Spaced Ranger

Excellent work! Automation and math is the way to go. ;D

The DVD has inflated highlights (at least in this shot). It carries over into your processing and looks bad there, too. I tried a deflation on the DVD with the lower end locked and non-singular R-G-B adjustments (to put some color back in). Not perfect, but it gets the artificial glare out. (Compare it to the more natural WOWOW.) If the entire DVD is this way inflated, a preliminary, single correction should produce a superior final result.

Spaced Ranger said:
(I once received an empty/error page somewhere when inadvertently hitting the max-end button).

Ah, found it! On the Off Topic (Unmoderated) list page, by clicking the last listing page number “182” (not signed in at the time, if that makes any difference), I received this error notice:

: - (

Error: syntax error at or near ")"
at EventEmitter.<anonymous> (/srv/www/originaltrilogy.com/comitium/node_modules/citizen/lib/helpers.js:246:13)
at emitOne (events.js:96:13)
at EventEmitter.emit (events.js:188:7)
at /srv/www/originaltrilogy.com/comitium/app/patterns/controllers/discussion.js:132:25
at groupTracker (/srv/www/originaltrilogy.com/comitium/node_modules/citizen/lib/helpers.js:298:9)
at EventEmitter.<anonymous> (/srv/www/originaltrilogy.com/comitium/node_modules/citizen/lib/helpers.js:244:7)
at emitOne (events.js:96:13)
at EventEmitter.emit (events.js:188:7)
at .<anonymous> (/srv/www/originaltrilogy.com/comitium/app/patterns/models/user.js:1085:21)
at nrWrappedHandler (/srv/www/originaltrilogy.com/comitium/node_modules/newrelic/lib/transaction/tracer/index.js:372:19)

It looks like the numbering function starts updating the top page-number buttons only on page “6” and thereafter. From page “2” through “5”, the button sequence remains 1 through 4. There is no way to use them to go to page “5” when on page “4”, nor to go to page “6” when on page “5”:

It’s probably a good idea to double check the logic and math for all min/max limits (I once received an empty/error page somewhere when inadvertently hitting the max-end button).

BTW, as a suggestion for design symmetry, both end “bracket” buttons should display the visual-cue “PAGE ###”.

Synnöve said:
I don’t recall the station scenes as being that white, or with that high a gamma.

I’m not using a calibrated monitor (in fact, this laptop LCD changes the picture as I move my head) so just consider my proof-of-concept adjustments as a general direction towards color correction. There’s much more on this over at captainsolo’s thread Cinerama 70mm 2001 preservation. Is it possible?, including this on-the-set shot from the must-have Taschen book The Making of Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey” (plenty of it’s awesome pictures all over the Internet – definitely worth searching out):

Synnöve said:
As some one who has seen 2001 in 70MM four times in the last 4 years …

Whoa, I nominate you as class president!

…the Blu-Ray is quite faithful to the print.

Oh, I un-nominate you. 😄 But only because of this:

Spaced Ranger said:
I tried a test color-correction to confirm that the 2001 HD release screenshot from the DVDBeaver review, linked previously wasn’t some unholy Lucas-Lowry space graffiti. Fortunately not, for my simple histogram R-G-B manipulations corrected the spectrum nicely:

And the rest of the Blu-ray is just as bad.

.

ww12345 said:
We did scan the second print - audio as well as video … The scanner just finished rebuilding and calibrating the mag machine to get the best scan possible …

That is excellent! This will be really cool!

BTW, I’m keeping an eye on DrDre’s matching/prediction color-correction project. It just keeps getting better and better, and may be very useful here.

Regarding the SOTS 35mm reference to 16mm target … I noticed that all matching/prediction attempts produced colorized tree-trunk shadows for the 16mm. (Such poor distributions are allot easier when viewed on the LCD screen I’m using, simply by changing my head position – never before thought of that as a plus.) I’ve come across something similar when using HSL color transferring between same pictures.

When the L (lightness) of the 2 pictures have differences (contrast, brightness), the transferred HS (hue,saturation) “colors” are altered by the destination’s different L, and sometimes unacceptably so. I’ve found that pre-matching the lightness of the destination to the source (very easy to do on the B&W L splits) produces a proper color transfer result.

