Jokke_r

It seems to me that a lot of these color ‘correction’(more like reinterpretation) samples fall victim to a lot of basic photography post processing mistakes (speaking as a professional photographer if that carries any weight (honestly it shouldn’t these days 😛)).

-The fixation on neutral whites and grays.
I remember a few years ago on this site when everyones color corrections included completely monochrome death star interiors and monochrome tie-fighters. And i knew for a fact that the models for the tie-fighters had a blue tint since i had seen them at the ‘art of star wars’ exhibition in Helsinki in 2000.

While this might seem like it makes sense in a still picture intended for display as is we have to remember that even though an object is painted white or gray it will not appear as such in almost anything except open daylight lighting conditions in outer space. Light is reflected off of every surface in the scene and tint white and gray objects.
If they used cool fluorescent lights on set or depending on what color balance film they used etc gray won’t look grey and white shouldn’t look perfectly white in almost any context which brings me to nr2.

-Maximizing the dynamic range of the shot.
There’s often a strive to maximize the utilization of the available dynamic range in every shot or scene in order to give more punch or life-like contrast to a scene. Which means people want to push the brightest pixels in the scene to close to pure white and the darkest pixels to close to pure black. And while it can mostly look good it can cause problems and inconsistency between shots of the same scene. There might not be anything close to resembling pure white light in the scene, so pushing to contrast to maximize the dynamic range will overexpose the next best thing. A lot of the white hallway shots the walls appear way way too bright. It’s also important to realize the relationship between contrast and saturation. A lot of the reason why something might appear too warm or cool can be explained by too much contrast. I often find it’s advantageous to alter luminance curves separately from saturation in order to not over-saturate (blow out) colored highlights which seems to be a constant problem in the blu-ray. I think this is the reason the desert shots of 4k83 look severely overexposed in the teaser trailer i saw.

Digitizing film is a minefield, i know since I’ve done it plenty, thankfully the restoration projects aren’t actually scanning negatives since you wouldn’t see one frame of accurate color if that was the case. Which i also think is one of the reason the older scans used for the blu-rays look so bad, especially when it comes to color accuracy, especially the magenta. Getting good digital color of a negative is very hard. Firstly you need to get rid of the extreme orange tint, and this should be done optically with colored filters since otherwise you’re just sacrificing color depth to do it digitally. And even so it’s completely open to interpretation what shade of red something was supposed to be, especially hard since if you couldn’t eliminate to orange mask optically then when inverted all your red tones will have a strong over-saturated magenta cast. Transparency film is easier somewhat since the color is mostly correct (unless it’s old and faded) but it has less captured dynamic range than negative film, so you get crushed blacks definitely and blown out highlights if you’re not careful. The contrast of the picture on the film is a lot higher on transparency film than negative, so there might be problems while digitizing unless your digitizing sensor is up to snuff.

I think most of drdre’s colors look good, but i’m mostly concerned that they are too contrasty, and could actually benefit from being a bit more darker and dull.

Don't think any visible depth of field is appropriate, at least i don't remember it from the originals (i could be wrong).

The original shot was probably set up with a dolly over a table with the text using a specialized tilt/shift lens, by tilting the lens they would be able to tilt the plane of focus to run parallel with the table surface, ensuring sharp focus across the whole text.

This is called the Scheimpflug principle:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scheimpflug_principle

Or at least, that's how i would have done it.

I for one would be happy with a 5-8GB x.264 encoded 720p mkv or even an xvid if i couldn't be bothered downloading 8gigs, as i only ever watch movies on my computer, don't even own a TV and couldn't give a rats ass about menus or whatever.

heh i'm kinda embarased to admit this, even though the name Palpatine wasn't ever in the OT it had been in the EU pretty much since the beginning, although i wasn't familiar with this stuff at all so when i was watching ep1 for the first time i had no idea senator Palpatine was supposed to become the emperor, this revelation came to me only later when i noticed in the credits that palpatine was played by Ian McDiarmid, and being such a SW nerd in my early years i imediately recognized him as being the emperor :P  His voice/face didn't spark any resemblence with the emperor to me initially.

I always figured Jerjerrod was more of an engineer type, overseeing the construction, and would not be the final commander of the completed DSII, would make sense for him to be vary of Vader as he's smart enough to not try and piss Vader off.

I noticed in one of the clips where vader is talking to the star destroyer captains via hologram, that one of the holograms (who are in the background) cover vaders shoulder (which is in the foreground) clearly it's just a compositing mishap.

Had an idea about the building of the lightsaber in ROTJ, if modified a little (essentially removing the dialogue) it could be done rather convincingly, all you need is a costume some bluescreen and some fancy editing skills. Render a cave backdrop and have the actor portraying luke attempting to assemble the lightsaber from various parts but failing, without dialogue this would consist of him attempting to assemble it and it failing to ignite, he would then remember yoda's talk from ESB, it wouldn't be a force "whisper" he's simply remembering seeing as he must accomplish this himself without help. He then reaches out with his mind and the parts of the saber start to float in front of him and combined with the right music the parts will assemble themselves and luke reaches out for the hilt and it ignites.

The face of the actor would need to be replaced via digital compositing with luke's, it could be done if the scene is set up in such a way that there is not much movement and having his face shrouded for the most part with his hood.

After the saber is built Luke leaves the cave, 3PO and R2 wait at the opening, luke places his hand on R2 and you cut to whatever scene you feel appropriate.

Looking at a couple of the youtube clips of Adywans upcoming ESB Revisited, i feel that some of the removal of the blueish hue in the Hoth scenes done in the name of color correction are in error.

Especially in the outdoor scenes, some of the shadows in the snowy enviroment should have a blue tint, seeing as shadows are lit by indirect light which for the most part consists of atmospheric scattering and to some part light reflected from the snow in the enviroment, my 2c...

EDIT: Here's some of my army photos from couple years back to show what i'm talking about

Only major problem i have with ESB is when Han suddenly decides to walk out to (as far as he know) a cave inside an asteroid in OUTER SPACE, in a vaccuum, with nothing but a breathing mask, oh and gravity on the asteroid is perfect as well. At least inside the ship they have the excuse of artificial gravity. But then again there's not much one can do to that scene.