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tellan

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19-Oct-2004
Last activity
27-Sep-2011
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442

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Post
#80066
Topic
.: The Lancer DVD Project :. (* unfinished project *)
Link
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/80066/action/topic#80066
Time
.
But you just agreed with me.


but I did and I didn't. yes, in the DE LD and SE DVD it's got a creamy cast, but its generally agreed on this board that the SE DVD has porked color correction thanks to lucasfilm prior to Lowry getting their hands on it. and the DE LD is very washed out and faded.

we know blue is off and over saturated, the skin tones are a bit red so it follows that other things are off too. stormtrooper white is a bit too cool blue, etc.

so my point is, in the sources we have, it appears creamy yes, ( ie I agree with you on how it looks in commercially available video sources), but those are sources we can't totally trust regards colour value.

which is why I cite other additional evidential sources regards dress colour. a similar argument exists regarding the shirt colour of the soldiers on the Tantive. in some scenes, it's blue, in others a gray blue.

hence, why I think I'm right in colour correcting the dress so that it is white in this scene. I think the amount of 'skin' showing through the fabric on the DVD is a color correction issue. a very faint pink through white would get changed as it has on the DVD to be more vibrant and obvious if the colour correction is off, which we know it is.


and yes, the skintone coming through the thin fabric is certainly an issue to consider. looking at other sources doesn't remotely show the dress as being as gauzy as the SE DVD so again, I think the new DVD is misleading us as to what colour values it should have.

the black of vaders costume and the white of the stormtroopers is a known factor and I think it's where we should be taking the colour key from in this scene, not her dress being creamy yellow white.
Post
#80055
Topic
.: The Lancer DVD Project :. (* unfinished project *)
Link
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/80055/action/topic#80055
Time
But her costume isn't white, at least not compared to the stromtroopers.


depends. in that corridor of the tantive, as far as the DE LD is concerned and the SE DVD, there is a creamy cast to her dress. it certainly doesn't look white in comparison to the white corridor and the stormtrooper armour which we know is white

but I'm afraid I disagree with you.

reasons for doing so

a) both the corridors of the tantive, and the stormtrooper armour were made from vacformed glossy plastic so it's white point is higher than white material.

b) later in the film, when leia is in her cell
i) when vader enters with the interrogation droid
ii) when luke comes into her cell

she is wearing a white dress, it's a bit mucky but it is a white dress.

c) archive evidence. take a look at the Star Wars Chronicles book if you can. (this is a huge hardback, coffee table glossy book, packed with hundreds of reference photo's from the lucasfilm archives.) in it are pictures of Leia's costume. it is plainly white.

also, publicity photo's of the day, show her dress to be white. they can't all be wrong.

screenie 5

yes, the top shot is yours. bottom shot has been adjusted using tweak, msu smart sharpen, RGB and white balance adjustment.

again this is a thorny shot. In the canyon sequence, luke's tunic changes color about 5 times. even allowing for film stock and different developing solutions on different days, I think this is more a case of the fact they made about 10 of these tunics and they got mucky in varying degrees in the tunisian desert and the canyon scene was shot over 5 days*.

(the unofficial making of star wars), so it seems probable that mark hammill wasn't wearing the same tunic on some of the days of shooting during this sequence. further examination of archival material indicates that the tunic was white but got mucky from desert dust and stained varying shades.

the white balance filter can be found her :

white balance filter

it is a good filter, but now that I've got everything else into script and have found an acceptable (but faster) way of getting a sharp interim file without using MSU, I don't need to be using vdubs full processing mode, which saves me a colorspace conversion step.


Post
#80024
Topic
.: The Lancer DVD Project :. (* unfinished project *)
Link
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/80024/action/topic#80024
Time
been playing with two things the last few days.

1. getting my sound from stereo PCM to 5.1

found for me personally, the most hassle free method to be

http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?s=&threadid=59949

so thanks mebejedi for even making me aware that such routines were doable. I'd looked at them once before on Doom9 but the plogue bidule VST route seemed like an awful lot of complicated effort with contradictory guides. the above link works like a charm and is easy to follow.

one thing though. did you tweak the guide much to get a good solid centre channel? I've found my speech to be a bit tinny.