Enough of your excellent matches show such anomalies that they cause you constant push-here-pull-there touch ups. Would some sort of R-G-B pre-normalization step, to create a better distribution for your limited samplings, save you such re-adjustments? (I would suggest using a larger sample pool, but the increased storage and processing requirements for such diminishing returns might be prohibitive.)

yotsuya said:

… Hoth … bright, sunlit areas are very white, but the overcast and shadows are more blue and … a triangle of blue sky visible through the smoke and the sky to the left should have some touches of blue. Also … smoke to the far right should have a very gray, almost bluish tone.

Gentle-curve tweaks of Green (weaker at mid and high) and Blue (stronger at mid but weaker at low) with other points anchored (to not throw off the rest) will get this:

Hmm … curious. Live action squeezed (for eventual expansion) and animation at academy size for … what?

I found this on Wikipedia, which indicates no widescreen version was ever released. Why then Superscope? Some funny aspect ratios as widescreen on the cheap? Or is this some Alice-In-Wonderland-induced hallucination?

"I wanted a special show just like Cinerama plays today … I had Fantasia set for a wide screen. I had dimensional sound … To get that wide screen I had the projector running sideways … I had the double frame. But I didn’t get to building my cameras or my projectors because the money problem came in … The compromise was that it finally went out standard with dimensional sound. I think if I’d had the money and I could have gone ahead I’d have a really sensational show at that time."
Walt Disney on the widescreen release in 1956.[91]

[91] Barrier 2008, p. 162
Barrier, Michael (2008). The Animated Man: A Life of Walt Disney. University of California Press. ISBN 978-0-520-25619-4

If you’d like to review a few pages of the book starting there, read it on Google Books - The Animated Man: A Life of Walt Disney and click Page >> to expand to full pages.

FrankT said:
… this image: the print with the BD overlayed on top.

FrankT said:
Maybe I’ll release a version with widescreen and one without.

The entire Superscope film is 4:3 for the Fantasia picture area? Wow. That kind of defeats the whole purpose of Superscope. (And what of those critics who viewed the “widescreen” Fantasia?)

.

SilverWook said:
… in the photograph it looks like Stokowski’s arms are at his sides …

My search couldn’t find a closer shot. But I did get one where the view was far enough back to still have the frame covering the old picture, when the frame was reduced to match the conductor’s size. Any way for someone to find the very same shot?

Only as it shows, without any weird squash or stretch characters. I’ve never seen it, so I have no idea where the original Fantasia was cropped and/or zoomed to get to widescreen. It may not be all widescreen-imaged (parts left at the original 4:3) for all I know.

BTW, you can know for sure by comparing it to the regular releases (everything except the Superscope).

If you find differences, please mention them here for we curious minded. .

Actually, if you find no differences, that would be of value to know, too. .

SilverWook said:
The only scant evidence widescreen was planned for Fantasia in 1940 is a very murky shot of a mixing session …

Thanks for that reminder (same website, too)! It looks like the “widescreen” Superscope was released, and to bad reviews:

Curator’s Note:
Buried in the tons of historical materials written about Fantasia is an infrequent mention that Walt Disney planned to show the film in a wide screen format. Figure 14 may give us evidence that those statements were true. The aspect ratio of the projection screen illustrated here is 2.14:1. In the early 1950s, Disney released the film in a Superscope version with four channel magnetic sound. The critics panned the cropping of the film, which may have been a sloppy job, pretty atypical of anything that Mr. Disney was associated with.

.

FrankT said:
So… Do I render the whole thing in 4:3 with the curtain effect untouched, or…?

Coincidentally, I worked up a demonstration of the above referenced Superscope picture (from the Fantasound studio) to show how the original 4:3 photography was cropped in this particular shot (other shot compositions would be different). Keep in mind that such instances of extreme zoom/crop would look grain-awful:

If your source is an actual Superscope print, all you would do is confirm that the entire frame (black bars and all) is in it’s widescreen projected size. The characters would look normal (no squash or stretch). Everything else, zooms, crops, bars, regardless of when they show and when they don’t, is as what they wanted (again, the critics panned it).

The “it’ll make everything short and fat” didn’t seem right. I thought that, at worst, it would be pre-cropped for widescreen format, after expansion. Anyway, to check it out, I came across these Widescreen Museum: SuperScope pages with some interesting tid-bits.

