snicker

With all the care and love you're showing this film, I can't imagine the opportunity being better served by any other group of people. It seems you also share a common philosophy with a number of people on this board on how to best preserve the film. You're exercising amazing restraint by not going over the top and removing every single speck and scratch and turning this into a glossy, textureless nightmare like the Blu-ray. Hat's off.

And, as with Mike Verta's preservation effort's, if I never get to see this I'd still be happy knowing that it's out there and that somebody is going to see it the way it should be seen. Hopefully a bunch of seven year old kids on a big screen with a bone rattling sound system :)

Love that rating card. You guys are doing such amazing work with these transfers. It's a privelege being able to see how film is worked on, something 99% of us would never had had the opportunity to have seen without these updates. I'm quite envious.

I bought mine for $70 off eBay a few years ago and the guy had more than 10 of them. I wish I'd bought them all now.

Champion effort, mate. Looking forward to seeing this when its done.

Sounds superb, Neg1. You guys have done an amazing job with this restoration.

Harmy, thanks so much for the massive effort restoring Star Wars (it looks outstanding) and have a very enjoyable birthday.

Impressive work. Looks superb.

Love it.

I'm guessing, as is the case with the laserbolts, that the appearance of the lightsabers (outside of being recomposited) has also been altered as a result of colour mismanagement. I've managed to restore the laser cores so maybe something can be done about the lightsabers too, at least to stabilise the colours.

TServo2049 said:

That frame, and the one of Leia peeking behind the corner, really make the red clipping obvious. In the 3PO/lobster-man frame, look at the reflection on 3PO's left leg. Even in the improved version, it's still an oversaturated blob that doesn't mesh with the rest of the image at all. You can see several other oversaturated red points among the wall lights, the reflections on 3PO, etc. There's blooming and pixellation around the edges - it look nasty even when the rest of the image is improved.

I'm absolutely not faulting you, Y_T - the red information in the transfer is just that screwed up.

Hey snicker, have you done any more work on your project to fix the clipped reds?

I've almost achieved a workflow I'm happy with. Had a massive tax problem to sort out (which I now have) so I can go back to this. To answer your question, yes, I have fixed the problem with the red channel clipping. Single channel clipping is not a major problem because there are two good channels to pull detail from. I know it's way past when I said I would have something ready but I really (no, really) hope to have a thread dedicated to all these colour problems up soon. I've also discovered through hue mapping that the Blu-ray transfer reproduces only 1/2 to 2/3 of all possible hues at any time. This range is usually cyan/blue (hue 210) to red/yellow (hue 30) and right in the middle of that range is magenta (hue 300) contaminating roughly half of the total hue range. If you scrub through the transfer in a video editor it's very rare to find green clipping but the instances of red and blue (magenta) clipping and colour shifts are numerous.

Harmy, that sentry droid update is superb.

** I've removed this post as I will be starting a dedicated thread.

Beautiful.

TheObi said:

... And yeah Harmy's despecialization sounds interesting, for what I understand he used a lot of difference sources and combined them, even with custom mattes. I wonder if it really combines unnoticeable. But definitely going to check out his V2.0 for Star Wars when it is released ;-)

You'd be surprised how well the majority of the alternate sources blend with the hi-def material. I'd be lying if I said it was perfect but then it never could be with what he has to work with. It's no exaggeration to say that it's a stunning effort. The colour, in particular, is sensational.

Just want to add that the other Dewback shots are perfectly integrated. Had a quick skim through the rest of the workprint and couldn't see anything else that stood out as a fix. You've really nailed the colours too.

Harmy, this is looking unbelievably good. I haven't been through the whole workprint but I noticed something that really stood out It's a shot that I know you've laboured over (and over) so I hate to point it out. In the first shot of the cantina Dewback starting at 00:41:50:17 there's a patch of what looks like blurred compression artifacts or large grain above the Dewback's head. Because it doesn't move it really stands out. The green grain in there also stands out unlike the green grain patch on the left which looks inherent. Could you render those few frames and patch heal that area in Photoshop? Alternatively you could mask it in Premiere and apply a bit of noise with a little blur. I gotta say, being able to watch the Mos Eisley sequence without the CGI additions is a wonderful thing and a shitload of work.

Mate, I'd be happy to help but I don't own the Blu-rays for either of those films. I'm also less familiar with Empire and don't care enough about Jedi to devote that sort of time to it. These settings are fairly selective in their application though so should port without much modification. Each film would still require colour correction, all this would do is eliminate clipping and repair damaged/noisy channels. I've noticed a marked improvement in automatic corrections with these settings too as they eliminate extreme colour shifts in the lower and upper ranges. I will be starting a thread over the weekend detailing this process and, as I said, I'm more than happy to share the knowledge.

