Zulu (1964): Restored UK Master

[Chewtobacca]

Falcon, I've only had time to have a quick look through your disc, but from what I've seen so far, the work that you've done on the video is first rate. Congratulations on an impressive release!

[BronzeTitan]

Thinking more about a procedure usable in a video editing program, I went to the standard histogram functions (no paint program "magic wand" selections) with the idea to push down the blown, speculator values (but not as far as before) and then expand the entire spectrum upwards to fill the gap. Then it occurred to me to test the images for range clipping. Sure enough, lots of crushed and blown values:







Maybe it was simply too much dial-twisting; not some convoluted Aliens "restoration"?

First of all, the crush & blown damage looks bad but not completely so. Notice that there's no or very little "white" showing (all three primaries, R + G + B, simultanteously crushed/blown). That means lost detail in one channel can be replaced with remaining detail in another channel re-leveled to fit the new-color range. A big job though, I would think.

However, the second part is easier -- color correction. With the new thinking that they didn't put allot of time and effort into making a mess, maybe one setting would (mostly) fix the entire movie. Fixing the high end was more a matter of bring up the low end. Sounds simple? It was. Gamma was increased in steps, higher, from each primary to the next (see highlighted settings) while contrast was increased/decreased to balance where, in each primary, the emphasis/de-emphasis was placed -- low or high (shadows or highlights) for uniform coloring:



Naturally, color "weakens" when becoming brighter so saturation was increased slightly to counter that:



I played around with the values across these snapshots to find something that looked good in all of them. Of course, they may have tweaked various areas in the movie, but we can do the same fixing it from our base-correction values:



Notice that the "specular" highlight looks more natural now. Maybe an even brighter picture would work even better (it is bright sun in this film).

Note: I'm not using a calibrated monitor, and so make do with an eyedropper.

[vbangle]

thank you for all of your work making this restoration.

[X5gb]

Just lost this in a hard drive crash and no longer seeded at the organ. Any chance someone has a link to this or can seed.

Thanks in advance.