Why Does Some Old Film Turn Red?

Hello Star Wars fans. While this film is about restoring Star Wars, it is also about restoring film in general. As you can see, this reel of Star Wars is, well not's beat about the bush, it's pink. And this is a problem with a lot of 1970s film. In this video I am going to show you how to restore the color, but first let's answer the question many of you may be thinking:

Why Does Some Old Film Turn Red?

Really it depends on the process. Technicolor perfected the three-color process that defined early color film in 1932. The technique was expensive, involving three separate black and white film negatives, each capturing one-third of the full color spectrum (for this process the spectrum was divided into red, green, and blue - RGB). Each of the three negatives would be dyed in the complementary third of the spectrum they represented and then pressed into the emulsion for the final release print of the movie.

The Technicolor process was expensive, but provided the lush color that has come to characterize 1940’s blockbusters, and if you are lucky enough to own a Technicolor print of Gone with the Wind or The Wizard of Oz, I bet the colors are just as vibrant today as they were 75 years ago, because the dyes used by Technicolor barely fade at all.

Then Eastman Kodak came along with their Eastmancolor process. This type of film was both cheaper to process and cheaper by the foot, advantaging both cost-cutting studios and smaller releases with more limited print runs. Unlike Technicolor, which had to be shipped to Technicolor facilities, Eastmancolor could be developed in standard photo labs.

Technicolor’s share of the market began to sink, and by 1975 their facilities were being closed, ceding color film processing entirely to Eastmancolor.

But Eastmancolor had a major problem. The dye used in the cyan third of the spectrum (that's blue to those of you who are like me and only see the world in primary colors and look puzzled when our wives talk about colors like fuchsia), where was I? Oh yes, the blue dye used in the Eastmancolor process would fade to red and eventually clear while in storage. This has since been a nightmare for film preservation efforts for obvious reasons. And while color fade is a problem with poorly preserved film in general, the first 20 years of Eastmancolor prints are in particular danger. Eastmancolor film can fade to pink in as few as five years if not properly stored.

Eastman Kodak introduced low fade film in 1979, which improved the durability of the cyan dye, and by about 1982, most of the films sent to your local cinema were being printed on the new Low fade (LPP) stock.

It is worth noting that Low fade does not mean "no fade" but it is certainly a heck of a lot better.

so anyway, this reel of Star Wars was printed on the old Eastman stock and is now pink. This particular reel, by the way, is owned by -1 (of Team Negative One) and it was one of the first sets of reels that he acquired for his "Silver Screen Edition" pre-Special Edition version of Star Wars. He was kind enough to dig up the original 10-bit color, 1080p, scan made back in 2010? Something like that. At that time, the team could not find a way to digitally restore enough color to make the film watchable, at least not without a bunch of weird color artifacts. In the end, of course, he found a low fade print of the film and never looked back.

About a year ago, somebody calling himself Dr. Dre created an algorithm to almost perfectly match the colors of one image to another. I already demonstrated how his free tool was able to restore some other faded Eastman footage of Greedo and Han Solo with very impressive results (although there were still some obvious artifacts in the window behind them). Then a few weeks ago, I was trying to free up some Hard Disk space and I came across an 8-bit color, h264 compressed scan of this faded Eastman Reel. On a whim, I decided to run it through Dre's tools (I have been beta testing a new color balance/restoration algorithm he developed too) and the results were just astounding.

So I contacted -1, and requested the lossless, 10-bit color scan of the same reel, and he was kind enough to send it to me. So that is what you are looking at here...

The first thing we need to do is to is to find a good color reference. Since we all know the color timing on the 2004 DVD and the 2011 blu-ray is horrible, this leaves us with the 2006 Bonus DVD or a fan made project. In this case I'm using the "Star Wars 77" GOUT upscale by Team Blu. This is a 720p upscale of the 2006 Bonus DVD, with Color Corrections by YouToo. I like the colors in this version more so than Harmy's Despecialized Edition 2.5, but an unfortunate byproduct of the upscale is that there is a layer of almost static grain sitting on top of the action like a blanket, which was so annoying I couldn't watch it. But for our purpose here, which is just to copy the colors, it should work well.

Before starting this tutorial, I already ran through all the steps once with another color source, again by Team Blu, in this case their "V3" Edition, which was a GOUT sourced DVD, and this is how it turned out...

It's not perfect, the skin tones in particular are too red, at least on my screen, but this is probably the result of applying only one set of LUTs to the entire reel. Fixing it on a shot by shot basis will probably produce much better results, so that is what I am going to try now.

The first thing I need to do is select a shot to fix. Let's try this one with Han, Chewie, Luke and Leia heading back to the Falcon after emerging from the Trash compactor. (frames 6827-7205)

So if we trim the working area to just that shot... OK. Now we need to find the same shot in our color reference... And trim that one.

And crop off the black bars.

Now we'll import the faded footage and try to register the two as closely as possible. First let's shrink it down to match the 720p footage. Then set the mode to "Difference" and just try to manually line them up...

