I am very interested in learning what is improved from what you had on MySpleen. I’ve found those useful in replacing some of the changes to the BR for the OT. I’m not a big fan of the DVD versions of eps 1, 4, 5, & 6, but I consider the DVD version of 2 and 3 to be very important. Looking forward to hearing how this works out.
I agree with your reasoning, Poita. We just don’t have the information to use the props to fix the colors. We’d have to know all those variables for each shot and as far as I know, it doesn’t exist. I think the production photos and props can help tell if the colors are off, close, or good, but only if you have a good eye for colors and how they change due to lighting and the other variables. For instance, if you look at the GOUT, BR, and SSE, and compare them to a production photo, you should get a good sense of which ones are close. I’ve actually noticed that even though a lot of production photos have a strong yellow tint, that the intense reds and blues still come through. You can’t match to them, but they really point out how off the reds are in the BR.
I think we have to really examine the history of each source. We know the BR was scanned from the SE negative. We just don’t know how they arrived at such a unique color palette. The GOUT was a telecine. I heard it was a good quality interpositive. In that case we know it was a first gen copy of the negative, properly color times, but printed with an oragy hue. I don’t think it was fully corrected in the master tape. I’m not sure what all the histories of the 35 mm prints, but I heard one is a copy of a release print. That would mean it is darker than the original. And the original release prints are a copy of the internegative from the interpositive, from the original negative. To really know the prints, you have to know how the image changed at each stage. Seems like there are some mysteries with each copy, but if we use all of them, o think we can arrive at something close, viewable, and easy on the eyes.
A great many of the production stills I have seen have a distinct yellow cast to them. This is not new or due to time. It has always been that way. Not sure why, but none of the home video transfers of the original film have that coloring.
Well, in my experience, everything changes color depending on the lighting. On this case, it is sunlight, the identical light source found in a lot of on set photos. It also depends on camera filters and processing. But in the above frame I have barely touched the colors, mainly concentrating on the brightness, contrast, and saturation. It is pushed slightly to the yellow to reduce the reds, prevalent even in the GOUT.
I fear that to get a version under 5 GB, you will have to find the software to do it yourself. I personally like files about 1 GB (small enough to load the entire saga on my phone) to for portability and for color checking, but I really don’t expect others to do the work for me.
One of the things I use to judge the accuracy of any color correction is R2’s blue panels. Now, they don’t come out quite the same in every scene that was shot, but in the sources I trust, they are always blue, maybe leaning to a dark cobalt. So when I see a scene that shows R2’s with a greenish tint to him, I am convinced that it has been over corrected toward the green. One thing that tends to cause corrections to lean that direction is the skin tones can turn out too red for some tastes, but I’ve found that in the reliable reference photos, the skin tones when shooting in Tunisia were a bit red. When I correct the skin tones just based on the set photography, R2 usually stays blue and the people look a bit pink, but not the magenta of the Lowry HD work. This is my color correction of the UK GOUT:
Note the lack of green in the sand crawler and Owen’s hair as well as in R2’s blue panels. I find this color pallet to be my favorite.
I’d say the sweet spot is about halfway between.
My understanding is that the 6 track with the 70 mm prints and the Dolby Stereo with the 35 mm prints were identical mixes. The 6 track was 4.1 or 4.2 discrete tracks and the Dolby Stereo was 4.1 matrixed. The only reason the monomix was made was for treaters that couldn’t handle the optical Stereo tracks. 3 years later that wasn’t necessary.
As a quick handling, balancing the colors (with R2 or Obi Wan’s beard as a neutral reference) and increasing highlights with Picasa seem to work pretty good. I don’t know if it is correct, but it looks fine for me :
You need to increase the gamma, not the highlights. And lowering the saturation as well helps make it look more natural.
I think they could use a slight reduction of yellow, and a slight increase in red…
In put the last image into photoshop and just increased the red slightly (red/green/blue color balance increase red by 6) and it looks fantastic.
No, I can’t remember what the original tape looked like. I wasn’t allowed to handle it and it was only in the apartment a day. Just long enough to copy (and watch). Can’t remember what happened to the copy, but I didn’t get to see it very many times before it either got taped over, damaged or lost. The only thing that my fuzzy memory has is something vague about how it wasn’t supposed to be out yet. But I was eleven and the memory is no longer very clear.
I have a question and those who have posted on this topic seem like they would be the most knowledgeable about it. Especially since we are talking the early days of Star Wars on home video/TV. What version would I have seen in July 1981? My dad had a copy (borrowed the original from a friend and copied it) that we watched in July 1981 in Wiesbaden, Germany. I remember when specifically because it was right after we came back from a vacation to Italy. Wondering if it would have had the Ep IV A New Hope crawl or the original and squished credits or cropped. I’m pretty sure it was an NTSC copy circulating the base.
There are many ways to tackle finding the original colors. Various members have various theories. One that held favor for quite some time and still does for many are to use the Technicolor IB prints as the example of what Star Wars looked like in 1977. An infrequently screened Technicolor IB print does not fade, however many have noted a green tint to them that seems to stem from bad quality control during the last days of Technicolor. DrDre is working on an automated color correction algorithm that is producing outstanding results. My take has been to gather on set and publicity photos from as many sources as possible as well as photos of the models and costumes and then use these to manually color correct the films. I favor using the 2006 GOUT DVD’s (once they are corrected to the sources) because he HD sources are a mess, especially for the original movie.
