Color Correcting the Dragon Box - 3 Part Spectacular

[HakkaiBills93]

(Tellyzbad1, I'm looking at you. Regardless of views on DNR, applying it to commercially-released DVDs is foolish)
Honestly, I've always considered the first part alone to be more than enough.

Tekkyzbad1 is banned cause it's an alternate enigmo account so you can forget trying to contact him

1) split your episode into parts like (opening, part a, eyecatch a, b, part b, ending, jikai
2) for each part you have to white balance before everything else as white balance the things will alter colors
3) then play with colors by the way you want or can to correct each colors

but it's not an easy task, it's a huge work as anyway dbox don't need only a color correction but have bright, dark issues and some others things to correct

[Bruma rabu]

I'm trying to make a kai cut out of the DBox. While cutting up the episodes I'm also trying to remove color cast as i go. So far i have decided to only remove color cast, i tried to color correct but i found it extremely difficult.
My question here is how does it look so far? I know its not so good but I'm hoping you guys can point out my flaws.
https://youtu.be/k8qyZUra2H8

[Robo4900]

I'm trying to make a kai cut out of the DBox. While cutting up the episodes I'm also trying to remove color cast as i go. So far i have decided to only remove color cast, i tried to color correct but i found it extremely difficult.
My question here is how does it look so far? I know its not so good but I'm hoping you guys can point out my flaws.
https://youtu.be/k8qyZUra2H8

Your link doesn't work; "Video is unavailable" is all I get.

[Bruma rabu]

Your link doesn't work; "Video is unavailable" is all I get.

https://streamable.com/ox2qa Hope this one doesn't get taken down

[lansing]

I'm trying to make a kai cut out of the DBox. While cutting up the episodes I'm also trying to remove color cast as i go. So far i have decided to only remove color cast, i tried to color correct but i found it extremely difficult.
My question here is how does it look so far? I know its not so good but I'm hoping you guys can point out my flaws.
https://youtu.be/k8qyZUra2H8

Up to this point, it should be clear to any new comers that it's impractical to color correct it yourself. Not only skill-wise but the volume of works that you need to put in is impossible to get anything done. Beside from all those amateur failed attempts people have been posting here and there, the only route we can go that can actually achieve something is by color matching with a color matching program, in which I have talked about a few months back in this thread. We use a reference as in Funimation's DBZ Season blu-ray and color matching whatever source you have to it. Here is a demonstration video I did a while back to show the accuracy of the program:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U82KSgtbc9o

The program will typically miss color that are small in size, such as a small red button in a frame, but other than that the accuracy is pretty on point. If you're really into color correcting the anime, this is where you should be looking at.

[Bruma rabu]

I'm trying to make a kai cut out of the DBox. While cutting up the episodes I'm also trying to remove color cast as i go. So far i have decided to only remove color cast, i tried to color correct but i found it extremely difficult.
My question here is how does it look so far? I know its not so good but I'm hoping you guys can point out my flaws.
https://youtu.be/k8qyZUra2H8

Up to this point, it should be clear to any new comers that it's impractical to color correct it yourself. Not only skill-wise but the volume of works that you need to put in is impossible to get anything done. Beside from all those amateur failed attempts people have been posting here and there, the only route we can go that can actually achieve something is by color matching with a color matching program, in which I have talked about a few months back in this thread. We use a reference as in Funimation's DBZ Season blu-ray and color matching whatever source you have to it. Here is a demonstration video I did a while back to show the accuracy of the program:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U82KSgtbc9o

The program will typically miss color that are small in size, such as a small red button in a frame, but other than that the accuracy is pretty on point. If you're really into color correcting the anime, this is where you should be looking at.

Ah Dr Dre cc program, I was actually contemplating on using it but wouldn't I need to buy the Funi blu rays to get the reference shoots? Also don't the Funi blu rays have a blue hue to them?

[Ajay]

Interesting tool. Always shied way from automated solutions, but it worked surprisingly well, requiring very little manual work on my half.

[spoiler][/spoiler]

I did have to crop the Kai reference to match the DBOX cropping for a good result, but that was about it. I slightly altered the blues and skin tones to be 1:1 with Kai, but again, very minor in the grand scheme of things.