2. findng some way of speeding things up when rendering to my interim avi.

as good as it is, I still get this feeling that I could get the same results MSU smartsharpen is giving me, without having to sit for 24+ hours watching it process at a mere 2 frames per second. I've got a P4 2.8 for gods sake and this unoptimised filter is not using the full power available.

so thus far. investigations last night found some interesting stuff.

firstly, asharp is a good filter. much faster than MSU, about 8 times faster in fact. however there are certain unsharp aspects to MSU that still give it the edge. however, tonight I will be trying unfilter.

I tried this once before a long time ago on a really crappy capture and got a reasonable result from it. it brought forward a lot of detail that was washed away. I'm hoping that this in combination with asharp will give a comparable result to MSU.



in addition, other filters to consider people if you don't want to go the combustion Mebejedi route to clean up some of the laser rot spots or film damage spots.

undot and removedot both do a nice job.


the only thing left to get everything out of virtualdub and into script is a comparable filter for avisynth that replicates donald grafts RGB filter and something that gets me control of white balance in avisynth.

laserschwert, you're a script guru.

my RGB setting is R 98, G 100, B 108
white balance is adjusting the white value to the standard 255, 255, 255.

what's comparable in avisynth to do this?


Post
#79378
Topic
.: Moth3r's PAL DVD project :.
Link
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/79378/action/topic#79378
Time
I think you've read it wrong moth3r

regardless of how the source was originally created, if you have an interlaced capture file, unless you deinterlace it, it will be nigh on impossible to run filters on it to sharpen or improve the image further as most filters for avisynth and vdub are designed to work with a progressive non-interlaced sourec.

so even if it looks fine on your PC screen, it is still interlaced. to smooth, sharpen or do anything else you will need to deinterlace to get it back to a non interlaced progressive source file.

eg Star wars on LD PAL.

25fps interlaced file, deinterlace back to 25fps progressive.

Star Wars on LD NTSC

29.97fps NTSC interlaced file, IVTC back to 23.97fps progressive using deinterlace and frame decimation.

that's my read on this situation.
Post
#79376
Topic
pal and interlaced material query
Link
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/79376/action/topic#79376
Time
I'm a bit lost, need some advice so I can capture this evening.

I've only ever captured and edited NTSC interlaced material before now even though I live in Europe. nature of what was captured. I am now going to be capturing PAL from a LD and VCR so the captured material will be 25fps interlaced.

I know I don't need to IVTC or anything to get it back to 24fps because PAL is just sped up 4% do I just do a standard interlace to make it a progressive source?

can I do this by just doing sangnom? or do I de-interlace then use sangnom like before and blend the material with an overlay ?

or what?

bit lost, doom 9 is confusing me more than helping to be honest.

would be I be able to just deinterlace using sangnom because that will interpolate and AA for me in one go.

quick answer would be nice because I'd like to capture tonight if I could.
Post
#79375
Topic
.: Moth3r's PAL DVD project :.
Link
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/79375/action/topic#79375
Time
?????

When the capture is loaded in AVISynth, the 2 fields are automatically combined to retrieve the full frame -


I'd love to know how that one is accomplished. you normally have to use a filter to make it deinterlace back to a full progressive file. it certainly doesn't to my knowledge deinterlace on the fly on its own without being told too.

if it did that, and you wanted to keep a source fil interlaced (for whatever reason) you would have to add a switch or command to your AVS file to NOT deinterlace automatically. no such mention of that on the avisynth.org site.

in addition, if it did do this on the fly, then the likes of Donald Graft wouldn't have bothered to create an avisynth deinterlace plugin surely?

most interested.
Post
#79365
Topic
Help Wanted: The "blast it, wedge" line needed...
Link
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/79365/action/topic#79365
Time

anyone got the blast it wedge line at all? this apparently is on the mono mix.

I distinctly remember seeing it once on a TV broadcast in the early 80’s and always thought it made more sense than the blast it biggs line that is on the video. seeing as it is wedge that saves him.

anyone able to score on this one?

Post
#79268
Topic
combustion v after effects
Link
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/79268/action/topic#79268
Time
I've been doing some reading and it would seem to my inexperienced eye that after effects and combustion do the same things.

ie mask, rotoscope, matte, composite etc.

I've AE 6 and will try getting a book at the weekend to learn how to use it to some extent. Isense a starfield and travelling matte in my future soon. but the work mebe has done in combustion is impressive.

anyone care to offer an opinion on which is better and why? be it easier to use, better plugins, easier interface etc.

would be interested to know. seeing as I have after effects, need I bother getting combustion if all I want to do is some rotoscoping, a basic matte to fix the starfield and some compositing so I can combine elements from two different captures.

