yotsuya

As promised, screen captures. You will note some are not perfect, but that requires doing scene scene adjustments and my goal was to find the overall color correction that works best. I have tried to avoid crushing the black and tried to pull down the brights to reveal details that were washed out on the blu-ray but present in other transfers, such as the scene of Luke and the Burning Homestead. I had thought I would have to layer in a correction from another version, but with the right adjustments I found that the details were still there. I also found that a lot of the shadows are oversaturated (in the red tones) and that would require correction of those scenes where if I corrected for that in the overall settings it ends up creating problems elsewhere.

After a lot of work, and watching the films many times, I think I have color corrections for all 6 films (from BR) that brings them into line with each other and the GOUT of the OT. My first step will to be tackle the extensive fixes that ANH needs to just restore the BR version to the right colors in a bunch of individual scenes. The light sabers need work, the explosions, some shots have a high contrast for no reason, some of the darker shots (one in a Y-wing and most of the shots of the Death Star screen showing the approach to the 4th moon of Yaavin) are blue. Plus I’d like to darken the space shots to be truly black and equalize the opening and closing title colors. Once that is done then I can start undoing the SE elements I don’t like. But I have the overall color correction that I needed to get started. I have not finalized all the films, but I have the colors and I just need to tweak the darkness to minimize the crushed blacks (which are nearly impossible to completely undo - but which I might lift some details from other versions as needed).

I think I have ROTJ nearly done. TESB is close. ANH is going to take some greater work to render a version that eliminates the 2004 transfer’s flaws, but I think I have the color correction nailed for the majority of shots. I had hoped to avoid using the curves in Vegas because there is really no way to relate the exact settings, but that proved to be the only way to handle bringing back some life to the color pallet. I ended up getting very close and then realizing that the BR does not use true black for the space shots. Sometimes you can get too close. I pulled back from trying to have the space shots be pure black and it looks good. I’m rending a low res copy (720x404) to watch and then I’ll post some screen shots and the settings I used (including screen shots of the curves settings). They look radical, but I think it works and it brings the overall pallet close to the GOUT. All three of the OT need some other specialized work to fix the bad 2004 transfer and TPM needs something that I have yet to figure out, but I feel I have 6 color corrections that bring the overall movies into a unified experience.

I have a 640x288 copy of the original theatrical version of ROTS. It’s not VHS, but it would be something different?

DrDre said:

Here’s another interpretation of this Star Wars frame inspired by the frame piota posted recently of one of his prints.

Bluray:

kk650:

DrDre:

Yes, I prefer the third one. One reason I am making my own set. KK650, I think you’ve over corrected for reds and taken out too much. Everything looks good except the skin tones. They aren’t lobsters, but they are kind of lifeless. And newborn babies are very red - they are lobsters. Not to my taste, but definitely less annoying and more watchable than the BR.

I am narrowing in on color corrections for all 6 films. ANH is definitely the hardest. I have come to the conclusion that a single, global color correction is not possible. I do no know what they did when they scanned the negative, but it is messed up. The good news is that I should be able to just use the BR to fix the BR. The bad news is that I need to use four or more separate corrections.

Overall, most scenes take a single color correction and come out close to the GOUT (which doesn’t have a very even color timing to begin with). A similar global correction seems to work for AOTC, ROTS, and TESB without the need for any additional correction.

ROTJ has one issue that ANH also has with flames and a similar correction works for both. It requires doing come channel mixing to restore the white cores. It affects the Blockade Runner explosion in the beginning, all the obviously recomped fighter explosion around the Death Star and Vader’s funeral pyre in ROTJ.

A Y-wing control panel and the Death Star screen have an unusual blue color. Easy to get rid of, but doing that creates unwanted yellow splotches in other scenes. And I’m not sure all of them can be fixed. The screen border might need to be replaced in a shot or two.

A number of scenes, mostly with C-3PO and one with Tarkin, are over contrasted and need to be toned down.

There are a few other annoyances, such as a scene or two where R2’s blue panels are too green and a few times when Ben’s lightsaber turns purple that I haven’t even gotten to yet.

And I am stumped on how to correct the Chancellor’s Guard from teal to royal blue in TPM.

I feel the need to comment on a few things. In 1997, film restoration was entirely old-school. Digital wasn’t up to the task yet. If you had a 3 color separation and one of the colors shrank at a different rate, they were junk. Fast forward to today and this is the very process that has restored virtually every film. No longer does difference in shrinkage make the 3 color separation useless. It just requires some extra work. In 1989, the Gone With the Wind negatives were found to suffer this in spots, so they had to use a print to patch those places. 20 years later, they used those original negatives in their entirely and realigned them. This has been invaluable with restoring color films shot on color stock. While the original color negative often has faded, some of the colors remain crisper than the color separations. Typically it is the blue/yellow that fades on these negatives and they replace it with the color separation blue/yellow to restore the picture. If the ANH color separations still survive, a complete restoration of it is still possible and relatively easy with modern restoration techniques. Someone who cares just needs to do it.

