[In progress] [FanColorFix] Book of Eli Re-Colorized

[deleted user]

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)?

[spoRv]

Nice project, Tom! I like the new color palette!

Some suggestions:

• I'd lower the saturation of the red
  
• I don't see the point of 10bit encoding, where many HD displays (even the most expensive) and video card are not capable of render them... I'd stay (for the moment, at least) with 8bit, not only for the eventual BD compatibility, but also to not "waste" video bitrate for a version that would be correctly displayed by few ones.
  
• And, if you'll go with 8bit (and possibly BD compatibility), FLAC should be discarded as well!
  

And if you like classifications, yes, I'd say this is a fan edit.

[deleted user]

Nice project, Tom! I like the new color palette!

Some suggestions:

• I'd lower the saturation of the red
  
• I don't see the point of 10bit encoding, where many HD displays (even the most expensive) and video card are not capable of render them... I'd stay (for the moment, at least) with 8bit, not only for the eventual BD compatibility, but also to not "waste" video bitrate for a version that would be correctly displayed by few ones.
  
• And, if you'll go with 8bit (and possibly BD compatibility), FLAC should be discarded as well!
  

And if you like classifications, yes, I'd say this is a fan edit.

Thanks!

I played around with lowering the red but I really like that intense red glow in indoors scenes, and didn't want to go without it. Call it my personal preference.

10bit for a few reasons:

1. I read that 10bit x264 is more efficient than 8bit x264. In fact, this seems to be true even for 8-bit material! Weird, huh? Apparently that's due to different quantization used by 10-bit x264.

2. The regraded result will be 16-bit anyway. So why not save with a bit more fidelity? It's cool for screenshots AND for those who maybe want to fix brightness or color a little while watching (as the 2 more bit will prevent crushed blacks and the likes).

Not gonna discard FLAC, but as noted above, I'll make it simple for anyone who cares to make themselves a Bluray compatible version.

And I don't really care for classifications but I thought others here might. Probably the best term would be "Color Fix" as used by Vinnie. I'll add that to the title.

[deleted user]

Trailer release

To give a more appealing sneak peak at the colors and picture quality, I recreated one of the 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, 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, resulting in a roughly 20 Mbps video.

Total size: 449 MB

Download link for the trailer: https://mega.nz/#!Jjw3lIba!nyoUn4OTibYOJ...9GIXDpObrQ

I'm trying to upload to Vimeo as well, so you can have a preview without downloading. But considering the 10-bit 4:4:4 x264 encode, I am not sure whether Vimeo will throw an error. Also, I don't expect Vimeo to come anywhere close to the original quality.

Edit: 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.

Edit 2: I did not recreate the title cards (is that what they're called?), so their quality is as good as the original trailer allows.

Edit 3: Vimeo video is uploaded, currently converting: https://vimeo.com/250221590 (password: "sealion"). Unfortunately it *seems* to me that the colors and contrast on Vimeo are somehow muted. Not sure why. Edit 3.1: I might be imagining it, as the Vimeo encode is rid of almost all grain, so it looks a bit worse than expected.