I have a guess what this might mean. But I'll keep it to myself and we'll see how it turns out. :)
Good luck with whatever deal it is! It sure sounds good.
Dunedain said:
Very interesting about the frames. So to fix a part of a frame that has, say, a scratch, you go the frame before or after that isn't scratched. And then find that same part of the clean image that matches the frame that is scratched, and place the clean pixels from that part of the image into their correct places in the scratched frame, so it's all correct and accurate when it's done?
That's one method. Sometimes it's a bit more complicated, especially if it's a scene with lots of motion.
Dunedain said:
As to the colors, I see the problem, hmm...tough one to get around. But it's good that you've been able to come up with a way to get the overall saturation levels back closer to where they should be, while protecting the skin tones to a greater degree. Look forward to seeing the latest color correction method. Perhaps you could post that same shot of Han like on the previous page, would be interesting to see how the different methods compare.
I thought about that too, and here's a comparison of before and after.
Notice how the "oversaturated-glow" is gone now, and that Han's shirt also looks more accurate thanks to the slight hue change in yellows.
Dunedain said:
Thanks for the level of effort being put by dark jedi and yourself into trying to make this restoration as accurate as possible. :)
Thank you for appreciating it. :)
Dunedain said:
It does indeed sound like it will be great with all the fixes. :) Perhaps individual clean frames from an HD broadcast source of the SE might be helpful in replacing some frames that are messed up? Since it's just a frame here and there, any slight differences in color after correction should not be noticeable.
It's not really a frame here and there. Or in a way, it is.
For SW we wrote down about 350 frame sequences that needed fixing. Usually when there's a glue mark or dirt for example, thanks to the smearing in the source it appears in more than one frame.
I clean it up very carefully and if I don't absolutely need to use the SE I don't. So far I've used the SE for 1 single frame only, and it was because there was a white piece of dirt over Luke's hair where he battles the sand people. There was no way to reconstruct that part so I took the SE and made the colors match.
Dunedain said:
This new version, of course, will have even more saturation to the scenes now, so you might want to try that script that isolates the skin from all else in a scene and applies a different color correction value to it. Even if there isn't enough color detail in the source to color correct the skin tones accurately, at least it would allow the rest of the scene to be saturated to any high level to bring the background colors back closer to where they should be without affecting the skin tones themselves. Allowing them to be kept restrained and more accurate and not be pulled along with the rest of the scene and made orange, reddish/burnt, etc. A quick test of how it looks might prove interesting. :)
Using the GOUT as source, you can't isolate the skin tones. The color of skin is shared with lots of other things. For example, when Luke and Han are talking about saving the princess, the red panels in the background share color with the skintones. In the 70mm shot of the same scene, they're nicely separated. There is no way to do this type of correction with the GOUT, unfortunately.
But, after lots and lots of analyzing again, I've worked out a script that will make it a bit more balanced and not as oversaturated-feeling as it was. I also noticed I needed to change the hue of yellow slightly. This has to be done after all the cleanup is finished.
I haven't talked to DJ about it yet, but I will do that very soon.
I layered the sample pic over the same shot from the SW blu-ray and it seems the most matching result was 720x246, so it wasn't as off as I thought.
Anyway, try using this for upscaling:
nnedi2_rpow2(rfactor=2, cshift="spline64resize", fwidth=720, fheight=960)
Probably the cleanest upscale method I've encountered so far.
After that, do the median thing and see how it comes out at 720x480.
If you want to resize it for an NTSC DVD sometime, use this:
Spline64Resize(720,292).AddBorders(0,94,0,94)
That makes it come out the same as it would with 720x246, just with some added resolution for the 16:9 ratio in NTSC.
I didn't know the guy, since I joined the forum about a year ago, but has anyone considered the possibility that maybe he got involved with Lucasfilm or something similar?
Like, maybe he is not allowed to continue posting here. Or maybe he got an offer from somebody/some company for his method of combining sources for a restoration?
Yeah, the aspect ratio looks better. Maybe it should be just a slight bit taller?
Anyway, are you sure there is no way to keep the original resolution? I mean, each field is half resolution in the original too, but together they make up the full image.
Otherwise, how about upscaling all the captures to the double size and then downscaling it again to 720x480? At least double the height?
That last sample pic does look pretty good.
Could you post it in full resolution?
Wouldn't 4 captures be enough? Or does it have to be 5 for that median thing to work?
All that work you're doing is appreciated. Can't wait to see the final version of this project!
I've explained it earlier in the thread but I understand if you don't wanna go back and search for it.
First I analyzed the whole movie scene by scene, writing down any frame that had glue marks, big dirt marks, stripes, flashes or light bleeding from frames before and after a frame, for example. (There were hundreds) And now we've also added scenes with color errors to the list.
DJ has extracted them from the render and I'm fixing them all in photoshop. Then DJ will take care of reinserting the fixed frames.
EDIT: @none: Thanks for adding that. :)
@AntcuFaalb: You mean with incorrect aspect ratio and such things?
Since our renders for all three films are already done, and we've worked so much on fixing bad frames already, we can't go back and change any crop settings or anything now, so if there's scenes with some slightly different aspect, we'll have to live with it.
Anyway, each film was cropped to remove black borders, any edge discoloration and stripes on edges.
Here's how that frame looks in our version:
@AntcuFaalb: Once all three movies are done and the blu-rays released, I'll post the scripts, or well, not all the theatrical sub parts and all that, but I'll post the parts of the scripts that can be useful for other similar projects.
With similar projects I mean that they could maybe prove useful in Laserdisc upscales if somebody was to do that, or to improve/upscale any movie with the same problems as the GOUT with jagged edges and stuff.
