that since film always has a bit of it's own motion blur, such a filter would remove both the bad blur and the blur we want to stay! It would take some insanely intelligent plugin to see the difference.