You_Too

Oh, ok. Adobe sure makes some useful but weird software.

Anyway, here's one color inconsistency I wanted to make you aware of, and that's because it happens before the part I rendered with reduced dark blue. This scene is right after the rebels have their mission briefing. Inbetween shot 1 and 2 is some seconds of Vader and Tarkin. Later when they show this same screen it's back to how it looked the first time.

Yeah, but I think you'll find the perfect balance, seeing how good it looks already.

Something you could experiment with if you want more "saturation", is a setting called vibrance. Photoshop and after effects both have that setting, but I'm not sure about premiere. Anyway, that setting has a different result on the colors than saturation. Here's an example: I took that shot from my last post and on top the saturation is increased, and on bottom the vibrance is increased instead.

Harmy, it looks great! And I like how you reduced red in the shadows, makes it looks more like the cinematic shots we've seen, without being too green or cyan.

For everyone else to see what I mean: My render I gave Harmy on top, and his preview on bottom.

Harmy, I hope it's ok I posted this, so you don't think I'm spamming your thread with comparisons. :)

Yeah, it does change a little even there. It doesn't matter to me really, I wouldn't even notice small details like that if nobody had told me. :)

Midnight_Trooper said:

You_Too; the upper chestbox light is indeed meant to be a green one but it was never lit. It was just the plastic cover glued on there.

Ok, I never mentioned it being lit though. :)

Here's what I was thinking about, scenes from earlier in the movie:

Anyway, this isn't meant as criticizm against Harmy of course. I know how hard it is to edit movies and you're doing a great job Harmy!

Yeah, most of those are not reliable as color references with their different tints and all. Still, it's a nice collection of photos! And there's this one again, well not the exact same shot as the one I posted before, but it makes me wonder how that scene looked in the cinema since there seems to be so many versions.

Harmy said:

Yeah, that's exactly the case. Rotoscoping the lightsabres was a huge pain in the ass and there's no way in hell I'm redoing that.

And I really understand that. I tried some rotoscoping in after effects a while ago and I found it very hard to get it right.

Nice wide saber and nice green lights! :)

Correct me if I'm wrong though, but shouldn't that upper button on Vader's "middle-console" be green as well? And you didn't use my render for this one, right? I checked mine and there's slightly more shadow detail and grain, and it's less cropped. Maybe this is one of those scenes you mentioned which you don't wanna remake from scratch?

Mike, of course you're right about them being photos of a screen. The print ITSELF scanned properly would be a good reference. That's a bit more like how I should've said it in my previous post. :)

Cobra Kai said:

It seems like the technicolor print would be the best reference for color. 

Here is a pic of the of the next shot in that scene.  I would think the color needs to be close to this.

Even that technicolor print has it's downsides as a reference. First of all, the contrast is way too high. Before rendering my version for Harmy, I tried replicating the technicolor print's contrast, and guess what, whites got crushed and the picture didn't look good. Also, the technicolor print has some tinting here and there. Look at the shadows in this picture for example:

The shadows are a mix of green and yellow here, and the whites are crushed by the high contrast. (or of the exposure of the camera that took this photo?)

And Harmy, correct me if I'm wrong but those shots of Vader and Leia on Tantive IV are not from the movie itself, but production photos. Either way, that guy sure has some nice stuff there. And how he got it? I guess like with all other stuff there's collectors and traders who exchange rare things, even photos.

Yeah, probably not but I just tried to recreate how it most likely looked when they shot it.

Now here's something interesting that I found, maybe something to think about when doing your final color correction for this scene Harmy?

Anyway, I was checking some Star Wars fansites on the web and found retrostarwars.com, where I found this picture:

Seems to me like a high resolution screenshot from a pre-SE version? Then I also found this photo, which I corrected a bit:

Keeping that photo in mind, I removed the pink tint from the first pic and color/level corrected it a bit to look more like that:

And here it is, compared to the file I gave Harmy to work with:

Quite a big difference! And remember that the file I gave Harmy was already brighter than the raw blu-ray. Now I don't know what this shot originally looked like in the theatres, (maybe someone else here knows?) but it's an interesting result I got out of this nevertheless.

Even though I actually liked the previous video's look, it does look more color-correct and RGB-balanced this time.

Harmy said:

But I just figured out something that may make this issue much better, it is a filter called Change to colour, where you pick a colour you want to change and a colour you want to change it to.

Sounds great! Such filters can be very useful but often comes with side effects. Just be careful like you said, with those artefacts and other colors being affected.

Anyway, for everyone interested, here's a couple comparison shots of the file I gave Harmy and the render he uploaded. I think especially the first shot here looks better with Harmy's adjustments.

To everyone mentioning the GOUT, keep in mind that the original theatrical prints looked nothing like the GOUT. The GOUT is originally a version made for video and laserdisc in 1993, right? And Harmy is, from the way I got it, trying to recreate the theatrical experience as good as possible, not the GOUT turned into HD.

joshdv said:

also if you are interested in some suggestions i noticed that the shot at around 2:27 has a lot of mosquito noise amongst the stars.

is that supposed to be there?

He said this was rendered in a lower bitrate than the final version will be. I can tell you that the source that I gave him was perfectly clean and high bitrate, so don't worry!

And Harmy, that preview looks SO great! When I first watched it though, I was like "isn't the audio a bit high pitched?" then I realized it was in 25fps. :)

The colors are amazing, even better with your adjustments added.

Ok, it's great that you pay attention to such details too. The shots sure are inconsistent in color either way.

By the way, this is one of those weird color changes in the movie that I noticed. The last shot is also less cropped.

Ok, any specific scene on Tantive IV that needs to be changed? I haven't seen nearly as many versions of the movie as you, so I just wonder because I'm not even sure what it's supposed to look like originally.

By the way, that sunset scene looked great. I saw you've brightened it a bit. :)

You know what, go to this forum http://forum.doom9.org/forumdisplay.php?f=77 and ask the guys there for help on converting it to lossless RGB avi. Seems there is a way to do it, but I just can't find any clear info on how.

EDIT: It seems that you should be able to open an avisynth script with the software VirtualDub and render it as lossless avi using an encoder called huffyuv. Not 100% sure about this but worth a try.

To make an avisynth script with the video, simply type this in notepad and save as ".avs" file extension, in the same folder where the video file is.

DirectShowSource("SWharmy.mkv")

Just an example, using the filename it had before you remuxed it. :)

As far as I know from using MeGUI it only converts to xvid or h264.

This might be a stupid idea, but have you tried remuxing my file to avi instead of mp4 and tried in premiere? Just a random idea.

doubleofive said:

You_Too said:

I wonder what the difference is if you'd tick "render at maximum depth"?

It converts the entire movie to 3D. What do you think the studios do? ;-)

:D

Or maybe it crushes the blacks to make the movie more "deep and dense" just like George Lucas intended.

Looks good, though you could probably untick "export audio" if you're not muxing that until later. I wonder what the difference is if you'd tick "render at maximum depth"?

Ok, I just cropped it to 542 to make it fit like it was, without any need for more cropping. Do what you want with it, of course. :)

1280x544? It was cropped to 542 to fit with your other footage.

By the way, to those talking about the HDTV version, here's a big reason why the blu-ray is a better source. Same shot from both, with increased gamma to reveal shadow details and compression artefacts, blu-ray on bottom: