poita

Spaced Ranger said:

@ poita & ww12345 - Thanks! Shortcomings aside, I was surprised, but pleased, this had the most color-fullness depth thus far.

The correction at this stage is something of a compromise -- fox's mint-green shirt color area overlaps that of girl's white lace. The more the lace goes to neutral, the more the shirt moves away from green. Since the mint-green is a spike of color, it might be tolerable to keep a lesser strength of it, in it's narrow area, as long as surrounding areas are more on-color.

I'm trying to duplicate in Curves (for the R-G-B separations) what the paint program tools added. BTW, is that necessary for me to do, or can you use your similar-function tools on it?

In the meantime, I'll work up & post my previous step-by-step numbers in case those become helpful recreating it in your software.

P.S. I mis-numbered the pictures in my previous post, which are now rearranged to be in the correct sequence with the corresponding text.  :)

Doing secondaries is exactly that, working on 'spot areas' of colour by isolating them out and working on them alone. So working on just the fox's shirt is quite acceptable and standard procedure. Getting an overall change for the entire reel that minimises the amount of secondary colour correction required is a massive timesaver. The numbers are very useful, it is easy to use them as a reference for correcting in Davinci where we can access the curves directly and apply them overall or just to qualified regions.

What you are doing is very valuable, it takes what would be a year's worth of colour corrections and brings it down to a few month's worth instead.

And yes it is best to work in YRGB or ACES colour space at 32bit whenever possible. A good overview of Davinci and colourspace relationships is here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=JVoUgR6bhBc

Oh and support Jesse's film if you can!

My God, you are right, I sharpened that picture up a bit and you can just make it out.

Well, I don't know how efficient hiding is when you keep the last name 'Skywalker' in Luke's case, and stashing him with your brother isn't the stealthiest idea. Changing your name from Obi Wan to Ben also isn't quite clever enough for the Witness Protection Program to adopt.

AntcuFaalb said:

_,,,^..^,,,_ said:

AntcuFaalb said:

A cleaning can't hurt (see below), but LDs aren't anywhere near as sensitive as CDs and DVDs are when it comes to surface cleanliness.

If you do choose to clean 'em, I suggest using Novus #1 Plastic Polish and a good microfiber cloth. Also, consider using Novus #2 to buff-out scratches.

I agree! Consider that laserdisc has analog video, and no error correction like CD/DVD/BD, so even a really tiny dust particle (<1μm) inside the layers could show up as black dots or lines.

Yes, unfortunately occlusion defects are impossible to avoid. :-(

Just crank up the laser power and burn them out of the way!

Just turn up at the cinema a little late ;)

I know what you mean though, when ever I hear the Fox fanfare, my first thought is always STAR WARS....

I have that pinkie French set, I will be capturing it once other projects are done.

I think the home cinema Super8 releases might be worth a look. Most are probably pre-tampering and the colour looks pretty good. There are short digests available to use as reference as well.

These are from the Dwarves Dilemma 200ft digest.

e.g. 

I have to say Mr Ranger that I am very impressed with what you are achieving with those tools in the hunt for a single application of colour correction for the entire reel. I tend to think with my hands in the grading suite, it is intriguing to see your approach, and the great results you are getting.

That would definitely give a better starting point to then go in and do the final grade to bring some of the punch back into the images. Your process flattens everything a little, but that is easier to fix than the colour cast. It will be a piece of cake to sneak a little blue back in there to restore the whites. You have restored the green without washing the reds to orange too much. Well done!

I can go around to the owner's house on the weekend and check it out. I'll get back to you.

Molly said:

I kind-of wish we could find 35s of everything.

Until then, hopefully between myself and drf we can scrounge up the best sources on disc.

There is a good 35 of The Great Mouse Detective going cheap right now.

I read the initial post as Star Wars Taxidermy, and was a little scared, and intrigued to see what may be in the post.

Why not do a scene change run and grab two frames from each scene change. Differences in edits will most likely show up on scene change/reel change areas.

The CLD-99 doesn't hold a candle to the X0 or the X9 I'm afraid.

BTW, there is a crackingly good 35mm print of the Great Mouse Detective going cheap on ebay.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/THE-GREAT-MOUSE-DETECTIVE-Disney-FEATURE-film-Animated-35mm-Vincent-Price-voiced-/290917307847?pt=US_Film&hash=item43bc05d5c7

On old transfers of cartoons, it was pretty common paractice to do a vblur on them as part of the transfer to thicken up the lines to stop them 'thrumming' which was a line ending up on only one of the TV scanlines. Due to TV being interlaced the cartoon lines would appear to jiggle or blink in and out, so various blur methods to thicken the lines up was pretty common.

What about the Derann Super8 film releases?

I'm hoping to see decartoonised versions, it is looking promising so far.

Zip Doodah said:

Spaced Ranger said:

. Also, I was suspicious of the 35mm's shaded shirt color compared to the 16mm's properly flat, painted cel color:

 

 

 

 

A quick thought on the 'properly' painted shirt- and, to calm your suspicions (!) it looks like that on the IB print.

A standard Eastmancolor print (like the one you're using and comparing to) looked very different in the first place from the original IB technicolor release. Even a 1971 IB release print looks different than a 1946 original release Nitrate technicolor print- and very different from the Eastman versions. You've actually lost more green and yellow in the Eastmancolor print than can even be recovered from that copy, though I give you huge kudos for trying.  Something that needs to be considered about 'accurate' colors on the cels versus the original film is how the Technicolor process worked in the first place- so 'accurate' is thrown out the window entirely since the process NEVER reproduced the color spectrum in any kind of accurate way, in animation or in live action- that's just a basic fact. That said, the Eastman print projected side by side when it was brand new next to a Technicolor print would look drastically different- and did since it was a contact print from a single color neg compared to Technicolor's 3 neg dye transfer process. Color wedges were made of scenes to determine what certain colors would reproduce as in the technicolor process, then painted a color up or down to reproduce the wanted color in the process. This was the only way to do it then.  About four years after this film was made Eastman's single color neg allowed a less bulky camera to be used finally for live action, with a single strip of film.  Animation was shot progressively- that is, the three color records were shot next to each other on a single strip of film, with the filter wheel turning for each frame, creating the three color records. Technicolor would then take these three records and make the three seperate color negs from those. The printing process using ink created film that looks more like color printing in a magazine from the era rather than a color photograph. Technicolor also often (especially in the early years) took the red negative and made a faze in b/w to boost the contrast on reds (just in live action). So, accurate becomes entirely in how you define it!  My thinking is that the closest to 'accurate' would be to have the film look as close as possible to the look of the actual Technicolor release- as gaudy and bright as it is..

All correct, it comes down to definitions.

To me a standard contact print from a neg is 'more accurate' than a technicolor IB print, the technicolor process has a much less wide gamut than 'normal' film and tends to be contrasty and oversaturated. It is definitely a different 'look' to standard film.

However we can't get a hold of Eastmancolor prints that haven't faded to shit, so tech IB prints are our best bet of getting decent versions of older films, short of getting the three strip separations or original negs.

Tech IB also deserve their own restorations as they were of course shown in cinemas and that would be the way some people saw them. But they aren't particularly accurate representations of what is on the negative due to all the reasons Zip has mentioned.

I asked Ben Burtt about that 'jumpy shot' a long time ago, he said it was a physical 'jump' (similar to a missing frame or damaged sprocket chatter) in the film, not onscreen marks on the picture.

I have seen a 1978 print that has the TOE in it along with the original Pre-ANH crawl.

Spaced Ranger said:

Those "secondaries" you mentioned are YCM (Yellow, Cyan, Magenta -- the inverse of RGB)? I cringe at approaching the film fade problem with anything besides RGB (Red, Green, Blue), which is why I try to stay away from HSL (Hue, Saturation, Lightness) or variant HSV (Hue, Saturation, Value), or the other spectrum segmentation/augmentation tools (I fear such corrections will produce the Hollywood cringe-worthy, visually broken Blu-ray releases we've seen of late ... right GL?). Just a personal research approach.

Can you list numbers for settings, which might be available in a paint program, for your nice green shirt correction? Alternately, could you reproduce it on the LUT-capture frame-strip (above) to see the effect of that cartoon correction on the live action sections?

BTW, awesome looking cel! I suggest the next archive and/or distribution medium incorporate vector frame-reproduction video!!

I didn't save my settings, but you can get there by adjusting the curves separately for the Red, Green and Blue channels. It ends up with a very wriggly top end to the curves to bring that colour mix to fruition.

Go to 2:47 for an overview of the colour tools in your current software.

http://vimeo.com/52072919

Unfortunately you won't be able to run Davinci on that laptop, but there are plenty of other options.

All color grading software works much the same way, pick up a copy of the book The Art and Technique of Digital Color Correction for a good overview that will apply to any software really.

nightstalkerpoet said:

Nice! Looks possible, but time consuming. And would take programming a new analysis program.

Considering the lengths people are willing to go to for star wars preservations, I wouldn't be surprised to see an "electron microscope laserdisc scanning and analysis to retrieve pure video signal" project pop up. (Fingers crossed).

But yes, a 3 source cross reference scan is more probable by far.

Either would be an awesome source for Harmy.

 

This was actually discussed by the guys back in the X0 project days, but the data is RF modulated analogue (kinda like FM radio), so not only would you have to get an SEM scan, you would have to write a program to extract the data and reconstruct the video signal. Not feasible on too many counts. If you were clever you could pickup the RF signal from the player before it is processed and digitise *that* to achieve nearly the same result, but would still have to write the reconstruction software, effectively doing in software what the player does in outdated software.

A more realistic goal is to pickup the composite video signal before it is amplified and before it goes through the overlay chips etc. and build a better video amp circuit with current components, bypassing the outdated and noisy LD circuitry. That is relatively simple to do and should result in a much cleaner signal. But anyway, we are derailing this thread again!

What computer setup are you running?

I think you need a CUDA capable card to run it.

The lace should be white that is around the girl's neck, so it is a good way to check for colour casts.

A quick go at the fox scene in davinci, correcting secondaries (and I do mean quick) gets me to here:

Which looks close to the references I have. It is easily enough corrected with secondaries.

Oddly the green is more intense when displayed in this forum. The BBC broadcast is obviously off as well, Brer Rabbit's face is lilac in that grab.