You_Too

Thank you Troyig88 from all of us!

I must say that even with the little delay, I haven't been worried at all. I've made lots of video projects in the past and run into similar obstacles. Almost everything can be solved one way or another, and I don't think Harmy would simply give up.

Even without the delay, a work done carefully always comes out better than a rush job. And that's why we are all grateful to Harmy for taking the time to correct all those small things in the movie. :)

All I have left on my paypal account is $2.43 but I'll donate that if needed. Let's see what Harmy says first. I sent him some pm's earlier with some suggestions on things to try with Premiere, and told him to try with Sony Vegas if it doesn't work. So let's see what happens.

Harmy said:

And 25fps because I work with 25fps throughout the whole process and then convert to 23,976fps only when muxing the final AVCHD.

No offense, but that setting not only makes the movie too much yellow, it also makes it even more dark.

And Chewtobacca: On avisynth wiki it says:

The second one (Rec.709) should be used when your source is DVD or HDTV:

ConvertToRGB(clip, matrix="rec709")

So it's not about output but input it seems.

Another post, but I just wanted to let everyone know that I've finally posted new screenshots in the first post.

Harmy said:

We've been in a frequent PM contact but I'd like to thank You_Too publicly for these awesome corrections and for all his behind the scenes help with using them in my edit! And believe me, it was a lot of help and he's been great about it and I'm very grateful. :-)

Thank you! It feels great to help improve your awesome despecialized edition. :)

Harmy said:

Look at the blurry edges around Han and the obvious heavy DVNR applied. IIRC, they couldn't find the original elements for the scene when making the 97SE, so they used some dupe they dug out somewhere in the archives, so they had to scrub out a lot of grain to make it "fit" with the rest of the film and at this resolution, it shows pretty horribly. And even the 2004 Jabba looks really horrible. He looks like a f*cking oil painting in this picture :-/ Well, actually everything does, look at Han's hair!

Yeah, in my opinion that whole scene is like one big joke. Just the fact that Jabba doesn't look anything like in ROTJ, and then all that DVNR. Kinda funny actually by the way, I think my first thought when I saw this scene in 97 was "Jabba can move?" :) And the 97 Jabba looked way worse too.

The Aluminum Falcon said:

I love You_Too's color corrections with their warm 70's-esque palette.

Thanks! Though since I started my thread I got a lot of good constructive criticism which led me to make it more neutral and "correct".

Video Collector said:

Purple shadows are not necessarily an error.

In this case they are an error, since there are some reference materials like 70mm scans where areas being purple in the SE aren't purple in the original.

TServo2049 said:

That R2 shot, I think it should be somewhere between the before and after. The blue panels on R2 were not originally as blue as the '04/'11, but not as black as your "after" image.

Exactly, I did some more testing yesterday and decided to only lower saturation of dark blue to 75%. Going to update the script. It won't remove the dark blue from some scenes now, but like I said it seems one could only do that properly with a shot-by-shot correction.

Chewtobacca: What I said was true, even though it doesn't sound like it. I took a raw screenshot from the blu-ray, processed it in photoshop with my settings, then took the same screenshot from the script running through media player classic. Skin tones were more pink for example. When I removed the matrix setting from ConvertToYV12, the screenshot I took looked identical to the photoshop one.

So wrong or not, if you want my corrections, don't specify the matrix the second time.

Seems I might have said "wow" too early as usual...

Poor R2 got ruined by badblue. Too bad since some scenes got a lot better with the plugin. I guess the only way to fix the dark blues properly is to do a shot-by-shot correction.

Darth Editous, thank you so much! I'm testing the badblue parameter, and so far it looks like it does a slightly better job than my custom script. I'll test it a bit more and we'll see.

TServo2049 said:

Could you try it on the "You'll be malfunctioning within a day" shot? IMO, that's one of the most blatant examples of those dark blues (or "purple shadows" as I previously referred to them).