The problem mentioned (the Tantive lights bleeding through the smoke) is something that can also be corrected. I'm positive that this transfer can be sort of reverse engineered to restore some subtlety to the image. The clipped blacks are my next challenge but, apart from a few noticeable shots, they usually account for something like 1% of a frame's total luma range. I'm looking at a flash frame now where the blue channel from 210-255 accounts for about 80-85% of the frame information while the green channel is only around 15-20%. It's just very fortunate that the green channel is intact (though slightly compressed) throughout the movie and that the blue channel highlights are often salvageable otherwise there would be no way to fix this thing. Anyway, I guess I should save some discussion for a dedicated thread. Sorry again Harmy.

Will do. Just need to fix a few settings that I inadvertently altered. Should have something up over the weekend.

A lot has been made of the problem of black crushing with these transfers but the highlight clipping is a much worse problem because it creates massive colour shifts. Red and blue highlights both clipped will give a full saturation of magenta at 100% brightness. Red and blue clipped shadows will still be black. Also highlight clipping creates hard-clipped specular highlights which are usually associated with video which has a narrow dynamic range, whereas deep shadows with nicely rolled-off highlights give the impression of watching film. Restoring the highlight detail allows the use of steep curves to stretch the black levels while retaining highlight detail. When you restore the highlight detail the specular highlights lose their hard edge and create a softer filmic look. Another problem with fully-saturated colours is that background objects are so fluorescent that they make a perceptual shift to the foreground. This is why these transfers suck so much, it's not the colours, it's that they just don't resemble film.

An example of how much red channel detail is missing from Star Wars is shown below. When you watch this uncorrected frame normally it looks horrid. The yellow and blue flames are swallowed up by red to give a pink fireball with a very hard edge where the clipping starts. These are raw Blu-ray captures. In the bottom one I've recovered the highlights in the red channel. Sorry Harmy, not trying to hijack your thread. I'll probably start one showing more instances of these problems.

Harmy, when you set a curve in the 'R/G_diff' layer turn it on temorarily to check the effect. Set a curve which looks like an upside-down 'U' cut in half. That is, hug the left of the histogram to about one-quarter of the way up then gradually roll it off to finish at the midpoint of the top line in the grid.

This curve will then make sure changes only take effect in areas of extreme difference (ie, clipped areas).

I don't know how much sense you'll make of this but here we go...

It's easier to work with separate RGB luma channels because you don't have to worry about altering colour values. For this example we'll use the red channel to brighten the green channel. Layer order as follows:

1. [Adjustment layer] Use Colorama to set to green luma (explained below)

2. R/G channel difference matte (created in a separate precomp and explained below) - Make sure you turn this channel off

3. Source video (duplicate) [Track Matte, Inv. Luma] -- Set blend mode to ‘Lighten’ – Set this channel to display red luma using Colorama

4. Source video

Some notes about these layers:

1. Changes everything below this layer to display luma values.

2. The red/green difference matte will show areas of difference between the red and green channels.

3. Applies changes to only areas of the green channel which differ in brightness to the red channel. As you’re working with areas that should be black or near black ideally you would expect there to be little difference in brightness between the channels so where it finds a difference it will apply a lighter value (Obviously if the change would make it darker there will be no change). In this way you can never darken the image further. You can apply a curves adjustment to layer 2 to increase/decrease the contrast of the matte and thus the area affected. You can also alter the opacity of this layer to lessen the effect and obviously apply whatever filters you like.

Optionally, if you want to further limit the effect you can paste another duplicate of the source video layer between layers 1 & 2 and create a luma mask to 'paste back' more of the original brightness values. Even though you're working in luma you should still select the channel colour as the key rather than luma.

Using Colorama (find it under 'Colour Correction' in Effects):

Input Phase - Choose colour channel values you wish to use

Output Cycle - Always choose 'Ramp Grey'

Modify - Deselect 'Modify Alpha'

Masking - Deselect 'Composite Over Layer'

R/G Channel Matte (create a precomp called, say, 'R/G_diff'):

1. Source video - Set this layer to display green luma using Colorama, set blend mode to 'Difference'

2. Source video - Set this layer to display red luma using Colorama, set blend mode to 'Normal'

Harmy, I'm trying to type a tutorial to explain the process but it's way too complicated to explain simply. I'm at work so I'll have another try when I get home.

Harmy said:

Did you do that in Photoshop or After Effects?

After Effects.

Harmy said:

Not really, because putting that matte around the subs took about 5 minutes, rotoscoping a new background into numerous shots from a low quality source, just to make something that is already there more visible and which would take hours, perhaps days for each shot is a whole different league. If I did that, why not go through the films and rotoscope out all the crushed blacks as well? Because it would take ten years, that's why ;-)

Harmy, I have actually achieved this to some degree using the same method I used for correcting the highlight clipping in Star Wars. It involves keying the crushed area within each colour channel and replacing it with the brighter of either (or both) of the other two channels. It's a little more complicated than that but that's the basics of it. Because it's a selective process you just need to pick a few of the worst affected frames and adjust for those.