I get that we may never see an official release of the originals. I can live with that if they just remaster the SE. The current transfer has to be one of the worst I have ever seen of any movie. ANH is particularly bad. I’ve been striving to bring it back to a viewable shape and that is damn hard. The changes I object to most strongly are the ones that break continuity and change the story. The rock in ANH, Greedo shooting at all, the hit or miss windows in Cloud City, the oversize door to Jabba’s Palace and Hayden as Anakin. I don’t mind a lot of the minor changes (in the version I am preparing I’m removing the ones I don’t like) or the additions. I can watch a version like that as long as some care is taken to restore it properly to a viewable color pallet. I don’t like Han looking like a lobster and it has ruined any enjoyment from watching the trilogy to either have the low quality SD GOUT or the miscolored DVD and BR sets. The despecialized editions are a step in the right direction and the scans of the 35mm prints are even closer yet.

The JSC LD preservation has the 81 crawl. Other than the timing of the text, the 77 and 97 versions are very similar. They use the same starfield, but they don’t pan down the same way. the 97 has a small improvement in the composting of the Star Destroyer that removes a black line that you can see when the tip crosses in front of the larger moon. The 81 version I believe has the identical text to 97, but the starfield is different. It is the one from empire, just offset slightly to the right. And that is all the stars from the moment the music starts until the Star Destroyer passes overhead and it cuts to the next scene. The 81 version also has a recomped Star Destroyer, but the moons are in slightly different positions and I think the timing might be slightly different (my initial review indicated it might be off by one frame, but don’t take my word for it - my memory has been very slippery lately). Also, the blue glow and lens flare of the Star Destroyer is stronger in the 97 version, but I think it is identical in the 81 and 77 version.

All things to check if you are going to use a recreation. You might want to contact team negative1 as I understand they have scanned a print with the 81 crawl.

I think it might be, but it is not in the same position. I took a quick look and this one pattern of stars is above the E in Episode V and above the IV in Episode IV. In the 77 and 97 openings, the stars are in the same left/right position, but not the same top/bottom positions… until it pans down and lines up under the Star Destroyer. The position of the moons is different in the 81 version as well. Ah the minutiae of trying to get it exactly right.

Darth Lucas said:

Harmy has been kind enough to supply a recreation of the '81 crawl that he did some time ago. This saves me the trouble of having to recreate it myself, however I still have to integrate it into a recreated '81 star destroyer flyover, so that’s what I will be working on for the next couple days. After that is finished, I can integrate that into the BD, create chapter markers and then Disc one will be complete.

Team negative1 evidently has scanned the entire 81 opening and will be including it in their release. What annoys me is that all three, 77, 81, and 97, all are different. 77 and 97 share the same starfield, though not aligned the same during the title crawl, but 81 was totally different. I pulled a reasonable copy from the JSC preservation that matches the GOUT source pretty well.

Dunedain said:

Thanks for the pass over the image, that’s much improved. 😃 But I can see this shot is going to be one of those hard ones, that orangey carrot effect seen in the videos can be tough to get rid of. Might even need some kind of separate intra-frame correction that’s only applied to the skin, with all else in the frame getting a different set of correction values. Hmm, is there such a tool?

Skin tones also vary from person to person. It is nearly impossible to make every image match unless you know for certain that the makeup was applied identically to each person (as in the classic studio pictures). I’ve identified several very distinct skin tones in ANH. Leia, Luke & Han, Ben, the older Rebel soldier, and Tarkin to name a few. None of them match each other, but do tend to match the same character from different parts of the film (though lighting and exposure again change things considerably). Also, the degree of sun in Tunesia would naturally result in some redder skin tones in those scenes. I too wanted the perfect, even skin tones, but at a meeting a few weeks ago, I took note that the four people sitting across from me all had very different skin tones. And several were somewhat red, even under florescent lights in late fall - long after our sunny summer.

There are two choices dealing with the skin tones in Star Wars. You can either accept that they are never going to be perfectly even (a product of natural uneven skin tones and the way the movies were shot) and find the best fit, or you can get in there and color correct every scene and make them match. I’m going with the former in my efforts. I’ve found that every one of the 6 movies has this issue and I think you check, most movies will, especially when shot in so many varied locations.

Darth Mallwalker said:

yotsuya said:

The first two are on one of the LD’s right at the start of the clip of the falcon in hyperspace. Those frames aren’t in the GOUT, EU broadcast, DVD, or BR.

