superrune

User Group: Members
Join date: 30-Sep-2006
Last activity: 2-Nov-2006
Posts: 8

Post History

Post: #252924
Topic: Info: Auto-correction from SE colours to GOUT colours (lots of information)
Link: https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/252924/action/topic#252924
Time: 23-Oct-2006 3:29 AM

Originally posted by: Desree
So, i captured the original Pal Pan And Scan laserdisc of Empire with which to take the histogram for it`s respective film, and lo and behold the results are stunning. First a comparison using the histogram on GOUT and SE:

Image1

Hi Desree!

It would be cool to see some shots from the laserdisc you're capturing the histogram from! I also tried auto-colourmatching the entire frame, but found the colours to be inaccurate that way in Fusion, so that's why I decided to use the original and match it accurately on top to transfer the colour pixel by pixel. Never tried the avisynth plugin you're mentioning, so it would be cool to see how your result looks compared to the source!

Rune

Post: #252648
Topic: Info: Auto-correction from SE colours to GOUT colours (lots of information)
Link: https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/252648/action/topic#252648
Time: 21-Oct-2006 5:01 AM

Originally posted by: Laserman
Rune, yeah, I consider the PAL versions a total fraud, I sent mine back to Lucasfilm, but I'd ask for a refund or a swap for the NTSC versions. They are not a true PAL version as far as I am concerned.

Amazon has a 30 day return policy, and I'm taking advantage of it under the reason "quality of merchandise not as expected". I'll order the NTSC versions straight away and continue testing as soon as they arrive

Post: #252436
Topic: Info: Auto-correction from SE colours to GOUT colours (lots of information)
Link: https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/252436/action/topic#252436
Time: 20-Oct-2006 5:55 AM

Ah, sorry for not specifying what the update was about. I'm not doing the entire film, but I am doing selected scenes just to see if the technique works at all. If it does, then I hope this might have practical use for someone else. Doing the entire film might not be possible, due to the changes in edits/composites/whathaveyou, but I still hope someone might want to give it a try.

I feel really cheated by this upscale issue, though. I need to find out if this is a valid reason to return the films back to Amazon (had to order them there since they're not sold in Norway). If the NTSC films doesn't have these artifacts, I'd rather have them instead.

Rune

Post: #252328
Topic: Info: Auto-correction from SE colours to GOUT colours (lots of information)
Link: https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/252328/action/topic#252328
Time: 19-Oct-2006 4:59 PM

A small update folks!

I finally got my ANH GOUT in the mail yesterday, and I saved out two small pieces of it so that I can "dye-transfer" the SE version. I read people on forums say that the GOUT looked kinda bad, but I always thought the screengrabs looked fair enough - but I was really surprised when I watched it in motion today!

I first noticed the wobble that I thought to be impossible:

http://www.superrune.com/offsite/2006/anhmatch_wobble.gif

Whole parts of the image are shaking completely independent of other parts - like some crazy jellovision technology! I guess this must be because this version has applied a noise-suppression-averaging algorithm to the film - before stabilizing the thing. The result is that the bright parts are wobbling about, while the darker parts stays somewhat calm... I take back what I said about the tracking, Laserman. This wobble calls for desperate measures indeed.

And then it seems like the film is interpolated or upscaled in some weird way:

http://www.superrune.com/offsite/2006/anhmatch_interpolate.gif

Look at the bright edge on Vaders chest armour, and the bright edge on his right (to the viewer) chin. It's almost like the film has been de-interlaced of sorts? Is this something that is PAL-only, or is this present in the NTSC version as well?

I will try to do the colour-transfer the next time I have a session here at home, but I doubt it will end up like much with the GOUT looking like this...

THX, here are some shots where I haven't retained the black at the SE levels. As you see, there's almost nothing to gain, with the areas ending up with a flat grey instead. It's especially apparent in Greedos face:

Rune

Post: #250268
Topic: Info: Auto-correction from SE colours to GOUT colours (lots of information)
Link: https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/250268/action/topic#250268
Time: 8-Oct-2006 10:22 AM

What if the 2004 version was digitally stabalized reducing camera wobble, and the OUT wasn't?

Sorry about my explanations, english is not my first language.

With wobble I mean that the information within the frame is shifted in relation to each other, like distortions under water, and that this relative shifting differs from one frame to the next. If the movie was doing something like that it would be very obvious. That's why I questioned the method of tracking several areas of the frame, instead of a single location (the stabilization you need if the frame is just shifting). I would assume the warping that is in the frame to be lens-distortions from the old telecine (at least that's what I think I see), and perhaps some corner squeezing in order to get more of the image inside the safe frames.

Some noise-reduction routines and DVD compression can produce an effect similar to wobble, making the dark areas lag one frame behind the rest of the image. But I haven't examined the movies enough to confirm that particular effect.

Rune

Post: #250169
Topic: Info: Auto-correction from SE colours to GOUT colours (lots of information)
Link: https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/250169/action/topic#250169
Time: 7-Oct-2006 12:04 PM

Originally posted by: boris
WELCOME TO THE FORUMS!I know I'm no expert, but I can see clear image flaws which have resulted after your combination - with ghosting as the main problem. Here are some examples:

Interesting results nonetheless.

boris: Thanks! I thought I mentioned it clearly in my first post, but I am fully aware of these alignment errors, and the only way to remove them is to do a proper warp of one of the elements. That's the next thing I will try when I find some spare hours one evening.

Thanks for the comments everyone, looks like this is a very popular issue

cbaka: the link to my website is in my signature

Marvolo: I'll look into a After FX comp as well. You will need the Color Finesse plugin that comes with After FX to do an auto correction, otherwise everything should be standard AFX filters.

