You_Too

I was thinking about the Reliance clip again and I've been curious about if their source was the 97 SE. I dug up the good old TB broadcast (which is the best version with most preserved detail by the way) and used the script we used for the TeamBlu version and then I cranked the saturation up like crazy in Photoshop and balanced it a bit to Mike's work-in-progress Tech print shot. Here's what came out:

Now the weird thing is that when I tried to do the same with the Reliance version, it was like everything was the same color, a bit monochrome-like as Mike put it. The GOUT lacks color on the walls in this shot too so it's weird that one could get the most color out of a TV broadcast of the 97 SE, compared to all other versions, yet Reliance who probably had access to superior material could not. (Or didn't want to) Or maybe their DVNR algorithms ate up whatever color information was hidden within the original grain.

dvdmike said:

to be fair to reliance, (and I hate their work more than anyone) I am not sure the shots in their trailer are fully timed

I don't know but if they hadn't been timed at all, the duel in ESB wouldn't be teal and orange. It has never looked like that before.

I love all the clips that have been posted so far Mike, if not only for the restoration work then your analysis and thoughts on each shot. Really interesting stuff for a Star Wars fan.

A couple years ago when I was working on pulling the most out of the 2006 bonus DVD as possible, I came across tons of things that seemed pretty weird to me, not knowing much about how everything in the film was done, or in 70's film at all.

There are some of these shots I am personally very interested in knowing your thoughts about, and maybe it would be nice as future videos about your restoration work on them. I didn't want to clutter your forum with this so I'm going to post them here instead.

First of all: Splicing glue marks. (is that the correct term?) They are all over the film but especially in almost every shot's first or last frame in the scenes on Tatooine. Did they appear like this in the tech prints? If so, what will you do to clean them up? Some examples:

In the Death Star battle there's this shot at around timecode 1.44.26 in the 2006 bonus DVD that has a line running over it on the right side. What is it? Is it in the tech print too and how will it be handled?

At around timecode 1.45.29 there's a shot of a Tie fighter chasing an X-wing and the starfield is full of dark "blobs" that appear in different areas during the shot.

And here's one I'm especially interested in what the heck it is. A cockpit shot of Biggs around 1.48.40 where there's one frame where the background element turns blue behind his face and has some big black mark in it.

And finally, a cockpit shot at 1.49.52 where a big horizontal line appears in one frame.

I would love to see videos about these shots in the future if possible.

Thanks for everything that has been posted so far!

msycamore said:

The frame I posted is from the DVD. Lovely isn't it. I assume it look the same way in the blu-ray.

Thanks Mike and msycamore.

That means they had no color data at all for that shot. What a mess. And they said that the 2004 DVD went through quality control... Yeah, sure.

Now I don't want to hijack this thread but I felt I wanted to post these two shots from our (TeamBlu) version of the GOUT as an interesting comparison.

Mike, I know you're probably not familiar with it but we did an upscale/antialiasing of the 2006 bonus DVD and tried to pull as much color out of it as possible and I did a color grading of the whole thing based on some shots you had shared from the tech prints and your work on Legacy in the past. Nowhere near perfect colorwise but a lot better than the raw 2006 bonus DVD, and interesting in a comparison like this since it actually shows how much was in there if they had taken the time to pull it out instead of leaving most of it desaturated except reds.

At what timecode is that stormtrooper shot? (in the GOUT if possible)

For some reason I can't find it for the life of me, and I want to check how it looks with our color timing.

Anyway, adding blue over the left side of the picture in the blu-ray, that just has to be one of the most sloppy things I've ever seen in "color correction". Did it look the same on the 2004 DVD or was this a change that first appeared on the blu-ray?

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

Great results, You_Too!

A question: did you use the NTSC GOUT DVD as source?

Thanks. It's the same as the version we released already, except I removed the color correction stuff from the script to be able to compare it to this thread's new algorithm.

Yes, since the NTSC DVD has more detail in it, (and I have tried upscaling both in the past) it's the best source for an upscale.

