zombie84

vbangle said:

Harmy said:

Although, in the light of the most recent findings, it seems that the SW and ESB colours might actually be quite accurate.

Are you referring to the 04 dvd's? if so they're not even close sorry.

As bad as the 2004 transfer is, I would say that the 2004 version of Star Wars has more accurate colours, but the GOUT has better brightness and contrast levels. Neither of them are accurate in terms of the overall image, but the 2004 colours in many instances are better for the simple reason that they are there. ESB is a bit iffy, since Hoth is really blue in the interiors, but then in the exteriors it's actually less blue than the GOUT's restored colours indicate if my memory of the SE is correct. I think the reason that the GOUT overall feels like a more natural viewing experience is because it is at least consistent overall, whereas the 2004 transfer has pretty good colours in one shot and then bad colours in another, and then in a lot of other shots it introduces problems that were never there in the first place, so you never have any adjustment time.

Well, he was kinda sly about it, he said words to the effect of "unfortunately, the newer versions get priority over what we call the 'classic versions' of the films. There are release pipelines to meet and you would have to clean them up and do a whole restoration and it would be too expensive." Or something like that. I think it was an interview with CNN or something right after the Celebration announcement. Which IMO is mainly a diplomatic way of brushing the issue off, because when is a release pipeline an issue when he owns the company and when is money an issue when he is a billionaire. Aside from the fact that relatively speaking it wouldn't really be THAT expensive. But anyway, it is a bit of a silver lining I suppose, because that is the first time he ever hinted about the possibility of them coming out that wasn't rooted in "the films are mine" rhetoric, even if his explanation is still filled with a lot of double-talk.

A project like that would require millions of dollars and months of work, involving dozens of people. I don't believe this would remain quiet for very long. Plus Lucas a couple months ago at Celebration said that they only restored the SE and that the "classic version" would have to wait until some time in the future. So, maybe Harris is just in the last months starting to do (preliminary?) work on it and has inspected the materials and devised a plan. But come on, more likely he just has heard from various people who restored and worked on the SE restoration materials since he is one of the top film restorationists in the world. Let's not jump the gun.

I have only seen discussion of separation masters existing for the original film. That's not exactly a completely standard thing to do for newer films, it's more common to just make a straight dupe negative. Seperation masters were used to repair SW, but there was never any mention anywhere of this process used on ESB, which to me always indicated that there is compelling reason to think that none exist. But then I am not the expert. Maybe Harris heard about their existance "through the grapevine", but as he has not had any direct contact or work with Lucasfilm or Fox regarding this issue it's really a bit of rumor and heresay and not something to just say "ah, don't worry, it's fine." I mean, I hope he is correct, if there is any guy to simply trust on his word it's him, but he is not being very specific here.

Anyway, he is right in a way, the existing duplicate materials aren't going to be unusable within the next 10-20 years and in theory they should yield very high quality results especially with modern tools, as there are lots of films that don't have original negatives. Personally, though, I believe it is doubtful how useable the negatives will be beyond the next ten to twenty years, just because they will continue to deteriorate, and that would be a crying shame because the films will never look as good as they do on the negative. Luckily the worst bits were repaired for 1997, but those original shots that were simply removed and put in a drawer somewhere will need a lot of work to bring back to life whenever the restoration comes, and even today the original negatives of them are not very useable because a lot of them are FX shots that were on the bad stock. If in 20 years the film gets a proper restoration, it will be very doable, but it will require a LOT of work to do right, and I mean a lot, and it's not clear that Lucasfilm would be willing to invest the money to do that, so the films are in danger of being struck from poorer materials with less effort put into them while the negatives continue to deteriorate and get worn out.

It's also strange that just two years ago he went on about how Godfather's negative was about to be lost and they had to this really high-tech (8k?) restoration right then or it would be gone forever. In fact, they had to use alternate takes for some shots because the original negative shot was no longer usable. Weird that he would say a film that is only 5 years older and historically has been reported as being in similar condition would be "fine" and "fully protected" for the near future.

Either he knows something we don't or I question his definition of fully protected.

dark_jedi said:

I am doing some more testing on this, I will have more samps later to show, but I am wondering, will these basic changes work on all 3? if I read zombie correctly, he seems to think that they all suffer about the same, so a general fix should make all look better to some point, at least a lot better than the V3 is the way it is now.

 

 I haven't seen Jedi, but in theory I believe this would work. Based on SW and ESB, the de-saturation and red shift seems to be pretty consistent across the board. But I'll admit I haven't done a very detailed comparison, so you might have to make the slightest of tweaks per film (i.e. it wouldn't surprise me if SW was a touch more colour-shifted because the negative was three years older).

The last of the ESB caps are up, there's maybe a half dozen more I will add tommorrow maybe. I spent like 3 hours taking them a day or two ago so why not post them. They are useful in demonstrating how blue the "I am your father" scene was at the very least. This will be the last of the pics I will be adding. Again, a more accurate version would have slighly less saturation and slightly less redness but you get the idea.

