yotsuya

ray_afraid said:

yotsuya said:

Rogue one just has proven how bad TFA really is.

I didn’t care much for TFA, but how has R1 “proven” it to be bad?
I hope that doesn’t sound condescending or whatever, I know how these things can read in the current mood of the forum, I’m just curious.

You have two opportunities to make a Star Wars movie. For Disney’s first outing in Star Wars, you have TFA. They seem to have all the right people involved and what you get is a story that plays it safe, doesn’t take many risks, has great characters, but contains a whole string of gaffs (lack of any explanation of the current and complex Republic government setup, lack of any explanation as to why the Republic fleet is in one place when it is a large galaxy, the all too convenient way the Falcon escapes Jakku and is found by Han and Chewy, the superweapon that manages to shoot a planet systems away and not have it take centuries to get there and provides no explanation of what the hell is going on, and somehow the blast is visible on Takodana and yet they are not destroyed themselves and then Luke at the end with no lines, and I could go on about the failings of the films but that seems enough) and just is unsatisfying. Then the second outing takes the first two paragraphs from the ANH crawl and gives us the full story. It was a daring script, only has cameos from the main saga cast, lots of easter eggs, but an solid story that is new and different for Star Wars (but very reminicent of many war movies, especially WWII movies) and it hit is out of the park. Abrams gave us little glimpses of classic Star Wars with the Falcon and a few other things, but Rogue One dives into the world of ANH and shows us different corners and makes it come alive. The writing, directing, and editing are outstanding and what I expected of a Star Wars movie. I expected it of the saga, not the side stories, but found the reverse to be true. To me the vast difference in quality (at least in my opinion) shows how bad TFA really is. That is how Rogue One proves that TFA is a bad movie. One can hold its own with the OT, the other I question whether it should even be included in the saga. Others are entitled to have a different opinion but this is how I feel. TFA is more in need of a fan edit than any of the other films followed closely by AOTC.

I have not decided yet if Rogue One comes up to the OT in quality. It far exceeds the quality of the other four movies so for now I am putting it between the OT and PT in ranking. And I have become increasingly annoyed with the starfield in The Force Awakens so my opinion of it continues to be bad. I think I can partially forgive Lucas for some of his gaffs in the PT because he gave us the OT. But I cannot forgive Abrams for what he did to Star Trek and so the flaws of TFA are far more glaring to me and highly annoy me to a greater extent. My opinion may change depending on how TLJ and IX are. But not yet. Rogue one just has proven how bad TFA really is.

Density said:

Alderaan said:

TPM was at least shot on film, and didn’t have Yoda flying around like a monkey. That seals it for me.

Plus, the factory sequence. Which I would never remember, if not for RLM, since I only saw the POS once.

The fact that it was shot on film doesn’t really matter to me. If anything it just makes the poorly aged CGI stand out more. And Yoda flying around like a monkey is less offensive than kiddie Vader to me. The legacy of both characters from the originals is basically destroyed, but it’s far worse in the latter case as far as I’m concerned. At least the fact that Yoda was a “great warrior” leaves open the possibility that he fought like that; the Anakin in TPM was sure as fuck not the “best star pilot in the galaxy” described by Obi-Wan.

Also nothing in the factory sequence is any worse than the childish toilet humor prevalent throughout TPM. Humor is not literally derived from Jar Jar Binks stepping in shit.

For Anakin’s skills in TPM as referenced in the OT, you have to go to ROTJ where Kenobi said that Anakin was already a good pilot when they met. He didn’t become “the best star pilot in the galaxy” until later and his flying skills in ATOC and ROTS are impressive enough to meet that requirement - especially coming from someone who hates flying.

TV’s Frink said:

Everyone is making good points right now regarding TPM vs AOTC, on both sides. Which just goes to show there is no winner in that battle, only less of a loser.

TPM is my favorite prequel but that’s saying barely anything.

Oh… you used the word “favorite” with a Prequel. Are you ill?