By the way, I hope nobody thinks I try to advertise anything here. I'm just saying that maybe the super resolution algorithm works better on a source lacking all the downsides the GOUT has. It would be interesting to try it on something that already looks good, some very well mastered DVD release. (Avatar maybe? Wasn't that one considered one of the best?) And then comparing it to a simple Spline64Resize in avisynth.

There's only so much detail you can get out of the GOUT.

Not only does the PAL version (of SW and ESB) actually have less detail in it than the NTSC but it has the same problems, which is a weird kind of horizontal line aliasing that looks as if somebody removed one of the fields in higher resolution and then scaled it down. (I tried recreating this using Harmy's version once and the aliasing ended up identical)

The DVNR smearing from the 1993 LD master makes it even worse.

It's as if everything that could possibly be done to prevent a really good looking upscale of this version was done to it.

When I worked on Team Blu's upscale method for the GOUT, I simply tried to keep as much detail as possible while still keeping the "sharp" look but reduce the aliasing. Some may think our version ended up too sharp but if you had seen what it looked like without the sharpening, you would've agreed the sharpening made it look closer to the source.

That said, here's a comparison of the Precise bicubic and Team Blu's upscale method. (Without our color correction)

http://screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/118261

Jonno said:

Was no theatrical audio mix available for this one?

I remember comparing the audio from an LD release with the Dutch BD which was the source for our International version and it sounded identical. It's probably already close to original theatrical. I listened to the audio from the US BD but that one sounded very fake-remastered, like too much treble, typical compressed modern mix.

As for the Extended, there is only one English audio source so we could do nothing about it. But it sounds good.

dark_jedi said:

there are only 2 versions, the International which is the Theatrical almost everywhere, and then the Extended which was only available in Germany up until recently, and our Extended is 100% English Friendly, if I have anything wrong here I will let You_Too straighten it out lol.

Correct. The first premiere of the film was in Germany and it had the audio dubbed to German. It's longer because a lot of scenes have either different shots or are just longer from start to end. It also has a slightly different use of the music since the Ivory Tower theme we're used to wasn't included, but a softer symphonic tune. And Limahl's song isn't there either. The english audio has different voices for the snail guy and Gmork compared to the later International cut that most of us are used to.

This German original version has been obtainable on DVD but only with German audio so it's really nice to have an English friendly version now. We took the English close-up shots of the book and note and color matched them to the Extended cut.

To those who are not familiar with the restoration of this German original version, some company named CinePostproduction in Germany took the negative of the International version as well as an interpositive (or whatever it was, the negative was gone) of the longer German cut, and did some restoration work as well as some very destructive grain reduction and a very weird new color timing choice.

Since this company posted some raw scans of the International negative as well as the German interpositive on their site, one can see that what they had to work with was beautiful. The International negative had faded to brown a little bit but all color was intact. The German interpositive was faded to pink and had slightly less detail but was still in pretty good shape.

Once they had cleaned these up, which I suspect they did with tons of automatic dirt removal as well as some manual too, they applied a heavy de-grain filter that gave the whole thing a waxdoll look. Then some colorist who had apparently "looked at all the sources" or something, went ahead and created an overall strange look which doesn't resemble any other version of this movie.

Nothing we could do with the new color timing since that would've taken re-doing it shot by shot, but we did fix one of the more horrible things they did, which was to add a very amateur-looking glow over the Ivory Tower wide shots. (The glow was not on the negative, it was a very ugly and weird creative choice) Here's before and after:

You might also see that we shifted back the colors to be less orange, which corrected an error they also did when creating their new master.

There are other things here and there in the movie, like in a wide shot of Atreyu riding his horse past a mountain, there's a waterfall in the foreground that's been brightened. Or the scenes with Morla where they painted Morla's face (and eyes!) orange and the environment around Morla teal. This is something I wish we could've fixed but again, that would've taken months of work.

For those interested, here's an example of a roughly color corrected negative vs raw German blu-ray release:

Even with those things pointed out, we're still very proud of what we did with the Extended version, or German original cut if you will, and we know that you who love this movie will enjoy it!

