spoRv

Tweaked a bit previous settings; lowered green and saturation a bit, increased gamma and contrast; top WOWOW, bottom WOWOW 2017ReGrade2:

Don’t want to push too much, because I’d like to leave some details in the shadows, and avoid black crush/white clipping as much as possible.

I can set the saturation lower (now it’s at 1.2, maybe 1.1 would do); didn’t touch brightness or contrast (yet).

Some weeks ago, during my daily color grading homeworks 😄 I managed to try to mimic the color grading of poita’s scan; to achieve that, I took WOWOW (still using that for tests, because EP4 * should * have a little better color grading than BD) and RaiTre as color reference; mixed 40% WOWOW untouched and 60% WOWOW regraded, raised the saturation a bit, moved the hue torwards green, and that’s the result:

Comparison: http://screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/198176

I call this 2017RG (regrade) just to remember; maybe Vader’s cape is too green now, but it reveals more details, crushed in the untouched version; still, a bit too green for my tastes, that’s why was put aside, but after reading the thread, I thought to post it nevertheless, to have some feedback.

Think it could be useful; actually more than 1700 entries; included also some restoration ideas, maybe another project maker could be interested in developing one of these.

http://blog.sporv.com/fan-edits-master-list

About OT projects, I used an old list I compiled few years ago, so they are outdated; also, IIRC, I added at the time just preservations and restorations, omitting fan edits. Waiting for your help!

Other master lists:
Open Matte http://blog.sporv.com/open-matte-master-list
Workprints http://blog.sporv.com/workprints-master-list

For the cantina scene, I would like to add for sure Han’s “girlfriend”, when they kiss, and when Luke and Ben meets him, as I said previously, the “nice muzzles” shot!

LeonVIII, checked the links you have sent me, and, apart the newest Rogue One “secrets”, they were just sitting in my HDD. Thanks anyway!

LeonVIII said:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJLmdLRUPtE this Chewbacca TFA deleted scene was all over my feeds and im a little lazy to look back on this thread to see if it was posted so im gonna post it for good measure

Actually is on the first post since the beginning… 😃

oh and i have a question are u planning on including the extra cantina scenes/monsters/aliens in the holiday special to ANH similar to war of the stars by TMBTM ?

Don’t know, there are so many behind the scenes rough material that I’d like to include, but they often look “out of place” when inserted in the films…

Thanks again for the links!

When I find usable bits for the project, I update the first post.

You will hear no crickets in few days… it’s a snowy winter, after all! 😄

Added, thanks! It will show up in the next update!

Is it this? Santa Claus: The Movie (1985)

Thanks, add will show up in the next update.

Thanks a lot for the link!

If someone has this kind of shows, with alternate takes, behind the scene etc. that thinks could be useful, please post here!

So, better the untouched caps, instead of the upscaled one… if you think the total is 30GB, and the final 1080p is 25GB… it will take at least TEN day to upload it! 😕 I should think about this.

@Dulus: thanks! You are right, there were a missing FIELD that messed up the cadence, I’m working on the first part, the second should be similar so I think no problems with it. If you noted other problems like that, please report them here.

@SmegPod: thanks, I like it too, more than non-grained version. “Untouched upscale”, what do you mean? Untouched original video, just upscaled? Warning, it will be quite ugly, and I don’t see the point - you can always get almost the same result watching the laserdisc through a video processor (or even a simple DVD recorder, that will be used in pass-through mode to decomb and deinterlace).

Thanks for the input.

If you talk about eventual repeated frames, they are in the source - usually at the shot change; but if you have specific timecode, I could check’em immediately!

Here you are: http://screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/197781

Ethically, I agree with you. But practically, the added grain (that is real, organic, not fake and artificially reconstructed) add a sort of autenticity, and actually improves the perceived detail (in motion, of course); that’s something that the eye could also not note, but the brain will know…

I’m compiling a pretty complete list (1700+ entries now) of fan edit and preservation projects; I added the ones I updated in the first post, but it was long time ago… now there are many new projects, and also I didn’t add fanedits (IIRC).

If someone would give an hand, could first check every link in the first post, and see if the project which was in progress were actually released, and add a release date for every project; drop me a pm in case.

Thanks!

applesandrice said:
Looks great! Glad to see you’re working on this again. 😃

Thanks!

One thing did catch my eye, though. The black levels on the regrade didn’t seem to be quite as deep as those in the untouched video. Could that just be related to the compression necessary for streaming?

