Color Correcting the Dragon Box - 3 Part Spectacular

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Re: Color Correcting the Dragon Box - 3 Part Spectacular

Post by clutchins » Sat Aug 12, 2017 4:54 pm

MadSpecialist wrote:
Robo4900 wrote:And really, just by removing the colour cast from the Dragon Boxes, you'll get something that looks pretty nice.
I was recently pondering the same thing, take the following comparison for example:

Image
Image
Removing the color cast, plus white and black balancing will get you an incredible picture. Maybe tweak the gamma in some shots too.
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Original Thread Topic wrote:Did Dragon Ball ever motivate you to exercise?
No, why would it? It's fiction. The strength of the characters is not possible to reach in reality.
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Re: Color Correcting the Dragon Box - 3 Part Spectacular

Post by Robo4900 » Sun Aug 13, 2017 9:18 pm

Probably easier to just remove the cast, though. Wouldn't need to necessarily be applied shot-by-shot, since the cast would be the same across any one reel.

And as you can see, with just cast removal, it already looks pretty great. Going any further is a lot of work for not a huge lot of gain, and any project to do so likely wouldn't get off the ground.
The point of Dragon Ball is to enjoy it. Never lose sight of that.

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Re: Color Correcting the Dragon Box - 3 Part Spectacular

Post by tellyzbad1 » Thu Aug 17, 2017 8:27 pm

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eledoremassis02
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Re: Color Correcting the Dragon Box - 3 Part Spectacular

Post by eledoremassis02 » Wed Aug 23, 2017 4:45 pm

Those are great! Is there a way to fix these for the DVD or do I have to rip the episodes?

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Re: Color Correcting the Dragon Box - 3 Part Spectacular

Post by MadSpecialist » Thu Aug 24, 2017 2:17 pm

eledoremassis02 wrote:Those are great! Is there a way to fix these for the DVD or do I have to rip the episodes?
Correct me if I'm wrong but I can't think of a way it could be done without copying the episodes to a hard disk.

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Re: Color Correcting the Dragon Box - 3 Part Spectacular

Post by eledoremassis02 » Fri Aug 25, 2017 1:59 am

Certantly coulda worded that better xD

I mean like a patch or somthing for VLC? (is that even possible?) I love the way these look but dont have the interest or time to rip all the episodes. If anything I'd just check an episode or two as I've kinda lost imterest in Dragon Ball again

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Re: Color Correcting the Dragon Box - 3 Part Spectacular

Post by ect5150 » Fri Aug 25, 2017 7:24 am

MadSpecialist wrote:
eledoremassis02 wrote:Those are great! Is there a way to fix these for the DVD or do I have to rip the episodes?
Correct me if I'm wrong but I can't think of a way it could be done without copying the episodes to a hard disk.
I want to think that there was a version of some video player that actually did let you run a script while playing any video (including the DVD in your DVD drive). The issue here was the single script would have to be applied in totality to the entire video (to use a new script required total restart). This means you couldn't remove a color cast from one part of the episode and remove a different color color cast from the remainder of the episode.

All-in-all ripping it to your harddrive usually is the easier method. Encoding the video to another file and playing it via your computer, or putting them video on a USB stick tends to work well with a BluRay player that supports such features.
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Re: Color Correcting the Dragon Box - 3 Part Spectacular

Post by HakkaiBills93 » Fri Aug 25, 2017 9:52 pm

Exact thé color cast is even sometimes differrent from one frame to other like in the first épisode for exemple when bulma got kidnap thé color cast change than before in this this b part of thé épisode

You can only reencode it as thé people that did it painfully won t share them

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Re: Color Correcting the Dragon Box - 3 Part Spectacular

Post by ect5150 » Wed Aug 30, 2017 5:12 pm

HakkaiBills93 wrote:You can only reencode it as thé people that did it painfully won t share them
This is an issue right here--

How do we share our work for others to use? Encoding entire episodes and sharing those episodes with others is basically some version of piracy unless we can maintain all parties involved actually own the physical copy of these discs.