Close enough. OK. Before I go any further, let's test out a few commercial tools and see what they can do for us. First let's try the Auto Color effect in After Effects. Nope, that's not going to work. How about playing with the curves? Well, even if I knew what I was doing, it might take hours to get what is still going to look like a very washed out and faded color film.

So let's try RevisionFX RE:Match which retails for $89 ($329 for the Pro version). So if we apply that effect, set the color source to SW77. hmm. better. Let's try some different modes. Ok, histogram 2 does a pretty nice job actually. But we can do better.

Now to be fair, Re:Match was designed to address the problems of multi camera shoots - in other words matching the footage from camera one with that of camera two, and in my experience, if you have two sources that are already very similar it does do a pretty good job of matching them up.

Let's see what else do I have here? Boris Continum includes a "Color Match" effect. Despite the name, I think it is more of a Luma Match tool, designed to match the lighting conditions between two sets of footage of the same shot but from different cameras, but let's give it a try because the name of the effect implies that it can do what we want it to do....

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I don't think you can buy just the Color Match Effect on it's own from Boris FX, it only comes bundled with other Effects, but these bundles start at $49.95 which isn't bad at all.

But let's back on track here and see what we can do using Dre's tools. First we are going to need some sample frames from both the faded version and our color reference. Rather than manually grabbing frames, let's create a new composition, based on this one, resize it to an SD resolution, and... How many frames do we have here? 378. 378 / 16 = about 23. So let's Enable Time Remapping, alt + click on the stopwatch and type in the following expression:  

n = 23;
n*time

What that will do, is give us only every 23rd frame, for a total of 16 frames. Instead of basing our color calculations on a single frame, we're going to create a montage of 16 frames. Let's trim this composition to 16 frames... And render it as a Tiff sequence. Now let's go back and switch the underlying source back to the color version. And render it again - but changing the destination. ok.

Now let's switch to Photoshop. Open the first image, increase the canvas size 400% from the top left corner. grab all the remaining images and drag them onto our canvas. If you have an earlier version of Photoshop you may find they all just open in their own windows. If that happens, you'll just have to use Ctrl + A to select all and Ctrl + C to copy and then switch back to the canvas and paste in each image, one at a time, but newer versions of Photoshop allow you to place each image on the canvas one at a time, which is exactly what we need here.

Ok, so there is our "Test" Image. Let's save that. Now let's do the same thing with the color images to create our "reference" image.

OK. Now comes the fun part. If we open up Dre's new Color Balance Tool (which is currently still in Beta and not available for download yet) and import our faded samples. And click "Build Color Balancing Model" in just a few seconds it balances the image, reducing the red and generally making it look much better. It is still very faded looking, which is to be expected, and this is about as good as you could get playing with the curves or color wheels in After Effects or Resolve. But this is only the first part of the process. First we Balance, then we Match. Let's save that LUT. And we should save the output image to use when matching.

OK. So now we open the Color Matching tool, which some of you may have seen before in my other tutorials, and which can be downloaded from the thread on OriginalTrilogy.com, or from here at TheStarWarsTrilogy.com. So we open up the balanced image as our "Test" Image, and crop off the white border. Then we open up our "Reference" image, no cropping required, and click "Build Color Matching Model", and wait for that to complete. Wow. Looks pretty good doesn't it? So let's save that LUT as "Match".

Let's also save the output image, because you may be wondering what happens if we skip the balancing step and jump straight to the Match. Well, let's try it... Still looks pretty good, and you may not even be able to see much of a difference, but in my experience balancing and then matching provides a much smoother image. There are often many artifacts that appear when you skip the balancing step.

Anyway, now we have our two LUT files, we can switch back to After Effects and apply them. And there you have it.

Now if we apply those LUTs to the whole reel, most of it still looks pretty great, but obviously repeating these steps for each scene will produce slightly better results.

So. There you have it. Hopefully you will find this video either helpful or entertaining, or perhaps even both; and the next time you see a faded 35mm trailer being sold dirt cheap on eBay because it is pink, you'll remember this video and buy it knowing that it can be restored.

Oh, and if you happen to work in Hollywood, restoring film, you know where to find me...

Testing Digital Noise Reduction Plugins for After Effects, on the Star Wars SSE

Hello Star Wars fans!

Today I'm going to take a look at some of the commercial noise reduction plugins for After Effects, and show you how you might use them to improve the quality of Team Negative One's Silver Screen Edition.

One of the most common complaints I hear about the SSE is about how grainy it is, and I think that is because of scenes like this one. This is probably the second worst shot in terms of how grimy it looks, in the whole film. (we'll tackle the worst shot shortly.)

However, the fact is that if you saw this film in Theaters in 1977 or in any of the cinema re-releases in the 1980s, you'll know that this is how it actually looked. I have access to 4 or 5 different 35mm prints of Star Wars on various film stocks, including two Technicolor prints, the LPP used for the SSE, and the red faded Eastman print we were looking at last time, and they all look like this. If you look at this scene on the 16mm and 8mm prints, it's there too, and even on the laserdiscs and VHS copies, despite the low resolution, you can still see traces of these brown blobs, so there is no doubt in my mind that this is how it looked in 1977.

