g-force

Harmy,

those torpedos look fantastic!

-G

You_Too said:

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.

 Looking forward to it!

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.

-G

timdiggerm said:

g-force said:

 this will shed light on the very top layer of the onion

Not sure why you haven't just told us instead of telling us you'll tell us.

 Well, I just wanted to have some nice screenshots to share first, but how about a hint? The biggest problem with the DVD/BR colors is blue compression.

-G

You_Too said:

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.

 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.

-G

Harmy said:

Not quite true. That's what he did for the V1 - V3 DVDs, as far as I know he heavily modified the script for Project Blu and having seen both V3 and Blu, I can say that Blu looks 10 times better.

 I guess the only way we would really know is if DJ posted the script.

DJ?

Harmy said:

Well, I don't know but what DJ did is pretty awesome. It is just so much better than the official GOUT that it's breath-taking and I personally doubt that there's much more detail that could be dug out of the GOUT than what DJ already did but I'll be interested to see what you can come up with g-force.

EDIT: Actually, I did dig more detail out of the still pictures from DJ's Blu by careful sharpening of certain areas of the stills but that's for stills only. This one for example:

Let's just be clear, what DJ did was to apply the g-force script.

-G

none said:

mverta wrote: but unless you plan on documenting each shot individually, you won't be presenting an accurate accounting.

In anticipation of a someone or a group attempting to do a shot by shot something, i've been creating a spreadsheet which lists every shot and people can take this and begin to document their progress.  Right now i'm using it to catalog revisions between home releases.  But if someone wants a column for color correction settings, it all can be incorporated.  (FYI: SW has the most progress, ESB just started and will get to the others in time)

http://originaltrilogy.com/forum/topic.cfm/Shot-List-Spreadsheet-v0206/topic/13403/

 I have been admiring that spreadsheet for the past few days, none!

dark_jedi said:

g-force said:

You know, I never thought the GOUT would be so important in a restoration such as Harmy is currently revisiting. Having spent the better part of a year getting the GOUT to look as good as it could, I came across several methods that could eek out some more detail, but these looked really bad on fast-moving scenes, so were abandoned.

I'm wondering if it would be worth digging up some of my old scripts and seeing what more detail could be had in scenes that are more static.

And, while I'm not sure if DJ used any of my advice on how to upscale, people seemed to like his end result, and since I was never a big fan of upscaling sub-SD material to HD, I never really cared what method he ended up using. It turns out that there is one way to do this correctly, and about a million ways to do it wrong.

Between the upscaling and the detail recovery, this might be worth revisiting. Thoughts?

LMAO! This post is so cool.

So let's see,
1) So you want to squeeze more detail out of the more static scenes, well what about the rest LOL.
2) you are not a big fan of upscaling sub-SD material.
3) Don't care how I did it, even though some like it pretty well.
4) Only 1 way to upscale, presumably your way, and all others are wrong.

But now you want to revisit it and try and get more detail, and upscale? this is cool, I can't wait to see what you come up with, I say go for it.

*edit - and for the record, I did not use your advice, it did not give me good enough results, actually DrM gave me much better advice, so I am sure my Set is wrong, but it looks and sounds DAMN good to me for being wrong, and it is helping Harmy out a lot, so I am very happy, I may have read your comments wrong(I have been known to do that) but it sure seems like a dig on me, and my project LOL.

1. correct. the rest will suffer as a result.

2. correct.

3. More accurately, I never asked, because it's not my cup of tea.

4. No, I didn't invent it. But, there is no way to get back information that just isn't there.

timdiggerm said:

dark_jedi said:

So you want to squeeze more detail out of the more static scenes, well what about the rest LOL.

I'm guessing he just won't squeeze as much detail out of them?

 right. the rest gets ruined in the process. Maybe there's little value in that, but it seems like there are a lot of static shots that Harmy is using that may benefit.

mverta said:

Most of what you're seeing with the Blu-Ray can be categorized by four classes: 1) Exposure issues, 2) Damaged element recovery, 3) Deliberate color grading, and 4) Lowry.

 

_Mike

 The four layers of hell indeed. These I agree can't be corrected globally, but there is one more class that you didn't mention. Something that was done to EVERY single frame equally, probably very late in the color chain you describe. Believe me, I wish this were the magic bullet for all of the various and different color problems that have plagued every single home video release of this film, but this will shed light on the very top layer of the onion.

-G

You Too’s recent excellent work on fixing the Blu Ray colors has inspired me to reverse engineer what was done to the DVD/Blu Ray releases that caused the colors to be so badly messed up. While he is on the right track and is getting good results, I feel it would be instructive to know WHY the colors are bad, as this leads to a less subjective and more scientific method to recovering the correct colors.

It turns out that the answer is quite simple.

Over the course of the next few weeks, I plan to detail the following:

1. Exacly what was done to the DVD (and Blu Ray) colors.

2. Why the colors are not perfectly recoverable.

3. How to recover the color as best as possible.

4. The tools required to do so.

Stay tuned…

-G

You know, I never thought the GOUT would be so important in a restoration such as Harmy is currently revisiting. Having spent the better part of a year getting the GOUT to look as good as it could, I came across several methods that could eek out some more detail, but these looked really bad on fast-moving scenes, so were abandoned.

I’m wondering if it would be worth digging up some of my old scripts and seeing what more detail could be had in scenes that are more static.

And, while I’m not sure if DJ used any of my advice on how to upscale, people seemed to like his end result, and since I was never a big fan of upscaling sub-SD material to HD, I never really cared what method he ended up using. It turns out that there is one way to do this correctly, and about a million ways to do it wrong.

