yotsuya

DominicCobb said:

They wrote the script very much together. That’s just a fact. JJ had final say obviously as he was the director but it was a complete collaboration.

And honestly, JJ’s track record in recent years is far superior to Kasdan’s.

JJ’s track record is that he can’t write endings. He’s great with characters but he sucks at overall story telling. He did great characterizations for the Star Trek films but the stories lack anything of genuine Star Trek and the endings make about as much sense. I literally hate those films. The PT are gold in comparison. I rate TFA as the worst Star Wars movie because of all the flubs that I attribute to JJ and his bad editing decisions as director and his bad input as writer. Rian Johnson at least has a track record of writing good stories that keep audiences interested. JJ’s great at characters and action, but he isn’t a very good story teller. At least Lucas was good at that. Kasdan has a good track record. I have no question on his ability to tell a story which I why I look forward to the Han Solo movie. I’ve liked all of the movies he has written that I have seen.

And there are potential spoilers for TLJ out there. There are some leaked set photos and some juicy plot points that are born out by casting.

The 81 and 77 engine flares are identical (though in pulling them out I could end up with some artifacts that don’t quite line up, but I’m hoping they won’t be noticeable). And no, it will not look like the DeEd. That is more based on the 97 flyover from the BR. It is dressed up to look like the 77 version with the crawl, starfield, and lasers, but the engines and engine glow are form the 97 SE. The 81 and 77 engines and engine glow are distinctly different. For one thing, the engine glow is more blue and cyan on the engines and the flares are completely different. The surrounding engine glow on the stars, planet, and moon is more cobalt and not such a bright blue. I will be lifting the 77 engine glow and using it as intact as I can. I might have to manually do some editing where the moon is because the moon is in different positions in 77 and 81, but my early tests indicate that I might not need to.

I’m having some computer issues so I haven’t been able to access the software to do some batch image conversions. The flyover is 415 frames and a lot of them are going to require manual editing. I already aligned the flyover to the background (I have aligned everything to the 81 35 mm scan which I aligned to the 1985 and 1993 LD versions) so once I have the 3 elements, it should be quick to put it in the project and render it. I still haven’t decided whether I want to use Vegas to cut the matte out for the beauty pass or if I want to do that manually (where I can then clean up the edges as needed) in my photo editing software. excluding the matte, I’m going to use the lasers/engine glow under the beauty pass setting the layer to lighten and then use that same one again using a color option over the beauty pass. I’m actually getting very close to being finished. Just a lot of image manipulation to get the elements isolated.

From what I’ve learned from studying the samples of the Technicolor IB prints, these are too bright. The midtones and darker tones should be darker. Also, it looks like the red/cyan channel is still to red. But so much better than the original.

I completed a test of overlaying the engine glow. On one hand it worked very well and on another it was iffy. I think I need to tweak it some, but to do that I need to finish the flyover. The good thing about procrastinating is that sometimes you think of a better way. I’m going to be using the 1977 flyover after I make sure all the details match the 81 flyover. I suspect there was some difference in matting some of the effects. As the blockader runner disappears behind the Star Destroyer, the engine glow of the BR shows a matte line in the 77 version and doesn’t in the 81 version. And I thought I saw a laser bolt that was different. So as soon as I correct for everything like that, I’m going to start making my layers. I found a way to cut out the stars, planet, and moons so I can make a matte. It will require some tweaking to remove the lasers, engine glow, and any stray stars along the edge of the ships. But once I have the matte, then it is fairly easy to get the ships isolated. The way I found of making the matte also gives me fairly decent laser and engine glow elements. It is a lot less work than what I first had in mind.

So I am actually getting ready to import the 77 crawl into my Vegas project today and align it to the ships in the 81 crawl from the 35 mm scan and the 85 Widescreen LD (I need a second source because the 35 mm scan has a lot of gateweave issues and a couple of severe jerks. I think I have them accounted for but I like a second source to confirm it). Then I’ll export to png my matte master (that filters out the stars and planet) and a beauty pass of the ships with noise reduction (if I don’t clean it up, when I add the noise and grain later it won’t match the other elements). Then I clean up the matte layer, extracting the frames for the lasers and engine glow before I erase them from the matte. Then I just need to put the layers back together. If my test of adding the engine glow works like I hope, I will use two layers, one for lightness and one for color. The test came out too purple, but I’m not going to try to fix that at this stage.

I hope to rank them:

OT
ST
PT

Rian Johnson is a superior writer to JJ Abrams so I have hope that the flaws of TFA will be countered by TLJ and IX. TFA may turn out to be an excellent part I to the trilogy if they tie it together right. We shall see.

Now, can we get back to TLJ spoilers instead of getting so off track.

To properly change the audio from NTSC to PAL and back (at least for the SW releases I have, like the UK GOUT - I prefer them because they preserver the original film frames), you have to change the duration and pitch. I’ve been using the altered GOUT Audio from the PAL source for TESB and Jedi. It suffers from some distortion. If you are after the 80’s home video experience, this is the way to go. If you are after the theatrical experience, you should set the video to 23.976 fps and use the GOUT audio synced audio.

dlvh said:

Goodness gracious…I don’t envy you.