The International cut that we're all used to is also there and looks better than ever!

EDIT: What we did with the Extended version was to soften the "edge-enhancement" applied to fake a sharper look, shift the colors back to how they should look (less orange skin tones and reds) and applied true to the negative grain, based on the grain from the very film stock they used, to make it all look more like film again.

DoomBot said:

When you click on the image to make it big, it shows more detail then.  Meaning you click on the image then click it once more.

Ah, I didn't see that. Still looks a bit compressed to me even in full size though, compared to what's on the disc.

I gotta add to dark_jedi's post that the screenshots seem to have been very compressed there from the postimg site. The movies have tons of more detail, just so you don't think we compressed them so horribly.

Beber said:

Have you done anything on the color timing for Terminator 2 ? Or is it the direct copy of the Japanese edition?

The color is just slightly warmer and balanced, with emphasis on slightly. The brightest highlights were a bit blown out so they were carefully balanced in brightness, to make the highlight detail more visible while removing some of the blown out look.

That frame is mirrored but anyway, in the GOUT source there sure is glue marks at the bottom because I remember fixing that frame because it had been "cleaned up" by their DVNR in 1993 leaving some extra aliasing where the glue marks were.

By the way, after some more analyzing of some frames from the Reliance clip, I'm starting to believe it's a new scan or something we haven't seen before. Not only is it less cropped on all sides, (especially left, right and bottom) but it's also less "eaten up" by DVNR which can even be seen through vimeo's compression. Look at Obi-Wan's lightsaber core here: http://screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/109157

I'm starting to think Disney is working from new scans or something, but making their own special edition. The new lightsaber glow looks very photoshop-ish to me.

Thanks for the new video, Mike. Always interesting to see some of your progress.

The version in that Reliance video is the SE for sure. Just look at the lightsabers:

EDIT: Seems this was discussed in another thread already. Sorry. Haven't been on here a lot lately.

Happy New Year everyone!

Thank you Team Negative1 for your work. It's nice to finally see a 35mm version released, and even though it's a bit rough I think with some work it'll look a lot like when originally screened. The detail is there for sure! Looking forward to see your future releases.

Thank you for noticing this and helping to report them.

I'm not surprised though, this will happen to anyone who makes a quality release of something that is not easily obtainable.

What I don't understand is how they dare. Won't they be banned from ebay?

@vroody: This blu-ray contains both the color corrected new version as well as a true 1080p version of the original as seen on DVD.

Hey guys, since there are people who can't get a hold of copies of this, (and other things we did) would those able to rip or copy them please try and help or at least direct these guys in the right direction. (over pm, naturally)

I have no way of sharing them myself (I have no BD-reader) and as you may know they were all removed from myspleen.

Octorox said:

To those that have these, how do the V3 DVD versions upscaled by a good Blu-Ray player compare to the 720p Blu-Ray versions?

What you need to understand is that the V3 DVDs used a very heavy anti-aliasing and anti-ringing method that destroyed a lot of detail, which in the Blu version is all kept intact while still applying anti-aliasing as well as enhancing what detail and color was in the GOUT.

V3 vs Blu is like night and day. No upscaling can save the V3. DJ has said it many times, the V3 isn't even worth being mentioned again. :)

If someone really wants a comparison to understand it, post some full res screenshots in png format of the V3 and I'll post the same from the Blu.

No I meant maybe Neverar looked at the PAL version.

If there were, it would've been in our version too. Maybe he was looking at the PAL version?

Anyway, very interesting find about the 13 frame difference.

http://originaltrilogy.com/forum/topic.cfm/Star-Wars-OT-1997-Special-Edition-Info/topic/10550/

The "Blu V2" that we did, using the GOUT as a source. That's where Harmy got those screenshots he posted.

We aren't missing any frames in our version. :)

Looking at angel eyes' face in screenshot 3, it looks even more like a watercolor painting in the "enhanced" version. I'd say the sharpening is a bit too heavy.