Thanks for sharing.

[Bruma rabu]

Oh wow that looks really nice. I was trying to use it a few months back but I couldn't figure it out as I was also trying to learn how to use premiere pro. If i were to do a whole episode how many shots would I need? Would it be frame by frame or cut by cut?

[Ajay]

From the 30 mins or so I've played around, it seems like the standard reel to reel procedure I typically use, and was mentioned earlier in the thread works best.

OP, Recap, Part A, Eyecatches, Part B, ED, NEP.

So 7 shots in total. There's quite a large number of episodes that don't require much readjustment for the B part, but it's worth doing anyway, especially since you'll be doing a little bit of manual adjustment afterwards -- white points and all that not so fun stuff.

[Bruma rabu]

Dang so it might be a little too late for the first 2 episodes I cut.

[Robo4900]

Your link doesn't work; "Video is unavailable" is all I get.

https://streamable.com/ox2qa Hope this one doesn't get taken down

Looks really nice. Seeing the whole series(Especially the original DB series) in this kind of quality would be great.

Using Dr. Dre's tool to match it to Kai works too, though. Of course, no original DB that way.

[lansing]

Ah Dr Dre cc program, I was actually contemplating on using it but wouldn't I need to buy the Funi blu rays to get the reference shoots? Also don't the Funi blu rays have a blue hue to them?

The blu ray set was like $100 during Christmas on amazon, it's $175 now, but still pretty cheap.

Oh wow that looks really nice. I was trying to use it a few months back but I couldn't figure it out as I was also trying to learn how to use premiere pro. If i were to do a whole episode how many shots would I need? Would it be frame by frame or cut by cut?

It has to be done scene by scene because a LUT generated from one scene may not work on another. So you'll need 300+ frames per episode.

I have written a helper script using Vapoursynth to do that. You manually jog down all the frame number of the scene changes into a text file, pass it to the script, and it will spit out a montage of 1-16 frames for each scene depending on your needs. I tested it out myself, took about 25-30 minutes of work, acceptable time.


If you've read my long post earlier, my idea is to scale this up to community project where everyone can contribute. We can then build up a library where works can be share, continue and update. So I have wrote some scripts to make the process as automatic as possible, that helper script is one of them.

My planned workflow went well until I found out that the reference and target images has to be align perfectly on top of each other to achieve a higher color matching quality. And the only program that can do this is Photoshop's "auto align", which can not be automated. This is where I got stuck, repeatedly aligning 300+ pairs of images manually is a lot of work.

[lansing]

Interesting tool. Always shied way from automated solutions, but it worked surprisingly well, requiring very little manual work on my half.

[spoiler][/spoiler]

I did have to crop the Kai reference to match the DBOX cropping for a good result, but that was about it. I slightly altered the blues and skin tones to be 1:1 with Kai, but again, very minor in the grand scheme of things.

Thanks for sharing.

I've tested enough to say that the program works on matching the kai 2nd season to the season blu-ray.

[ionutbigiu1]

I think that...to create a massive library of scripts, informations about where the frames should be found in each release from Dragon Box to Season Sets and Kai seasons. For each scene.. or maybe for episode packs somebody has to take their time to write them down..and maybe the craziest part is to allign all of them to one another's source. That seems like a rather titanic work.But in the end, maybe this is hat it takes to make it perfect. I am genuinely excited to see where this library will get.

I guess this is the perfect time and period for it. Now that DB super is leaving us.Old school shall be back stronger than ever before.

[Bruma rabu]

I was thinking of cutting up an episode (op/recap/part a/eyecatch/part b/ed/episode preview). Only keeping part a, eyecatch, and part b. Take a few screen shots from kai 1.0 to use as reference, maybe about 6 each for both part b and a. Would this not work?