Is it supposed to look like this? Did George Lucas want it to look like this? I seriously doubt it, but by the time he got the film back from the lab he was out of time and money so that's how it looks. This is how it was for two decades so we didn't want to fix it for the Silver Screen Edition. If we had done so, we would have been accused by many of the same sort of revisionism that Lucas himself is guilty of.

But now that the original is out there, there is no reason why you can't fix it and make it the way YOU want to see it. So I'm here to show you how you can have your cake and eat it too. A lot of the footage used by Harmy to "despecialize" the official blu-ray actually came from the 2006 Bonus DVD, affectionatly known as the "GOUT" (George's Original Unaltered Trilogy), and he did some truly remarkable things to make that work seamlessly, but now that the Silver Screen Edition is out there, anyone with a little know how can go in and Despecialize the blu-ray or swap out shots from Harmy's masterpiece with real 1080p Star Wars.

Of course, just dropping this shot back in would be extremely jarring! Clearly it needs to be cleaned up some more.

So with that in mind, let's jump right in and try to fix up two of the grungiest shots of the SSE and make them ready for their Despecialized closeup.

We'll start with the Sandcrawler shot (a shot that was completely replaced in the Special Edition), which comes right after the "Look, Sir, Droids!" line when the stormtroopers check out the escape pod. The first thing I did was stabilize the shot using the VFX Warp Stabilizer effect in After Effects, because it was still a bit wobbly in the Silver Screen Edition and that affected the cleanup.

So here it is before we add any noise reduction effects. If we zoom in a little you can see it doesn't really look like film grain - it's just weird floating brown blobs, and this sort of color noise is present in a lot of scenes, particularly in the desert, but also on the Falcon. Perhaps it's the film stock used in the camera or maybe there was a stocking or some kind of weird filter on the camera. Whatever it is, let's see if we can reduce it to a more tolerable level.

RevisionFX offers two different Noise Reduction plugins for After Effects. The first one, called DE:Noise works pretty well here with just the default settings. The Sandcrawler moves so slowly that this scene is almost static, and because there isn't a lot of motion we can crank up the noise reduction a little without seeing any of the smearing or other problems that happen in high motion shots. With this effect, on this shot, though I don't see a lot of difference as I play with the settings. I don't know how much of it will come through on the screen capture, especially after YouTube recompresses it, but I'm not seeing a lot of changes here.

The second effect is called DE:Noise Frame Average. The default settings aren't nearly so impressive but if I tweak the threshold to about 40 and increase the frames Before and After to 2, it looks much better. Comparing it to the basic DE:Noise I think it is slightly better here, there are certainly fewer brown blobs.

The third effect by RevisionFX that I want to show you is their Deflicker Effect. For some reason this effect does a fantastic job of removing the noise while preserving detail, however if there is any kind of significant movement there is horrible smearing. Here though, it works pretty well using noise clean method #1 or #2.

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Red Giant's Denoiser II does a nice job here too, the only change to the default settings I made here was to change the "Footage Source" to "film". Since most of the noise is in the blue channel, increasing the "Blue Offset" by 100% under "fine tuning" further improves the image. Overall, it looks smoother and cleaner than any of the RevisionFX.

BorisFX Noise Reduction Effect has a lot of tweakable settings, but I certainly didn't bother to read the manual to find out what they all do! But adjusting the sliders under Temporal and Spacial smoothing produces pretty nice results.

Finally, there is NeatVideo (which is also available for Virtualdub). I have been a customer of theirs since version 2.0, and of all the effects we have tried so far, I think this is the best one out there, and it is the one I use the most. It is able to almost completely remove all the those blobs from this shot, while retaining all the detail. You're probably thinking, that we're done - that this cleaned footage could now be dropped right into the blu-ray footage, though you might have to crank up the saturation and add a blue/magenta tint to it if you want it to match the blu-ray colors, but I mean it looks great, right?

But wait. Watch whap happens when you play it back. Look at the clouds. It's almost as if there is a heat haze up there. None of the other effeccts are having this problem. They don't get it so clean, but the clouds aren't changing shape either. The best solution here might be to use one of the other filters, and then apply Neat Video on top of that. I don't really like the idea of filtering it twice, but that might be the best solution here.

Let's move on to the next shot which is the Land Speeder entering Mos Eisley. This is without a doubt, the grungiest shot in the whole movie. So right off the bat let's show you the before and After, and then we'll take a look at how well the various plugins did. So here's the before - plenty of brown blobs. And here is after, again using the Neat Video 4 plugin. You'll notice that I added some color and a little film grain too. Now I think that looks really good given the source.

If you've watched Mike Verta's video on this shot, you'll notice that he managed to recover more detail, but then he was working with a 4k scan of the Technicolor print, while this is from a 2k scan of the LPP, which was itself a duplicate made from another 35mm print. So unfortunately the power lines visible in the blu-ray (and somewhat recovered in Legacy Edition) could not be recovered here.