… nor Puggo GRANDE, nor Stjärnornas Krig,
nor poita’s Super8, nor mverta’s color ref.
Methinks you’re chasing somebody’s IVTC error
.

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Yes. I finally found the comparison and I had misremembered which spot it was in. That spot was where one of my copies was missing 2 frames. The real spot was from where it cuts from Owen and Beru in the kitchen to Luke and C-3PO in the speeder and my older copy of the JSC has 4 extra frames in there.

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Get well soon poita’s baby girl!

Ditto. Lots of prayers and well wishes headed her way.

My color correction project is coming along to the extent that I might be ready to tackle the video end for the PT and TESB. The audio isn’t going to be as easy. And I still need to finish extracting the deleted scenes from the DVD’s Oddly, I’m having a problem locating the ROTS Yoda landing on Dagobah scene to extract it.

I have the GOUT color corrected. None required very much. I can see why they used this set of prints for the Definitive Edition LD set. I made them a little darker (some might complain about crushed blacks, but I like that making them darker hides a multitude of sins, like the garbage mattes and the slugs).

Now I’m on to the Blu-rays. I toyed with ANH again, but I moved on. I can’t seem to find the secret and I’m beginning to think that some of the color information I am trying to recover might be just plain lost. The blue channel appears to be the most intact while the green requires the most work. I know I can fix the blue panel in the Y-wing, but I’m not sure the information is there to fix the Death Star viewscreen. And I know the information is there to fix all the crushed brights in the explosions in ANH, but the same thing isn’t working for ROTJ.

Anyway, my first pass at the Saga has produced some interesting results. I think I have TESB and AOTC. And I might be close for TPM (though without the brighter blues I had hoped for so I don’t think I am done yet), but ROTS and ROTJ aren’t there yet. Close, but not close enough. But, I have Yoda nearly matched in the 5 movies he appears in. I think he is just about dead on in TPM, AOTC, and TESB and nearly there in ROTS and ROTJ. But, I’ll let the images do the talking. I have two from TESB because one is a general lighting that should match the PT and the other is the firelight glow in his hut to match ROTJ.

I’m down to tweaking the GOUT. I’ve been noticing some odd colors in some scenes, but overall I think I have it. The last tweak was to pull down the brights so there are no blown out areas. When I get around to screen caps I’m sure some are going to think the blacks are too crushed, but with what I’m looking at, they should be somewhat crushed. I’m going to have to pull up a bit on the bluray to match this so it is dark, but not as dark as the bluray. I also have a new theory to test on ANH. But I want to tackle TESB and ROTJ first. I hope to have some screen caps this week.

I also found that we have 3 completely distinct opening crawls for ANH. When they changed it in 81, they used a completely different starfield. For the SE, the went back to the original, but not quite the same layout. I’m not sure if they restored the original 77 opening and replaced the tiles with ones identical to 81, or if they redid it. It seems like the SE is the 81 titles over the 77 background with the Star Destroyer recomped. Anyway, thanks to the efforts to archive the JSC LD’s, I was able to get close the GOUT quality for the 81 version.

Something that has always bugged me is the 20th Century Fox fanfare on ANH. They re-recorded it for TESB, but they never updated ANH. Just wondering how many people it would bug. I mean, these are going to be semi-special editions anyway. I would like it be be nearly impossible to tell them apart until the episode number and title crawl onto the screen.

Well, all that work I did on the TR47 ANH and it is for naught. I found a better way and got better, less yellow, results for both the GOUT and TR47 (they are nearly identical in color to begin with, TR47 is just a bit darker - I assume from whatever color correction was done when it was captured). I have recolored the GOUT OT (from the PAL dvd's) and they are very watchable and the DNR smearing is tolerable. I want to fix that, but that step is a lot of work. I have to get the JSC versions color corrected first.

In the mean time, I am going to work on aligning all the ANH soundtracks and see if I can burn a AVCHD disk with both opening crawls and maybe both end credits and all the soundtracks that interest me. I'm contemplating making my own mix that would be stereo, but closer to the mono mix. No DTS for now. I'm not ready to wrap my head around 6 channels yet. I'm going to start with the 93 version, mix in the tractor beam line from the 85 version, and the see about Beru and some of the other changes directly from the mono. Music and effects could pose a challenge for some, but I'm also going to look at the BR stereo soundtrack to see how it compares since that was a fresh mix, supposedly closer to the mono (except for Beru).

Ever closer.

poita said:

yotsuya said:

Oh, as I posted before, TESB, ROTJ, ATOC, and ROTS are my primary color references to go by for ANH. I think the GOUT is pretty close, but I still need to bring the DVD/BR back to where the GOUT is and for that I need a lot of practice and reference. Such as the end of ROTS and the work room in AOTC, sets recreated from ANH.

