You_Too

vadertyme said:

Hey You_Too, I just wanted to take a moment and give you a proper shout-out on your recolor-timing efforts on the TT transfer.  You did an absolute masterful job, my friend.  Keep up the excellent work.

-VT

Thank you! It sure wasn't easy, and then we also added back the lost grain to the crushed blacks.

The HDX version was slightly problematic too since it had some frozen and corrupted frames here and there. To find them I had to watch it at half speed and then we took those frames from the HDTV broadcast and replaced the bad ones. That one also had "edge enhancement" which we reduced.

I'm really proud of this one, the whole team are. And I was surprised by how nice the menu was, I had only seen one preview pic of it long ago and didn't know that we would be able to switch between the two versions while watching.

Chewtobacca said:

Could someone tell me if this the correct way to apply the difference between two clips to a third?

a=Avisource()

b=Avisource()

c=Avisource()

RGBMatch(b,a,c)

Just checking...

In your case (B,A,C), B would be your color reference, A would be the clip it would try to colormatch to B and it would then apply those color changes to C.

Thanks vbangle and vadertyme!

And DJ for sending it to me, I hope it arrives soon! It'll be interesting to try and switch between the 2 versions while watching. And to watch all the extras!

Oh, I almost forgot to thank zeropc too. In my last post I just pointed out that I really don't think the Twilight Time release was good and why, but forgot to thank you!

Knowing that so many people appreciate what we do makes it even more rewarding in the end.

zeropc said:

don't call it bad! the work done by twillight time was actually pretty good. the only thing to criticize, is the total misunderstanding on how the movie should look.

I'm a complete amateur compared to many others who work with color timing and related things, yet I would never take a clean film and crush the shadow and highlight detail, no matter what color timing I aim for. I could easily have made the same color timing as they did but preserving all that detail and grain. This was a sloppy job probably made by somebody without knowledge about it.

I do still have that script but it's way outdated. I mean, if I were to re-do it today I might have tried to find some kind of better solution to the oversaturated magenta parts. (like laser flashes)

And I also remember I did two versions for Harmy, one for the whole film and one for only the Death Star battle where I removed the dark blue in the shadow detail.

@djchaseb: Thank you so much for your review! And for appreciating what we did.

This might sound weird since I'm part of the team but I can't wait to get my copy! haha

Harmy said:

So are there threads for all these other projects? I'd be especially inerested in what you guys are planning with the Terminators and the Neverending Story.

Here's the Terminator 1 & 2 thread. Most good stuff is on the last few pages.

We haven't started a thread about The Neverending Story yet, but basically we'll be using the new extended blu-ray release, which has some waxdoll-ish DVNR but the best colors and contrast so far, and remove some edge sharpening and add back the lost grain and then probably create both an extended and normal version. (the normal version on this new release is the same dark, orange version that was released before)

@DavidMerrick: Here is an old post with some before/after color comparisons for ANH 97 SE.

Basically they're all sourced from the TB versions (the main audio is sourced from the real 1997 theatrical DTS discs) and will have simple color correction and be upscaled but that's about it, since our main focus is the originals.

Just want to clarify one thing to those interested in color timing of films.

Before DJ and I first started working on the US theatrical cut of Conan, I hadn't seen the film for many many years and I wasn't aware of the color differences. I simply thought that the only one with most scenes being "warm" was the US theatrical but DJ did show me that the extended version on DVD was in fact the same.

Those who have seen all versions know that both the US theatrical and extended versions on DVD have lots of dirt and grain, but that the blu-ray versions are all much clearer and the grain is smaller. I suspect they scanned the original negative for the blu-ray releases and thus they got all scenes the way they looked when they were shot, then ignoring the theatrical/extended color timing and instead giving us the dull-looking blu-ray version.

Maybe somebody with a bit more film knowledge could explain how color timing was done back then, and why the negatives always seem to lack this.

And by the way, another interesting fact is that not all scenes have warmer colors on the DVDs. Some are cooler! A good example is one shot around the 1 hour mark, where Conan is riding his horse through a snowy landscape. In the retail blu-rays, that shot looks natural while in the original versions it's very blue.

Pff... That's nothing against what Blu V2 has to offer.

Some previously unseen shots of Luke hitting a stormtrooper with the hook and then dragging him down over the edge!

Ok, I can confirm this is a scam attempt.

Those screenshots have fake grain added over them, even in the black bars!

That's really interesting. I can only imagine the fancut potential if they were to release all that footage.

Yeah, unfortunately, ColourLike seems to have troubles handling scenes with crushed blacks or whites.

Yeah, you should always use RGB for ColourLike, since YV12 is in YUV format which seems to not allow for as accurate changes in the colors. Not an expert but I know that in YUV, red, green and blue can't be balanced separately.

And the reason why it might come out weird if you choose every 1000 frames is because sometimes we have shot/scene switches in movies! When those happen, it might still adjust to a completely different frame it registered before.

Try AntcuFaalb's frame by frame method, might work a lot better. Otherwise, maybe we would need a script that detects shot changes and applies ColourLike with an average value registered from frames only in one shot at a time.

Gotta add also that I don't have the Matrix DVD, only the BD. For the samples I made I took your posted images and applied ColourLike only on those frames.