I think it looks really good - until you look at the blu-ray. While there are obviously a ton of issues with the Blu-ray version - CGI dinosaurs, the speeder has had the bottom completely shaved off, and the colors are just hideous - but there is no denying that the level of detail and sharpness is a huge step up here. But again, the Blu-ray was able to recomposite many of the original elements directly from the camera negatives, so that is to be expected. I ran this shot through Dr Dre's Color Balance tool to create a LUT. Applying it, makes the colors a little more natural.

It looks like they also worked very hard to remove that smear of vasaline on the camera lens (you can see it moves with the camera) which was there to help obscure the wheels on the Speeder. But anyway, when compared to the Blu-ray it does seem like a bit of a let down, until of course you see all the CGI crap and you turn that layer off. From Before to After is still quite impressive, right?

Especially when compared to the next best official release: This is the same shot from the 2006 Bonus DVD. Now you remember when I talked about how we didn't need to worry about "temporal smearing" when working on the Sandcrawler shot, because there was no fast motion, well in this shot there is plenty of motion. Not only are the people moving, and the speeder is whizzing by, but the camera is panning too.

There are two basic kinds of cleanup techniques. Spacial Cleaning recruits nearby pixels from the same frame, and Temporal cleaning uses the pixels from the previous / next frame. As I scroll through the GOUT version here, what do you notice? See the guy's leg? It vanishes! Then the whole Guy just gets blurred out completely - He's the invisible man! This is what happens when using any kind of automated cleanup tools - though today the side effects are not nearly so bad. But it's why the Silver Screen Edition was cleaned manually, frame by frame whenever possible. The 2006 Bonus DVD uses a master created for the 1993 Definitive Edition Laserdiscs, and their automated cleanup process leaves a lot to be desired. And the fact that Neat Video was able to prevent this problem is really very impressive.

Let me show you how well that RevisionFX Deflicker tool worked here. As you can see, the static areas look fantastic, but the areas with motion are all smeary, with echos of past and future frames. Even the regular DE:Noise effect shows some smearing - look at the guys leg - and this is with the default settings. The Frame Average one, doesn't do much here on the default setting - just sort of blurs the brown blobs. Upping the threshold helps, but if we go as high as 40, which is what we used on the Sandcrawler shot, there is all kinds of smearing.

 Using the Red Giant Denoiser II with the same settings here as we used on the Sandcrawler just isn't good enough, and increasing the sensitivity creates some weird, wavy artifacts, similar to those we saw on the DVD, while washing out details, particularly on the ground.
 
 Here is the BorisFX plugin with the same settings we used on the Sandcrawler. Watch as I turn it on and off. See all that pixelation? And look at the tower - it is being blended into the sky.
 
 Which brings up back to the Neat Video plugin. all the brown blobs are just about gone, there is no smearing, and most of the detail is still there. It doesn't look quite so sharp, but that is an illusion.
 
 But anyway, that's about it for today, I look forward to seeing new projects featuring re-purposed Silver Screen Edition footage.

Sources

Hello Star Wars fans!

We've had a few questions about the 35mm sources we are using, so I figured I would just show you what they are. 

Most of project 4K77 will be either Eastman or Technicolor, supplemented by an upscaled Silver Screen Edition when needed, most notably at the reel changes. We are still waiting on a complete 4k scan of the Spanish LPP on which the Silver Screen Edition was based, but we do still have access to those reels, so if it became absolutely necessary we could make our own 4k scan of any given shot. But since both the Eastman and the Technicolor prints are sharper and less grainy, the LPP is really only being used as a repair layer and we can move ahead without that new scan.

Some of you may be wondering, "but are you using THAT Technicolor print, the one Mike Verta used for his Legacy Edition and that caused so much trouble earlier this year?" Well, we are using it as a color reference for sure, and it may be called upon to provide some frames if they are missing from other prints, occasionally even entire shots. As you may recall, Mike Verta himself sent us the entire Greedo Sequence from this print in 4k for us to use in the Silver Screen Edition and that's exactly what we did. But the fact is that we actually have access to another 35mm Technicolor print of Star Wars that has far less damage. And this is one that Mike Verta does not even have. Let me show you.

So this is the Tech that Mike used as the backbone of his Legacy Edition. As you can see, there is lots of damage, but the colors are really good. Still, it's a lot of work to clean that up.

Now this is our scan of the other Technicolor print. The colors are not so good, but that really doesn't matter because we have Dr. Dre and his wonderful algorithms that can almost perfectly match our scan to the other one. But just look at how much less damage there is! So, rest assured, when it comes to the Technicolor footage, we will be using our own scan over Mike's most of the time.

As you know we also have several Eastman Reels. Reel 1 is in pretty good shape despite the fading, but not all of the reels are so good. Here is the same sequence we were just looking at but on the Eastman stock:

Yikes, clearly our Technicolor scan is the best choice for this sequence. As you saw in our Techniques video, every shot is really a combination of prints, so really it would be our Tech laid on top of the Silver Screen Edition.

So there you have it. We pick the best source we have for each shot.

