Book of Eli Re-Colorized


Description

The desaturated look of Book of Eli is absolutely not my thing, so I decided to push the colour out a little more.

Played around for a while to get a good compromise with a blanket 3D LUT until I was satisfied.

Here's a screenshot comparison (also included in subfolder): http://screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/128273

Since the saturation is so low in the original, there's lots of obvious chroma blocking when raising the saturation, which is why I applied a grainplate for each RGB channel separately. This results in some extreme grain/noise in some areas where there is strong chroma contrast, which I kinda like. Looks better than the blocking, anyway.

Audio is the lossless 5.1 DTS-HD MA audio from the Blu Ray transcoded to FLAC 5.1. On top, you get a FLAC 2.0 Dolby Headphone track rendered from the lossless 5.1 soundtrack, with amplification set so that there is no clipping. This track basically simulates a 5.1 surround setup on your headphones.


Encoding & Files for your own re-encode

Final encode is done by applying the 3D LUT through ffmpeg in 16-bit, then piping into and encoding with 10-bit x264. If someone wants a blu-ray compatible encode, I have included the .avs-file, grainplate, 3D LUT and a .bat script using ffmpeg for the LUT application and piping into x264 (that took some tinkering to get it to work), so you can just make your own version with your own encoding settings. I personally don't have a Blu Ray player, so I don't care about compatibility much.

I know that not all the choices I made with the 3D LUT may be to the liking of everybody, so feel free to adjust the 3D LUT any way you like for your own encode to make it more to your liking. An example of this may be the intense red tones, which I chose because I liked the look and also because there are some red elements in less saturated scenes which otherwise don't pop nicely. Another may be the dark yellow patches on the skies, which were originally green and brighter. I like it this way, but maybe you don't. Partly the choices were also dictated by scenes that would have looked bad if I had done it differently, but you can figure that out for yourself.


Trailer

Also included is a trailer which I created to give a sneak peak at the colors and picture quality. For this I recreated one of the movie's trailers (I think it's called Trailer #2) with scenes from the Blu Ray, then applied the same processing and LUT as for the movie. Shots that were trailer-exclusive were first regraded to match the Blu Ray as best as possible, for example by creating a conversion LUT for other shots of the same scene that do exist on the Blu Ray, using DrDre's ColorMatch software, then also had the same final LUT applied.

Since the best quality trailer source I could find had an Apple logo, that one was patched out with a Youtube trailer. That one had slightly different color, but I was able to fix that with two passes of the ColourLike plugin (Planar & RGB).

The best audio I could find was a 318kbps 2.0 English DTS track from the German Blu Ray (despite the video only being in letterboxed SD there). I retimed it from 25 fps to 23.976 fps by interpreting sample rate as 48000*23.976/25, then resampling the result to 48000 with a good SRC. Normalizing was applied before resampling. Result was saved as 24-bit 2-channel FLAC. That one I ran through the Dolby SDU4 Hardware decoder using a good audio interface, from which I created a 5.1 FLAC track (BC minus 3dB, split to SL and SR, LFE created from low frequencies of all resulting channels, without removing them from those). From that 5.1 I also created a Dolby Headphone track, which is a FLAC stereo.

So the trailer comes with 3 audio tracks:
- Original DTS 2.0 retimed and resampled and saved as FLAC
- SDU4-decoded 5.1 FLAC
- Dolby Headphone 2.0 FLAC

Video encoding process is the same as for the main video.

This was a funny undertaking in general. Many of the scenes in the trailer were unfinished, missing matte paintings and VFX. For example the original trailer was missing an error arrow piercing someone's throat and a head being chopped off. The remade one has all these ... beautiful things.

I did not recreate the title cards (is that what they're called?), so their quality is as good as the original trailer allows.


Release

Project has been released on Blutopia. Feel free to share anywhere, as far as I am concerned.


Screenshots

[Image: 3e9c26716393863.jpg] [Image: af67bb716429393.jpg] [Image: e058e5716433923.jpg] [Image: 973ac3716448573.jpg] [Image: d629a0716461623.jpg] [Image: 581824716496663.jpg] [Image: 1182bd716503983.jpg] [Image: 1f5093716705383.jpg]  [Image: 1f5093716531693.jpg] [Image: 7d287b716534373.jpg] [Image: 5c3953716549143.jpg] [Image: 452d5f716553113.jpg] [Image: ae7731716564783.jpg] [Image: d443ae716578793.jpg] [Image: a948ce716590093.jpg] [Image: 4496ba716595013.jpg] [Image: 0a1ad8716627333.jpg] [Image: 98d803716631903.jpg] [Image: e648f5716634003.jpg]

This could be an extremely tough project. What we need to do in order to realize it is to capture every single 16:9 (as in, filling the whole screen) broadcast of SW:TFA from here on out, look at the "Escape from Jakku" sequence to see if it's open matte, and check it with the 3D print already circulating since just over a year ago.

OK, this movie is into my HDD since many years... I thought to start a project about it several times, but any time there was the announcement "Blu-ray will be released..." and I left it behind, and regularly the BD never appeared, so... maybe it's time to do it!

This will use the WEBdl as main source; the logo is deleted using HDTV; film scan is used as color reference and, despite the fact it's letterbox, color regrade *seems* quite good - should check the whole film when it will be ready - quite close to film; this is also one of the rare full open matte versions - where the whole letterbox image is included, so there are no cropped parts, apart very few shots (I spotted only the Harrier take off, so far).