Between the upscaling and the detail recovery, this might be worth revisiting. Thoughts?

One more thing Mike,

I don't suppose you would be willing to share a starfield frame from the end credits? That would really put the icing on Laserschwert's awesome recreation.

-G

doubleofive said:

mverta said:

Absolutely possible.  What's curious is I've seen it on 4 4k sources with identical offset.

 

 

_Mike

I appreciate that even though you're not going to share your final product that you're willing to have some input on other projects. Your knowledge is valuable to us all.

 I second doubleofive's appreciation. That's interesting that all 4 have the same offset. Maybe the offset is intentional? less likely would be that all 4 were out of registration.

One thing that may resolve the amount of gate weave issue - it's likely that the subtitles weren't filmed, merely statically projected to the optical printer. So you would have gate weave from the filmed Greedo scene, but none from the subtitles. Eventually, this gets copied and projected on the big screen and everything gets gate weave, but the subs would always have one less level of gate weave than the live action stuff.

-G

msycamore said:

canofhumdingers said:
Getting to the point, I'm wondering, are you recreating the drop shadow on the credits like what mverta posted? I ask b/c, while I have no intention of arguing whether those are authentic of not (as I don't know for certain what his source is) I DO know for certain that not all prints had that. I've seen the end credits of a 1977 35mm print that absolutely did not have the drop shadow. Anyway, sorry if I'm late to the game. I was just curious about this. Can't WAIT for ver. 1.2 or 2.0 or whatever it is now, the stuff you've posted recently looks AWESOME!

I'm pretty sure his source is a 35mm print, and that what we're seeing is a slight misalignment in the layers of the text. The letters had one layer of blue and another in cyan creating a nice blue halo around the letters, the A long time ago - subs was done in the same way with a blue layer underneath.

 I believe this theory is much more likely, explaining the differences between various prints. Dropshadow should really be a halo.

-G

You_Too said:

I saw that too, so that's one reason why I changed the settings. Comparison, old on top:

 better, but still not as good as the Technidisc transfer by mysycamore:

LexX said:

Yeah, it seems that the same settings won't work. TESB is now way too yellow. So they need adjusting. :)

 I agree, same settings won't work, but each one of You-Too's ESB shots are better, and at least a step in the right direction.

-G

You-Too,

I really think you're on to something here. I always suspeceted that there was an overall color change to the entire ANH, and maybe to all of the sequels, as the same color push seems to be everywhere. It's possible that individual shots were color re-timed as well, but I bet there are not very many, as that seems like a lot more work than what otherwise has been put into the DVD and BR releases.

I know you mentioned that you changed some greens and blues, so this may be resolved already, but the light green leaves in the back during the awards ceremony look too neon in your posted pics. I'd be curious to see what it looks like again with your new settings.

Please keep up this AWESOME work, and keep posting pics!

BTW, I have to agree with some here that the Technidisc transfer that mysycamore did is about the best color reference there is. Might want to do some comparisons with that.

-G

Stinky-Dinkins said:

If this country replaced foreign people with question marks Texas' population would be 93% question marks, and that would be outrageous.

Offensive

-G

grisan,

glad you found a use for that median-of-5 filter.

_,,,^..^,,,_,

If I remember correctly, Toot is EXACTLY the same as a median-of-3 filter. Whatever combination choice you decide to do, everything has to be lined up perfectly.

-G

Doctor M said:

Chewtobacca said:

Nobody's making things harder.  Demuxing in different ways led to different frame counts, and nobody knew for sure how g-force had done it, so it needed to be established. That's all.

I can't say if g-force did it PROPERLY, but you would have to use PGCDemux.

DVDDecrypter doesn't properly read delays (and celltimes IIRC) from NTSC discs, and just using DGIndex without demuxing the PGC's means you wouldn't be able to properly rebuild the DVD afterwards.

I'd say PGCDemux or nothing.

What's wrong with demuxing with DGindex? Was the question about rebuilding the DVD, or how to prepare for running through Avisynth?

-G

Here's what I did:

insert SW bonus disc into drive
open DVD decrypter
Mode > IFO
Edit > Select Main Movie PGC
Tools > Settings... under "IFO Mode" Tab check "Chapter Information - IfoEdit", click OK
File > Decrypt

open dgindex.exe
Video > Field Operation > Force Film
File > Open > (path where you saved the Decrypted files) "VTS_03_1.VOB" "VTS_03_2.VOB" "VTS_03_3.VOB" "VTS_03_4.VOB" "VTS_03_5.VOB" "VTS_03_6.VOB" "VTS_03_7.VOB"
File > Save Project (save to some path other than where the decrypted files are or you may get a file protection error)

Boy, it's been a while, so I can't answer your question off the top of my head, but I have detailed instructions on how I did it, I can check tonight when I get home. It's basically the same way Moth3r did it so that I would end up with the same frame numbers as he did. I know OSJ's instructions are correct also.

Let me check tonight and get back to you.

-G

Moth3r said:

Well, I do prefer my colour adjustments and minimal noise reduction.

But as I said on page 1, still pics don't show you g-force/DJ's stabilized wobble, which is a deal breaker for some.

And, of course, there's your excellent work on the subtitles... 

NR in the script is a side effect of the local motion stabilization. The global stabilization by itself revealed film warp that made still things look like they were moving in relation to things next to them. So, one way to make things more stable temporally is to apply some temporal NR. I do like the original film grain, but not as much as a more still image.

-G