Why Does Some Old Film Turn Red?

Hello Star Wars fans. While this film is about restoring Star Wars, it is also about restoring film in general. As you can see, this reel of Star Wars is, well not's beat about the bush, it's pink. And this is a problem with a lot of 1970s film. In this video I am going to show you how to restore the color, but first let's answer the question many of you may be thinking:

Why Does Some Old Film Turn Red?

Really it depends on the process. Technicolor perfected the three-color process that defined early color film in 1932. The technique was expensive, involving three separate black and white film negatives, each capturing one-third of the full color spectrum (for this process the spectrum was divided into red, green, and blue - RGB). Each of the three negatives would be dyed in the complementary third of the spectrum they represented and then pressed into the emulsion for the final release print of the movie.

The Technicolor process was expensive, but provided the lush color that has come to characterize 1940’s blockbusters, and if you are lucky enough to own a Technicolor print of Gone with the Wind or The Wizard of Oz, I bet the colors are just as vibrant today as they were 75 years ago, because the dyes used by Technicolor barely fade at all.

Then Eastman Kodak came along with their Eastmancolor process. This type of film was both cheaper to process and cheaper by the foot, advantaging both cost-cutting studios and smaller releases with more limited print runs. Unlike Technicolor, which had to be shipped to Technicolor facilities, Eastmancolor could be developed in standard photo labs.

Technicolor’s share of the market began to sink, and by 1975 their facilities were being closed, ceding color film processing entirely to Eastmancolor.

But Eastmancolor had a major problem. The dye used in the cyan third of the spectrum (that's blue to those of you who are like me and only see the world in primary colors and look puzzled when our wives talk about colors like fuchsia), where was I? Oh yes, the blue dye used in the Eastmancolor process would fade to red and eventually clear while in storage. This has since been a nightmare for film preservation efforts for obvious reasons. And while color fade is a problem with poorly preserved film in general, the first 20 years of Eastmancolor prints are in particular danger. Eastmancolor film can fade to pink in as few as five years if not properly stored.

Eastman Kodak introduced low fade film in 1979, which improved the durability of the cyan dye, and by about 1982, most of the films sent to your local cinema were being printed on the new Low fade (LPP) stock.

It is worth noting that Low fade does not mean "no fade" but it is certainly a heck of a lot better.

so anyway, this reel of Star Wars was printed on the old Eastman stock and is now pink. This particular reel, by the way, is owned by -1 (of Team Negative One) and it was one of the first sets of reels that he acquired for his "Silver Screen Edition" pre-Special Edition version of Star Wars. He was kind enough to dig up the original 10-bit color, 1080p, scan made back in 2010? Something like that. At that time, the team could not find a way to digitally restore enough color to make the film watchable, at least not without a bunch of weird color artifacts. In the end, of course, he found a low fade print of the film and never looked back.

About a year ago, somebody calling himself Dr. Dre created an algorithm to almost perfectly match the colors of one image to another. I already demonstrated how his free tool was able to restore some other faded Eastman footage of Greedo and Han Solo with very impressive results (although there were still some obvious artifacts in the window behind them). Then a few weeks ago, I was trying to free up some Hard Disk space and I came across an 8-bit color, h264 compressed scan of this faded Eastman Reel. On a whim, I decided to run it through Dre's tools (I have been beta testing a new color balance/restoration algorithm he developed too) and the results were just astounding.

So I contacted -1, and requested the lossless, 10-bit color scan of the same reel, and he was kind enough to send it to me. So that is what you are looking at here...

The first thing we need to do is to is to find a good color reference. Since we all know the color timing on the 2004 DVD and the 2011 blu-ray is horrible, this leaves us with the 2006 Bonus DVD or a fan made project. In this case I'm using the "Star Wars 77" GOUT upscale by Team Blu. This is a 720p upscale of the 2006 Bonus DVD, with Color Corrections by YouToo. I like the colors in this version more so than Harmy's Despecialized Edition 2.5, but an unfortunate byproduct of the upscale is that there is a layer of almost static grain sitting on top of the action like a blanket, which was so annoying I couldn't watch it. But for our purpose here, which is just to copy the colors, it should work well.

Before starting this tutorial, I already ran through all the steps once with another color source, again by Team Blu, in this case their "V3" Edition, which was a GOUT sourced DVD, and this is how it turned out...

It's not perfect, the skin tones in particular are too red, at least on my screen, but this is probably the result of applying only one set of LUTs to the entire reel. Fixing it on a shot by shot basis will probably produce much better results, so that is what I am going to try now.

The first thing I need to do is select a shot to fix. Let's try this one with Han, Chewie, Luke and Leia heading back to the Falcon after emerging from the Trash compactor. (frames 6827-7205)

So if we trim the working area to just that shot... OK. Now we need to find the same shot in our color reference... And trim that one.

And crop off the black bars.

Now we'll import the faded footage and try to register the two as closely as possible. First let's shrink it down to match the 720p footage. Then set the mode to "Difference" and just try to manually line them up...