Some people seem to use some Adobe product for the color correction. I prefer using AVISynth scripts to keep it open. In my scenario, I actually can share my script... and you can use it across the episode yourself. I dunno how you'd share the Adobe projects easily (some people don't want to purchase that software anyways).

I would be nice to have a community collection of sorts dedicated to this information. Then an outsider would basically lookup the relevant information. For example, you guys might be able to lookup DBZ episode 120 (where Freeza is sliced in half by Trunks). You'd basically see a bunch of general information... frame numbers where the color cast changes... color profiles for removing the color cast. Color profiles for targeting Kai colors... some information targeting the US release, another for the Japanese release. It'd be a great community resource for this stuff.
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Re: Color Correcting the Dragon Box - 3 Part Spectacular

Post by HakkaiBills93 » Thu Aug 31, 2017 9:24 am

ect5150 wrote:
HakkaiBills93 wrote:You can only reencode it as thé people that did it painfully won t share them
This is an issue right here--

How do we share our work for others to use? Encoding entire episodes and sharing those episodes with others is basically some version of piracy unless we can maintain all parties involved actually own the physical copy of these discs.

Some people seem to use some Adobe product for the color correction. I prefer using AVISynth scripts to keep it open. In my scenario, I actually can share my script... and you can use it across the episode yourself. I dunno how you'd share the Adobe projects easily (some people don't want to purchase that software anyways).

I would be nice to have a community collection of sorts dedicated to this information. Then an outsider would basically lookup the relevant information. For example, you guys might be able to lookup DBZ episode 120 (where Freeza is sliced in half by Trunks). You'd basically see a bunch of general information... frame numbers where the color cast changes... color profiles for removing the color cast. Color profiles for targeting Kai colors... some information targeting the US release, another for the Japanese release. It'd be a great community resource for this stuff.
it wasn't a criticized . i can easilly understand why it cannot be shared
this topic could have been better with more people like you, overdrive or ashura but for some times lot of people only want to show others theirs skills (like enigmo just for the ego) but don't even want to share theirs technical things . This community here have two side
- the public one where people say things or show rare things it's mainly basics things that someone can know with deep search
- the private as those people have very very very rare footage, audios, technicals things but just collect stuffs and shared them with useful people for them but hide this from public, they talk with you only when they have some kind of interest to get (selfish)

some people don't share their way only cause i know lot of people which will use YOUR script and said that it's THEIRS scripts and this is the way i really dislike

I never shared mine as i stopped doing cc , i was never happy with my work and i don't want to share wrong settings

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Re: Color Correcting the Dragon Box - 3 Part Spectacular

Post by lansing » Thu Aug 31, 2017 10:34 pm

ect5150 wrote:
HakkaiBills93 wrote:You can only reencode it as thé people that did it painfully won t share them
This is an issue right here--

How do we share our work for others to use? Encoding entire episodes and sharing those episodes with others is basically some version of piracy unless we can maintain all parties involved actually own the physical copy of these discs.

Some people seem to use some Adobe product for the color correction. I prefer using AVISynth scripts to keep it open. In my scenario, I actually can share my script... and you can use it across the episode yourself. I dunno how you'd share the Adobe projects easily (some people don't want to purchase that software anyways).

I would be nice to have a community collection of sorts dedicated to this information. Then an outsider would basically lookup the relevant information. For example, you guys might be able to lookup DBZ episode 120 (where Freeza is sliced in half by Trunks). You'd basically see a bunch of general information... frame numbers where the color cast changes... color profiles for removing the color cast. Color profiles for targeting Kai colors... some information targeting the US release, another for the Japanese release. It'd be a great community resource for this stuff.
Since you brought this up, I'm going to share my findings here now. This is the exact same idea that I've been working on right now. I have this project of building a library of color correcting files on my mind since I've been informed about this color matching program 4 months ago. And after some tests, I'm going to say the color matching accuracy of that program is above 95%, which makes the project worth the time investment.