Kenobius: I posted this in the other topic, but I'll repost it here. All images are the GOUT, except for two Technicolor photos in the introduction, which I thought I identified in the text but I could make it more obvious since I threw together this page on the spur of the moment. It's not meant for public viewing, I made it for this thread.

Ah. Well, all pictures are the GOUT, except for two Technicolor photos at the introduction. I didn't make the text the clearest I suppose, it was done very quickly; that page isn't for the public, I made it just for the thread you linked to.

Kenobius Prime said:

Zombie:

Fantastic work, man.  Might I make a suggestion?  Okay, the page is image intensive, and that's just fine, but I wonder if you can put some text in the corner of each image, stating what the source is?  I think it would help relieve any confusion that builds up as someone views the page.

Whattaya think?

 Which page are you referring to?

none said:

Are there photos maybe a publicity still or technical magazine article pic which can act as the goal for one or two of these shots?  I find myself wanting a reference so these before and afters gain some grounding.

 

 Well the easiest way is that I tried to match screencaps to many of the Technicolour photograph shots. Aside from exposure problems which tend to wash out the colours a bit in some of the photographs, you can see that the colours are very close, identical in some instances.

ChainsawAsh said:

One of these days (possibly with DJ's V3, actually) I'm seriously considering loading each film into Avid or FCP's Color and color correcting them shot by shot, maybe even doing some scratch & dirt cleanup while I'm at it. 

 Yeah, but at the same time one reason I feel doing a sort of "one light" printing like I have done is good is because it gets rid of the guesswork. Part of the problem I feel is that people tend to colour films they way they would like them to look, or feel they ought to look, instead of the way they should actually be, because sometimes shots need to have some objectionable elements in them in order to be "correct" but people make the mistake of assuming they were ideal looking, or looked more like a particular version we are familiar with. Because the problem with the GOUT is not really a shot-by-shot thing, its an overall problem caused by a print-wide desaturation and a print-wide red shift. So you basically have to work backwards from that, but it would be a set variable condition and not a shot-to-shot thing, so it's really a matter of finding that golden setting that is the perfect opposite of the desaturation and red shift levels. I can see treating the odd shot for video defects, because some shots might need less saturation due to video noise. Adywan is a good example where he really put a lot of work into tweaking each shot to "fix" it using a number of different colour balance controls depending on the shot--but while the completed shot look great, it didn't quite look like it did theatrically. For instance I think I remember he had to do this for one of the shots in Luke's Hoth recovery ("scruffy looking nerfherder" scene) in order to get it white, but if you look at the shot I posted of it, it has a lot of beige in it, with some red and green mixed lighting in the frame. A lot of shots are like that. In the raw GOUT they just look neutral though, once you get the colours back you see how much variation there is in the frame.

Every shot in the GOUT has been affected in the same manner and in the same way as far as any of us can tell (the exception being the binary sunset scene, which was recoloured), so for the most part the same correction setting should be used for the whole film. That would be my take on it. Maybe this wouldn't work as well in practice.

Yeah, the images I posted weren't supposed to be definitive or anything, they are just a rough example to give you an approximate effect and get a sense of the palette and details. It's more to demonstrate that just by using automated player settings you can recover the colours to their original form. The biggest problem though will be noise, because when you start boosting colours like this, even if you don't go as far as I took them, you still get noise in some scenes, or even just in specific shots.

Yes, that looks better. You still lose out on some of the vibrancy, there is a luminant quality to the way the films looked, but it's pretty hard to recreate that using such an old and washed out video transfer.

Going back over my caps, I found that a more accurate reproduction, probably close to your levels there, is to shift it cyan a few points and then reduce the saturation by 5-10% based on the shot; it tends to make the skintones more neutral and takes the saturation "edge" off, probably not far from the example above.

I realise that the results here look slightly ugly. One reason is because of the video transfer, tones don't saturate evenly or smoothly, so you have that blotchy effect, especially in faces, the video literally cannot handle colours like this and begins to break up a bit. Perhaps the settings were a bit too saturated, but if they are it is only by a bit; a lot of people have their monitor settings too vibrant keep in mind as well. Some shots needed to be treated individually (Han in the SW cockpit comes to mind, too orange) but I wanted to leave them on a "one-light" printing for demo purposes.

But in fact, this kind of vibrancy is basically what the films looked like. The colours were bright and saturated and skin tones were vibrant. The effect is not fully reproduced here because of the video issues and also because I didn't spend enough time getting a totally pleasing effect but just did a quick pass for a demonstration.

What people always ask though is what was the palette of the films? What was the "look"? Is it like the SE, or the GOUT? It is actually in between, but leaning towards the SE, and in fact the actual original colours are often more vibrant that the 2004 transfer because of frequent dullness that transfer was plagued with in shots. No one has ever seen the film look right since theatres.