Close enough. OK. Before I go any further, let's test out a few commercial tools and see what they can do for us. First let's try the Auto Color effect in After Effects. Nope, that's not going to work. How about playing with the curves? Well, even if I knew what I was doing, it might take hours to get what is still going to look like a very washed out and faded color film.

So let's try RevisionFX RE:Match which retails for $89 ($329 for the Pro version). So if we apply that effect, set the color source to SW77. hmm. better. Let's try some different modes. Ok, histogram 2 does a pretty nice job actually. But we can do better.

Now to be fair, Re:Match was designed to address the problems of multi camera shoots - in other words matching the footage from camera one with that of camera two, and in my experience, if you have two sources that are already very similar it does do a pretty good job of matching them up.

Let's see what else do I have here? Boris Continum includes a "Color Match" effect. Despite the name, I think it is more of a Luma Match tool, designed to match the lighting conditions between two sets of footage of the same shot but from different cameras, but let's give it a try because the name of the effect implies that it can do what we want it to do....

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I don't think you can buy just the Color Match Effect on it's own from Boris FX, it only comes bundled with other Effects, but these bundles start at $49.95 which isn't bad at all.

But let's back on track here and see what we can do using Dre's tools. First we are going to need some sample frames from both the faded version and our color reference. Rather than manually grabbing frames, let's create a new composition, based on this one, resize it to an SD resolution, and... How many frames do we have here? 378. 378 / 16 = about 23. So let's Enable Time Remapping, alt + click on the stopwatch and type in the following expression:  

n = 23;
n*time

What that will do, is give us only every 23rd frame, for a total of 16 frames. Instead of basing our color calculations on a single frame, we're going to create a montage of 16 frames. Let's trim this composition to 16 frames... And render it as a Tiff sequence. Now let's go back and switch the underlying source back to the color version. And render it again - but changing the destination. ok.

Now let's switch to Photoshop. Open the first image, increase the canvas size 400% from the top left corner. grab all the remaining images and drag them onto our canvas. If you have an earlier version of Photoshop you may find they all just open in their own windows. If that happens, you'll just have to use Ctrl + A to select all and Ctrl + C to copy and then switch back to the canvas and paste in each image, one at a time, but newer versions of Photoshop allow you to place each image on the canvas one at a time, which is exactly what we need here.

Ok, so there is our "Test" Image. Let's save that. Now let's do the same thing with the color images to create our "reference" image.

OK. Now comes the fun part. If we open up Dre's new Color Balance Tool (which is currently still in Beta and not available for download yet) and import our faded samples. And click "Build Color Balancing Model" in just a few seconds it balances the image, reducing the red and generally making it look much better. It is still very faded looking, which is to be expected, and this is about as good as you could get playing with the curves or color wheels in After Effects or Resolve. But this is only the first part of the process. First we Balance, then we Match. Let's save that LUT. And we should save the output image to use when matching.

OK. So now we open the Color Matching tool, which some of you may have seen before in my other tutorials, and which can be downloaded from the thread on OriginalTrilogy.com, or from here at TheStarWarsTrilogy.com. So we open up the balanced image as our "Test" Image, and crop off the white border. Then we open up our "Reference" image, no cropping required, and click "Build Color Matching Model", and wait for that to complete. Wow. Looks pretty good doesn't it? So let's save that LUT as "Match".

Let's also save the output image, because you may be wondering what happens if we skip the balancing step and jump straight to the Match. Well, let's try it... Still looks pretty good, and you may not even be able to see much of a difference, but in my experience balancing and then matching provides a much smoother image. There are often many artifacts that appear when you skip the balancing step.

Anyway, now we have our two LUT files, we can switch back to After Effects and apply them. And there you have it.

Now if we apply those LUTs to the whole reel, most of it still looks pretty great, but obviously repeating these steps for each scene will produce slightly better results.

So. There you have it. Hopefully you will find this video either helpful or entertaining, or perhaps even both; and the next time you see a faded 35mm trailer being sold dirt cheap on eBay because it is pink, you'll remember this video and buy it knowing that it can be restored.

Oh, and if you happen to work in Hollywood, restoring film, you know where to find me...

Testing Digital Noise Reduction Plugins for After Effects, on the Star Wars SSE

Hello Star Wars fans!

Today I'm going to take a look at some of the commercial noise reduction plugins for After Effects, and show you how you might use them to improve the quality of Team Negative One's Silver Screen Edition.

One of the most common complaints I hear about the SSE is about how grainy it is, and I think that is because of scenes like this one. This is probably the second worst shot in terms of how grimy it looks, in the whole film. (we'll tackle the worst shot shortly.)

However, the fact is that if you saw this film in Theaters in 1977 or in any of the cinema re-releases in the 1980s, you'll know that this is how it actually looked. I have access to 4 or 5 different 35mm prints of Star Wars on various film stocks, including two Technicolor prints, the LPP used for the SSE, and the red faded Eastman print we were looking at last time, and they all look like this. If you look at this scene on the 16mm and 8mm prints, it's there too, and even on the laserdiscs and VHS copies, despite the low resolution, you can still see traces of these brown blobs, so there is no doubt in my mind that this is how it looked in 1977.