I'm less bothered about fixing spots and tears, but if it's easy enough in after effects, it might be worth fixing some of the more glaring ones in ANH.
Post
#79264
Topic
STAR WARS: The Torrents thread
Link
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/79264/action/topic#79264
Time
um...shuffles feet. dumb question, but


how the hell do you know if this is working?

I got abc torrent program, I've got a torrent file, I've double clicked on it and on the status there is something happening, but I'm damned if I know what's happening. far as I can tell nothing is actually downloading and it's been connected for 20 minutes.

any site link which is a good how to for torrents.
Post
#79260
Topic
Censorship of the original films
Link
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/79260/action/topic#79260
Time
if a painting is so badly damaged it needs restoring, then yes, you may have to do those things to bring it back to where it originally was.

that's the point. restoring back to original state

you argument of

Fix the colours, after all picasso would have used a more vibrant red, if it was on his pallet.


doesn't hold water. that's not what people are doing. the DE LD is the best example of this.

compare the color values of this against, a mid 80's VHS of the film, the 93 THX VHS release of the film, the 97 SE VHS release of the film.

the SE is oversaturated, no one ever denied it wasn't.

however, the DE LD, which I, amongst others has used as my capture source, is tremendously bleached and faded in comparison to the earlier VHS releases. so which is correct? which commercial release of the film has the best color?

you don't know, I don't know. we never will know because the original film deteriorated to such an extent we can't see the original movie film strip and see for ourselves. all we can do as videophiles is color correct our capture as best we can using the equipment we have and logically apply algorithims to arrive at a finished product.

as always, we must use things we know to be white and pure red as guidelines for the rest. this is subjective but there is nothing we can do about that. we aren't intentionally altering things, we are trying to get the color values back to where we 'think' those values should be.

it's not revisionist, hell by that guideline you've stated, then all of the restorations everyone has ever done to Star wars and released on DVD-R for people to enjoy are null and void altered revisionist editions, because the color isn't right.
Post
#79258
Topic
Censorship of the original films
Link
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/79258/action/topic#79258
Time
personally I'm with mebe on this.

anything that fixes print damage must surely be considered a good thing. if we had an original print in pristine condition, then it wouldn't have the damage evident on the LD transfers that we have, I mean things like emulsion blobs, spots, tears, scratches.

a lot of what Mebejedi is doing is fixing this print damage and I can't see how anyone can say that this is wrong. re-rotoscoping botched lightsaber stuff again must surely fall into the same category. it's fixing the film.

he's not adding revisionist scenes like lucas,
he's not adding out of place CGI
he's not extended scenes and changed music tempo to make it fit.

he's taking the original movie and repairing it.

you didn't see people complaining when Ben Hur got 'restored' and put on DVD. same goes for Lawrence of Arabia. those were both films that were recomposited digitally, color corrected, had print damage repaired and were cleaned to give as nice a presentation as possible.

you didn't see anyone shouting from the rooftops that they weren't the original versions of the film. what Mebejedi is doing is the same. he's repairing visible damage, colour correcting, sharpening to get best possible picture quality and fixing a few dodgy effects that have been flaws since the beginning which would never have been missed if Fox hadn't rushed lucas at the end of production.

as regards Mverta and his legacy edition I think kudos to someone who's putting in such work to repair the botched 2004 DVD.

lets take the changes mentioned, the red on the tantive and the opening crawl starfield.

the red on the tantive was color correction.
he re-rotoscoped the bolts on the opening corvette star destroyer dogfight because the digital work has erased the glows around the bolts
he redid the starfield because you could hardly see it. the sharpening routines had obscured it from view.

all of that by any film restorers yardstick would be classed as restoration to the original print. none of what he has done thus far has been revisionist. he has not deviated from the original film apart from keeping the new FOX studio logo

so fair play to them. I did think that danielb was fairly moderate but this thread has just convinced me otherwise and that he better either pony up and do his own set and show us how it should be done, be quiet on the relevant threads or download TR47's or Gonzo's sets if he wants the unsullied originals.
Post
#79122
Topic
***The MeBeJedi feedback thread ***
Link
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/79122/action/topic#79122
Time
@danielb

I see what you're saying Dan, but I also think there is a valid case for the work mebejedi is doing. personally, it's too mind numbing for me to envisage doing, kudos for him to go through the film and erase dirt. (psssst...mebe, when you're done I'll send a hard drive, copy me over your cleaned but as yet unadjusted or color corrected interim file. ta )