A question for you yotsuya, Is the only color in either the '77, '81 or 97 starfield, Black and White, or is there variations of Blue in there somewhere?

The only thing I have to go by is the enhancement that Poita did. He used astronomy software to pull out a lot more stars than I could detect out of the 35 mm scan of the '81 starfield and a lot of them have some color. I went under the assumption that the color he came up with was oversaturated because none of the other shots of the same starsfield (it was created for TESB and various pieces of it show up in like 50+ different shots in TESB) don’t show any color to speak of. When I up the saturation, the small stars tend to go blue and the large ones tend to go red. But using the original saturation they all tend to be neutral in color - white or gray.

I have 5 sources. The 1982 PAL release (the crawl/flyover was horizontally compressed rather than cropped), the 1985 US Special Widescreen Edition, the Japanese Special Collection, the 1995 Definitive Edition/Faces Edition (the same source as the rest of the GOUT), and the 35 mm scan that was included with the Silver Screen Edition. Not one of them is good enough to even match the GOUT. The 1982 version has a lot of horizontal smearing (The stars are ovals). The words in the LD versions have artifacts that distort the edges, not to mention some ghosting. Some are too bright and you can see the full disc of the moons and the edge of the atmosphere in the matte, which, like the effects mattes, should be dark and invisible. Then you have the film scan which has super crushed blacks. The few stars that are visible are tiny specks.

As the 1981 crawl/flyover is the one I grew up watching at home, it is the one I want most to go with either the restoration from film, a despecialized version, or an enhanced GOUT. So I am willing to spend the time to make something that is close enough to the original from matching original elements to get it. I’m doing it in 1080p so it will match the 77 35 mm crawl/flyover in quality. It is a challenging but fun exercise.

I decided that the place to start was to use the 35mm scan as my base plate. I also found, thanks to althor1138 sharing it on spleen, that the 1985 Special Widescreen Edition has very good alignment with it and has a lot less crush to the blacks making alignment easier. Step two was to redo the planet plate. For that I overlayed several frames together to eliminate the grainyness. That lowered the detail so I used a scan of the original matte painting to up the detail while retaining the color from the scan. Then I used the image Poita created of the 35 mm starfield and started hunting for the matching starfiends in TESB. For that I used the 35 mm grindhouse to maintain a consistent image quality. I found that the upper left corner, a strip across the top, and a strip along the bottom right of the moon cannot be found in TESB. So I used one of the 81 crawl sources and I selected the correct size star from the ones I’d fond and pasted it in the correct location to fill in those two areas. In order to fix the placement of the TESB stars to match the various 1981 ANH stars, I had to manually warp the images - aligning star that were in both. Then I overlayed a desaturated copy of Poita’s starfield over the top.

I have the elements and a method for processing them for the ships in the flyover, but it is very time consuming so I haven’t made much progress yet. It looks like I will be using the 77 version and fixing it to match the 81. There are few changes due to using the same elements but slightly different mattes and compositing. None of the actual 81 flyover elements are good enough and the 97 flyover is far too different (the engines are aligned differently and the blue glow and engine lens flares are different).

Armed with the new starfield and planet/moons layers, I redid the background layer, matching it to the 81 35 mm scan (some key stars are visible). I had to align the 5 different versions of the 81 sequence that I have so I could properly align the planet layer to the stars. They move in relation to each other and to get the movement right is complex as they move in both x and y in relation to each other. I also aligned the title and crawl to the stars. That just leaves the flyover. I need 4 layers for that. I need a beauty pass of the two ships, I need a matte for the two ships, I need the lasers, and I need the engine glow. The LD captures may be my source of the engine glow simply because it doesn’t have much detail to speak of and because the planet is aligned differently and it might produce some artifacts to use the 77 sequence to source that.

If what I have in mind works, the beauty pass will just be the 77 flyover. The matte will ensure that I don’t capture the stray star and block out all the other stars, the planet, and the moons from the source. The lasers will be somewhat transparent to capture the effect of the stars shining through the dimmer sides of the effect. Same with the engine glow which will be the top layer. At the moment I still need to test how the layers will go back together before I proceed very much farther. No point in creating all the layers if I can’t reassemble it.

My main PC has a raid 1 setup. I’ve had to replace one of the drives twice while the other is still original.

I’m trying to figure out how to compare the original recording with a remastered rerelease to see if the artist added something or to see if the remaster is just revealing more of the original sonic pallet that we haven’t heard before. I have several tools at my disposal. I have my old reliable version of Cool Edit, Sony Vegas 12, and Adobe Audition 2015. I’m pretty sure that nothing has been added because some of the tracks in question have a noticeable tape hiss that I think would have been impacted by any modern effects added to the old recording. I just need a way to prove it technically so it isn’t just my ears that I’m basing it on.

Oh my. I tried to apply my version of this to the SE broadcast. Much harder to achieve and it does not come out even across the film. Reels 1 and 3 seem very yellow and reels 4-6 seem very blue. I settled for getting a few key scenes to match. Whatever weird color grading they used, it is probably a good thing that they didn’t scan the movie using those settings. The BR is closer to the original than the SE is.

