I should have sent it with tracking in the first place. What's the bet that both drives arrive within days of each other ;)
And yes, I am heading back to bed now.
I have sent a second drive to AntcuFaalb as the first one appears to have gone AWOL. It has tracking this time, so hopefully it will arrive soon!
I am pretty sick again, running 40+C temps, so if I sound a little crazy at times, it is the fever talking, please ignore :)
You are getting some light-leakage at the bottom middle by the look of it.
The coolscan supports digital ICE, how do those frames look processed with it on?
If you mean 'how they looked in the cinema' then the only real way is to get a look at a print. The next closest source is the Derann release of ROTJ, and the 'available' release of ESB on Super8. They are pretty close to the theatrical release colour timing.
I haven't seen Jedi or ESB on BD yet, so can't really say. I have seen ESB a lot of times on film lately, and the original has really variable colour timing.
Some Hoth scenes are blue on film, some are white, some are grey, and there isn't a lot of consistency shot to shot. It is also quite different to any of the laserdisc releases as far as the Hoth sequences go.
I'll watch the Empire BD release side by side with a print in the next month or so, and can report back, but until then, I'm afraid my knowledge has a big hole in it for anything outside of the original Star Wars release.
My second try I got 10.0 as well! I think I had better not try a third time :)
I got 10.3 (11/10/10/11/10/10) on my first go, I'm sure the clock was counting down faster on the last two!
I'm trying again as well :) There goes my productivity for today.
I am twiddling my thumbs a bit whilst I save up for my scanner parts, but I thought this was a fun way to get to understand colour.
http://color.method.ac/
check it out, it also has support for tablets, and even adjusts for colour-blindness.
You go through colour matching for hue, saturation, complementary, analogous, triadic, tetradic etc. and it is a lot of fun and an interesting exercise.
The best way to play this is to look at the colour swatch and then click precisely where you think the required colour would be.
You can then see how far off your initial impression was, and then slide about until you get the colour to match the requirement.
If you just start sliding from the get-go, you might get a better score, but I think it is more interesting to know how far off your first estimate was.
The colour controls are quite similar to those in most colour grading packages, so it is a fun way to get the hang of how those controls work, and improve your understanding of colour.
Post your scores!
Jetrell Fo said:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/a-selection-of-starwars-b-w-colour-film-cells-/271388974337?&_trksid=p2056016.m2518.l4276
Anyone know if these are legit?
Don't know, but I have put a bid in.
SilverWook said:
Must be some other piece of equipment then. A boom mike would ideally be over Mark's head, pointed downwards, and not way off to the left of the shot.
Most likely a handheld shade required to get the shot. They are used all the time on location.
I'll take a look at the film I have here and see what it looks like in motion, and if it is in shot on the 'aussie' print.
That has a nicely saturated and punchy, yet more natural and a bit less flat look than your first one.
A lot of people have their brightness, contrast and sharpness set way to high on their televisions, and aren't seeing movies the way the director intended.
The easiest way to calibrate a TV these days is with the THX app for iOS or Android. You will need a cable to connect your device to the TV (or an apple TV if you have one) and the software is only a couple of bucks.
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,1975752,00.asp
If you don't have a device, then the Disney WOW: World of Wonder Blu-ray disc has a fantastic calibration set on it, or if you want to be a little more hardcore, the Spears and Munsil disc set.
http://www.spearsandmunsil.com/
BTW kk650, what software are you using for grading?
You are still running a powermac? Wow. Which one? It must have been one of the last ones, they stopped making them in 2006 I think.
Grab a 2nd hand intel imac with a 2560-by-1440 screen and dedicated graphics card, you won't know yerself.
Went for 680 GBP.
I might need a better image to start with, the blacks look really crushed on that preview.
I'll check out the linked image and see how it looks, they might not be as crushed as they look on the forum.
It might be a week or so before I can get to it, I am pretty snowed.
Check out Davinci Resolve 10 lite, it is completely free for anything up to UHD resolution, is available for OSX, Linux and Windows, and allows you much more control than most programs. The lite version is basically the complete version apart from resolutions above 3184x2160 and the ability to use more than one GPU.
I thought that even with that soft filter applied, it looked sharper in most places than your original image. I was doing a quick compensation for the quick and dirty processing I did which created some sharpening, so I had to tone it back down again when done. Film does this automatically, it is much softer than the neg.
If doing the grade properly (i.e. if I spent more than a few seconds on it) then the filter wouldn't be needed at all.
The trick is never to blow out the highlights at all, this might not be possible with what you are using, but any decent grading software will allow you to tweak the highlights without blowing them.