My thought process is as follow:
    1. I assumed that the level set to have accurate color
    2. and since the season blu-ray came from the same source as the level set, I can reverse it and makes it looks like the level set again, then it'll becomes the reference clip for color matching program. The process is pretty simple, you just have to follow a few rules, everyone can do it. I have made a video that explains it already but there're just too many stuttering and silent in my speaking that I need to remake one again.
    3. then here's a split of jobs
      1. if one is to match kai to the reference, then he'll have to trim the reference to match the video length of kai. I'm going to write a helper script in vapoursynth to aim on this job.
      2. if one is to match the dragonbox dvd to the reference, like so he'll need to trim the reference to match the dragonbox.
    4. after that is the part to match the color of the dragonball version clip(eg: kai) to the reference using the program, and I'm writing scripts to try to make it as automatic and streamline as possible,
      1. the program do the best balance matching when you pass in a montage as the input (eg: kai) and reference, so I wrote a script here that will takes in a video, generate a montage that begins on every scene change (key frame) of the video, and spit them out as images with their corresponding frame number attached to the filename.
      2. then you put the montages of all inputs and references to the program one by one and generate lut(look-up table) files, there should be around 350 for every episode.
      3. I wrote a script then takes the lut files and the input video, then automatically apply each lut file to each range of frames according to the keyframe frame number, and ta-da, you have a color matched final video!
___________________________________________

And to make this a community contribute project (because nobody can do this alone), my plan is to make an online library with lut and other materials for every episode of every dragon ball version.

As for someone who wanted to contribute, he can choose a job he likes, work on it, and share it back to the library. For example, if a guy has a slow computer that couldn't do the heavy color matching, he can do a cut list in step 3, going through the video and type out all the frame number of the cut points, and then upload the text file to the library.

And as for any typical end user, all he has to do is look up the episode and dragonball version that he has, grab the corresponded lut zip, apply and lut to his video using my script and bang, he'll have the exact same color matched result as I that's ready for whatever he wanted to do.

___________________________________________

Here are the challenges I'm having right now:
    1. My montage generate script is very slow because it needs to loop through the entire video in order to find the key frames (3+ minutes of loading), and the quality of the scene change filter kind of sucks too. I've been stuck on this issue about a week now and couldn't find better options. So I'm tending to make this step a community contribution to have people manually going through the video and typing out the keyframe frame number into a textfile and then read that file from the script, that'll vastly speed the script loading time to just a couple of seconds.
    2. The color matching program only has a 32 bit version because the author doesn't have a 64 bit MathLab and compiler, and a big montage image requires a 64 bit version in order to run (it needs more than 4G of RAM), so I have no choice but to reduce the resolution of the montage, which will result in lower quality color matching. So if anyone has a windows version of 64 bit MathLab and complier, you can help out by contacting the author here and help him compiles a 64 bit version.
    3. So far the program doesn't have a batch processing function, so we'll need to manually do the 350 lut per episode color matching one by one. And again, if you want to help out, go give some love for the author so he has some reason to add it
    4. I'm trying to recover the last 5% accuracy that the program is unable to match but I just fail to figure out a way, probably going to give up on this.
    5. How do we make the library? We need something that can takes in user uploads, like text files, and store link. Do we make a website+database for it? Or like store them into a google spreadsheet, in which I have no experience of.
    6. We'll need an online drive to store all the lut files. About 220KB a lut in 7zip, and there're around 350 lut for an episode, so that is 77MB per episode. And there're 291 episode for dragonbox + 167 episodes for kai = 458 total episodes. And then 458 x 77MB = 35GB. So we need at least 35GB of drive space.

I'm going to force myself this few days to make a before/after video to demonstrate how huge this project really is to get people interested. Feel free to chip in your thoughts.

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Re: Color Correcting the Dragon Box - 3 Part Spectacular

Post by thaman91 » Thu Aug 31, 2017 10:56 pm

Wait, why does there have to be 350 LUTs for each episode? From what I've read, each episode might have its first and second halves from separate reels. So there would need to be two LUTs (one for each half). And then 1 or 2 for the recap, 1 for the intro, 1 for the credits, and 1 or 2 for the eyecatch.

So I'm really confused about that 350 number. The 3 colors used in correction are red, green, and blue. So if you generate a LUT using frames that contain good amounts of these 3 colors, then that LUT should theoretically be able to work for the entire reel. Unless I'm missing something here.