Is it supposed to look like this? Did George Lucas want it to look like this? I seriously doubt it, but by the time he got the film back from the lab he was out of time and money so that's how it looks. This is how it was for two decades so we didn't want to fix it for the Silver Screen Edition. If we had done so, we would have been accused by many of the same sort of revisionism that Lucas himself is guilty of.

But now that the original is out there, there is no reason why you can't fix it and make it the way YOU want to see it. So I'm here to show you how you can have your cake and eat it too. A lot of the footage used by Harmy to "despecialize" the official blu-ray actually came from the 2006 Bonus DVD, affectionatly known as the "GOUT" (George's Original Unaltered Trilogy), and he did some truly remarkable things to make that work seamlessly, but now that the Silver Screen Edition is out there, anyone with a little know how can go in and Despecialize the blu-ray or swap out shots from Harmy's masterpiece with real 1080p Star Wars.

Of course, just dropping this shot back in would be extremely jarring! Clearly it needs to be cleaned up some more.

So with that in mind, let's jump right in and try to fix up two of the grungiest shots of the SSE and make them ready for their Despecialized closeup.

We'll start with the Sandcrawler shot (a shot that was completely replaced in the Special Edition), which comes right after the "Look, Sir, Droids!" line when the stormtroopers check out the escape pod. The first thing I did was stabilize the shot using the VFX Warp Stabilizer effect in After Effects, because it was still a bit wobbly in the Silver Screen Edition and that affected the cleanup.

So here it is before we add any noise reduction effects. If we zoom in a little you can see it doesn't really look like film grain - it's just weird floating brown blobs, and this sort of color noise is present in a lot of scenes, particularly in the desert, but also on the Falcon. Perhaps it's the film stock used in the camera or maybe there was a stocking or some kind of weird filter on the camera. Whatever it is, let's see if we can reduce it to a more tolerable level.

RevisionFX offers two different Noise Reduction plugins for After Effects. The first one, called DE:Noise works pretty well here with just the default settings. The Sandcrawler moves so slowly that this scene is almost static, and because there isn't a lot of motion we can crank up the noise reduction a little without seeing any of the smearing or other problems that happen in high motion shots. With this effect, on this shot, though I don't see a lot of difference as I play with the settings. I don't know how much of it will come through on the screen capture, especially after YouTube recompresses it, but I'm not seeing a lot of changes here.

The second effect is called DE:Noise Frame Average. The default settings aren't nearly so impressive but if I tweak the threshold to about 40 and increase the frames Before and After to 2, it looks much better. Comparing it to the basic DE:Noise I think it is slightly better here, there are certainly fewer brown blobs.

The third effect by RevisionFX that I want to show you is their Deflicker Effect. For some reason this effect does a fantastic job of removing the noise while preserving detail, however if there is any kind of significant movement there is horrible smearing. Here though, it works pretty well using noise clean method #1 or #2.

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Red Giant's Denoiser II does a nice job here too, the only change to the default settings I made here was to change the "Footage Source" to "film". Since most of the noise is in the blue channel, increasing the "Blue Offset" by 100% under "fine tuning" further improves the image. Overall, it looks smoother and cleaner than any of the RevisionFX.

BorisFX Noise Reduction Effect has a lot of tweakable settings, but I certainly didn't bother to read the manual to find out what they all do! But adjusting the sliders under Temporal and Spacial smoothing produces pretty nice results.

Finally, there is NeatVideo (which is also available for Virtualdub). I have been a customer of theirs since version 2.0, and of all the effects we have tried so far, I think this is the best one out there, and it is the one I use the most. It is able to almost completely remove all the those blobs from this shot, while retaining all the detail. You're probably thinking, that we're done - that this cleaned footage could now be dropped right into the blu-ray footage, though you might have to crank up the saturation and add a blue/magenta tint to it if you want it to match the blu-ray colors, but I mean it looks great, right?

But wait. Watch whap happens when you play it back. Look at the clouds. It's almost as if there is a heat haze up there. None of the other effeccts are having this problem. They don't get it so clean, but the clouds aren't changing shape either. The best solution here might be to use one of the other filters, and then apply Neat Video on top of that. I don't really like the idea of filtering it twice, but that might be the best solution here.

Let's move on to the next shot which is the Land Speeder entering Mos Eisley. This is without a doubt, the grungiest shot in the whole movie. So right off the bat let's show you the before and After, and then we'll take a look at how well the various plugins did. So here's the before - plenty of brown blobs. And here is after, again using the Neat Video 4 plugin. You'll notice that I added some color and a little film grain too. Now I think that looks really good given the source.

If you've watched Mike Verta's video on this shot, you'll notice that he managed to recover more detail, but then he was working with a 4k scan of the Technicolor print, while this is from a 2k scan of the LPP, which was itself a duplicate made from another 35mm print. So unfortunately the power lines visible in the blu-ray (and somewhat recovered in Legacy Edition) could not be recovered here.