Superscope was conceived and developed by Irving and Joseph Tushinsky. Their process was created in the laboratory rather than the camera. It was their contention that Superscope anamorphic prints could be generated from straight 35mm negatives, or from double frame (VistaVision) or other wide area negatives.
…
Photography in the Superscope process was generally no different than normal non-widescreen films.
…
While the first few 3 strip Technicolor films were released by RKO, all color product up until 1946 was produced by the independents like Walt Disney, Merian C. Cooper and Jock Whitney.
…
Superscope was used in nine RKO Technicolor productions from 1955 thru 1957, and a few re-releases of older films including a bastardized conversion of Walt Disney’s Fantasia which featured the original optical Fantasound system adapted to four track magnetic stereo.
…
Of course by now you know that no movie was ever photographed IN Superscope. Instead they may have been photographed FOR Superscope.

Well, then, the plainer the better. It would be a push-force for them to put in their own avatars. But I agree – the default should be something “original trilogy” but generic enough (or 50/50 enough) so as to be like something from the new movie(s), too.

Maybe George & Mickey? 😄

Now that Disney is holding Vader’s leash, I’d suggest an up-to-date image for the new Star Wars audience

or high contrasted like the present generic

or mixed contrasts

BTW, is there a recommended/exact size for original avatar submissions to prevent resizing (usually with unwanted/detrimental results)? If so, could that information be included on the account page?

DrDre said:
In this case the color match was done using an 8-bit color image. In practise you would use at least a 16-bit color image …

Yes, if one starts in 16-bit to finally end in 8-bit, it would fudge a solution. But the problem is, with faded film, the scanned R-G-B layers no longer have that 16-bit (or 8-bit) spread. They might have (for example, in 8-bit) only a 7 or 6 or 5-bit spread. As soon as one color-corrects it (expands it back to 8-bit), steps are introduced in that original workspace. Same for working in 16-bit.

poita said:
… add a little noise to the image. This stops the stepped-gradient effect happening when you start adjusting things. The noise can then mostly be removed afterwards.

DrDre said:
Currently, … a smoothing parameter is used to decide the smoothness of the gradient. This reduces stair stepping and similar artifacts.

My thought was to use integration – “an integral assigns numbers to functions in a way that can describe displacement, area, volume, and other concepts that arise by combining infinitesimal data” – or was it differentials (the reverse of integration; my advanced calculus is very foggy now) – to create an entirely new spread based on the old, remaining samples. It’s probably vector calculus (using both), but I never studied that.

Does this sound like a right approach (vectors) and/or what do pro-software incorporate for their solutions?

DrDre said:

The debugged color matching tool v1.2 offers much improved color matching capabilities. It’s more accurate, more stable, and much faster.

Just a little late catching up here, but … whoa, that’s an awesome demonstration!

• Will you incorporate any algorithm to prevent the originally flattened RGB from “stair-stepping” on expansion (looking like acne pot-marks especially on skin colors)?

[EDIT: Actually, most of what finally shows is on the source (ouch, I’ve seen those R-G-B splits!). Only, it is stronger once the RGB spectrums are normalized. That would require pre-processing, which is probably outside of the scope of a color-match project.]

• Since you’re working in RGB, would this work even on a film faded nearly flat where R≈G≈B (ww1234’s 2001:ASO project scan comes to mind)?

Hmmm … well, I quickly searched (ended up on Amazon) and read some reviews that mentioned old extras (The Making Of Peter Pan, et al) were carried over to the newer releases. Would it be correct to assume that such extras wouldn’t necessarily be “fixed-up” even if the movie was? And does this shot-in-question show anywhere in one of these extras? Not retouched?

Perhaps the 1998, and after, releases actually corrected such an egregious flaw as this, along with their color adjustments to the movie. If not (too hard to do if it’s not digital?), then I’m out of ideas.

I was suggesting (without knowing the pedigree of the various releases) it could’ve been on the actual cels.

Notice that particular marks, in any single frame, show up all over the green dress only (and not the wings, for example). Many times you can see it as if painted up to the color border, as a painter would do. A scan anomaly would violate all those constraints.

If true, then any later release sourced from film would have those marks, too, unless a “restoration” corrected them.

Doctor M said:
They look more like a flaw than intentional effects.

Definitely agree.

