I don't know if this can be useful here, but here's a recreation I made a while ago for Harmy to use in his Despecialized V2.0: http://img846.imageshack.us/img846/8849/alta1080fixed.png
My references for this recreation were some frames Mike posted on his Legacy forum.
We're both fine.
We just felt that after the setback of having to start over with the script and change our approach on the aliasing and flickering, we needed some time off this project to clear our minds, and come back later with some fresh energy and rethink some things.
Please respect this choice we made, and we'll let you be the first to know once we're back on track with it.
Doctor M said:
red5-626 said:
OK! There is a lot I do not Know.
For one I thought that THX optimizer was specific to the movie it was on. When I would watch the GOUT I would use the GOUT THX optimizer if I watch the 2004 DVD I would use the 2004 DVD THX optimizer. Are all the optimizer’s the same?
No, your first statement is correct. All the optimizers should be different to some degree.
The mind set behind THX is that the optimizer is passed through the same transfer process to the disc as the movie is. As a result any variation that occurs in the film will similarly happen to the Optimode allowing you to compensate.
Whether this is still true or not is anyone's guess, but it was at its inception.
And I don't know anyone crazy enough to recalibrate their TV every time they put a different movie on.
They might look different on different DVDs/Blu-rays, but there is only one reference for the greyscale for HDTV and that's D65, and for the color it's called Rec709. Because of this, the greyscale patterns and color/tint setting patterns can't be different, or it would make you set the wrong settings.
You can't set your screen to those references by using a THX optimizer but you can reach a correct setting on brightness, contrast, color and tint. Some people say you can set gamma correctly by using those patterns but that can't be done by eye. I know that from trying myself, and comparing with the result when using a colorimeter.
And Doctor M: I know the tweak settings for avisynth, but the plugin selective color is much better when changing each color separately. I've used tweak for that before and usually it results in blocking and weird artefacts in different scenes.
And I won't change reds anyway, since not all scenes have such strong skintones, and the ones with less saturated skin would come out as having too little color in them. I found a good balance and both me and DJ are happy with it. :)
A THX optimizer is not calibration, it's basic setup.
And you can find such discs all over the web anyway, to be able to set the brightness, contrast and saturation/color of your screen.
Calibration is when you use a colorimeter to set the greyscale and each color to match a reference.
This has also been explained before, I think.
The movies have a very dynamic picture. I worked for weeks on it to make stuff like people's faces come out with more contrast like in the theatrical prints, and to be able to keep the whole range of contrast and still keep it balanced, I had to push the whites together a bit, without crushing them of course. The other option would be to crush the blacks.
I've kept the whole range and made the best of it that was possible. And I think some original prints were quite bright too, so I'm happy with this result.
Also remember I'm working on a calibrated screen. I think on a laptop screen you might even see crushed whites, making them look worse than they actually are.
dlbsyst said:
I for one want the grain left exactly as it is in the sample. To my eyes it looks very sharp and looks more like a film print. Please do not DNR this release.
We won't use DNR. Of course there will always be different opinions and this version won't be for everyone, but rest assured that both me and DJ want to keep as much detail as possible.
vbangle said:
The wall panels look f__king awesome in the bottom pic.
Yeah, can you imagine all that color was actually there in the GOUT? :)
Once we got rid of the tint and desaturation, the true colors start to show up!
The grain exists in the source, and to be able to dig up more detail I had to sharpen the films on the smallest level of fine detail. This brings up more details, it really does, but also sharpens some of the grain but like I said, the grain IS there already. If we smooth out the films it will look waxy and ugly because of the low resolution of the source, and there would be no reason to even make it a blu-ray, because a DVD would be more than capable of reproducing the detail that is left.
The flicker DJ is mentioning is also there in the source, and is a weird byproduct of the bad aliasing/interlacing and maybe also the noise reduction LFL applied to the prints which also gave us the smearing. The reason it's more visible is because we've stabilized the gate weave, thus making our eyes focus more on details than the overall wobble of the picture. It's also more visible since the image is more detailed now!
To show you a comparison between "smoothed out" and "detailed" I took one shot from moth3r's website which is from DJ's V3, and on the bottom is the Blu V2 downscaled:
patkhoo said:
Ah, Gotcha! Were you using auto on levels or curves? Or both? I understand putting many frames into one big image, but would that be equivalent to finding the average of 10 when 3 are more like "X", 2 are closer to "Y" and the last 5 closer to "J"? I'm sure you considered this already, so what was the conclusion you came to? Related is, how was the previous (DVDv3) methods used (in comparison to this new method), which incidentally is clearly nowhere as good as this new method..
I'm not criticising the new approach, just trying to understand the rationale behind the methods used.
I used auto on curves, with zero on clipping of course. Of course it wouldn't be equivalent of the perfect average, but on the other hand, it will almost always find the most obvious tint and fix it.
As for DVD V3 I don't know since I wasn't involved back then.