And DJ is just as involved as before. He's just taking some time off the forum.
@pat man: Yeah, watching on a calibrated screen is the best thing to do if you want to see how it really looks.
Unfortunately, most people who will watch this probably don't have calibrated TVs or projectors, but hopefully it will look good to them as well since the colors are pretty neutral overall.
Jan said:
Which decoder do you use?
Probably some 70's psychedelic music video encoder. :)
EDIT: Ah, you said DEcoder.
What happened is truly weird.
I don't really know what would be considered "correct" for TPM. Probably if someone had a bootleg straight from a theatrical print we'd know how it should really look. (Not talking about the cam-recorded versions)
In the DVD/HD broadcast there's the pink tint over the whole thing, not to mention the over-sharpened edge ringing.
In AOTC on blu-ray though, the hue has been shifted on each color separately, it seems. The only cure for that would be to use selective color or something similar and match them back to the HD broadcast.
Or are you talking about a scene by scene RGB balancing correction? (Like, not following a reference.)
Take my advice and if using QTGMC, always use "Placebo".
In mine and DJ's project, using any other setting for it came out looking slightly worse. Also, using Edimode="EEDI2" made it look smoother.
I don't know all technical details about the plugin but this is the experience I had with it.
Your work is appreciated. It will be interesting to hear the finished audio.
mverta said:
Well I want people from all corners of the galaxy to be able to attend...
Well... that's the real trick, isn't it? ;)
mverta said:
Since the announcement's already gone out for this Sunday's chat, I'll set up a back-to-back and schedule a new one, but the time and date we'll do by popularity poll, how's that?
Sounds great.
Is there any chance you could have one of those chats a bit earlier sometime? I've wanted to join the chats every time, but at 7pm PST it's 4am here in sweden. I'll still try to join this time though, if I can stay up that late... haha
@frank678: Thank you! Yeah, there sure has been a lot of work on the color correction, and even more on cleaning up the bad frames.
No problem! Of course everyone has the right to have opinions.
And I think everyone will think it's oversaturated at first, because our eyes are used to the GOUT being washed out.
pat man said:
Lower the contrast and increase the gamma a little bit.that should make the skin tones look better without losing the colors in the movie.
The GOUT has a way too soft contrast, that's why the opposite was done to make it look more like the original prints, at least with the contrast/gamma.
Trust me, after trying hundreds of variations of the script, I'm sure it looks best this way.
Cobra Kai said:
So speaking of Empire and Jedi, what sort of theatrical color references are available for these? Is the GOUT fairly accurate or is there even any way to know for sure? Just curious. I've seen various discussions on Empire and the question of how "blue" Hoth is supposed to look, for example, but didn't know if there were any reliable sources like the SW tech prints. I assume it would be from a variety of sources like the GOUT, PSB, 35mm scans, etc?
If one would aim for a true theatrical look for each film, I think ESB and ROTJ would be a bit problematic. Since none of those two were printed by technicolor, I guess there is no completely accurate reference source where the colors hasn't faded, at least that we have access to. (Correct me if I'm wrong!)
But one thing is sure about the GOUT, and that is that the colors differ from the screens I've seen of theatrical prints of each film. It's like they did a new color grade pass when this version was released on LD.
So what we chose to do was to simply use the greyscale in the three movies and tried to balance it nicely, and use the same color correction settings for all three films since they all have the same problem with reds and tint. Except that SW is more desaturated than ESB and ROTJ so the saturation increase is a bit higher in SW. What you get is a better representation of how the LD release should have looked.
So not a true theatrical version but a nice cleaner GOUT with more colors dug up!
Harmy said:
It seems to me that DJ's and You_Too's picture is closer to that technicolor photo that the raw GOUT, including the skintone.
I think so too. Look at the right part of the technicolor photo, at the X-wing engine, it's got a bit of a cyan tint. A slight cyan tint can be seen in our V2 too if you look there closely and compare to the raw GOUT shot.
I'm sad to say to everyone who thinks it's oversaturated, that this kind of saturation boost, satmask, known as vibrance in photoshop, was the only way to bring all those colors back, and because of the bad overall balance of colors in the GOUT, it ends up this way. Dialing down the saturation will make skintones less saturated, yes, but would remove all that color which was brought back.
When I made these color settings I tried many combinations, lower saturation for example, and in the end I decided and DJ agreed, that this was the best overall look. Perhaps when you see it all in motion you'll see that many scenes benefit a lot from this. A lot has also been done to improve the very muted contrast of the GOUT.
If it had been a cleaner and more balanced scan of for example a technicolor print, it would have been much easier but there is a limit for what can be done with this particular version.
ESB and ROTJ weren't as desaturated as SW though, so in those two the result might be a little better to your eyes.
But of course, do take in account that you're all used to watch the GOUT as desaturated as it is. When you get used to our version most of you will like it, I'm sure. :)
@Dunedain: I haven't seen the Blu V1 but in the raw GOUT there is mostly more reds than other colors in all scenes. Or a kind of pinkish red.
The only thing I could do to make it look better, while digging up the rest of the colors, was to push the reds down a lot so they blend with the rest. They will still look strong, but all the picture will be strong, not just reds. :)
Here's a couple comparisons between the raw GOUT upscaled and Blu V2:
In this shot of Leia you can see lots of more colors in the picture in V2, and the reds doesn't have that pink tint.
In this shot of Han, in the GOUT all you see is basically pinkish red and grey, except for his shirt that shows the slightest yellow. In V2 you'll find lots of colors here too. The picture becomes much more interesting and alive.