I would rule out the standard procedure of washing and reusing animation cels (a cost saving measure) being involved in such an anomaly. If so, it would affect other colors. However, I don’t see it on the adjoining skin. More likely there was some other-color reside (or too much water) still on the brush or in the paint container to affect green painting across a group of cels.

Does anything show immediately before or after this shot, but nowhere else, for just this color?

LOL! That was excellent. I started watching with a “Hey, wait a second here.”, then a “Oh … really?”, and finally a “Fascinating. Never knew that!”

Now, I’m all ready to buy the Brooklyn Bridge. Are small bills okay?

This next group was the usual pain. 😃

sync 35mm to 16mm - as 2 parallel streams matching where they can
5th 1000+ frames
[note: each 1000-frame section begins exactly on shot]

35 frames . . description
39199-42869 . . begin match @ THX_prep-room
42870-43019 . . begin 35mm-Italian violation_report
. 00000-00152 . spacer for 16mm-English violation_report
. 00000-00001 . spacer for spliced-out violation_control
43020-43182 . . begin violation_control
. 00000-00046 . spacer for spliced-out violation_control_2
43183-43189 . . begin violation_control
43190-43191 . . bad frames violation_typing
. 00000-00001 . spacer for badcap-frames violation_typing
43192-45743 . . match after badcap-frames violation_typing
45744-45842 . . 35mm-Italian arrest_readout
. 00000-00101 . spacer for 16mm-English arrest_readout
45843-46041 . .
. 00000-00002 . spacer for spliced-out robo_beating
46042-48002 . . match @ robo_beating
. 00000-(-1) … spacer for spliced-out whiteout_meeting (single frame)
48003-48524 . . match @ whiteout_meeting

16mm frames . . description
40186-43856 . . begin match @ THX_prep-room
. 00000-00149 . spacer for spliced-out 35mm-Italian violation_typing
43857-44009 . . begin 16mm-English 2-violation_reports
44010-44228 . . match @ violation_typing
. 00000-00001 . spacer for badcap-frames 35mm-Italian violation_typing
44229-46782 . . match after badcap-frames violation_typing
. 00000-00098 . _spacer for 35mm-Italian arrest_readout
46783-46883 . . begin 16mm-English arrest_readout (2 frames longer that 35mm)
46884-49570 . . match @ black (before robo_beating)
.

BTW, I know that this is slow-going, so if it’s too late or redundant to be useful, let me know.

<sarcasm on> Thanks for that link and for this pic:
<sarcasm off>

That totally blows apart my hard-worked theory of this shot originally being B&W dailies (and later colorized to use it).

Now excuse me while I slink away . . .

Okay! Nice solution and easier on the eyes (TV’s Frink’s too?) …

One suggestion – when expanded, the button should be named “collapse”.

captainsolo said:

I did direct comparisons with the opening, Robby’s first appearance and introduction, and the first arrival at the house (reel change point). The mix seems the same. Both the Criterion and MGM have the sound panning.

To maybe answer RayRogers’ inquiry, I made a search “forbidden planet” site:originaltrilogy.com (happen to use Google) to see if anyone had worked up a Forbidden Planet project. Didn’t find one, but did find this from October 2013 about it’s Blu-ray:

GregK said:

Chewtobacca said:

Does anyone have any comments on the DTS-HD MA 5.1 on the BD of Forbidden Planet (1956)?

As most know, FORBIDDEN PLANET originally had a wide release with a Perspecta Sound encoded track, along with a few limited engagements in (true) 4-track mag sound.

The three front channels are original for sure. They match the very old Criterion laserdisc version as far as front channel image placement goes. The bluray’s DTS-MA audio has the advantage of being discrete, vs being matrix encoded like the previous home video versions. The MGM DVD and first WB DVD (same version of the MGM DVD pressing) had screwed up audio with no real directionality in dialog or effects. The Bluray corrects this, and as noted above, also offers the audio for the first time since the 1950’s in discrete multi-channel. Can’t say for sure about the effect/surround track, but it wouldn’t surprise me if it is the original.

As long as just closing the new-tab page, or using the back-button on the parent-page, doesn’t cause the any information to linger, or even update, then that’s fine.
(Just a little healthy paranoia. Ha, ha … uh, what was that? … see it just now? … did, did something just update?)