It could be it, or just the fact I tried to match not only colors, but also brightness and contrast (as much as possible); to check if it’s the former, just download the video, if it’s the same, then the black level is the one found in the DVD. I could always use the BD luma along the regraded chroma, but then colors will be affected, too… I’d like to stay true as much as possible to DVD.

It seems there is still some interest in this project…

Well, during the past months I learned a lot of new things, filters, techniques etc. and I thought to get back to old projects (even released one) and see if I can improve them somehow.

For BATB, maybe it’s wise to do a slight color correction, and make a step back and avoid the super-razor-sharp-and-ungrained version, in favour of a little bit more “natural” (as natural could be an animated feature, of course) and to add a grain plate (asked by many) - at the end, the grain was there when printed in the film, right?

Here you are a comparison: http://screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/197762

Which is better, old or new?

Quick’n’dirt comparison; both upscaled (one at 720p, the other at 1080p), copied in MSPaint, saved as JPG (to simulate a sort of compression), opened with IrfanView, copied again in MSPaint and saved again in JPG:

http://screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/197757

I chose an animated feature, with few colors, because it’s easy to spot the grain structure; using a real compressed material, difference, in particular in details could be even more evident, when zoomed in; at normal (or higher) distance from the display, difference could be not that easy to spot.

Conclusion? To upscale to 720p instead 1080p to save bandwidth or disk space, and time to compress, and to upload, and to download etc. is a wise decision; result will be not that far from 1080p. But it will be, nevertheless…

Again, it all depends from many factors; but if it’s true that 720p upscaled = 1080p, then why we have 4K (actually 2160p) displays? It’s so easy to upscale 1080p to 2160p (2x) or even 720p (3x)…

schorman13 said:

Looks great!

Thanks!

Just wondering if 1080p is really an improvement over 720p, with regard to detail. It might save encoding time to stick with 720p.

Agree, will save encoding time, but at what price? I tried to answer to that question in this brief article, written few weeks ago: https://forum.fanres.com/thread-1205.html

For the lazy ones, long story short: proper (read: well done, not a simple bilinear or bicubic) upscale to 1080p is ALWAYS better than using the same upscale technique to upscale to 720p, and leave the rest to software/hardware player, or display (at least today, January 2017); how much the improvement is significant is up to the technique involved, the player/display quality, the subjective quality perceived by any given individual due to his/her visual and color acuity, distance from screen, ambient light etc.

About grain: if you add a grain plate to 720p, it will be of course upscaled to 1080p as well, enlarging each grain 1.5x1.5=2.25 times… so, if you set up a fine grain, you will end up with a coarse grain, while a coarse grain will be… a lot more coarser! 😄

This is not theory; just take any SD source, upscale it (again, using only the best methods) to 720p, add your preferred 35mm grain plate, encode it lossy with decent bitrate, open the encoded file in your player fullscreen (that should be 1920x1080), pause, capture the screen, copy it in your image editor and save it as “720p”.

Now take the same SD source, upscale it with the same method used for 720p, but this time to 1080p, add the same 35mm grain plate, encode it lossy using the same code and a 2.25 times the bitrate used for 720p, open the encoded file in your player fullscreen (that will be the same as previous, 1920x1080), pause at the same frame, capture the screen, copy it in your image editor and save it as “1080p”.

At the end, just compare the two frames “720p” and “1080p”; are they the same? Are they REALLY similar? If you can answer no to both questions (as I did) I think it’s better to encode at 1080p… I would do a live example for you right now, but I’m in the middle of an encoding, so I can’t risk to block everything - again 😄

Added a direct comparison video between untouched and regraded BD: https://vimeo.com/200184533 - have fun, and post your feedbacks!

After a long time, I decided to work again on this project; now that the color matching is refined, result is even better; still, don’t know if it’s just good or great 😄

So, take three and half minutes of your time to watch the test clip, and let me know:
https://vimeo.com/200171806

Thanks!

Thanks guys, happy to know you like it!

I’d like to do the entire upscale, but the sad thing is that it will take WEEKS (literally!) to encode it lossless, plus a day or two for the lossy version, plus a week or so to upload/seed the final BD-25 version… I need a new, faster, more powerful PC, at least to limit the encoding time to a day (or around it); for the line speed, I should check if finally the fiber has reached my home…

Also, a before-after comparison would help…