WEBdl untouched vs regraded: http://screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/128478
Test clip

download (1m44s, no audio, 10mbps x264, 121MB): https://mega.nz/#!ZuQlnDYS!ShNfTWncBGxFE...rwz9W1LXFw

Regraded version is also often very close to trailer (even if all we know trailers can't be taken as absolute reference, color wise, they could be taken in account somehow): https://diff.pics/2_OMj9L-18bx/1 - would be great to find out the full screen DVD, maybe for an AAP-AR version

I have the Italian AC-3 track, along with the English and Russian ones. I'd like to add the Cinema DTS track, plus English DTS-ES 6.1 from DVD, and the usual other languages (Spanish, French, German) audio and sub tracks; if anybody would/could help, please chime in!

I have grasped by now that some movies are filmed anamorphically, so they will never have an Open Matte.

While I understand the concept of anamorphic filming theoretically, I am not very familiar with all the established technologies and terms used for this in the film industry, specifically 35mm-related (I do understand the somewhat separate topic of anamorphic video encoding, so no need to delve into that). 

It follows I have neither yet grasped how to derive this information from imdb's Technical Specs. Can anyone perhaps give me a quick rundown over the most basic terms and anything that might be necessary to grasp this subject in its entirety? I'd like to know enough about the process to look at imdb's Spec page and quickly find an answer to whether that movie was filmed with any option to later Open Matte or not.

Currently I end up giving up googling all the various listed film stocks and listed lenses and whatnot, as I kinda lack the basics.

I originally joined here with the intent to provide useful information and get help to finish some projects I've been working on and off for a while. However, severe personal issues just came up which means I won't have time to finish anything nor be on Fanres much, and I don't want to cause problems and come across as a leach to some people who helped me if I can't contribute anything on my end due to time constraints. I was going to have an admin ban my account, but he was against the idea and told me to write this post and just not log in, but the thing is I probably won't be coming back at all from this point on and I don't people hanging or wondering what happened to me. I'm not sure if anyone is with me on this.

It was nice being with you all but life is life and don't want to cause any problems if I cannot provide in return. 

The Knight

EDIT: posts moved from here: https://fanrestore.com/thread-1980.html

The Matrix - AXIS-ALIGNED POLYGON ASPECT RATIO™ - EXPERIMENTAL VERSION

Are you curious to watch an entire movie with more image than both the letterbox and open matte versions?
Are you ready to watch it with a "strange" aspect ratio?

Comparison between HDTV 1.78:1 and AAP-AR version:
http://screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/128176

This version is AFAIK the first full lenght movie release with an AAP-AR; thanks to random.next and his plugin, the alignment is perfect in almost all shots (I'd say 99.9%); it used HDTV and DVD as they have very similar (but not identical) color grading.

Problems:

• sometime the alignment is completely wrong (first 52 frames are my fault) for a whole shot, or just for a frame or two at the beginning of a shot
  
• colors in the "slices" are different sometimes, due to not identical color grading of the sources
  
• there is at least a glitch which was present in the HDTV source
  
• no end credits
  

The Blu-ray didn't come with it's original mono mix in english.
However it's available on the US DVD and on LaserDisc (Jap/USA). So I'm asking
if someone who has either, LaserDisc preferred, could please share the
audio. It would be also useful to have the video from the version, to help
with syncing it to the Blu-ray.

As for the 5.1 mix on the BD, it's okay for what it is. However you can hear
the mono origins, as voices and SFX bleed into the surround channel. I'd say
that the original mono mix will be a much more pleasing listening experience.

Thanks in advance

Something I wanted to do since I first saw this movie. The desaturated look is absolutely not my thing. Luckily the color is still there and just needs to be seduced to show itself.

Played around for a while to get the ideal compromise with a blanket 3D LUT and am now at a point where I am kinda satisfied.

Here's a screenshot comparison: http://screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/128273

Since the saturation is so low in the original, there's lots of obvious chroma blocking when raising the saturation, which is why I apply a grainplate for each RGB channel separately. This results in some extreme grain/noise in some areas where there is strong chroma contrast, but I actually kinda like that. Looks better than the blocking, anyway.

Here's a sample (across entire movie, spoiler warning, done with SelectRangeEvery): https://mega.nz/#!lzpUSRRJ!TTzofwfOK4WaK...NM8R8UGBM8

I only encoded that one with Adobe Media Encoder, so don't expect great quality. Should give you a fair idea what to expect color-wise though. And in the beginning scenes you can see some of that chroma grain acting up which I mentioned above.

Final encode will be done by applying the 3D LUT through ffmpeg in 16-bit, then piping into and encoding with 10-bit x264. If someone wants a blu-ray compatible encode, I'll include the .avs-file, grainplate, 3D LUT and a .bat script using ffmpeg for the LUT application and piping into x264 (that took some tinkering to get it to work), so you can just make your own version with your own encoding settings. I personally don't have a Blu Ray player, so I don't care about compatibility much.

Audio will be the lossless audio from the Blu Ray transcoded to FLAC.

This is pretty much finished, just need to find good encode settings and encode. I'll probably aim at a bitrate between 15 and 20 Mbps, to preserve the beautiful grain acting up.

If anyone has suggestions for further audio tracks or anything, let me know.

P.S. Should I classify this as fanedit as I am not technically preserving anything (other than the color)?

For those who have scanned 35mm film, have you done it yourself or do you have an outside service do it professionally?

For those who've done it themselves: what is your process?

For those who've had a professional service do it: any specific service you would recommend?