One way you can tell that the vibrancy here is approximately accurate is because you get colour in Hoth and in the Death Star again, and you get those luminant skin tones. That is what the Technicolor print looks like, and it's sort of the way the SE looks like as well, and also other prints and stills --and it's all there on the GOUT. Which indicates that this approximate level of saturation is appropriate. Again, there are some issues, the video doesn't reproduce it well and maybe I could have made the tones more pleasing looking or backed off a touch. You can't get the original colours to look accurate like this and also pleasant, which is why G-Force and LFL Pwnage just gave it a bit of a bump rather than something radical like this. Even then, I felt LFL Pwnage had some popping issues; I've stated before that my favourite version thusfar is the newer Editdroid, even though its the most desaturated and thus the least accurate, but it just looks more pleasant to me.

However, I think it is noteworthy to demonstrate how desaturated the GOUT is, that colours that approximate the Technicolour levels is actually hidden in there and that it reveals a lot of information about the grading palettes--Dagobah being so green and blue, rather than grey and brown, with colour back in the Death Star as already confirmed by other sources, and blue tinting returning back to Hoth in most (but not all, mind you) scenes there. You also get to see that a lot of scenes, even in live action, had unexpected colour casts either in lighting or grading or just print fluxuations, which has been seen in other prints and stills but never in home video telecines. I just thought this would be interesting for demonstration purposes, that the GOUT has fairly accurate colour buried in it if you can extract it. Again, the effect is not the greatest looking for various reasons, but like I said the original colour vibrancy is pretty close to the levels here and it changes the GOUT palette pretty radically, which a lot of people might not have seen before.

Zion, thanks for finally speaking up about this and being transparent. A few years overdue, I don't know why so long but better late than never.

I think everyone everywhere would benefit from the two completed Black Magic shots being put together and released. I know a lot of people, myself included, have been wanting to simply see them. Obviously the project is dead, but pegging off two less OOT shots to have to use the GOUT for is always a plus to people out there, and will at least mean this was not completely in vain.

Also, DJ, I think you are confused or maybe I just have explained myself poorly. The lower version in the examples with more saturated colouring is the theatrical version. Both of those are the GOUT, the top one being the GOUT as you see it when you put it in your DVD player, the lower one being that exact same image processed on-the-fly by VLC to basically increase the saturation to original levels of vibrancy. It's not the SE or anything, just in case you thought maybe that's what the lower one was. Although it does resemble the SE, which shows that the SE isn't as "wrong" as people may think in this respect.

It does say "alternate scenes". But, for example there is the ESB alternate Han-Leia Bespin scene. And lots of other stuff like that in the PT because they refilmed half that shit after principle photog. And like they did with Blade Runner, they might just have been including alternate unseen angles on familiar scenes. But "alternate scenes" is slightly tantalizing. Could they be finally giving us the alternate "original scenes" and sort of acknowledging that if fans want to edit together their own original version then that's fine but it will not be officially endorsed?

I guess we will see. Probably I am just being optimistic.

ESB pt 2/3 is up.

What I am discovering is that the way the 1997 SE looked is for the most part the way the original film would have looked. Not quite, but especially with the bolder colours it is very reminiscent of what I remember in theatres back then.

Some of them are a little red, the pic of Obi Wan saying "the Force will be with you" and Han's "do you think a princess and a guy like me...". But most of the others have pretty balanced skintones IMO; they are more red than they ought to be perhaps, but I don't think distractingly so. Anyway, like I said, it is 85-90% accurate, but gives you a glimpse of what the original colouring would have looked like, even if this isn't the total, one hundred percent real deal. If you were to try it yourself you could spend more time getting rid of the red, as I admittedly did a very quick pass at it.

I'm not sure if it is possible to do this with Avisynth; the colours tend to bleed and pop more than with other methods in my experience. Even here there is a lot of noise that comes up in certain scenes. It's more for the cool factor of seeing what it ought to look like, but certain scenes would need to be modified on a shot-by-shot basis rather than applying a single setting like I have here. Feel free to take a crack though.

ESB pt 1 of 3 is up. Hint: it's very blue.

I never actually bought the Jedi GOUT...hehe...

You can pretty much follow my lead though. Just crank up the saturation, back off on the red a bit and sharpen it a little. And that's what you get. Again, not 100% maybe, but in the 90% range which is quite good.

I've done a lot of research on the original theatrical colouring and I found a really easy way to share it with people. The GOUT actually has most of the original colours hidden in it. You just have to extract it. It's not 100% accurate, and it depends on how you have your settings; the pics posted I would say are about 85-90% accurate overall. That's an improvement from the GOUT uncorrected, which I would peg at about 30%.

Very pic heavy, so I am posting this off-site. Only SW is up. Need more pics. ESB is much more interesting, hopefully have those up by the end of the night. You can try it out yourself if you have VLC player.

http://savestarwars.com/goutcorrect.html 

I can't believe Canadians will have to pay $179 for that. I was saying three months ago that pricing it at $99 would be steep. Come on. I know its six films and not three like most sets but still, yeesh.