ADigitalMan: Yoda, eh?

I'll take a look at that as soon as I get my GOUT DVDs

Thanks for the fan-edits by the way!

Darth Lars: Substituting the loaders with one or several HD sources are no problem. Fusion is pretty much resolution independent, which makes it nice to switch back an forth between different sizes. By the way, is there any HD material available from the old trilogy? Trailers, anything?

THX: I'll give you some screenshots where the dark aren't kept as black. The noise has a horrible compression-like pattern, but since I haven't seen it in motion yet it might not be that bad when playing. However, there's not much extra detail in there. The subtle dark grays in Darths cape are lost forever in the new SE colour grade...

Laserman: Is it really necessary to do a tracked warp? I would imagine the warp to stay coherent within each shot, otherwise there would be a wobble, right? I reckon it should be enought to do an initial warp on one shot, and then tweak it on a per shot basis, offsetting the image before feeding it into a warp node. But of course I haven't got the bonus of experience here, so... But Fusion is great, by the way

One of the reasons I picked it instead of Shake is because it runs After Effects plugins, which is a great bonus. It could be a little better on memory handling, but at least it compensated by being fast.

I will bring you an update when I get back from Berlin after next sunday.

Cheers,
Rune

Post: #249185
Topic: Info: Auto-correction from SE colours to GOUT colours (lots of information)
Link: https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/249185/action/topic#249185
Time: 3-Oct-2006 5:13 AM

Hi again,

Thanks a lot for your comments!!

Darthballs: Unfortunately I will not be doing this to the entire movie, there's no way I can get time to that when I only get to play with the computer a couple of hours per week. But I would like to try out a small sequence, maybe the boarding of the Tantive, since I really like how it turned out. If it works in motion, I would be happy sharing the Fusion project to anyone who want to have a go at the entire film, or I could setup a similar project in After Effects 7 if someone is curious

Fusion is great for bluescreening, by the way. We also purchased Primatte for Fusion, but I rarely use it since the built in keyers are so good!

Editous: The match thing works automatically for the first brightness and contrast pass, but to apply the colours themselves I use something similar to a colour transfer mode in Photoshop, I simply put the original video on top of the old one and transfer the colour down. For that I need a perfect match to avoid any bleeding. And that brings me to the final issue mentioned by Darthballs; you can't do a proper transfer where the elements have been changed. But Fusion lets you do histogram matching of colours as well, but it's not as accurate as just matching the contrast. You can get quite far by just doing that.

As soon as I have a small sequence colour-matched I'll post it here. I'll just have to finish another movie project and clean up some hard disk space first

Edit: By the way, if there are anything else that would be cool to do - please give me suggestions. I'm planning a series of tutorials on my new website, and stuff like this is great for learning.

Cheers,
Rune

Post: #248893
Topic: Info: Auto-correction from SE colours to GOUT colours (lots of information)
Link: https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/248893/action/topic#248893
Time: 1-Oct-2006 12:32 PM — Edited 2-Aug-2020 7:22 AM

Hi!

Since this is my first post on this forum, let me introduce myself. My name is Rune, I’m a 3D animation and VFX guy from Norway. I’ve been doing 3D for around 17 years, and like all healthy people I am a huge fan of Star Wars I discovered this forum after searching the web for documentaries on the Star Wars films. Thanks to myspleen, I’ve discovered the wonderful world of fan edits, and I thought I might give something back by sharing something I played with today.

Looking through the thread on screenshots ( http://www.originaltrilogy.com/forum/messageview.cfm?catid=9&threadid=4681 ) I thought it might be interesting to apply the GOUT colours to the new SE edition image. In other words, keep the excellent edge sharpness of the new transfer, but retain the old colours of the laserdisc version of the film.

When I do compositing I work in a piece of software called Eyeon Fusion. It’s my favourite software for this kind of work (after having played with After Effects and Shake), and its node based interface makes it great for quick and non-destructive changes to a shot. It costs around 5000 dollars, but that’s the price you have to pay for these things…

Anyways, I set up a project in Fusion that imports the screenshots from the mentioned post, and using some simple nodes I did this:

transformed the GOUT image to match the SE version
used the match histogram functions in a colorcorrect node to match the SE brightness to the GOUT
used a color merge (similar to photoshop color layer) to apply the GOUT colors to the SE image
keyed out the blacks from the SE and kept them, to avoid noise in the resulting image

The project in Fusion looks like this:

The result was surprisingly good - at least on the 30-so images inside the screengrab comparison page. A New Hope got that instant seventies look right away, but with the super sharp quality of the new SE image. Combined it gives the impression of being sharper than the SE even. Scroll down to see some comparison images.

Drawbacks using this method:

Each shot need a separate transform, which makes this time-consuming for an entire film.
Transforming the GOUT is too simple, you need a warp to properly match the two images (the way it’s done now, the corners have some slight alignment problems that would be very apparent on a large screen).
I have not seen this in motion, there could be flickering in the auto-match node
Some colour differences, both due to the necessary smoothing of the histogram curve (otherwise you get banding), and some differences due to the new transfer using selective correction in the telecine (this method can only do the entire image in one operation).

Despite that, it’s really nice seeing these two sources blended together so successfully (after a couple of hours playing around). Hope you like the result. Here are some other examples:

Cheers, Rune

Click here for “shot03”

Click here for “shot09”

Click here for “shot17”

Click here for “shot18”

Click here for “shot21”

Click here for “shot29”

Click here for “shot34”