I think it looks really good - until you look at the blu-ray. While there are obviously a ton of issues with the Blu-ray version - CGI dinosaurs, the speeder has had the bottom completely shaved off, and the colors are just hideous - but there is no denying that the level of detail and sharpness is a huge step up here. But again, the Blu-ray was able to recomposite many of the original elements directly from the camera negatives, so that is to be expected. I ran this shot through Dr Dre's Color Balance tool to create a LUT. Applying it, makes the colors a little more natural.

It looks like they also worked very hard to remove that smear of vasaline on the camera lens (you can see it moves with the camera) which was there to help obscure the wheels on the Speeder. But anyway, when compared to the Blu-ray it does seem like a bit of a let down, until of course you see all the CGI crap and you turn that layer off. From Before to After is still quite impressive, right?

Especially when compared to the next best official release: This is the same shot from the 2006 Bonus DVD. Now you remember when I talked about how we didn't need to worry about "temporal smearing" when working on the Sandcrawler shot, because there was no fast motion, well in this shot there is plenty of motion. Not only are the people moving, and the speeder is whizzing by, but the camera is panning too.

There are two basic kinds of cleanup techniques. Spacial Cleaning recruits nearby pixels from the same frame, and Temporal cleaning uses the pixels from the previous / next frame. As I scroll through the GOUT version here, what do you notice? See the guy's leg? It vanishes! Then the whole Guy just gets blurred out completely - He's the invisible man! This is what happens when using any kind of automated cleanup tools - though today the side effects are not nearly so bad. But it's why the Silver Screen Edition was cleaned manually, frame by frame whenever possible. The 2006 Bonus DVD uses a master created for the 1993 Definitive Edition Laserdiscs, and their automated cleanup process leaves a lot to be desired. And the fact that Neat Video was able to prevent this problem is really very impressive.

Let me show you how well that RevisionFX Deflicker tool worked here. As you can see, the static areas look fantastic, but the areas with motion are all smeary, with echos of past and future frames. Even the regular DE:Noise effect shows some smearing - look at the guys leg - and this is with the default settings. The Frame Average one, doesn't do much here on the default setting - just sort of blurs the brown blobs. Upping the threshold helps, but if we go as high as 40, which is what we used on the Sandcrawler shot, there is all kinds of smearing.

 Using the Red Giant Denoiser II with the same settings here as we used on the Sandcrawler just isn't good enough, and increasing the sensitivity creates some weird, wavy artifacts, similar to those we saw on the DVD, while washing out details, particularly on the ground.
 
 Here is the BorisFX plugin with the same settings we used on the Sandcrawler. Watch as I turn it on and off. See all that pixelation? And look at the tower - it is being blended into the sky.
 
 Which brings up back to the Neat Video plugin. all the brown blobs are just about gone, there is no smearing, and most of the detail is still there. It doesn't look quite so sharp, but that is an illusion.
 
 But anyway, that's about it for today, I look forward to seeing new projects featuring re-purposed Silver Screen Edition footage.

Sources

Hello Star Wars fans!

We've had a few questions about the 35mm sources we are using, so I figured I would just show you what they are. 

Most of project 4K77 will be either Eastman or Technicolor, supplemented by an upscaled Silver Screen Edition when needed, most notably at the reel changes. We are still waiting on a complete 4k scan of the Spanish LPP on which the Silver Screen Edition was based, but we do still have access to those reels, so if it became absolutely necessary we could make our own 4k scan of any given shot. But since both the Eastman and the Technicolor prints are sharper and less grainy, the LPP is really only being used as a repair layer and we can move ahead without that new scan.

Some of you may be wondering, "but are you using THAT Technicolor print, the one Mike Verta used for his Legacy Edition and that caused so much trouble earlier this year?" Well, we are using it as a color reference for sure, and it may be called upon to provide some frames if they are missing from other prints, occasionally even entire shots. As you may recall, Mike Verta himself sent us the entire Greedo Sequence from this print in 4k for us to use in the Silver Screen Edition and that's exactly what we did. But the fact is that we actually have access to another 35mm Technicolor print of Star Wars that has far less damage. And this is one that Mike Verta does not even have. Let me show you.

So this is the Tech that Mike used as the backbone of his Legacy Edition. As you can see, there is lots of damage, but the colors are really good. Still, it's a lot of work to clean that up.

Now this is our scan of the other Technicolor print. The colors are not so good, but that really doesn't matter because we have Dr. Dre and his wonderful algorithms that can almost perfectly match our scan to the other one. But just look at how much less damage there is! So, rest assured, when it comes to the Technicolor footage, we will be using our own scan over Mike's most of the time.

As you know we also have several Eastman Reels. Reel 1 is in pretty good shape despite the fading, but not all of the reels are so good. Here is the same sequence we were just looking at but on the Eastman stock:

Yikes, clearly our Technicolor scan is the best choice for this sequence. As you saw in our Techniques video, every shot is really a combination of prints, so really it would be our Tech laid on top of the Silver Screen Edition.

So there you have it. We pick the best source we have for each shot.