Basically you want to increase the dynamic range in the skintones, bring up the highlights that should be there, typically along the bridge of the nose, the sparkly highlights in the eyes, the whites of the eyes and the gloss of the lips and hair etc.
This gives a much more natural and alive look with depth, rather than the flat leathery faces of the BD. The film prints have much brighter highlights than the BDs do.
Nope I don't touch the blacks at all, Davinci has tools to just work with individual components of the signal, so I probably have a very different workflow to you.
Your images posted here look very different when I bring them into photoshop, but it is most likely just a colourspace thing. I was just wondering if you load these images from OT.COM back into photoshop if they look different to you.
e.g. if you save http://imageshack.com/a/img837/5302/7tsj.jpg and load that into photoshop, does it look the same as it does in the browser here. Wanted to make sure we were both looking at the same thing :)
Anyway, it's not all that important, was just trying to quickly whip up a rough image to illustrate what I meant by making the skintones less flat.
Some people prefer the flat look anyway, I personally feel it looks a bit lifeless, but I've had some clients disagree.
Then to give the image back the 'soft glow' that they were going for on the film
Although the skintones are a little brighter all up, (and as I said I have pushed the effect much more than usual just to illustrate the concept) the real difference is in the range of tones in the face, the nose, lips and eyes now have more depth with stronger highlights to differentiate themselves from the rest of the face.
The idea is to make the subject look more alive, and less 'pancake'.
Quick question, do your images look the same in your editing program as they do pasted into this forum? I've found some images here look identical on the page as they do in the editor and some are quite different.
Anyway, here is an exaggerated version to breathe a bit more life into the face, leaving the blacks and midtones alone, and concentrating on getting the skintones to look less flat and a bit more alive.
I have overdone it a bit just so it is more visible.
Looking at those images on my calibrated system, the matte boxes aren't really visible, I'd be betting the values for the matte box are around 0,16,0 or less and any values under 16 are displayed as black anyway. On the uncalibrated (overly bright) monitor they stand out like dog's balls.
The left half of the image looks about as green to me as the matte-box as well, so it shows how little variance it takes to have it not match perfectly.
TServo2049 said:
Could someone more knowledgeable in film projection (poita?) explain again why garbage mattes are not perceptible when a print is projected in a theater?
That's right, with an optical process, getting blacks to match is an absolute nightmare. It is much easier now to push the image and check that it matches perfectly.
The garbage mattes are visible in the cinema however, I remember schoolkids arguing about the TIE Fighter's green-shields and pondering how they worked.
Most people won't notice them though, they are pretty close to black, and there is a lot of motion and laser blasts and other stuff happening. In '77 these effects and action were so damn amazing, that glitches were simply not noticed, you were just too blown away.
It is another of those things that you see once they are pointed out, and they are hard to un-see.
They are faint in the cinema though, mainly because of generational losses in the print making process, grain and relatively (compared to televisions) dim picture all contribute to the mattes being less noticeable. A 35mm projector with clear leader in the gate, in a good cinema will punch out about 14 foot-lamberts, that is considered a nice bright vibrant image. An LCD TV can be up to 140 foot lamberts, or about 10 times as bright. Even an old CRT telly is over 20 foot-lamberts. This makes things like garbage mattes, mismatches on matte paintings etc. stand out more on a TV than at the cinema, and the reduced colour resolution for home video releases can also contribute to it. The blacks get crushed more, shifting them more away from the colour of the garbage matte making it stand out more.
So they are there in the cinema, some people noticed them (like me on the 15th or so viewing at the cinema in '77) but most people didn't unless they were pointed out.
It could well be the case, the card *should* be an indication of any unwanted colour casts in the finished print, but it isn't always the case. Sometimes the leader isn't from the rest of the print anyway.
I haven't had a chance to play with it yet to see.
Well, it depends what you mean by technicolor, the Tech IB releases of Star Wars don't have very saturated skin tones at all.
If you mean the old tri-strip camera technicolor (Like Song of the South) then yes, they have very saturated colours.
I really like the last images you posted a lot. I'd probably rework the highlights just slightly to breath a bit more life into it, but I love the colour.
Anyway, back to scanning, can't wait to see your finished result!
The uncorrected scan is too dark (intentionally to preserve the highlights) and the reds are shifted towards orange, you can see that in the LAD frame and in the shot just before the Leia one, the orangey stuff in the cabinet should be much closer to red.
If I ever get through the rest of my scanning backlog Iwill move onto colour grading, but I will be interested to see what the community comes up with inbetween.
Thanks, that's the document I was looking for, but it is 1am and I couldn't find it :)