Also, I don't think the Level sets have accurate colors. I think the consensus here has been that they're too muted/desaturated. But in theory (as you mentioned), a Level-set color grading could be reverse-engineered from the Season Blu-rays (even for episodes that the Level sets didn't get to) as long as the colors from the Level set masters were tweaked consistently for each episode to achieve the Season Set colors.

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Re: Color Correcting the Dragon Box - 3 Part Spectacular

Post by lansing » Fri Sep 01, 2017 12:05 am

thaman91 wrote:Wait, why does there have to be 350 LUTs for each episode? From what I've read, each episode might have its first and second halves from separate reels. So there would need to be two LUTs for each half. And then 1 or 2 for the recap, 1 for the intro, 1 for the credits, and 1 or 2 for the eyecatch.
Because there are about 350 scene changes in each episode, and since I'll be generating a montage for each scene, that's 350 lut.
The 3 colors used in correction are red, green, and blue. So if you generate a LUT using frames that contain good amounts of these 3 colors, then that LUT should theoretically be able to work for the entire reel. Unless I'm missing something here.
Because in reality, the color changes in every scene, people who had tried to correct the kai Buu sage can tell you that. There's not going to be an all around lut.

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Re: Color Correcting the Dragon Box - 3 Part Spectacular

Post by thaman91 » Fri Sep 01, 2017 12:17 am

lansing wrote: Because there are about 350 scene changes in each episode, and since I'll be generating a montage for each scene, that's 350 lut.
The 3 colors used in correction are red, green, and blue. So if you generate a LUT using frames that contain good amounts of these 3 colors, then that LUT should theoretically be able to work for the entire reel. Unless I'm missing something here.
Because in reality, the color changes in every scene, people who had tried to correct the kai Buu sage can tell you that. There's not going to be an all around lut.
I've read the same about Buu Kai. But for the Dragon Boxes, everything I've read seems to indicate that an entire reel can pretty much be corrected with a single setting; and one reel = half of the episode (not counting the intro, recap, or credits). Or, in some rare cases, there might be 2 or 3 different settings to use per half. But 350 unique settings/LUTs?! I've never heard of anyone color correcting the Dragon Boxes scene-by-scene like that.

I mean, if you're 100% sure then go for it. But in case you're wrong, that could end up being a whole lot of extra computing power for no reason with 350 LUTs compared to 6-8 which is all I thought would be necessary per episode. But hey, I'm no expert on this stuff. Maybe someone more knowledgeable than me can chime in.

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Re: Color Correcting the Dragon Box - 3 Part Spectacular

Post by lansing » Fri Sep 01, 2017 12:54 am

thaman91 wrote:
lansing wrote: Because there are about 350 scene changes in each episode, and since I'll be generating a montage for each scene, that's 350 lut.
The 3 colors used in correction are red, green, and blue. So if you generate a LUT using frames that contain good amounts of these 3 colors, then that LUT should theoretically be able to work for the entire reel. Unless I'm missing something here.
Because in reality, the color changes in every scene, people who had tried to correct the kai Buu sage can tell you that. There's not going to be an all around lut.
I've read the same about Buu Kai. But for the Dragon Boxes, everything I've read seems to indicate that an entire reel can pretty much be corrected with a single setting; and one reel = half of the episode (not counting the intro, recap, or credits). Or, in some rare cases, there might be 2 or 3 different settings to use per half. But 350 unique settings/LUTs?! I've never heard of anyone color correcting the Dragon Boxes scene-by-scene like that.

I mean, if you're 100% sure then go for it. But in case you're wrong, that could end up being a whole lot of extra computing power for no reason with 350 LUTs compared to 6-8 which is all I thought would be necessary per episode. But hey, I'm no expert on this stuff. Maybe someone more knowledgeable than me can chime in.
Here is the logic: if the dragon box is like you said, only have a few color changes, the next questions are going to be "How do you know where it starts and ends" and "how do you find that out"? Well, you don't know, so you're going to end up manually go through every scene yourself to find out. At the end, you would be using up more of your own time instead of letting the computer do it for you.