And your idea with Lightroom is a very good one, but we won't go for such an advanced approach. We'll keep our color settings as they are and work from there. Feel free to start your own project! :)
We'll see. Right now our main problem is that we might need to re-render all three movies to get rid of the red bleeding. Some analyzing showed it wasn't caused by the encoder, but happened when rendering the avisynth script. And if a re-render is needed, it means we'll need to redo all the bad frames again I guess.
Thanks a lot for your feedback adywan!
We're looking into the red bleeding thing right now.
And the reds being too saturated, well, believe it or not but I've reduced them greatly already! Using selective color in the avisynth script we're basing this on, I took them down as much as I could without leaving the less saturated red objects looking too desaturated.
Yeah, nice build! And it really is a mini-version of the other rig.
@patkhoo: What I did to find the balance in the movies was to take lots of frames from each movie, put them in photoshop beside each other in one big file, and let photoshop auto find the mid-balance of the greyscale.
Also, keep in mind that the movies were projected with warmer bulbs back in the day, as Mike Verta discussed in Harmy's thread. This would make them look more warm than the 70mm scans, which I bet were scanned using today's standards.
And this shot was just one of very many in that movie. Some shots still have a very cold feeling to them. The GOUT does not do a good job in representing the original color but I think we did the best we could to bring some of it back.
And about the sample on myspleen: I know some people saw artefacts in dark scenes, and that's because it's much more compressed than the final blu-ray will be. Some dark details you haven't seen before are also brought up a bit from the increase in saturation.
Right now me and DJ are discussing something more important though, that I noticed in the sample, and that's the strongest reds bleeding color to the left from where they should be. This was caused by the encoder it seems, so we're trying to find which setting caused it.
About the color thing and old movies:
Check this comparison I made from ESB.
First pic is a scan of an original print. Second is raw GOUT. Third is our version.
Notice how pink/magenta tinted the original scan is, with unnatural skin tones, but also how colorful it is. Anyway, all three movies have a kind of similar tint in the GOUT, so we ended up balancing the colors in the same way in all three movies. See how much more natural that shot looks now. And the colors look just as strong as in that print.
@pupil: We are well aware of the skintones being off or too "sunburn" in some spots. This has to do with the source we're using. The GOUT has a very bad balance of skintones compared to other things with a lot of red in it. So bringing up all other colors and balancing them always left something looking like that one shot. There are no pure miracle cures for the GOUT.
And with no offense, I want to say that the thing you mentioned is not contrast, it's saturation.
And to everyone else, thank you so much for your compliments and feedback.
Hostmaster said:
lol XD
I think that guy it's awaiting eagerly for the new SW Despecialized too
Yeah, he probably found out some barbarian altered or destroyed his works of art for profit or as an exercise of power.
Hey Funcha,
Thanks a lot! It's been some months since I was working on this script though, since I'm busy with another project now.
Anyway, how to find out what causes the error is to open the script in notepad and press Ctrl+G and type in 73.
At that line I guess you'll have to remove the "\" if you find it.
Otherwise, try removing the whole thing and paste the script text into the file again. It should work, since I remember what I posted here did work.
In this project, "bad frames" are frames with stuff that appear suddenly and distracts from the film itself, things that shouldn't be there. We decided that we will only fix the most visible ones, since fixing all of them would require long, hard work that we're just not willing to do. It's difficult enough to fix all the ones we've already found.
Examples from SW:
So don't expect the movies to be free of bad frames, but expect to see less of them than in the raw GOUT. :)
@msycamore: We're not waiting! But it will take a while for us to finish what we're doing, so in case some more corrections show up here, I'll add them while we still can.
That movie should be entered in Guinness book of world records for the most excessive use of DNR ever.
Oh, it's no problem! I'm changing the files myself.
@msycamore: Good that you pointed those typos and errors out, since me and DJ are using the subs for our project. Thanks.
EDIT: The "Switch all power to front deflector screen(s)" line is actually correct like it is. The reason it sounds like "screens" is that they replay the line without a gap = "Switch all power to front deflector screenSwitch all power to front deflector screen". At least that's what it sounds like to me.
SS4DarthPayne said:
I never had the privilege of seeing the originals in theaters :( so I'm jealous of you older folks who got to have that experience. In fact, my introduction to Star Wars was the 97 SE's on VHS's.
Actually, if you meant me, I'm 27 so I wasn't even born when they hit the theatres originally.
My introduction was sometime in 1992-93 maybe, when they were broadcasted on TV.
Interesting. And it's also weird how bright all shots are. Even ANH looks much less crushed in the shadow detail.
I found one shot with a lot of compression artefacts though: http://ninfo.eu/wp-content/gallery/StarWars/Episode.4/StarWars.Episode.4.39.jpg
So all of them can't be from a digital intermediate.
Maybe some kind of pre-release promo discs?
Thank you everyone for all nice comments.
I assure you, even if you'll watch this new version on DVD, it will blow you away. You've never seen the originals this full of life since the cinema.
OMEN!-_-! said:
Is that a rhetorical question you're asking there You_Too? Do you know what the source is?
No, I have no idea. I'm just wondering what the source is, if now both the blu-ray and the 3D version has the DNR.
