You_Too

PDB said:

Buster D said:

James Cameron recently did a Reddit AMA, but it doesn't look like anyone bothered to ask him about Terminator and Abyss getting a blanket teal tint.  I'd kind of like to hear his justification for it, although I suspect the answer might not be very satisfying (if he even would be willing to answer).

I'm sure he would give the standard, unsatisfying its my film/its the way its suppose to look anyway.

Unfortunately I'm sure he'd say that too.

Anyway, just to clear things up: It's not a plain blanket tint. When they do these restorations they go back to scanning and cleaning up the original negative, and by doing that they lose the color timing done to the theatrical/home video prints. They get higher resolution and all the original detail, but as far as I know they have to redo the color timing from scratch. (Basically it would be like taking the Japanese Abyss broadcast and making it look like the DVD shot by shot) This takes more than putting a blanket tint on it, believe me. It's probably a lot about hue/saturation/luminance control.

That's where the idea of creating a new color timing comes in. James Cameron likes doing it so he keeps doing it to all his re-releases now. Terminator 1 got more teal added to it than Aliens and Titanic though, as well as a slight green tint on top of it all. (Aliens and Titanic also has more green in the whites than red and blue, but also slightly more red than blue, just like T1 except it's not as heavy)

Now the interesting thing is that The Abyss is, judging by the latest screenshots, exactly like Aliens and Titanic, which is not as heavily overdone as T1, but still the exact same thing with the whites, most green, less red, even less blue.

The original look of all these films is without a doubt close to what we see in theatrical trailers or the old home video releases, that is Cameron focusing on a clean blue for the cold-looking scenes, teal only being slightly visible here and there as part of the natural color balance, not something over-forced.

And the good news is that Aliens, Titanic and The Abyss will be easy to correct, though the digital changes won't be fixable. (Like added stars in the sky in Titanic or removed camera crew being visible etc.) And of course, the changes in brightness in some scenes will still be there but it would look closer to the original look.

And I don't usually do this but I have to say it: Stamper, quit defending Cameron or present technical proof for your claims. There's so much technical proof of what has been done here that one could easily make a wall of text from it.

I bet this is exactly how the official blu-ray will look. Teal...

Even when I was a kid and didn't know anything about color timing, I saw that there was something about James Cameron using a lot of blue in his movies like Terminator, Aliens, The Abyss, it always set a special mood to the films, and now he just changes what many of us grew up watching and loving, just to make it look "modern".

By the look of this, it'll be easy to correct though. Might even work with the script me and DJ are using for T1.

EDIT: I forgot to mention, that the theatrical trailers for The Abyss suggests that the blue look we got used to on video and DVD is the correct one, not the warm-looking japanese broadcast.

oh_riginal said:

Off topic, but is there any hope for the 1968 original to be worked on still?

Not really off topic since this one was a remake!

Anyway, we won't do the 1968 version I think, because I compared some screenshots from different versions and while I don't remember the name of the best release, it was good enough to not need our treatment. I had another idea though, which was to use the chroma (color) from the colorized DVD and merge it with the luma of one of the blu-rays, but none of them matched so that won't happen either, at least until somebody comes up with a subpixel-perfect image-matching tool.

We are indeed upscaling them but also color correcting them a little bit. It won't be nearly as advanced as our GOUT project though, since I originally didn't even want to do the 97 SE since I'm not interested in it, but promised DJ to do so since he wanted to.

We all have our different views on these things, personally I'll probably never watch the 97 SE again after doing this project but I can tell you it'll be the best looking version so far, next only to the theatrical prints.

If we had mixed in the 2004 versions they wouldn't be the 1997 versions. :)  The colors (and some other things) are very different in the 2004 versions since they started from scratch with them.

We're using the TB versions of 97 SE with some lost frames taken from Gkar.

Life of Pi had different aspect ratios, and on top of that it had some stuff move out over the black borders sometimes!

mverta said:

Yes, it'll be going to Vimeo, it's just a long upload.  Stay tuned, keep checking the Legacy forums for updates on when it's up.

Thanks in advance! I was gonna ask the same thing.

I so wanted to join last night but it was 5am here when it started and I just couldn't stay up that long! Hope there will be some earlier chat sometime in the future.

mverta said:

Crawl update, sportsfans.  Go check out the video in the Legacy forums!

I'm still interested but I can't access the forums anymore. I can login but no forums show up. It's like I'm banned, and if so I would like to know why.

Even I didn't know 2 members got married. Congratulations!

(DJ is the one taking care of most contacts and I'm just working on the video, though we're taking a break now.)

Jonno said:

back when TVs and broadcast signals were launched, they didn't use resolutions like 1024x768

Well, no. They didn't.

Just to finish this off: I meant that as a response to "anamorphic PAL contains an image designed for display at 1024x768 square pixels". And no offense intended!

Even though this thread has derailed, just to finish the PAL discussion here's an article to read: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/576i

Just like Laserschwert says, 720x576 is what it is and wasn't "designed for display at 1024x768 square pixels". In the case of square pixel aspect ratio, 720x576 is 5:4 while 1024x768 is 4:3 so nope, they don't match and back when TVs and broadcast signals were launched, they didn't use resolutions like 1024x768.

@livserge: Which versions of ESB and ROTJ are you referring to? If you mean the blu-rays then everything is basically wrong since they started from the original negatives and made a new color timing.