Unfortunately the only accurate source in existence isn’t in public hands and hasn’t been worked on to my knowledge. Back in 1977, they made a 3 color separation of the original negative with the original color timing. In the 1990’s they found that the elements had some shrinkage, but being 3 separate films, they had not done so evenly so they had become useless for duplicating the original negative using photographic methods. Since then, so many movies have had that problem that they have tackled it digitally and can easily realign the elements to create a digital master. There is no word that they have done or are planning to do that. Nor is there any word whether they kept the 3 color separation (though with GL’s packrat tendencies it seems likely that they did) after they found the shrinkage problem. I haven’t heard that there is anything similar for Empire or Jedi, but both movies were shot on better film stock so their negatives have not faded (as bad?).
Could someone maybe post a soundbyte of the line? I’ll analyze the centre channel from the Blu-ray and see if there’s anything to be heard.
Here is a clip with the soundbyte in question. I have two copies that have this and one notes that the audio is from the UK. I checked the DVD and there is nothing audible in French, Spanish, or English.
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B99_EmD83rgxb2lHVDlXdEFNejA
It’s in the English subtitles on the blu-ray as well.
I’m interested in what prints they used. There are many possible sources. There were audition prints, interpositives, internegatives, distribution prints. Did they made a special print to telecine or was it one of the above? I’ve head it was often an interpositive (which are usually somewhat orange). Did it vary from film to film and did they have predefined settings depending on the source material? The pan&scan process would also be interesting to hear about, such as whether to squish, pan&scan, or letterbox the opening and closing titles.
I just checked what I have (after the changes in the past I consider camera prints to be invaluable assets) and I have two distinct audio mixes in English. Unless they did extra mixing and her lines are actually from a foreign language version of the audio, then there were multiple audio sources and the BR represents one of them. I will compare more when I have more time.
I’m close with my version of the 1981 crawl as well. Mine looks a bit different. The flyover isn’t final and a few other things might need some tweaking, but in general this is pretty close to what I wanted. The title is from TESB, but with an earlier fadeout. The crawl is from the BR, the flyover is from the TN1 bonus 1981 crawl, as are the brightest stars. The others were hand drawn using the 1993 DE LD and the 1982 PAL LD for placement as well as TESB (for the far left stars only). The moons and planet are a mix of the SSE and the BR and resized and re positioned to match the 1993 DE LD. That version has really been my template for most of this, though I did change some things from that one once I realized that the TN1 Bonus 1981 crawl was more accurate.
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B99_EmD83rgxSE5aTWlRMWgyWms
I tweaked the pan down. Not sure it is quite right yet, but definitely better. Also cleaned up the flyover a bit. Mostly stabilized, but due to the nature of what was wrong, I think I’ll have to do some final aligning and adjusting of the last second to manually align it to one of the already stabilized versions. But for now, this is a good draft and it works very well if you are doing anything DVD quality.
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B99_EmD83rgxSE5aTWlRMWgyWms
Probably funny considering my last comment, but that last image makes Threepio look too bronze (pale and green). Well, he always looks pale in that scene, but not always so lacking in golden tones. Seems to be my complaint with the Tatooine outdoor scenes, doesn’t it? That is one reason I have been relying on the GOUT. It has a consistent coloring for him throughout (as consistent as any color in a SW movie).
I was basing my comment on not only on what the costume looked like in reality, but in TESB, ROTJ, set photos, publicity shots, The Making of Star Wars, the Holiday Special, ROTS, and pretty much everything I’ve seen in the last 40 years. And that trumpet isn’t very brass colored. Brass is lighter in tone than gold but has a very similar hue. Basically it is brighter and less warm. Except for the opening shots in the JSC, Treepio has been a typical brassy gold in every copy of the trilogy I’ve seen. That has been part of the fun of finding a good pallet, keeping Treepio green enough (just that hint that separates gold from brass) and the skin tones red enough. Also, that last image of his is way higher contrast than the film. That tends to darken and saturate colors rather than reveal their true appearance.
From his appearance in the other movies and in various other productions, he isn’t supposed to be gold so much as brass. Gold has a unique tone and C-3PO has always looked more brass (which can look green if it isn’t balanced right).
Ok, excellent.
So basically it gets us back to the colours on set, but not necessarily the colours captured on film, or to the original grade.
It does give a great neutral starting point to work from, I am keen to try it out.
Well, since you would correct large parts of the reel as a whole, the shot to shot color relationships would remain intact, so unless the original grade had some color bias (even for shots that were originally shot under white light), you should recover the original grade to a good approximation, before it was captured on film, which would then introduce the bias of the film stock.
Yes, very much the description of the colors I want to see. I’m not interested in film bias or bulb tint, I want what was captured on film. The image itself. I think we are close to being able to achieve this. Especially if Poita’s scans are any indication.
Well the image is influenced by the biases of a film stock. Kodak’s Vision stocks, for example, are much more saturated and colorful than the older Eastman stocks. Fuji stocks have a green-ish haze to them. So the image “itself” that was “captured on film” is very much influenced by the filmstock used. Film isn’t neutral.
And then you have to ask which film stock. The o-neg, the IP, the IN, the print, the doup print, etc. But I think DrDre’s algorithm takes a lot of that into account to get to the root colors.
The guy who played the younger version of Ford’s character in Age of Adeline would be my choice. I was amazed at how much like Ford he was, but he is kind of unknown and I don’t know how good an actor he is because his part was pretty minor. But he was a believable young Ford.
Ok, excellent.
So basically it gets us back to the colours on set, but not necessarily the colours captured on film, or to the original grade.
It does give a great neutral starting point to work from, I am keen to try it out.
Well, since you would correct large parts of the reel as a whole, the shot to shot color relationships would remain intact, so unless the original grade had some color bias (even for shots that were originally shot under white light), you should recover the original grade to a good approximation, before it was captured on film, which would then introduce the bias of the film stock.
Yes, very much the description of the colors I want to see. I’m not interested in film bias or bulb tint, I want what was captured on film. The image itself. I think we are close to being able to achieve this. Especially if Poita’s scans are any indication.