The sad thing is that Jabba in ANH and Yoda in TPM were both added to badly colored digital masters. So do I just leave them and let their color change or do I rotoscope them (a lot of work) and tweak their color separately? I eventually want to change Jabba to be more red and green than yellow and olive, so I'm already working on that, but that leave the question of Yoda. I guess I'll have to see what my color correction does to him.

 In resolve, simply pull a matte for Jabba using the HLS tools and tracker and you can colour him separately. I took a quick look at that scene and you can separate him out in just a few seconds.

 In Sony Vegas? I have not yet mastered mattes.

Darth Mallwalker said:

yotsuya said:

And I can so understand chasing frames. I have found that the US ANH GOUT dvd is missing at least 3 frames that I have in other versions. One from the UK ANH GOUT and two from an LD preservation I found before the OT came out on DVD.

Please do tell more.
Perhaps it would be appropriate in one of those threads

 The first two are on one of the LD's right at the start of the clip of the falcon in hyperspace. Those frames aren't in the GOUT, EU broadcast, DVD, or BR. the other one is the final frame of when we see the green R2 unit lowered into the X-wing. The man's hands curl. I was thinking it was my rip, but it is not in the VOB file on the DVD. It is in the PAL GOUT, EU Broadcast, DVD, and BR. The uncorrected (but resized) frame:

I like to blame my computer or the software I use for some things like this, but I checked and to the best of my knowledge this from is not on the US DVD.

Oh, as I posted before, TESB, ROTJ, ATOC, and ROTS are my primary color references to go by for ANH. I think the GOUT is pretty close, but I still need to bring the DVD/BR back to where the GOUT is and for that I need a lot of practice and reference. Such as the end of ROTS and the work room in AOTC, sets recreated from ANH.

The sad thing is that Jabba in ANH and Yoda in TPM were both added to badly colored digital masters. So do I just leave them and let their color change or do I rotoscope them (a lot of work) and tweak their color separately? I eventually want to change Jabba to be more red and green than yellow and olive, so I'm already working on that, but that leave the question of Yoda. I guess I'll have to see what my color correction does to him.

I'm bummed. My tests of rendering the 97 SE for TESB (GKAR and TB) are showing way too much DNR blurring. It is a shame. Those SE broadcasts have such nice color compared to the DVD/BR. I will just have to get the colors right and maybe I can do a despecialization later to recreate them.

HDD failures are the curse of computers. I've had very few of them over the years, but they can be devastating without backups.

Health to you Poita.

And I can so understand chasing frames. I have found that the US ANH GOUT dvd is missing at least 3 frames that I have in other versions. One from the UK ANH GOUT and two from an LD preservation I found before the OT came out on DVD.

I have become convinced that, barring access to the ANH 3 color separations, that the original colors have been lost. Technicolor gives us a low fade print, but not fade free and we can't be sure how accurate a given print is. The color film stock prints have all faded in various ways. The original negative has faded and that is what the SE, DVD, and BR were taken from. I'm operating under the assumption that the prints used to make the DE LD set and the GOUT DVDs, being the oldest well cared for prints I know of and with the transfers done so long ago, that those are probably the best examples of the color. I found that TESB didn't need much more than some contrast adjustment. The GOUT ANH barely more than that. So I'm going to use the DE/GOUT as my reference. It helps that they match so many other references that I've been going over, such as the various behind the scenes videos and promotional photos. But this whole area of color correcting is really a matter of taste. Those who like red faces, don't mind the DVD/BR edition. Those who love Technicolor, go for that. I don't agree with all of Harmy's color choices, but his color choices are way better than the DVD/BR colors and his version is much more watchable. Since I don't agree with his choices, I'm doing my own. I'm obsessed with getting the flesh tones right, some red, but not too much. So that colors how I prefer to see these films and how I am going about changing the colors to match. And a meeting I had today at work may allow a bit more red into what I'm doing (outside observations of real people can be very insightful).

Starting to work on Empire. First step is to find out what frames are missing from each version. The TR47 is missing a bunch, but oddly, so are the NTSC GOUT. ANH was missing one from NTSC vs. PAL and Empire seems to be missing two.

I have all the GOUT version lined up. TR47, GONZO, NTSC GOUT, PAL GOUT, and Hyperspace along with the cut down TB, GKAR, DVD and BR. There were some color changes for the SE, especially on Hoth, so not everything will match, but I'm going to use the PAL GOUT as my guide. Colorwise it doesn't need much, if anything, just some contrast and gamma adjustments.

Where ANH fought me like a tiger for two weeks and I still didn't come up with draft coloring that was satisfactory, TESB, in one day, has yielded a workable color correction for all three versions (PAL GOUT, GKAR, and BR). Now to render and watch and then tweak.