by Projbalance » October 4th 2004 8:01 pm
By dead on I think he was referring to things like flesh tones, black level, and color stability. If memory serves, the issue of the saber coor problems was covered elsewhere on the site, but I cant recall which thread. It basically said that the restoration used a method that scanned the entire frame of film in order to balance the image as a whole under a certain set of parameters. There are many occasions where the white core of teh sabers created a heavy contrast imbalance that would wash out the frame (the infamous 'Sabers Across the Emperor' shot being one). In order to maintain balance throught the entire frame, many times the core of the saber was rationalized using the surrounding pixel data, which was ofter the colored saber 'corona', usually resulting in some shade of grey or a lighter shade of whatever color the saber was. The same effect occured on some of the explosions where there was a really "hot" center to it. The only way to fix these things is to go into each frame, isolate each element, and individually color correct, and this was just outside the scope of the program that did the cleanup. However, as far as total color balance, contrast, brightness, fine object detail, black level, and presence of grain in the image, it really does not get much better than this.