EDIT:

Changed your script there, try this:

c1=bd.ConvertToRGB32()

c2=dvd.ConvertToRGB32()

function ColourLikeFBF(clip c1, clip c2)
{ # Color-matches c1 to c2, frame by frame.
  # Assumes c1 and c2 are the same length and are
  # both compatible with ColourLike.
  global c1 = c1
  global c2 = c2
  return c1.ScriptClip("""
    ca = c1.Trim(current_frame, -1)
    cb = c2.Trim(current_frame, -1)
    ca.WriteHistogram("hist1.txt", 1)
    cb.WriteHistogram("hist2.txt", 1)
    ca.ColourLike("hist1.txt", "hist2.txt")
    """)
}

CLRGB=ColourLikeFBF(c1, c2).ConvertToYV12()

stackvertical(\
bd.subtitle("BD",size=60),\
dvd.subtitle("DVD",size=60),\
CLRGB.subtitle("ColourLikeRGB",size=60)\
).spline36resize(960,1200)

Also, make sure you use Avisynth 2.6 MT (multithread), that's the version that gave me the least color troubles. You don't need a multi core CPU to run it though, it just has some additional features one can add to scripts. LINK

I can't help but think you must have done something wrong when you tried ColourLike. (Maybe you didn't run it in RGB32?) I tried a couple of the latest shots and it matches them very nicely:

I will listen to the whole score sometime for sure, but I think most people will hear enough of it even when choosing the 5.1 mix, since the score is pretty loud in it.

Actually, why not upload ABC's score remix as a separate CD on myspleen?

Doctor M said:

I've never found ColourLike to do anything good for a movie.

It's good on a frame by frame basis, but even for as little as a scene it fails to produce good results.

The problem is the references it uses are for whole clips, not individual frames.

If you could get it to check the a single frame, adjust the colors and then move to the next frame and start again, it'd probably be useful.

Our own AntcuFaalb wrote a function for just that:

function ColourLikeFBF(clip c1, clip c2)
{ # Color-matches c1 to c2, frame by frame.
  # Assumes c1 and c2 are the same length and are
  # both compatible with ColourLike.
  global c1 = c1
  global c2 = c2
  return c1.ScriptClip("""
    ca = c1.Trim(current_frame, -1)
    cb = c2.Trim(current_frame, -1)
    ca.WriteHistogram("hist1.txt", 1)
    cb.WriteHistogram("hist2.txt", 1)
    ca.ColourLike("hist1.txt", "hist2.txt")
    """)
}

How good it works depends on differences in the sources. If one frame has blown out whites and the same frame of the other clip doesn't, it can adjust it weirdly sometimes.

You know, I've actually gotten a bit unsure about if I would want us to have a logo and all. I know DJ does, but I also know that if there's anything the film companies are trying to hunt down, it's release groups. I wouldn't want to be in a so called release group. I think it's better to be at least a bit anonymous.

Just wanted to say that the ColourLike method is the best. The BDluma+DVDchroma doesn't work because the framing is different and the chroma is off by a few pixels, in all of them but most visible in the closeup of Neo.

BDluma+DVDchroma would work much better if there was a way to do image registration on each frame to make them exactly matched.

By the way, an important thing to do when using ColourLike is probably to crop away the black borders before applying it. Otherwise it might pick up some dark color artefacts which often exist in the black borders of compressed video, and use those in the calculation.

The Aluminum Falcon said:

Not having high hopes for a 3D BD. Wouldn't be surprised if it was heavily DNR'ed to improve the 3D effect. Just like Jurassic Park, unfortunately, though that wasn't DNR'ed so bad.

The 3D trailer for Jurassic Park wasn't DNR'd so bad, but the BD release was horrible!

I do think that DJ has a point about the blanks. Ever since I started getting Verbatim DVDs I haven't had a single failed disc.

Of course it might be different with BDs since they're so much larger but, well, quality is quality I guess.

sasuke said:

Pardon me if this has already been asked but is this going to be released in AVCHD format as well? Please?

Not by us but maybe somebody else will convert it and upload. We'll see.

Those color differences are very interesting. I think for most shots, maybe a mix of both chromas would look best?

dark_jedi said:

Quite slow? are you fracking kidding me? Spleen and my torrent client shows 5, there will be 6 once I jump back on, I just started this at around 7:30 PM last night, it also looks like there will be another seeder very soon and there are over 5 members at over 50% so you say this is SLOW! wow.

I can't help if members do not know how to set up their torrent client correctly.

DJ, take it easy. The guys here are just reporting how the download's going and what the speed is. There's a lot of factors to take in account that can cause speed drops or some people being unable to connect to certain seeders. (Different ISPs, firewalls etc)

And I'm sure everybody here will help us once they're at 100%. I bet the hit & runners are just some random myspleen visitors. Don't take out your anger against them on the OT members. The guys here appreciate our work too much to just hit & run. And we all know myspleen isn't perfect, no file sharing method seems to be, but it seems to work at least.

Unfortunately I can't help seeding since I don't have a blu-ray reader in the computer but everybody should know I would have helped if I could.

Other than that I'll just say everybody's welcome to watch our version and I hope you'll enjoy it! Just make sure to help seeding and maybe make copies for others who can't download it.

And of course: Support the film companies! :D

That's a great looking cover!