Also, do your curves/corrections/scripts reduce the blue haze effect when the Star Destroyer engines come into view? The original '77 composite did have that blue lens flare effect, but it was absolutely nowhere near as overpowering as in the '04/'11.

The purple shadow problem is already solved with my magenta setting. Also the pink flashes throughout the movie are much better. The blue haze will probably get better now with Darth Editous's plugin.

Interesting! If you find it I'll compare it to my new script.

I'm going to add an experimental longer script in post 3. What I've added is a custom "in-script plugin" and a setting that greatly reduces the dark blue colors which are seen in lots of places in the movie where it looks like they shouldn't be.

Some examples, on top - only color corrections and curves, on bottom, correction + curves + additional script.

Nicely edited intro from that video in the other thread.

And great with some more picture on the side.

Update! I managed to make an avisynth script for those interested. Check post 3.

I will soon post updated screenshots in post 1 as well. This time I'll only do the 36 shots seen in the screenshot thread.

Very interesting video! Nice to see how you actually do these amazing "despecializations".

Something funny I discovered is that some SE-only scenes does actually look much better using my settings too. Some comparisons between raw blu-ray (top) and my settings (bottom).

Even the (in my opinion) weird-looking Jabba scene looks better:

Now, if only scenes like this one was free of CGI and looked this good:

snicker said:

You-Too, would you be OK with me posting some comparisons here of my own corrections or would you prefer I start another thread?

If you're using my settings you could post some, as long as you apply selective color before the curves, and keep it like that. If you're making completely own corrections with own settings you should make a new thread.

g-force said:

BTW, I'm starting to think that your greens are more accurate than the Technidisc. I just love how much color there is in the Technidisc, especially in the highlights, I keep forgetting that those colors aren't perfect either.

Sadly there's no way of really knowing what's accurate, since I guess only the original negative is accurate.

Anyway, the greens seems to have ended up like I thought they "should" look like, somewhere inbetween that 35mm scan posted earlier and the GOUT. Here's using the latest settings:

After some more experimenting, I decided to change the gamma curve back to the old version, keeping the new RGB adjustment so the colors are still more correct and not yellow-ish. There were some scenes on Tatooine where the whites looked much more crushed than in others. That's what made me change my mind about it.

I also updated my color settings again, to make red colors less yellow, (made skintones look slightly more real) and I changed cyan back to the old setting. I made a new cyan setting to try and correct R2's hologram of Leia, the insanely blue lights on the tractor beam control in the death star, and some other things. The new setting resulted in other scenes looking weird like for example, Greedo's jacket looked oversaturated and dark.

I'll post the new settings and curve soon in post 3.

g-force said:

Thanks You_Too! I hope you don't think I was dissing your results, but I've been following your thread and like your results, and have been giving this a lot of thought thanks to you. Stay tuned.

No I don't think you're dissing anything! I made my thread simply to help people who wanted to work on preserving the movie(s), so naturally you are free to get new ideas from it.

Good idea! Though I can tell you it's going to be difficult. At least the part with recovering the colors. When experimenting with my color settings in different scenes I saw that reducing cyan in some scenes resulted in other scenes looking weird, and so on. Of course, what I did was to try and find the best way of using a setting for a whole movie, and of course some things won't look correct then, but at least better.

doubleofive said:

canofhumdingers said:

I think it looks great Harmy! Oh, any chance someone could post what it looks like in the SE, as I don't even know what was changed for that shot!

Everything. Which is why this article upset me so much:

Fixed! :)

Anyway, the death star explosion looks very good. Good job!

Harmy said:

OK, so I accepted the challenge and put my sources together and came up with this:

1. A frame of the 35mm scan I got.

2. GOUT

3. v1.0

4. v2.0 (unless I get my hands on a better source)

Ok, I tried to use my photoshop skills to contribute. I took that 35mm scan and turned black and white, (tried to dig up any colors from it but there was nothing but red it seems) then I cleaned it up, sized and warped it on top of your v2.0 shot and blended them together as good as I could. I think there might be a slight increase in detail in some parts. Anyway, here you go, do whatever you wish with it!