Has anyone compared the Theatrical DTS to the DVD or blu-ray version?

althor1138 has released at least 2 different LD sets that were done from release prints. One German and one French. They are still up on MS. I downloaded the French one and it is interesting, but the colors are all over the place. Some shots are very blue, some yellow, some magenta. Worth looking at but I didn’t find it very helpful.

That’s why I posted the video. It is really hard to tell. I only noticed when I had it zoomed way in as I was trying to align them. As I said, it is only a few pixels and I’m sure there are other aspects of this project that are going to be off by a few pixels. If I get all the correct elements and composite them right, I’m hoping no will will notice a few tiny things off.

The color reference slide is to calibrate the scanner so you know that the colors you get in the final image are true to the original. Film stock is irrelevant. Once calibrated, you can scan anything the scanner can handle (in this case a dedicated film scanner for 35 mm film prints and slides). Then you can adjust for projector bulb variations if you so desire. But I believe the intent is to archive the accurate colors from a technicolor print - the closest we are going to get to the O-neg.

Photographers often use something similar to get accurate color prints. But in the case of a projector ready film, that has already been done and the case before us is how to get those colors from film to digital.

And software is quite capable of converting that for output. Look at DVD’s.

I don’t have anything ready, but this is a sample of just how close the 77 and 81 crawls are. I created this to check the laser blasts to be sure that they are identical in both versions. If you look closely you can see that some of the details on the Star Destroyer do not line up, but it is really hard to see much of anything different when you play it at speed. But as you can see, the engine glow lines up nicely. I have the engine glow layer isolated now and am working on the beauty pass layer (I’m creating PNG files with a transparent background for easy composition). Then I need to work on the laser layer (I need to isolate all the laser bolts so I can control the transparency allowing stars to show through like in the original 77 version - then I can use that to fix the blu-ray).

https://vimeo.com/209821415
password: OT

I have a detailed knowledge of the various sound mixes for Star Wars, but I am less familiar with Empire and Jedi. I want to have an accurate theatrical sound mix and I’m wondering if there were any changes that I have not caught between the initial theatrical and home video releases and the 1985 release and the 1993 Definitive Edition/Faces/GOUT releases. At the moment I am unaware of any changes to the stereo/surround sound mix from the original 35 mm theatrical version to the 1993 version. But I wanted to check with the community before I continue with that assumption. I am aware that there are some sound quality differences between the versions (dynamics, stereo field width, etc.) but I am looking for actual edits like Star Wars has (the appearing and disappearing Threepio tractor beam line, the many differences between the original mono and stereo versions and the partial inclusion of some of the mono variations in the 1993 version). I understand Empire might have had a unique mono mix, but I have never come across it. I just want to be complete if those two movies any any similar edits that I might have missed. Especially since I am mostly familiar with the 1985 and 1993 versions.

Darth Lucas said:

yotsuya said:

I was hoping to automate some of the process, but that didn’t work as I’d hoped. Other than that things are going well, just slowly.

Certainly let us know if you find an easy way to separate the elements. My own work recreating this was very exhausting and slow for simply the matter of rotoscoping all the elements.

I did manage to automatically create a matte, but it isn’t very accurate. But I’m going to use a similar process to do it manually. First, I extracted the starfield and planets from some of the early frames of the flyover. I couldn’t use the earliest frames due to some alignment and color issues so the ones I used were about in the middle of the Blockade Runner’s pass and shortly before the star destroyer. I picked 4 frames from two locations and overlayed them to create an average for each location and then cut out the Blockade Runner from one and laid it over the other to fill the hole. Then in Vegas, I used that image to create an overlay layer using the difference setting. That way it would cancel out the stars and planets and leave a very dark background. Then I aligned the entire flyover to that image to maximize how much was cancelled out (I also used a mask to remove the smaller moon from creating an artifact on the star destroyer). Then I exported the resulting sequence to PNG images and ran a salt & pepper filter to remove the last trace of the stars. This leaves a horrible image, but a wonder black area that if selected properly will erase the unwanted area from the original pristine frame. For the later frames where the blue engine glow still remains, I had to isolate the green layer to get a clean enough image to be usable. But it also gave me the solution to isolating the blue engine glow by taking the two images (full color and isolated green) and removing all the lighter areas of the Star Destroyer and leaving only the blue glow. Still, I have to do all the layer operations manually, though I did automate doing the salt and pepper filter and isolating the green (as a b&w image).

