Color Correcting the Dragon Box - 3 Part Spectacular

[lansing]

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

What do you mean?

[HakkaiBills93]

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.

Dragon Ball Kai 1.0 use differrent color palette than the dbox, some colors aren't in the same channel and like you said they took some kind of liberty so matching dbz to kai 1.0 is useless.

About colors artifact it's cause of the dragon box dark colors or bright colors sometimes, it seems that this color match tools alter color channel but also other things like contrast etc so if your reference is bright the dbox will have artifact and macroblock as you allways have few macroblocks on the vob but they will be far more visible like that: i have the same issue when i do it manually with after effect for example but you can't have better as it is already in the vob.
But even with that it make the episode look better for sure

About the number of shot it's wrong , you need 1 screenshot for each part of the eyecatch , they look differrent often in the dbox

the hardest part to color match all dragon box will be to get a reference for all this part with good colors AND no tint

The season sets also have slight tint if you match those colors it will copy this tint to the dbox so you also need to correct the tint of the shot before.

season sets also have crushed black and white and dark colors

[Bruma rabu]

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.

This should work in theory as I am using only shots in kai. The first video I posted was DBox footage synced to kai audio. Also I seem to have run into a snag. For some reason when I import a LUT from the program into premiere pro it doesnt seem to replicate colors correctly. The image shows up fine on the program but the moment I move it to premiere it's looks different.

[Bruma rabu]

Another way of doing this could involve toeis vobs no? I think I have one for almost every episode but that's the thing it's only one per episode.

[ionutbigiu1]

Another way of doing this could involve toeis vobs no? I think I have one for almost every episode but that's the thing it's only one per episode.

Immitating other release will be no good if you ask me . I would do it from scratch.

[ionutbigiu1]

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

What do you mean?

I mean what is the reason of syncing season set release to kai ?

[Bruma rabu]

Another way of doing this could involve toeis vobs no? I think I have one for almost every episode but that's the thing it's only one per episode.

Immitating other release will be no good if you ask me . I would do it from scratch.

In the end you'd still need reference material.

[lansing]

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.

The season set came from the same source as the level set, whose color matched the printed dragon ball cards in the 90s. I believed that those cards were printed from the cel. They are more believable to be color accurate than any random pre-production cel you may have.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vy-doFUADb0

[Ajay]

The season set came from the same source as the level set, whose color matched the printed dragon ball cards in the 90s. I believed that those cards were printed from the cel. They are more believable to be color accurate than any random pre-production cel you may have.

The Level sets are from second gen masters that Toei gave them years ago, and the season sets were not given the same level of treatment (aka colour correction) as the them anyway. They're not very good, nor particularly accurate. You cannot get more accurate than the very cels themselves.

[lansing]

This should work in theory as I am using only shots in kai. The first video I posted was DBox footage synced to kai audio. Also I seem to have run into a snag. For some reason when I import a LUT from the program into premiere pro it doesnt seem to replicate colors correctly. The image shows up fine on the program but the moment I move it to premiere it's looks different.

Another way of doing this could involve toeis vobs no? I think I have one for almost every episode but that's the thing it's only one per episode.

Well I have done enough test to assure you that color matching the entire episode from 1 or 2 reference frames is not going work. Your second video clearly showed that. And considering how quick and simple you can make a scene change file for the entire video, there's no reason not to do it.

And you would probably want to move to the scripting way of doing this because doing it alone in premiere is not scalable. People cannot reproduce what you did and you wouldn't want to apply 300 LUT onto 300 scenes manually. Yes premiere is a quick tool for testing but for real works, script should be the way to go.

[lansing]

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

What do you mean?

I mean what is the reason of syncing season set release to kai ?

Because I'm color matching the kai to season. It will be a nightmare to do follow ups and updates without the sync first. For example, you and I are sharing the work load to make the scene change file, where we write down the frame number of all the scene changes. On the first day, I wrote down frames [0,10,20,30] for kai. With season, those corresponding frames are [0,100,150,200]. So on the second day you want to double check on my work and continue the job, but then how do you check them? The frames are not in sync, you would have to jump back and forth for all of them in order to do that. And then a couple of weeks later a third person come along and find out that the color match of kai[10] and season[100] is not right, so he wanted to update it using a new reference. He thought frame kai[15] can give better matching result, so he start to look for the corresponding frame in season. But he would have to go through frame 100-150 of season to find that exact frame, which is a nightmare.

With the sync, all these problems can be eliminated.

[Bruma rabu]

Ok so heres part of episode one of kai the final chapters. https://streamable.com/t2ri3

So for the first test i took the the unaltered video of DBZ ep1 and used drdres program to cc it and it came out looking pretty good but had a good amount of blemishes. For this one though i went and tried to fix all the blacks, whites, brightness, and contrast before applying the LUT. Looks like it did much better not perfect but better. I still only used one picture.

Here are the shoots used
[spoiler][/spoiler]

[Bruma rabu]

And you would probably want to move to the scripting way of doing this because doing it alone in premiere is not scalable. People cannot reproduce what you did and you wouldn't want to apply 300 LUT onto 300 scenes manually. Yes premiere is a quick tool for testing but for real works, script should be the way to go.

I dont know how to script, I'm pretty new to this. I've only been messing around with this for a few months.

[ionutbigiu1]

Ok so heres part of episode one of kai the final chapters. https://streamable.com/t2ri3

So for the first test i took the the unaltered video of DBZ ep1 and used drdres program to cc it and it came out looking pretty good but had a good amount of blemishes. For this one though i went and tried to fix all the blacks, whites, brightness, and contrast before applying the LUT. Looks like it did much better not perfect but better. I still only used one picture.

