Harmy said:
I'm still hoping for a more detailed explanation about PSB as a reference - I know Ady is using it as a pretty literal reference (although he is taking some liberties but I think he believes those to then be different from theatrical color timing) and I'd like to know if there's some proof beyond "it looks like it's not faded" that the PSB is the closest color reference. You know, I'd really like to know whether I can trust PSB the same way as I did with the IB print for Star Wars - i.e. not keeping 100% perfectly faithful to it but keeping very close to it. Because at first glance PSB looks a bit wrong to me in some scenes but it could be for the same reason the IB print did look wrong but in the end we accepted it as a good reference and got used to those colors, even though they were differnt from what we were used to watching on discolored video releases. But in the case of the IB print, that was conclusively proved to be non fade material, plus there were several of them and the colours were the same (or close enough) on each of them - is there any such empirical evidence of the PSB colors being similarly correct?
As with Star Wars there's no 100% "correct" or "accurate" , I've seen the IB Technicolor timing myself and even that supposed bulletproof source look off in many scenes but if you know what to look for I guess it beats everything out there, imo all these should only serve as a guide, not as a bluprint. In no way does Puggo Strikes Back represent an theatrical "accurate" color timing of ESB if I have to voice my opinion, it looks very good sometimes, but even as one who just speak as a layman in the field, you don't have to be a rocket scientist to see that there's too much blue in many sequences. Not an attack on Puggo's and Ady's work, I absolutely love it, but I think it's quite obvious where it is too much - you have quite severe levels of blue in it in some scenes, to the point where it actually starts to show up in skintones and even hair, some scenes are so cold/blue they almost starts to take on a black & white quality for the lack of a better description. Harmy, if you follow this print religiously, you're only doing your project a disservice imo.
The only official ones that can give some guidance are the GOUT (perhaps the '80's P&S for some particular clues) and '97SE, the latter was tweaked in certain scenes but is otherwise pretty true to its origin. The biggest offender when it comes to these clusterfucks of transfers is the heavily manipulated contrast levels, for that I think the '97SE broadcasts can be an excellent reference for you. It's mostly brightened in the re-comps, and when it comes to ESB, the GOUT is actually worse in terms of DVNR-smear compared to the '97 broadcasts. I saw there was some discussion of the establishing shot of the Imperial fleet some pages back, my suggestion would be for you to use the '97SE source instead to overcome its problems there if possible. Higher res, no clipped whites or crushed blacks, original fx except the dissolve which I assume you would recreate anyway. But I guess there's bad compression artifacts to deal with instead.
No proof. Just my thoughts on it...