Looking forward to some calibrated scans. Any time estimate for the first ones?

doubleofive said:

I have fff200 on this.

That look closer to the GOUT

That probably is the best source. After thinking about what I’ve seen in some of the copies and looking for a good solid area of color, I picked a frame at 0:00:49 (after the Episode VI, Return of the Jedi, and the first line of the crawl appears) and I took a chunk off the lower right of the N in Return and processed that with some blurring to even out the color, picked the center of the image and I got the RGB color 232, 198, 39 (Hex: #E8C627). Just from that little process I think it is still unclear what the specific color is, but that should be in the ball park. Another way would be to take points from multiple frames and multiple places in the frame and create an average. There might be some more automated tools that I am not aware of.

The only version of the logo that I’m aware that Mike Verta shared is on his website and isn’t very high quality. From that I got 255, 198, 45 (Hex: #FFC62D) from the lower side of the S in Star as that seemed to be the most even spot of color.

I’m really curious to see what color other people get.

Throughout the years, the opening title and crawl have appeared in variations of the same golden color. I’m curious if there is any consensus about what that color should be. There is the pale yellow of the old home video releases, there is the more vibrant yellow of the GOUT, there is the very goldenrod on the DVD and blu-rays, there is something more orange than yellow in some of the foreign releases. So what is the best color? I’m leaning to a yellow tinged with orange - about the color I like to see Threepio as. But are there any better guesses. I’ve never liked how dark they are in the DVD/BR releases (a lot of things about them are too dark).

I was hoping to automate some of the process, but that didn’t work as I’d hoped. Other than that things are going well, just slowly.

The list of issues with the GOUT is long. It is a very flawed release, though it was not unheard of in DVD release history, it was about 10 years after other such titles that I have in my collection. It is pretty pathetic to try and watch it on a widescreen TV. It would have been nice if they had just used the same interpositives to make a new widescreen transfer, but they were lazy and used a slightly modified version of the 1993 Definitive Edition LD master tapes (replacing the ANH Episode IV title sequence with the original 1977 title sequence and leaving the 1993 audio). There is too much noise reduction and it is badly done (though from other releases where they didn’t use it there are issues and the choice becomes understandable in the old world of CRTs). They are just flawed, but they are still a better video source than most LD’s (the master tapes would be the full 480 lines where the LD is 400 lines of resolution)

The GOUT can be enhanced to look better, but not much better. It is probably best suited to sourcing a widescreen DVD, though from what I’ve seen, there is some benefit to scaling it up to 720p depending on what effects are used. It is better than LD, but still far below DVD standard.

Some of those shots are looking great. Some are too red (particularly of Ben on Tatooine and the Imperial officers). A suggestion, you might think about doing each reel separately. Looks like on setting isn’t going to work for the entire film unless you compromise on some shots.

DrDre said:

I would like to add, that I believe it’s important to preserve the original theatrical print colors (or one of them) without interpretation, or subjective taste. I think once those are preserved, we can have a fair discussion about which colors are intentional, and which might be erroneous or otherwise.

I like your idea of basing it on the technicolor prints and correcting the GOUT as a template. I am eagerly awaiting your more accurate scans as I am doing the same thing and I currently have based it on Mike Verta’s samples with some corrections for the flaws he reported. I think this project can really help with the restoration of TESB. I’ve gone under the assumption (not always safe, but I like the results I see from it) that the 1993 Definitive Edition (the GOUT’s source) used the same process for all three films using interpositive prints. So I’ve applied exactly the same settings to all three films and it works very well. Following Poita’s current work on TESB, there are no prints of it that truly preserve the original colors so correcting the ANH GOUT to match the Technicolor frames and applying the results to TESB might be the best color source we have for it.

kk650 said:

yotsuya said:

kk650 said:

DrDre said:

This is a very rough approximation, and is definitely not an accurate color reference, but the Mike Verta scans look something like this:

…whereas the print itself looks something like this:

On my main monitor the top image looks too red and the bottom image looks too blue, you can see it in the highlights on C3PO. There’s a very noticable difference in colour between those two frames, at least to my eyes. Both are oversaturated as well IMHO.