I think your both right in different ways.

danielb, preservation of the original version as it was shot, as it was made. admirable. I'm doing it myself as you know. but coming to this forum has also opened my eyes to other possibilities.

the SE fixed various fx goofs from the original. example, digitally recompositing the space battle. forget the CGI, I'm talking about the actual original fx shots.

good example, the explosions of the ywings in the trench attack. the explosions are more vibrant and more full because all of it is there and is no longer comped out. For me, that is a restoration, not an alteration, not a self imposed edit.

same goes for vaders sabre pole in the docking bay when they escape. it was missed from the original movie due to time constraints. for it to be fixed is to sort a continuity error that in todays movie world, wouldn't really be missed.

the fact mebejedi is spending the time to re-rotoscope the sabres I think falls into this category.

he's not altering the film, what he is doing is fixing a few of the technical errors that crept into the films.

so, by a certain point of view, you're both right. there is a place for both visions here.
Post
#79112
Topic
.: The Lancer DVD Project :. (* unfinished project *)
Link
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/79112/action/topic#79112
Time
@ danielb

non-anamorphic. nope, sorry, won't happen. takes too long for my machine to render out the avi file as it is, I'm not going to be able to get that past the wife twice.

I wouldn't say mine is the best to be honest. for a start, mverta is gonna kill all our efforts stone dead some day, already has to some extent. I would still say Zion , mebejedi and Moth3r have the edge, purely because they are capturing on better kit than I did.

mine was done two years ago from the DE set on a Pioneer 515 player into a VIVO Geforce 1 card. the whites and highlights are a bit blown out on my capture and that detail is lost, never to return. I did it two years ago and having seen the likes of Zion's and others, mebejedi for example, my capture lacks in some areas. all I'm doing now is polishing a turd really.

I do have empire and jedi's raw capture, but not ANH, I lost it in a partition crash. all this work has been done using an AVI'd version of my original encodes M2v file. yup, I'm re-encoding an mpeg of my original capture. so I am starting two generations down from the source.

the compensating factor here is how the filters have improved in the last two years.

big thanks to zion and laserschwert, without your input I'd never have found sangnom.

sangnom fixed the jaggies big time, seriously, use that filter.
msu smart sharpen is entirely responsible for the detail you now see. the top screenies illustrates how I oversoftened my source capture and lost lots of edge detail. I used pixiedust for that originally and while it killed the mosquito noise, it also buggered a lot else. on my TV it looks a bit soft, but the new MSU smart sharpened version kicks ass.

it makes me mad though, I am sorely tempted to buy another laserdisc player, buy the discs again and do it all over again. I know I could do a better job of it.

instead I am going to try and DE SE the DVD next time and do what I can that way.
Post
#79106
Topic
I'm doing a comparison - opinions please!
Link
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/79106/action/topic#79106
Time
Star wars is actually a bloody hard film to sync the sound on if you're doing video capture work because about the first ten minutes of film only has dialogue from three humans in that time and two of those are dubbed, so you can only use the Princess Leia vs Vader conversation as a key.

the rest is unuseable as it is either, artoo, threepio or stormtroopers talking, all of whom are wearing masks. the dubbing on all the alliance pilots in the final battle and the two imperial officers on the tantive and most of the officers on the death star apart from Peter cushing were re-dubbed in the states as well. so like I say, a hard film to sync.
Post
#79067
Topic
.: The Lancer DVD Project :. (* unfinished project *)
Link
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/79067/action/topic#79067
Time
more tweaks. adjusted the saturation again, went a little heavier on reds this time, I'm a little happier with the skin tones but not entirely convinced, opinions sought on this, have I gone too far perhaps?

also, adjusted contrast slightly to overcome the eye searingly white of the stormtrooper armour in some scenes. this is not something I can cure becase the original capture was too bright but the contrast adjust seems to be okay. I've also made it a bit more blue in the RGB values.
this tweak has also toned down the vibrancy of the orange flight suits which I am happy about. I've always felt that in the SE's and the new DVD's that they are just toooooo orange, I never ever remember them being that bright and I think that is more a fault of the color correction done in the reissues.