My take is that the main saga should have the good music by Williams. Side films like this should follow in line with Clone Wars and Rebels. They use the same themes, but the music is completely different. So I’m good with how the Rogue One score came out. It was Star Wars enough in the same way the film was.

I’ve worked on the blu-ray. It is garbage. Though so far I’ve only need to create a layer from a different version for one thing - the four shots of the flowers when Luke, Owen, and Beru are eating. The yellow is completely missing and the plants themselves are blue. I’m not happy with how they turned out so I may have another go at it. But some of the shots are absolutely horrible and very difficult to bring back. Other shots are really easy. My starting point has always been a universal correction that fixes the most shots and then individual corrections for the rest. It results in a lot of corrected shots. But since DrDre and I seem to have had the same idea at about the same time of correcting the GOUT to the technicolor samples, I am planning on retackling my work again. I hadn’t yet gotten to TESB and ROTJ blu-rays other than the base pass so only ANH will require reworking, and hopefully only to realign the work I’ve already done rather than completely redo it.

Williarob said:
Obviously not a reliable color reference for many reasons, but interesting because I’ve never seen the Leia and R2 shot look so green anywhere else.

I brought it into photoshop, adjusted the green levels and the saturation, and I got something that is much closer to the Technicolor frames. You can tell it is off because Darth Vader looks green instead of gray/black.

Yes, this looks much better. I like it. I think you’ve nailed the colors.

And while I’m at it, here are the other two shots that we have been discussing here and elsewhere.

I extracted these from the Tech IB scan sample.

The colors are similar, but no quite so much green in the shadows behind Han. And the stormtrooper armor is more a true white than yellowish.

From the beginning I have been working with the GOUT. Not as the best source of color, but as the best testbed for global color corrections. I have the 1 fps sample that Mike Verta shared of the Tech IB scan. It suffers from a lot of color issues at either end. When I balanced it and then worked on making the GOUT match it, I got pretty much what you have gotten. Just less green in the darker areas and less yellow in the brighter areas. I think what I got could be called a mint green for the Tantive IV walls. And that shot of Leia and R2 in the corridor has that distinctive green tint, just not as strong as what you are getting.

One of my operating theories is that the interpositives used for Eps 4, 5, and 6 from 85 to 94 were all scanned with the same settings to yield the GOUT versions we have (except for the opening crawl of Ep 4 which came from some other source). When I applied those same settings to Ep 5 and compared it to the test scan and initial color correction Poita has been working on for TESB, the colors matched very close. I have not tested it with the grindhouse ROTJ yet.

LexX said:

Dreamaster said:

Dr. Dre’s:

I think this is the best so far.

I think it is as close as I hope to ever see so I’m going to base my next BR regrade on it.

Working at it from the different direction and different sources, I have the following frame of Tarkin from my GOUT color correction.

I took Mike Verta’s sample (it only has 1 fps or 1 frame out of every 24), corrected for the brights, the darks, the overblown highlights, and the often stated green tint and then matched the GOUT to that. A fun aside, I did get to see the Star Wars Costume exhibit and I took a lot of pictures. Most for fun, but some for color reference, including an Imperial Officer uniform. The colors are a near match. And while DrDre’s image in the previous post is more saturated, when I copied and adjusted the contrast and saturation to match my frame, it is almost identical in color. That is 3 completely different sources processed separately that come out to have the same color.

Some of us are working on that. But all told, with the different versions, I have 14 films to color correct. None of them are quick and many of them require multiple attempts. I will get to it eventually. However, Revenge of the Sith is the one film that was released in almost its original color and edit. I am only planning on changing it because some of the scenes have weird colors and I am trying to make Yoda match in all his CG appearances to the OT.

You might want to contact Gigabyte. It probably just requires the same RAID controller. They might have some for instances like this.

DrDre said:

At this point it does seem the color of technicolor prints (I’m pretty sure the 1977 bootleg is also of a technicolor print) does have a green shift when projected as has been argued by many, and any color grading attempting to match these colors should incorporate these anomalies. However, it’s also interesting to estimate what the colors would look like without these anomalies. One thing which helps in this case, is the presence of subtitles, which are supposed to be white, and can thus be used to balance the colors.

Before:

After:

That is about what I came up with for that shot. Then the shot of Leia and R2 remains green, but is less green. I think the green is integral to the 77 print, but it should be minimized as much as the surrounding scenes will allow. I think to accurately represent the 35 mm prints, we need to take the reported green tint of the Tech IB and compensate for it. So this is the color grading I would champion.

DrDre said:

Williarob said:

On set video (from OCP Movie’s Deleted Magic) shows that there was a blue light in the escape pod:

Cool! So, that’s another thing we definitely can confirm was part of the original color grading.

The blue light comes and goes depending on the shot. It is present about half the time. R2 should be very blue when the light is on and he has entered the pod. It is one of those things on my list to correct with my edit, but not with my BR restoration. Just one of those warts we have to live with.