Here are the shoots used
[spoiler][/spoiler]

Oh my damn. This actually looks worse looking at the shot used. Darker colors and details hidden now more than they actually were, wierd blues.

I would have went with something like this.

Left dragon box/ right CC

[HakkaiBills93]

in yours it's the white that is too bright and will make you loose bright details, if you carefully look at gohan cloth the grey on his shirt is brighter than in the left shot you can also see this things on the cloud that have less details at the right than in the left shot, it's probably cause of the use of a level plugin but it is sad there is far better tools that allow the same things without any alteration

about toei VOD cels they are wrong and in no case the final product shot on film, like enigmo said once (he don't allways lie) it's probably a redrawn shot done by Toei for thumbnails or booklet, you also have some kind of error , just try to match the dragon ball cel of upa and his father to the dbox and you will understand why it's wrong

[ionutbigiu1]

in yours it's the white that is too bright and will make you loose bright details, if you carefully look at gohan cloth the grey on his shirt is brighter than in the left shot you can also see this things on the cloud that have less details at the right than in the left shot, it's probably cause of the use of a level plugin but it is sad there is far better tools that allow the same things without any alteration

about toei VOD cels they are wrong and in no case the final product shot on film, like enigmo said once (he don't allways lie) it's probably a redrawn shot done by Toei for thumbnails or booklet, you also have some kind of error , just try to match the dragon ball cel of upa and his father to the dbox and you will understand why it's wrong

Ohh you mean the clouds above the trees? Depends on the situation sometimes , for that i usually keep different variants of the same scrit with different settings of course .

[Bruma rabu]

in yours it's the white that is too bright and will make you loose bright details, if you carefully look at gohan cloth the grey on his shirt is brighter than in the left shot you can also see this things on the cloud that have less details at the right than in the left shot, it's probably cause of the use of a level plugin but it is sad there is far better tools that allow the same things without any alteration

about toei VOD cels they are wrong and in no case the final product shot on film, like enigmo said once (he don't allways lie) it's probably a redrawn shot done by Toei for thumbnails or booklet, you also have some kind of error , just try to match the dragon ball cel of upa and his father to the dbox and you will understand why it's wrong

What really?! Lol it goes to show you how much I know. Well I don't actually know how to cc so if vods aren't the way to go them that means I got to find some other way.

[ionutbigiu1]

in yours it's the white that is too bright and will make you loose bright details, if you carefully look at gohan cloth the grey on his shirt is brighter than in the left shot you can also see this things on the cloud that have less details at the right than in the left shot, it's probably cause of the use of a level plugin but it is sad there is far better tools that allow the same things without any alteration

about toei VOD cels they are wrong and in no case the final product shot on film, like enigmo said once (he don't allways lie) it's probably a redrawn shot done by Toei for thumbnails or booklet, you also have some kind of error , just try to match the dragon ball cel of upa and his father to the dbox and you will understand why it's wrong

What really?! Lol it goes to show you how much I know. Well I don't actually know how to cc so if vods aren't the way to go them that means I got to find some other way.

Yep he knows his stuff. listen to what he tells you and you might learn a thing or two.

[HakkaiBills93]

in yours it's the white that is too bright and will make you loose bright details, if you carefully look at gohan cloth the grey on his shirt is brighter than in the left shot you can also see this things on the cloud that have less details at the right than in the left shot, it's probably cause of the use of a level plugin but it is sad there is far better tools that allow the same things without any alteration

about toei VOD cels they are wrong and in no case the final product shot on film, like enigmo said once (he don't allways lie) it's probably a redrawn shot done by Toei for thumbnails or booklet, you also have some kind of error , just try to match the dragon ball cel of upa and his father to the dbox and you will understand why it's wrong

What really?! Lol it goes to show you how much I know. Well I don't actually know how to cc so if vods aren't the way to go them that means I got to find some other way.

Yep he knows his stuff. listen to what he tells you and you might learn a thing or two.

i just try several times doing it , this very great tools dr dre did could have been useful if a release with unaltered colors was already out but dragon ball case is very complicated, if you want to make a color correction, you need to create a color palette by combinate each cel you can find, for example in the dragon box, goku 's gi is red for z so you need to make it more orange, sky is greenish so you need to make it more blue, etc...the hardest things is to find a settings that work for everythings that have the same color or that use a color, for example bulma's hair color and the sky are in the same color channel so you need to make a settings that give you a good colors for the sky but that also give the right colors for bulma's hair.

it's an hellish work to do, and you also have to play with other issues that are on dragon box (crushed black, excessive brightness etc...)

[ionutbigiu1]

What really?! Lol it goes to show you how much I know. Well I don't actually know how to cc so if vods aren't the way to go them that means I got to find some other way.

Yep he knows his stuff. listen to what he tells you and you might learn a thing or two.

i just try several times doing it , this very great tools dr dre did could have been useful if a release with unaltered colors was already out but dragon ball case is very complicated, if you want to make a color correction, you need to create a color palette by combinate each cel you can find, for example in the dragon box, goku 's gi is red for z so you need to make it more orange, sky is greenish so you need to make it more blue, etc...the hardest things is to find a settings that work for everythings that have the same color or that use a color, for example bulma's hair color and the sky are in the same color channel so you need to make a settings that give you a good colors for the sky but that also give the right colors for bulma's hair.

it's an hellish work to do, and you also have to play with other issues that are on dragon box (crushed black, excessive brightness etc...)

Totally agreed . If you are thingking of coming to this dark real of color correctint you must prepare yourself for reencodes and tests over and over and over again . Because the thing is you will have to experiemnt a lot and makt a lot of references by using your eyes and shit not matching tools . But yeah...welcome aboard and do your best , that's the most important thing.