Ghost in the Shell

[zoidberg]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTSC-J

[der richter]

i see for analog there is something like this. thx for that info.

[BronzeTitan]

Once a film is released and has made its initial run it really is discarded!

Everything involved in obtaining the final negative is a means to an end. ...
The real irony is that the original elements were rescanned and recomposited... for 2.0  

It was similar to early (Disney years) animation, where the cels were "scrubbed" and reused due to keep expenses down. A means to an end. Too bad.

The "original elements" means . . . re-photographing of the actual cels and backgrounds? Or just re-compositing the old, pre-1995 negative (or inter-positive / whatever)) elements?

I would think the latter. It would better explain why GITS still doesn't look up to full HD (and now UHD) -- re-photography would surely be able to produce razor-sharp pictures (anywhere they wanted them).

[BronzeTitan]

basically, it introduced a colour shift to counter a general colour shift on TV equipment. ... it wasn't even done consistently everywhere.

I noticed that in my test correction and would've re-shifted the spectrum but didn't want to interfere with the crushed-blown re-adjustment demonstration. From your extra information, I re-approached it with a HSL hue shift, first, and then added the Histogram compensation for the flattened lows and highs (but still not filling in those actual crushed-blownout areas) . .

That "hit the nail on the head" (at least for this shot). Thanks!   (And good to keep in mind for other JP LDs.)

[BronzeTitan]

I came across a JP LD screenshot (right) of that same US LD one (left) . .

(Pay no attention to relative frame sizes -- it was a slow zoom-in and I resized according to the center character.)

The US may be a poor LD, but we would only know with a capture that isn't crushed and blown. The JP is crushed all around the surrounding shadows, but had no blow-out. Only good captures of both would tell about detail in those areas. It's all to determine if the laserdiscs have anything to contribute to a restoration.

[drood]

Hi, I've been silently watching this thread for a while now, and finally decided to create an account. I thought it would be interesting to point out that 35mm strips are available on eBay. I've contacted the guy selling them back when I discovered that, and he confirmed he owned the whole reel. Needless to say his business is so lucrative he will never consider selling it. There is also an alarming number of cells for sale here since last time I checked, that's sad

Also, this is probably not really helpful but a while ago I tried to read the C code typed by Dr.Willis and it seems to be image-processing related. One of my crazy theories is that this is the source code of some of the software used during the digital processing of the movie. But we will probably never know the truth.

[edit]
I forgot to talk about this. It seems to contain some information about Ghost in the Shell. I don't know exactly what, since I can't read Japanese, but maybe we're lucky and it gives a few details about production ?

[der richter]

@drood i only noticed your PM just now and wanted to reply to you. though you have PMs disabled and i can't message you.

also on topic, i completed my work on my v3 release to ~80%. i had to fix all the frame by frame filtering for the new source and i rechecked basically all my filtering. a fair amount of the special filtering could also be discarded since the new source is a lot cleaner, but on the other hand it also has issues the old source didn't have. for the latter case i had to add some new filtering. it took a lot more time than anticipated, though admittedly my time is really limited since a few months.

i will probably not be able to write much about what i did because of the lack of time. though when i am done i will make sure to get you guys a heads up and some comparisons.

[drood]

Eww sorry about that, it should be fine now... Can't wait to see this v3 as well

[CSchmidlapp]

Awesome.

[drood]

I just stumbled across this article about the UHD blu-ray. The author seems to have attended the preview screening with Mamoru Oshii and a certain Makoto Imazuka, who I think is working at this company and was responsible for the HDR UHD remastering process. He makes some simple technical comments to explain how it was all conducted, but it's actually what Oshii said that caught my attention :

最後に驚きの情報をひとつ。主人公の草薙素子の肌の色は、実は色指定がなく、すべてのカットで色が違っているという。それは、場面や背景に合わせて最適な肌の色とすることを狙ったもので、撮影や現像などの段階ですべて細かく調整したという。そんな肌の色の違いまで、4Kリマスター版では精密に再現されている。

My google translate expertise loosely puts it that way

One last surprising information. The color of Motoko Kusanagi's skin was never specified and differs in all the cuts. It aims to create an optimal skin color depending on the scene and background and was adjusted during the shooting and development. Such differences in are precisely reproduced in the 4K remastered version.

I remember noticing a big color shift when she faces the camera after looking at her "twin" (during the canal sequence). If I understand correctly they never had any reference, so maybe it can explain.