I also see where I went wrong first time around. all of my color values were done to match the capture source. ie what you see in the original shots at the beginning of this thread is what the DE LD's were like. when I should have been more subjective in my color correction etc to better values. now leia's white costume actually is white rather than a more creamy white yellow.

the shots are laid out in sequential pairs. the top shot is the pre shot, basic brightness contrast and saturation adjustment + limitedsharpen via avisynth script, the bottom one has been further adjusted using saturation and RGB balancing + MSU smart sharpen to tighten up the image further.

shot 5 is also a bit of a treat for mebejedi fans as this is one of the frames he was kind enough to send me to fix my canyon problem. I have color corrected his frame + also sharpened it up but his base capture file is a lot better than what I am working with at present.

mebe, I can send you my settings that I have used if you're interested and wondering how I got from your original colour set to mine.

screenie1
screenie2
screenie3
screenie4
screenie5
screenie6

for those interested, I seriously recommend getting a virtualdub filter called white balance. get to the site here
go to the hosted menu and it is on the list there.

tremendously useful.

it combines the donald graft brightness/contrast filter, his hue saturation intensity filter and a white balance filter into one. the white balance in particular is an invaluable tool and made my final product look a damn sight more balanced on its color values without tons of farting around.
Post
#79060
Topic
Thought on de-SE'ing the DVD
Link
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/79060/action/topic#79060
Time
@adigitalman

if you want a frame accurate cheap solution get virtualdubmod from here http://virtualdubmod.sourceforge.net/

you can do all the color correction you want with filters and it's especially useful when assembling shots in a sequence, you can't edit like you can in premier, but it allows you to make precise cuts from footage, and output certain selection as a file which you could then reassemble back in premier.

regarding combining pal and bntsc footage, the aspect will be different,

widescreen non anamorphic NTSC is 720 x 272ish, pal is 720 x 325ish

now as the width is the same, it makes it hard to just vertically squash the footage down because it's just that, squashed.

I don't know of a way to convert a widescreen item from PAL to NTSC 'and' keep the correct aspect ratio. normally when I do something quick and dirty for work, I just crop some of the black bars off top and bottom to change 576 to 480 without losing any of the image.

Post
#79013
Topic
<strong>The Cowclops Transfers (a.k.a. the PCM audio DVD's, Row47 set) Info and Feedback Thread</strong> (Released)
Link
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/79013/action/topic#79013
Time
let no one misunderstand me here. I didn't say I didn't like PCM, It's nice to have, but in a situation when you have limited space (4.7GB) and are trying to get as best a picture quality as possible, then AC3 sound with good encode is infinitely superior.

same goes for filling the disc with moving menus and trailers etc. my menus are under 35mb, that's 7 images, 7 looping audio tracks for them, + the main film and movie audio.

maximum space for movie image, then a 2.0 dolby stereo Ac3 file made from the PCM recording.

If you're going dual layer then yeah, PCM is great to have, I just think it's a waste of time on a DVD5 that's all. there are better things to use you disk space on.
Post
#78993
Topic
Do you think George Lucas might release the original triloggy
Link
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/78993/action/topic#78993
Time
won't happen,

Luas has said repeatedly that the OT would never be released, that 'they don't exist any more' which is crap cos the AFI has a copy of the OT pre SE changes. (late 90's the AFI asked Lucasfilm for a set of star wars, empire and jedi for inclusion in the national film archive. the story goes that lucasfilm sent 97 SE's of the films and the AFI sent them back, saying those were not the films as they were originally released. so apparently lucasfilm sent them original reels.)

anyway, it's been stated too many times now by lucasfilm for them to do a 180 and release it I think.

being amercia, they could get slapped with a class action by loads of people saying 'I only bought this set cos you said the originals were never gonna get released'

lots of corporate embarassment, won't happen.

I'd like them too, but it won't.
Post
#78974
Topic
<strong>The Cowclops Transfers (a.k.a. the PCM audio DVD's, Row47 set) Info and Feedback Thread</strong> (Released)
Link
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/78974/action/topic#78974
Time
@tr47,

this is going to sound quite bolshie but I honestly can't see how you can say a DVD5 version looks the same as a DVD9 version when you are using a PCM soundtrack.

if you've put the original PCM capture audio track on a DVD5, that means you are giving up around 1.2-1.3GB of disc space to the audio. that's a 3rd of the discs capacity which means you have around a 3GB M2v encode file.

on a DVD9 you've got about 8GB useable, something must be up if you've encoded a DVD9 version and it looks no better than a DVD5 encode. seriously

unless you are using a DVD9 DL disc, admirable as it is to retain the original PCM file, you are giving up a lot of space on a DVD5 single layer disc to sound and not picture. parituclarly when you can get a 300mb ac3 file instead.