For those interested in comparing, here’s roughly that frame from the new Star Wars Semi-Specialised Edition V2.6 I just uploaded to tehparadox:

The blue highlights on Threepio are the reflection of the sky. This last image also lacks the reds that should be in the faces in the exterior Tatooine shots. The image has been over adjusted to make their skin tones look good when all the on set photos I’ve come across also show very red tones. Basically it has been over corrected. Though my one issue with DrDre’s new scan is that the darker areas seem over saturated to the point where detail is lost, but that could be the print itself. But the colors seem on the money to me. His color sense is excellent and he is using very good equipment to scan the frames.

I’m not exactly sure what you think over corrected means Yotsuya. When I think of over corrected, I think of a frame that had a blanket blue tint like in the second frame and too much is removed in correction, making it too yellow, or a frame that is too contrasty and too much contrast is removed and the frame ends up looking flat and washed out. The first frame has a blanket red tint and the second has a blanket blue tint, both are oversaturated, with too much contrast for home viewing. You are aware that set photos are not 100% reliable when it comes to deciding what the colours/image dynamics in a film should be right? Those set photos get manipulated for publication and the original film footage also gets regraded in post.

It doesn’t matter how red the fleshtones are in set photos, what matters is getting as balanced colours as possible with the frame/transfer you’re working with and that for me means getting the contrast and saturation within normal levels for home viewing, getting fleshtones looking fairly natural relative to the light sources they’re exposed to and getting rid of any blanket tints like the blanket red tint in the first frame and blanket blue tint in the second frame, from the OT films we know the daytime sunlight on tatooine is supposed to be normal for a hot desert country, a warm yellowish colour, not tinted red or blue.

I’m confident that there is no blanket tint in that frame I posted and that the brightness/contrast/saturation settings are correct in the context of the blu-ray’s colour scheme because a single setting was used to grade the vast majority of the film, including this whole scene with Ben. White scenes on Tantive IV and other scenes from the film like the ones below were used to carefully calibrate that single overall setting and remove any blanket tints on the blu-ray and get the best balance of colours possible:

Blu-ray 1:

Star Wars Semi-Specialised Edition V2.6 Regraded 1:

Blu-ray 2:

Star Wars Semi-Specialised Edition V2.6 Regraded 2:

Blu-ray 3:

Star Wars Semi-Specialised Edition V2.6 Regraded 3:

Blu-ray 4:

Star Wars Semi-Specialised Edition V2.6 Regraded 4:

Blu-ray 5:

Star Wars Semi-Specialised Edition V2.6 Regraded 5:

Blu-ray 6:

Star Wars Semi-Specialised Edition V2.6 Regraded 6:

Blu-ray 7:

Star Wars Semi-Specialised Edition V2.6 Regraded 7:

Blu-ray 8:

Star Wars Semi-Specialised Edition V2.6 Regraded 8:

Blu-ray 9:

Star Wars Semi-Specialised Edition V2.6 Regraded 9:

Blu-ray 10:

Star Wars Semi-Specialised Edition V2.6 Regraded 10:

Blu-ray 1:

Star Wars Semi-Specialised Edition V2.6 Regraded 1:

Blu-ray 2:

Star Wars Semi-Specialised Edition V2.6 Regraded 2:

By over correcting I mean that there is a problem with the source and in the process of correcting the problem you take it too far the other way. So the above frames correct the magenta of the BR but leave the frames far yellower than our most accurate sources would indicate. In essence, exchanging one bad color for another (though the yellow is less offensive to the eye). DrDre has posted some awesome color corrections that are generally agreed to be the best the posters to this thread have ever seen the colors. When you overlay the original BR with the above correction, you get something far more pleasing and I feel more accurate.

kk650 said:

DrDre said:

This is a very rough approximation, and is definitely not an accurate color reference, but the Mike Verta scans look something like this:

…whereas the print itself looks something like this:

On my main monitor the top image looks too red and the bottom image looks too blue, you can see it in the highlights on C3PO. There’s a very noticable difference in colour between those two frames, at least to my eyes. Both are oversaturated as well IMHO.