If you mean the 2006 bonus DVDs (GOUT) they're sourced from some interpositives made for home releases which didn't have the same color timing as the theatrical prints, and also those two has some issues like red lasers being green in some shots or green being yellow etc. GOUT ESB also has shifted chroma in some parts. An easy explanation of what that means is that the colors aren't in the exact same place as the background where they belong.

Team negative1 has 35mm trailers for SW and ESB, but I've only seen them share the full ESB trailer with their logo in the bottom right corner. I guess you could ask them.

For the rest of the trailers there are only upscales I guess. Me and dark_jedi will include good quality upscales of all trailers on our future releases.

Nice! That was a fun color game. I got 10.0 so you beat me poita. :)

Thanks a ton for the nice reviews!

silverwheel said:

Another vote for the MPEG2 BD.  I've been very happy with how it looks, and I wish more releases were treated this way (that is, not being screwed up).

Or at least offer people a choice, with all films.

_,,,^..^,,,_ said:

So it's better to stick to MPEG2 BD, right?

Some Team Blu ideas about this title?

Yeah, the MPEG2 BD is the best there is. And even with the compression I personally think it looks great.

And nope, there's nothing we could do to improve it.

_,,,^..^,,,_ said:

I read somewhere that the new 3D version has "only" the first 20 minutes with DVNR, while the rest of the movie is (almost) free ot it... can someone confirm that?

Not true. Check this comparison.

It's the exact same master used for UH edition, except it's more cropped on the sides but less on top and bottom. And of course some digital alterations if you check shots 3, 7, 12-16. Horrible.

DJ sure deserves a lot of praise for synching the LD audio to this one. I took a look at it and it was horrible indeed, he had to make hundreds of cuts and edits.

But I somehow don't think it's got something to do with overdubs because the out-of-synchs happen at parts where there's like just music and sound effects too. I think it's just the frame count in lots of shots that differs between the prints or something.

@Matt_Stevens: In a way I agree with you, but we gotta do what we can to make it more watchable since it's the only version we have of the German extended cut in HD.

By the way, on CinePostproduction's site I found the guy who was in charge over this restoration: http://www.cinepostproduction.com/?cat=19&member=669#tab2

Maybe somebody fluent in German (in case he's not fluent in english) could contact him and just ask why they applied the heavy DVNR, and if there's any way to get our hands on their restoration minus that horrible addition, or their raw negative scans. :)

@kk650: I've done some tests, back when the first shots surfaced from the German restoration. I posted some earlier in the thread but they were just lightly adjusted and they will need more adjustment.

Unfortunately there isn't much detail to dig up since I typically dig up detail from within the grain but there is no real grain! The grain that is there might be added artificially since it doesn't look like the grain on the negative scans.

Basically, what will be done with the extended version is this:

1. Blurring away the edge enhancement (fake edge sharpening)
2. Trying to dig up hidden detail
3. Blurring everything slightly to hide the DVNR waxdoll look
4. Adding grain from either the negative scans or other releases

But also considering how this has been altered so much, for the international version we might just adjust the Dutch BD, like digging up detail and color correcting it slightly.

Oh, and thanks Kingherb for the ivory tower shots, but the third one is the only that seems to match the film and it's just a DVD upscale.

@kk650: First of all, we haven't started to work on this one yet. What I did there was tests because I found those scans.

The plan is to work with that DVNR blu-ray at least for the extended cut, because it's the only source there is. (I think maybe there's an old German DVD release of it too but upscaled it won't look good anyway I guess) The idea is to remove the edge enhancement, add back grain either from the negative scans or the other blu-ray releases to give it the film look back.

We're still open for changing the plans for this project though.

Thanks, but unfortunately we won't get any complete raw scan...

We'll have to do the best we can with the blu-ray, but I found this interesting since apparently they didn't do much of a good job on the blu-ray, at least from what I've seen so far.

If Kingherb or anybody else could find those matte paintings it would be very interesting to see them.

Even though we're all taking a break, the other day I came across some comparisons linked to the article about the restoration of The Neverending Story and I just couldn't resist to take a look. It was comparisons between the source scans vs the final blu-ray.

If I got it right, the yellow tinted scans are from the negative of the international cut, and the pink ones from a dupe positive of the extended german cut.

I color corrected the scans (using mainly black and white points as well as midpoint average RGB and also manually balancing what looked "off") to be able to compare them to the blu-ray images and the result was a bit confusing in many ways. The first thing that you notice is of course that the negative and dupe positive has beautiful detail and grain which they scrubbed away with their waxdoll-DVNR. But then I saw a couple other things.

In the shot of the ivory tower, it looks like somebody took a photoshop brush and just amateurishly drew a brightening light over it, thus altering it digitally.

Then the shots of Morla, where you can see in my corrections that Morla's mouth is just as dark as the shadow under it, but in the blu-ray there's an orange shadow and the whole face looks like it's been painted orange while keeping it separate from the rest of the shot. In the same shots, if you look at Atreyu's arms it almost looks as if they tried to remove the blood.

Then you come to the shot with Atreyu between the yellow Oracle statues, and see that it looks like they used automatic dirt removal which also removed a lot of stuff in the background that is not dirt or grain.

And what's up with the green parts in the sky in the shot with Atreyu riding the horse?

I made a gallery with these pics so you can see this for yourself: http://imgur.com/a/RcurU

They're sorted 3 by 3, first - scan, second - my correction, third - blu-ray release.

Now, what do you guys think?