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Re: Color Correcting the Dragon Box - 3 Part Spectacular

Post by HakkaiBills93 » Fri Sep 01, 2017 6:34 am

The color matching tools have limit it's really complicate to get the best result and like you said you need lot of lut to do that .
Another problem is that you already need to fix all trouble from your source as no source from my knowledge have 100% accurate colors so if you can correct levels you can fix dbox as you know how it should look
the hardest things is that opposite to what it seems even if it's true that each part is on differrent reels sometimes one reels can have some part that degrade differrently
the better things is to correct frame by frame but it's really giant works

the only way to restore to dbox could be make a team of as many people as there is episodes to do , learn to everyone how to correct and then each people work on 1 episodes frame by frame but it's just a dream to find more than 500 people

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Re: Color Correcting the Dragon Box - 3 Part Spectacular

Post by tellyzbad1 » Fri Sep 01, 2017 11:16 am

Why on earth would you color correct frame by frame?

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left toei vod, right dbox cc

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Re: Color Correcting the Dragon Box - 3 Part Spectacular

Post by lansing » Fri Sep 01, 2017 12:51 pm

HakkaiBills93 wrote:The color matching tools have limit it's really complicate to get the best result and like you said you need lot of lut to do that .
95% color matching accuracy is pretty AMAZING already man. Sure 100% would be even better but we couldn't find a way to do that yet.
the hardest things is that opposite to what it seems even if it's true that each part is on differrent reels sometimes one reels can have some part that degrade differrently
the better things is to correct frame by frame but it's really giant works
Color matching frame by frame gives you no safety check. For example, what happen if you see artifact after a match? What do you do then? Well there's nothing you can do, except to look for a lut from a similar frame from the same scene. What happen if there's another match with artifact? Well you repeat the same thing, which is what ultimately becomes the idea of a montage. You make a montage by joining a series of similar frames together, and the resulting lut will give you a well balance color match for all the frames in the scene, reducing the risk of artifact and balancing slight changes of what should be the same color.
the only way to restore to dbox could be make a team of as many people as there is episodes to do , learn to everyone how to correct and then each people work on 1 episodes frame by frame but it's just a dream to find more than 500 people
That is a counterproductive way to do things. It's better to have 500 people and teach each one of them one or two things, than to have 500 people and have everyone doing 50 things at a time. The first scenario is going to win because everyone can do one or two things, it's easy. And the second scenario will give you quality issues because one person doing 50 things at once is hard.

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Re: Color Correcting the Dragon Box - 3 Part Spectacular

Post by HakkaiBills93 » Fri Sep 01, 2017 3:45 pm

tellyzbad1 wrote:Why on earth would you color correct frame by frame?

Image

left toei vod, right dbox cc
nice job but i don't think that it is lossless in the bright and dark parts as toei vod cels have their own brightness, contrast etc

lansing wrote: Color matching frame by frame gives you no safety check. For example, what happen if you see artifact after a match? What do you do then? Well there's nothing you can do, except to look for a lut from a similar frame from the same scene. What happen if there's another match with artifact? Well you repeat the same thing, which is what ultimately becomes the idea of a montage. You make a montage by joining a series of similar frames together, and the resulting lut will give you a well balance color match for all the frames in the scene, reducing the risk of artifact and balancing slight changes of what should be the same color.
i didn't wanted to color match each frame but correct them manually as it's not so hard to color correct , the color cast is the main things that can change in some part so if you know how to remove color cast from one frame, just did it frame by frame is easy.
The main problem when you color correct a video is that you have sometimes differrent color cast on some parts so settings can't work on the full episode

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Re: Color Correcting the Dragon Box - 3 Part Spectacular

Post by lansing » Fri Sep 01, 2017 4:10 pm

HakkaiBills93 wrote: i didn't wanted to color match each frame but correct them manually as it's not so hard to color correct , the color cast is the main things that can change in some part so if you know how to remove color cast from one frame, just did it frame by frame is easy.
The main problem when you color correct a video is that you have sometimes differrent color cast on some parts so settings can't work on the full episode
There are on average 35,000 frames per episode and you want to manually correct them frame by frame? Are you serious?

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