For those interested in comparing, here’s roughly that frame from the new Star Wars Semi-Specialised Edition V2.6 I just uploaded to tehparadox:

The blue highlights on Threepio are the reflection of the sky. This last image also lacks the reds that should be in the faces in the exterior Tatooine shots. The image has been over adjusted to make their skin tones look good when all the on set photos I’ve come across also show very red tones. Basically it has been over corrected. Though my one issue with DrDre’s new scan is that the darker areas seem over saturated to the point where detail is lost, but that could be the print itself. But the colors seem on the money to me. His color sense is excellent and he is using very good equipment to scan the frames.

Wow. I just compared that to what I was doing (based on Verta’s scan, but corrected and then applied to the GOUT), and I was so close. The GOUT has some issues and I don’t think I can get that contrast, but the only color correction I had to do was to up the blue channel. Awesome scan, DrDre. I can’t wait to see more. I think you are finally getting this community the accurate color pallet we have been searching for (and largely guessing at). Thanks a million.

Well, for the 1981 crawl, we have a 1982 PAL source (widescreen version extracted from horizontally compressed rather than cropped source), the 1985 US Special Widescreen Edition, the Japanese Special Collection, the 1993 Definitive Edition (CAV - later rereleased as the Faces CLV set), and the scanned 35 mm element courtesy of TN1. All of the home video sources are washed out and have heavy smearing (they don’t even come up to the GOUT level of quality). The 35 mm scan has crushed blacks. So bad that there are few visible stars and heavy shadows on the Star Destroyer that shouldn’t be there. That right there would require a better source to repair and the only better sources are the 77 and 97 versions.

Also, as this is a recreation using the best sources possible to get as close to the original as possible, and as the small detail is not one that is readily apparent (I had to overlay the two on top of each other in contrasting colors to even detect it), it will be just one more thing among the long list of points where this will be close but not exact. I’m aiming for as exact as I can make it, but it cannot be perfect. So I have accepted this small little flaw. It is off by all of 3 pixels in the 1920x1080 image. I have stars off by more than that in some frames (I don’t have the skill to match the lens effects to put all the stars in the correct location in every frame). What it comes down to is that the 77 version from 35 mm is closer to the 81 version on 35 mm than any of the LD verions are. The 1985 US SWE is the next best in alignment but it lacks the quality. The other 3 don’t even align properly. And two of the main places that I would need to fix on the 81 35 mm scan are the hanger and the engines. I did not check the 97 (or more properly the DVD/BR version) because the entire engine section and engine glow is wrong and would have to be replaced and I would still have to use the 77 version but have to edit it onto a different version. The 77 version is the closest I can get to the original without sacrificing quality. My goal is to have it look right and feel right and to pass all but the most detailed inspection. I want it to be the best available until a better source is found for the original.

Yeah. I just determined that I will need to use the mask via the graphics software. That is merging two different images 415 times and then cleaning up the result. Well, 411… the first four frames don’t have any elements to mask. Plus about 120 images (a lot of which have no lasers, just ships) for the lasers and engine glow. I did find an interesting way to isolate just the engine glow and eliminate the star destroyer. But a lot of work ahead. But at least I don’t have to align and resize the frames like I would with the 81 elements. One thing I did discover (not a big thing, but significant) - for the 81 flyover they refilmed the Star Destroyer (or used a different take). It is hard to tell, but the ship isn’t in 100% the same positions. You can tell when the hanger moves across the top of the screen. The edge doesn’t align when you overlay the two different flyovers. They look identical unless you overlay them and catch it. And I thought they just reprocessed it to make a new matte.