dark_jedi said:
there are only 2 versions, the International which is the Theatrical almost everywhere, and then the Extended which was only available in Germany up until recently, and our Extended is 100% English Friendly, if I have anything wrong here I will let You_Too straighten it out lol.
Correct. The first premiere of the film was in Germany and it had the audio dubbed to German. It's longer because a lot of scenes have either different shots or are just longer from start to end. It also has a slightly different use of the music since the Ivory Tower theme we're used to wasn't included, but a softer symphonic tune. And Limahl's song isn't there either. The english audio has different voices for the snail guy and Gmork compared to the later International cut that most of us are used to.
This German original version has been obtainable on DVD but only with German audio so it's really nice to have an English friendly version now. We took the English close-up shots of the book and note and color matched them to the Extended cut.
To those who are not familiar with the restoration of this German original version, some company named CinePostproduction in Germany took the negative of the International version as well as an interpositive (or whatever it was, the negative was gone) of the longer German cut, and did some restoration work as well as some very destructive grain reduction and a very weird new color timing choice.
Since this company posted some raw scans of the International negative as well as the German interpositive on their site, one can see that what they had to work with was beautiful. The International negative had faded to brown a little bit but all color was intact. The German interpositive was faded to pink and had slightly less detail but was still in pretty good shape.
Once they had cleaned these up, which I suspect they did with tons of automatic dirt removal as well as some manual too, they applied a heavy de-grain filter that gave the whole thing a waxdoll look. Then some colorist who had apparently "looked at all the sources" or something, went ahead and created an overall strange look which doesn't resemble any other version of this movie.
Nothing we could do with the new color timing since that would've taken re-doing it shot by shot, but we did fix one of the more horrible things they did, which was to add a very amateur-looking glow over the Ivory Tower wide shots. (The glow was not on the negative, it was a very ugly and weird creative choice) Here's before and after:
You might also see that we shifted back the colors to be less orange, which corrected an error they also did when creating their new master.
There are other things here and there in the movie, like in a wide shot of Atreyu riding his horse past a mountain, there's a waterfall in the foreground that's been brightened. Or the scenes with Morla where they painted Morla's face (and eyes!) orange and the environment around Morla teal. This is something I wish we could've fixed but again, that would've taken months of work.
For those interested, here's an example of a roughly color corrected negative vs raw German blu-ray release:
Even with those things pointed out, we're still very proud of what we did with the Extended version, or German original cut if you will, and we know that you who love this movie will enjoy it!
The International cut that we're all used to is also there and looks better than ever!
EDIT: What we did with the Extended version was to soften the "edge-enhancement" applied to fake a sharper look, shift the colors back to how they should look (less orange skin tones and reds) and applied true to the negative grain, based on the grain from the very film stock they used, to make it all look more like film again.