[Bruma rabu]

https://streamable.com/p7i5s
So this is the result I got from 1 reference picture, obviously not perfect but damn does it looks good.
Here are some artifacts(there's a few more here and there) that I'm not so sure i could possibly fix and could be this programs achilles heel. Perhaps its macro blocking present in the North American release? [spoiler][/spoiler][spoiler][/spoiler]

[lansing]

I think that...to create a massive library of scripts, informations about where the frames should be found in each release from Dragon Box to Season Sets and Kai seasons. For each scene.. or maybe for episode packs somebody has to take their time to write them down..and maybe the craziest part is to allign all of them to one another's source. That seems like a rather titanic work.But in the end, maybe this is hat it takes to make it perfect. I am genuinely excited to see where this library will get.

I guess this is the perfect time and period for it. Now that DB super is leaving us.Old school shall be back stronger than ever before.

There is no point to color match the dragon box to kai because you wouldn't have reference for so many scenes that kai had cut out, and the color of kai is not accurate anyway.
The two possible forks that you can do is to match kai to season or the dragon box to the season, though I'm only interested in the first one. Well I doubt that many people have a copy of the dragon box anyway.

I did do a semi testing run for an episode myself to see how the speed goes. The basic work flow is this:

1. Going through the video to create a scene change file (25 minutes)
2. Syncing the season to kai, that includes a lot of trimming, some frame replacing for the season set, result will be save to a cut file (12 hours)
3. Load the scene change file and cut file into the helper script, and output image sequences for both kai and season for color matching
4. align and crop the images using photoshop
5. Ran the color matching program using the images to create a LUT file for every scene

I left out some detail descriptions but this should include all the general workflow. As you can see, syncing season to kai is possibly the most time consuming part. It's crazy to find out that the kai people had trimmed out every beginning and ending frames of every scene just to speed up the story. I didn't do 4 and 5 but they should take hours of works too.

[ionutbigiu1]

I think that...to create a massive library of scripts, informations about where the frames should be found in each release from Dragon Box to Season Sets and Kai seasons. For each scene.. or maybe for episode packs somebody has to take their time to write them down..and maybe the craziest part is to allign all of them to one another's source. That seems like a rather titanic work.But in the end, maybe this is hat it takes to make it perfect. I am genuinely excited to see where this library will get.

I guess this is the perfect time and period for it. Now that DB super is leaving us.Old school shall be back stronger than ever before.

There is no point to color match the dragon box to kai because you wouldn't have reference for so many scenes that kai had cut out, and the color of kai is not accurate anyway.
The two possible forks that you can do is to match kai to season or the dragon box to the season, though I'm only interested in the first one. Well I doubt that many people have a copy of the dragon box anyway.

I did do a semi testing run for an episode myself to see how the speed goes. The basic work flow is this:

1. Going through the video to create a scene change file (25 minutes)
2. Syncing the season to kai, that includes a lot of trimming, some frame replacing for the season set, result will be save to a cut file (12 hours)
3. Load the scene change file and cut file into the helper script, and output image sequences for both kai and season for color matching
4. align and crop the images using photoshop
5. Ran the color matching program using the images to create a LUT file for every scene

I left out some detail descriptions but this should include all the general workflow. As you can see, syncing season to kai is possibly the most time consuming part. It's crazy to find out that the kai people had trimmed out every beginning and ending frames of every scene just to speed up the story. I didn't do 4 and 5 but they should take hours of works too.

And you are syncing season to Kai....because?

[Ajay]

There is no point to color match the dragon box to kai because you wouldn't have reference for so many scenes that kai had cut out, and the color of kai is not accurate anyway.
The two possible forks that you can do is to match kai to season or the dragon box to the season, though I'm only interested in the first one. Well I doubt that many people have a copy of the dragon box anyway.

While it's true you won't have references for many scenes, Kai's colours are significantly more accurate than the Season Sets, which are an absolute mess in just about way. I would personally never watch anything matched to those. Kai may take some liberties in areas, but they're much closer to the cels than anything else. Heck, I own cels and have compared them.

[Robo4900]

wouldn't I need to buy the Funi blu rays to get the reference shoots? Also don't the Funi blu rays have a blue hue to them?

I missed this last time I saw this thread.

As Ajay says, the season BDs are terrible for colours; just use Kai.
You should be able to get a reference for just about every part you'd need a reference for. Only major outliers would be the opening and ending. Perhaps you can ask someone to supply you with a couple of screenshots from the Level Blu-Rays for those.